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On Saturday, I was honoured to stand with the family of former Guantánamo prisoner Ravil Mingazov outside the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in London to call on the Emirati government to free him from the arbitrary detention to which he has been subjected for the last six years and eight months, following his transfer there, on the basis of grotesquely betrayed promises that he would be helped to rebuild his life and to be reunited with his family, after over 14 years’ imprisonment without charge or trial in Guantánamo.

Around 25 people gathered outside the publicly located but thoroughly inaccessible embassy in Belgravia, whose officials’ disdain for any complaints about the Emirati authorities is such that no one even deigned to answer the door when Ravil’s son Yusuf, his mother, his aunt and uncle and his cousin sought to hand in a letter urging his release. Nevertheless, we made our presence felt, and Yusuf and I both spoke (and you can see the video of my speech below), as did a representative of the UK Guantánamo Network (of which I’m also a member), which had organised the protest with the Muslim NGO CAGE.

It was an inspiring event — one of those where the solidarity of those present, and the charm and humanity of Ravil’s relatives came together to create exactly the kind of fortitude and determination that is required to prevail in circumstances of chronic injustice like that to which Ravil has been subjected for over 20 years, and I look forward to reconvening sometime soon outside the Home Office, where the home secretary Suella Braverman needs to be reminded of what mercy, kindness and generosity look like.

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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

In disturbing news from Yemen, reported by the Intercept, a former Guantánamo prisoner, who had only just been reunited with his family after 14 years in Guantánamo, and five subsequent years in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he had been imprisoned despite having been promised his freedom, has been seized by Houthi militia, and is being held an undisclosed location.

The disappearance of Abdulqadir al-Madhfari (identified by the US as Abdel Qadir Hussein al-Mudhaffari, and given the prisoner number ISN 40) is one of the more depressing examples of how the “taint” of having been held at Guantánamo, despite never having been charged with a crime or put on trial, dogs former prisoners. It also provides a vivid example of the US government’s almost complete lack of interest in the welfare of men released after long years of unjustifiable imprisonment in the US’s notorious offshore prison in Cuba.

Al-Madhfari’s long ordeal began almost 20 years ago, when he was seized crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Whilst it was likely that the “young physician’s assistant who dreamed of becoming a doctor,” as the Intercept described him, had been a foot soldier with the Taliban, there was no reason to suppose, as the US alleged, that he had been part of what his captors described as the “Dirty Thirty,” a group of bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, because most of the men in question were young men, who had been in Afghanistan for only a short amount of time, and would not, therefore, have been trusted to guard Al-Qaeda’s leader.

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In a shocking development, the government of the UAE (United Arab Emirates) has repatriated six former Guantánamo prisoners — out of 18 Yemenis in total who were sent to the UAE between November 2015 and January 2017 — even though the security situation in Yemen is horrendous, because of the ongoing civil war, and their safety cannot be guaranteed.

The six men, whose stories I reported here and here, when they were transferred in November 2015 and August 2016, are Khalid al-Qadasi (ISN 163), Sulaiman al-Nahdi (ISN 511), Saeed Jarabh (ISN 235), Jamil Nassir (ISN 728), Mohammed al-Adahi (ISN 033) and Mohammed Khusruf (ISN 509). Jarabh, the youngest, was born in 1976, and is now 44 or 45 years old, while the eldest are al-Adahi, born in 1962, who is 58 or 59 years old, and Khusruf, reportedly born in February 1950, which would make him 71.

When they were first sent to the UAE, the Yemenis — and four Afghans and a Russian who were also transferred with them — were told that they would be integrated into Emirati society after spending time in a rehabilitation center, but instead they found themselves indefinitely detained in abusive conditions in secret prisons, even though they had all been unanimously approved for release either by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, or by Periodic Review Boards, the two high-level US government review processes for the Guantánamo prisoners that were established under President Obama, which assessed that they did not pose a threat to the US.

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Yesterday (July 2), UN human rights experts, including Nils Melzer, the Special Rapporteur on Torture, condemned the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for its proposals to repatriate Ravil Mingazov, a former Guantánamo prisoner who was sent to the UAE from Guantánamo in January 2017, just before President Obama left office.

Despite what the experts describe as “informal assurances guaranteeing his release into Emirati society after undergoing a short-term rehabilitation programme,” Mingazov — and 22 other former prisoners (18 Yemenis and four Afghans), who were sent to the UAE from Guantánamo between November 2015 and January 2017 — found that, on their arrival in the UAE, the assurances evaporated, and they have instead been “subjected to continuous arbitrary detention at an undisclosed location in the UAE, which amounts to enforced disappearance.”

The only exceptions to this continued pattern of “arbitrary detention” and “enforced disappearance” are three of the Afghans, who, after suffering the same disgraceful treatment, were repatriated as a result of peace negotiations in Afghanistan involving the Afghan government and Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), a militant group that had supported al-Qaeda at the time of the US-led invasion of 2001, but that reached a peace deal with the Afghan government in 2016.

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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Depressing but important news about life after Guantánamo was published by the Associated Press on Wednesday, focusing on the appalling treatment that former Guantánamo prisoners have received since being resettled in the United Arab Emirates between November 2015 and January 2017, when President Obama left office; specifically, 18 Yemenis (out of 23 men in total sent to the UAE), who have now been told that the UAE is preparing to repatriate them, even though their lives may well be at risk in Yemen.

As reporter Maggie Michael described it, the prisoners “were promised they were being sent to a Muslim country for rehabilitation that would help integrate them into society, opening the way to jobs, money, and marriage, according to their lawyers and families. It was a lie.”

To anyone paying close attention, this wasn’t news. The Washington Post reported in May 2018 that former prisoners sent to the UAE after being unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes remain imprisoned, despite promises that their new host country would help them rebuild their lives. Missy Ryan’s story was entitled, “After over a decade at Guantanamo, these men were supposed to go free. Instead, they’re locked in a secretive center in the UAE.”

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At the start of the year, I stumbled across a couple of news sources reporting that three former Guantánamo prisoners — all Afghan nationals — had been repatriated to Afghanistan from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where they had been sent by Barack Obama between November 2015 and January 2017, just before Donald Trump took office.

The reason for the men’s release wasn’t given in these reports, and while I picked up a few hints about what had happened on my US trip to call for the closure of Guantánamo (from January 10-20), it wasn’t until last week that I was alerted to a more thorough explanation of their repatriation, via the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), “an independent non-profit policy research organisation,” established in 2009, and, specifically, via ‘Freed at Last: Three Afghans sent to Guantánamo in 2002 and 2003 are finally home,’ an article by Kate Clark, who has been involved wth Afghanistan since 1999 when she was the BBC’s Kabul correspondent, and who, in 2016, authored a detailed report, “Kafka in Cuba: The Afghan Experience in Guantánamo.”

In total, 23 men were sent from Guantánamo to the UAE — five Yemenis in November 2015, 12 Yemenis and three Afghans in August 2016 (see here and here), and one Russian, one Afghan and one Yemeni in January 2017 — but as Kate Clark explains, although the men “sent to the UAE believed — as did their families and lawyers — that they were also heading for temporary detention and then resettlement and family reunion,” what transpired instead was that, “for almost all of the last three years, the UAE authorities … held them in al-Rizan maximum security prison”, where they “were allowed family visits, but were not permitted to see their lawyers or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).”

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I wrote the following article, as “Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners Endangers U.S. National Security,” for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

The presence of Donald Trump in the White House has been an unmitigated disaster for anyone concerned about the ongoing existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and any notion of justice regarding those held there, or, indeed, those freed from the prison over the years.

For Trump, the notion that there might be anything wrong — or un-American — about imprisoning people forever without any meaningful form of due process clearly doesn’t exist. Since he took office nearly two years ago, only one prisoner has been released, out of the 41 men still held at the prison when Obama took office; and that man, Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi, was only released, and transferred to ongoing imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, because of a plea deal he agreed to in his military commission trial proceedings back in 2014.

Trump, clearly, has no desire to meaningfully continue the parole-type process — the Periodic Review Boards — that Barack Obama initiated to release lower-level prisoners who could demonstrate that they didn’t pose a threat to the U.S. Indeed, his contempt for the process is such that he has shut down any possibility of the two men whose release was approved by Obama’s PRBs, but who didn’t get released before Obama left office, being freed by shutting down the State Department office that dealt with resettlements — the office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

There’s been some disturbing news, via the Washington Post, about former Guantánamo prisoners who were resettled in the United Arab Emirates, between November 2015 and January 2017, after being unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by high-level US government review processes. 

23 men in total were sent to the UAE — five Yemenis in November 2015, 12 Yemenis and three Afghans in August 2016, and another Afghan, a Russian and another Yemeni in January 2017, just before President Obama left office, as he scrambled to release as many prisoners approved for release by his own review processes as possible before Donald Trump took office. 

All were resettled in a third country because the entire US establishment refused to contemplate releasing Yemenis to their home country because of the security situation there, because Congress had, additionally, refused to allow any more Afghan prisoners to be repatriated, and because, in the case of the Russian, it was not considered safe for him to be sent home. Read the rest of this entry »

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Excellent news from Guantánamo yesterday, as Charlie Savage, in the New York Times, confirmed what those of us seeking the prison’s closure had hoped — that the majority of the 22 men approved for release (out of the 59 men still held) will be freed before President Obama leaves office.

Because of requirements put in place over many years by a hostile Congress, the Pentagon must notify Congress 30 days before a release — a “transfer” — is to take place, and the deadline for securing releases before Obama leaves office was therefore this Monday, December 19. By late in the day, officials told the Times, the administration had secured homes for 17 or 18 of the remaining prisoners, who, crucially, will be sent to Italy, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Gulf countries have all taken prisoners in the last two years — almost all of them Yemenis, for whom third countries had to be found because the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate Yemenis based on fears about the security situation in their homeland. Four were sent to Oman in January 2015, another six in June 2015, and five were sent to the UAE in November 2015. Another ten were sent to Oman in January 2016, and another 12 were sent to the UAE in August 2016 (with three Afghans, whose repatriation had been prohibited by Congress, based on fears about them ending up taking up arms against US forces). In addition, another nine Yemenis were sent to Saudi Arabia in April 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

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In August, a long-suffering Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo, Obaidullah, was finally released after 14 years of imprisonment without charge or trial, sent to the United Arab Emirates rather than to his home village, because the US Congress had, with a rather hysterical disregard for any sense of proportion, passed a law preventing any Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo from being repatriated. Below I’m cross-posting a moving account of Obaidullah himself, and of his wrongful imprisonment, by one of his attorneys, Anne Richardson. Other civilian lawyers who worked on his case include Dan Stormer and Cindy Pánuco of Hadsell Stormer & Renick LLP in Pasadena, CA, where Richardson worked before moving to Public Counsel, the US’s largest pro bono firm, where she is the directing attorney of the Consumer Law Project.

Obaidullah, who has just one name like many Afghans, was seized in July 2002, when he was around 22 years old (he doesn’t know his exact year of birth), and was accused of having “stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment,” and it was also claimed that he “concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices”; and that he “knew or intended” that his “material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.”

The charges were listed when he was, absurdly, put forward for a trial by military commission in September 2008. Even if the allegations were true, putting forward a minor insurgent for a war crimes trial was a disgracefully overblown response to his alleged activities, but as an investigation by his military lawyers found in 2011, it appears that the US authorities were mistaken about Obaidullah’s role in any kind of plot against US forces. His wife had just given birth, and blood found in his car, interpreted as being a sign that someone was wounded in an attack, seems to have been from his wife’s labor, which he failed to mention because speaking about such things is not something an Afghan man does. Read the rest of this entry »