Guantánamo: Two Malaysians Convicted of Terrorism Repatriated to Serve Out the Rest of Their Sentences; 18 Men Never Charged Are Still Held

Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep, photographed at Guantánamo in recent years by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

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After 20 intensely irritating months of inaction, the Biden administration is — finally, belatedly — making up for lost time, releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, ending the second longest period in the prisons’s long and sordid history that no prisoners have been freed.

The good news began yesterday, when the Pentagon announced that Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, the prison’s sole Kenyan prisoner, and one of 16 men long approved for release by high-level US government review processes, had been repatriated, as I reported here. Bajabu arrived at Guantánamo nearly 18 years ago, in March 2007, after brief and brutal stays in secret US prisons in Djibouti and at Bagram airbase, and had been held without charge or trial at Guantánamo ever since.

Almost exactly three years ago, in December 2021, he was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process introduced by President Obama in 2013, but like the 15 other men long approved for release, that decision had not led to any enthusiasm on the part of the authorities to actually free him, in large part because the review processes were and are purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists to compel the government to release these men if they find it complicated or inconvenient to do so.

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Guantánamo’s Sole Kenyan Prisoner Is Freed; 15 Other Men Long Approved for Release Must Now Be Freed Too

Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, in a photo taken at Guantánamo by members of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and made available to members of his family and his lawyers.

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Wonderful news from Guantánamo, as Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, the prison’s sole Kenyan prisoner, and one of 16 men who had long been approved for release, has been repatriated and reunited with his family, leaving 29 men in total still held at the prison.

The release confirms that, behind the scenes, the Biden administration has taken seriously the scandal of holding 16 men unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes — decisions that were taken between two and four years ago, and in three outlying cases, nearly 15 years ago.

Bajabu, with two other men, was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established by President Obama in 2013, almost three years ago, on December 27, 2021, but had not been freed in part because the review process is purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists to compel the government to free any of these men if they cannot be bothered or find it politically inconvenient.

Read the rest of this entry »

69 Senators and Representatives Urge Congress to Lift Restrictions on Transferring Guantánamo Prisoners to the US Mainland

Campaigners calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay walk past Congress on January 11, 2012, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison.

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In the long and shameful 20-year history of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, obstacles to the prison’s closure — and to the conditions in which prisoners are held — have been raised persistently, since 2010, after President Obama lost control of Congress in the mid-term elections, by Republican lawmakers, in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This year, as in previous years, concerned Democrats are hoping to overturn these provisions, and below I’m posting a letter they wrote recently to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, but before I get to that it’s worthwhile looking back at the long history of these Congressional obstacles.

In December 2010, when Congress passed the NDAA for 2011, it included, for the first time, three provisions regarding Guantánamo that represented an unacceptable intrusion on the president’s authority: firstly, a ban on the use of funds to bring any Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland for any reasons, even to face trials; secondly, a ban on the use of funds to purchase or construct any facility on the US mainland for housing prisoners held, at the time, at Guantánamo; and, thirdly, a requirement that, before any prisoner is released, the defense secretary must sign off on the safety of doing so.

The first of these provisions was specifically aimed at derailing the Obama administration’s proposals to try Khalid Shiekh Mohammed (KSM) and the other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks on the US mainland in federal court (and, just to make it clear, it mentioned KSM by name), while the second was designed to prevent the closure of Guantánamo by derailing the administration’s efforts to buy the empty Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois to transfer men from Guantánamo so that the prison could be closed. The third provision, meanwhile, was meant to make the release of prisoners unpalatable, as any post-release problems would become the responsibility of the defense secretary.

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Video: Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing Powerfully Endorses Closure of Guantánamo, But Republicans Still Mired in “War on Terror” Hysteria

A screenshot of Sen. Dick Durbin introducing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing, “Closing Guantánamo: Ending 20 Years of Injustice,” on December 7, 2021.

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Last Tuesday (Dec. 7), the Senate Judiciary Committee held a powerful hearing, “Closing Guantánamo: Ending 20 Years of Injustice,” which presented an unerring case for the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed. The committee’s chair, Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip, and the second most influential Democrat in Congress, is a longtime opponent of the existence of Guantánamo, and has been doing all he can to ensure its closure since Joe Biden became president in January.

in April, Sen. Durbin was the lead signatory of a letter to President Biden urging him to close the prison, which was also signed by 23 other Democratic Senators (a House version, in August, was signed by 75 Democratic members of the House of Representatives). The letters were particularly significant because the lawmakers recognized that holding prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial is unacceptable, and urged the Biden administration to release everyone still held who has not been charged (27 of the remaining 39 prisoners), with plea deals to be negotiated for the prisoners charged with crimes, to bring to an end the irredeemably broken military commission system in which they are currently trapped.

The lawmakers also called for a senior White House official to be appointed to be accountable for the prison’s closure, and for the role of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the State Department, responsible for prisoner releases and post-release monitoring, to be revived, and they also urged the Justice Department to abandon its long-held position of resisting every legal challenge submitted by the prisoners, even in cases where the administration itself has endorsed their release. As the Senators explained, “If the Justice Department were not to oppose habeas petitions in appropriate cases, those detainees could be transferred more easily pursuant to court orders.”

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A Guantánamo Insider’s Detailed Proposal for How Joe Biden Can Finally Close the Prison

A composite image of President Elect Joe Biden and Camp 6 at Guantánamo.

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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.

With Joe Biden’s victory in the Presidential Election, it’s reassuring that Guantánamo is back on the radar, after four long years under Donald Trump in which time may as well have stood still.

The Just Security website has just published a powerful article, “A Path for Renewing Guantánamo Closure,” which we’re cross-posting below. It was written by Benjamin R. Farley, who served as Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the U.S. Department of State from 2013-17, and is currently a Trial Attorney and Law-of-War Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization, assigned to the team representing Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five co-defendants in the 9/11 trial.

Farley explains how, of the 40 men still held, 30 can be released “simply by restoring, with slight modification, the successful GTMO closure policy process developed during the Obama administration,” although he concedes that, “[t]o finish the remaining 25 percent of the project, [he] will likely need the historically elusive support of Congress.”

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Elizabeth Warren and 14 Other Senators Ask Pentagon About Coronavirus Protections at Guantánamo

Six of the 15 Senators who have written to defense secretary Mark Esper to ask what protections are being provided to prisoners and US personnel at Guantánamo in response to the coronavirus crisis. Top row, L to R: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Dianne Feinstein. Bottom row, L to R: Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, Cory Booker.

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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.





 

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.

The prisoners at Guantánamo Bay — held, for the most part, without charge or trial for over 18 years now — have rarely had the support they should have received from the various branches of the U.S. government — the executive branch, Congress and the judiciary — considering how outrageous it is for prisoners of the U.S. to be held in such fundamentally unjust conditions.

Since Donald Trump became president, of course, any pretence of even caring about this situation has been jettisoned. Trump loves Guantánamo, and is happy for the 40 men still held to be imprisoned until they die, and he hasn’t changed his mind as a new threat — the novel coronavirus, COVID-19 — has emerged.

Last week, however, representatives of another group of people with a long history of not doing much for the prisoners — lawmakers — sent a letter to defense secretary Mark T. Esper calling for clarification regarding what, if anything, the Pentagon is doing to “prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic among detainees in the prison facility at the United States Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (Guantánamo), as well as efforts to protect service members responsible for detention operations and all other military personnel at the base.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Closing Guantánamo, the Democrats and the NDAA

Campaigners calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay walk past Congress on January 11, 2012, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison.

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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.





 

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 the long and dispiriting story of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, in defiance of its purported values, the US is holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, the role of Congress is not always well understood.

Under George W. Bush, lawmakers were largely compliant with the shameful innovations introduced after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the week after the attacks, which allowed the president to pursue anyone that he felt was associated with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces, and to imprison them at the Guantánamo prison, which was deliberately established on the US naval base in Cuba to be beyond the reach of the US courts.

From the beginning, the men — and boys — held there were held without rights, and although long legal struggles led to them eventually securing habeas corpus rights, Congress fought back. However, when their habeas rights were eventually gutted of all meaning, the responsibility lay with ideologically malignant appeals court judges rather than Congress.

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Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court Nomination, Has a Dangerous Track Record of Defending Guantánamo and Unfettered Executive Power

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and a close-up of Guantanamo prisoners photographed on the day the prison opened, January 11, 2002. The photo on the left is an edit of a photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.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.

Disgraceful though Donald Trump’s presidency is, it will at least be over at some point in the imaginable future, with the potential that his most outrageous policy changes, enacted in legislation by a Republican majority in Congress, can be reversed should Congress end up with a Democratic majority instead.

When it comes to interpreting the law, however, his impact will last for decades, through his nominations to the nation’s District Courts, appeals courts (the Circuit Courts), and, most crucially, the Supreme Court.

Shamefully, although Barack Obama successfully nominated two of the Supreme Court’s nine justices during his eight years in office (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan), Congress — where Republicans had a majority, as they did throughout most of Obama’s presidency — refused to consider his third nomination, Merrick Garland, nominated in March 2016. Garland’s appointment would have given Democratic appointees a majority on the Supreme Court for the first time since 1970, but Garland’s nomination expired in January 2017, when Obama left office, and when Donald Trump took over he wasted no time in nominating Neil Gorsuch instead, a dangerous right-winger whose nomination was subsequently approved by the Republican-controlled Congress. Read the rest of this entry »

June 15 Marks 6,000 Days of Guantánamo: Join Us in Telling Donald Trump, “Not One Day More!”

20 of the people who have supported the campaign to tell Donald Trump to close Guantanamo in 2018, via the Gitmo Clock, which counts how long the prison has been open in real time.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.

Next Friday, June 15, 2018, is a bleak day for anyone who cares about justice and the rule of law, because the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where men are, for the most part, held indefinitely without charge or trial, will have been open for 6,000 days; or, to put it another way, 16 years, five months and four days. We hope you will join us in making some noise to mark this sad milestone in America’s modern history.

All year we’ve been running the Gitmo Clock, which counts, in real time, how long Guantánamo has been open, and in connection with that, we’ve made posters available every 25 days showing how long the prison has been open, and inviting suporters of Guantánamo’s closure to take photos with them, and to send them to us. The poster for 6,000 days is here. Please print it off, take a photo with it, ask your family and friends to do the same, and send the photos to us. We will add them to the photos we’ve been publishing all year, which can be found here. 

How long is 6,000 days?

To give you some idea of how long 6,000 days is, try to remember what you were doing on January 11, 2002, when the prison opened. Perhaps you weren’t yet born, or perhaps, like me, you have sons or daughters who were just toddlers when those first photos of orange-clad, sensorily-deprived prisoners kneeling in the Caribbean sun as US soldiers barked orders at them were first released. My son is now 18 years old — nearly 18 and a half, in fact — but he was just two when Guantánamo opened. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Donald Trump Actually Close Guantánamo?

'Guantanamo: Closing down', an image used by Reprieve to accompany their new petition calling for the closure of Guantanamo.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. Please also sign the new petition launched by Reprieve, from which the image accompanying this article was taken, calling for Guantánamo’s closure.





 

I wrote the following article, as “Alberto Mora, U.S. Navy’s Former Top Lawyer, Explains How Donald Trump Might Close Guantánamo,” 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.

Forgive me for what must appear to be a weirdly upbeat headline, given that it’s just over a week since Donald Trump issued a practically pointless but symbolically malevolent executive order keeping the prison at Guantánamo Bay open. However, as Alberto Mora, the General Counsel of the Department of the Navy under George W. Bush, has just explained in an op-ed for the Atlantic’s Defense One website, despite Trump’s seeming obsession with keeping Guantánamo open, it may be that a review of detention policies that he included in his executive order will conclude that he should close it after all.

Alberto Mora, who nowadays is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, played a key role in resisting some of the most dangerously lawless innovations of the Bush administration in his role as the Navy’s General Counsel. In December 2002, when he was advised by David Brant, the director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), that military interrogators, were “engaging in escalating levels of physical and psychological abuse,” as Jane Mayer described it in a groundbreaking New Yorker article in 2006, he was appalled, and when Brant revealed that the abuse wasn’t “rogue activity,” but was “rumored to have been authorized at a high level in Washington,” he confronted William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, and Donald Rumsfeld, who had approved a memo authorizing torture at Guantánamo on December 2, 2002,  unearthing the memo, and threatening to go public about its contents unless it was withdrawn. Rumsfeld complied, but secretly convened a working group to reinstate the policies Mora objected to, which had the approval of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, as written by John Yoo, the author of the infamous CIA “torture memos,” which cynically sought to redefine torture so that the CIA could use it.

As a result, Mora is well-placed to comment on Guantánamo 15 years on from his struggle to prevent the use of torture at the prison, and his suggestion that Donald Trump might close it is based on Trump’s “command to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to ‘reexamine our military detention policy’ and report back to him within 90 days and his request to Congress to ensure that ‘we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists.’” I’m not sure that I agree with Mora that this shows “unexpected open-mindedness” on Trump’s part, and I cannot agree with his assessment that, in “asking Mattis to take charge,” and also including Congress in an assessment of detention policy, Trump “acted prudently and, dare I say it, wisely.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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