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UPDATE: Just after I posted this article, the news broke that eleven of the 14 men approved for release from Guantánamo have been resettled in Oman. My article celebrating this news will be published tomorrow, but the photo campaign and the vigils will, of course, be proceeding as planned, because 15 men are still held — three who have also long been approved for release, three “forever prisoners”, never charged, but never approved for release either, and nine others in the military commissions trial system. Here’s my article about the release of these eleven men, containing more information than you’ll find in the mainstream media!

With the plight of 14 men who have long been approved for release from Guantánamo but are still held dominating the thoughts of those of us who have spent years — or decades — calling for the prison’s closure, this coming week — which includes the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening, on Saturday January 11 — is a crucial time for highlighting the need for urgent action from the Biden administration, in the last few weeks before Donald Trump once more occupies the White House, bringing with him, no doubt, a profound antipathy towards any of the men still held, and a hunger for sealing the prison shut as he did during his first term in office.

This Thursday, January 9, marks 8,400 days since the prison opened, and, as I’ve been doing every 100 days for the last seven years, I’m encouraging people across the US and around the world to show their solidarity with the men still held by taking a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking this grim milestone, and calling for the prison’s closure. The poster is here, and please send your photo here. If you don’t have a printer, you can bring up the poster on a phone, or on a tablet or laptop, and get someone to take a photo with their phone.

Normally, I also produce a separate poster marking the number of days that Guantánamo has been open on the anniversary of its opening, but this year, because the anniversary falls just two days after 8,400 days, I’m encouraging everyone holding vigils on January 11 to print off the 8,400 days poster and to use that. After 8,400 days, two days really make very little difference at all.

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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. 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.

Next Thursday, January 11, the US government’s shameful and disgraceful “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 22 years, and a number of online events, as well as in-person vigils and rallies, are taking place across the US and around the world, which are listed below.

This is an unforgivable anniversary for a prison that should never have existed, where men continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, or mired in a broken trial system, the military commissions, that is incapable of delivering justice.

Guantánamo’s continued existence ought to be a source of profound shame for the three branches of the US government — the executive, Congress and the judiciary — who have all failed to close it, for the mainstream US media, who have largely failed to recognize the gravity of the crimes committed there over the last 22 years, and for the majority of the American people, who have failed to take an interest in what is being done in their name in this secretive prison on the grounds of a US naval base on the shore of Cuba’s easternmost bay.

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My thanks to Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, in Victoria, Canada, for reaching out to interview me last week about the coordinated monthly vigils for the closure of Guantánamo which take place in London, across the US and around the world on the first Wednesday of every month, and which I initiated in February (following up on monthly vigils in London, which began last September) by reaching out to friends and colleagues elsewhere to join us. Chris and I have spoken many times over the years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to him.

Our interview takes up the second half of the one-hour show, beginning at 28:45, following an interview that is also worth listening to — with William S. Geimer, a peace activist, Professor Emeritus of Law at Washington and Lee University, a military veteran who resigned his 82nd Airborne commission in opposition to the war against Vietnam, the author of the book, ‘Canada: The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars’, and the founder of the Greater Victoria Peace School.

The interview is available here as an MP3, or here on the Gorilla Radio website, and it’s also embedded below.

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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. 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.

With the release from Guantánamo three weeks ago of the Saudi citizen Ghassan al-Sharbi, the prison now holds just 31 men, out of the 779 held by the US military since it first opened over 21 years ago.

17 of these 31 men have been approved for release, and yet there is no way of knowing when, if ever, they will be released, because they did not have their release ordered by a court, but recommended by administrative review processes, and, as a result, they cannot appeal to a judge to order their release if, as is the case, the government shows no sense of urgency when it comes to freeing them.

Complicating matters, however, we acknowledge that, in the cases of 13 of these men, the US government must find third countries prepared to offer them new homes, because provisions inserted by Republicans into the annual National Defense Authorization Act since the early years of the Obama presidency prevent any repatriations from Guantánamo to countries including Yemen, Libya and Somalia, and eleven of these men are Yemeni, one is a Libyan, and another is a Somali. An additional complication is that none of these men can be resettled in the US, because another provision in the NDAA prevents any Guantánamo prisoner from being brought to the US mainland for any reason.

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On Wednesday, February 15, campaigners in London and Washington, D.C. held their first coordinated monthly protest calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, specifically, for the release of 20 men (out of the 34 men still held), who have long been approved for release, but who are still held because of a lack of urgency on the part of the US government when it comes to securing their freedom.

I wrote about the plight of the 20 men here, when Majid Khan was released from Guantánamo and resettled in Belize, eleven months after his military commission sentence came to an end, when I noted that, while it was, of course, just and appropriate that Khan had been freed and resettled, because the US government was legally required to freedom at the end of his sentence, it was unforgivable that the Biden administration is dragging its heels when it comes to releasing the 20 other men still held who have been approved for release, because the decisions to release them were taken by administrative review processes that carry no legal weight.

As I stated at the time, “Until they are freed, the message the US government is sending to these 20 men, and to the world, is that it is easier to resettle from Guantánamo someone convicted of terrorism but demonstrably remorseful than it is to resettle someone never charged with a crime at all.”

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I’ve been shocked by the nightly scenes of violence beamed around the world from Portland, Oregon, where Donald Trump has sent in federal law enforcement officers — from the Department of Homeland Security, the US Marshals Service and the border patrol — to bypass Portland’s own police force and to assault and terrify protestors, who, since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis two months ago, have been engaged in ongoing protests about racism and police brutality.

As the Guardian explained, Donald Trump sent federal law enforcement officers to “take control” of Portland at the start of July, having decided that it “had been abandoned by its mayor to anarchists and mob rule.” The officers, “often in unmarked uniforms and vehicles”, have been deployed against protesters in Portland since the beginning of the month, “using teargas, stun grenades and munitions to control crowds descending on to federal buildings in Oregon’s largest city.”

As the Guardian also explained, the arrival of the federal officers initially “sent a wave of alarm through the demonstrators after men in camouflage began snatching people off the streets in unmarked vans. Those detained said they were dragged into the courthouse without being told why they were being arrested or by whom and then suddenly let go without any official record of being held. It smacked of police state tactics. So did some of the violence meted out by federal agents who looked more like an occupying army in a war zone.”

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See my photos of the rally on Flickr here.

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.

It’s now five days since a sad occasion that I traveled to the US from the UK to mark — and to rail against: the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, on January 11, when I took part in a rally outside the White House organized by numerous rights groups, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Witness Against Torture.

This was the tenth year in a row that I’ve traveled to the US to mark the anniversary, and I’m still here, about to take part in a speaking event at Revolution Books in Harlem this evening, and also taking part in numerous media interviews — for the Scott Horton Show, and with Sunsara Taylor on her show “We Only Want the World” on WBAI in New York. Yesterday, I was interviewed on RT America (video posted below), today I’m speaking with Paul DiRienzo on WBAI and with Mickey Duff for “Project Censored” on KPFA, Pacifica Radio in Berkeley — and tomorrow I’ll be speaking with Latif Nasser on WNYC, New York Public Radio, and on the Michael Slate Show in Los Angeles. Do get in touch if you’d like to be added to this list!

Here’s that RT America video, which represents, I believe, the sole focus on Guantánamo, on the 18th anniversary of its opening, in the whole of the US-based broadcast media:

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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, including my current visit to the US to call for the prison’s closure. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, for the tenth year running, I was in Washington, D.C., calling for its closure.

I was there as a representative of Close Guantánamo, an organization I established eight years ago — on the tenth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo — with the attorney Tom Wilner, and I was delighted to be part of a line-up of speakers that included representatives of numerous other campaigning groups and lawyers’ organizations — Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Justice for Muslims Collective, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and Witness Against Torture, to name just a few, as well as some other individuals playing music and performing spoken word pieces.

The video is posted below, via the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Facebook page, and I hope that you have time to watch it in its entirety. If you want to see what happened when I distilled a year’s worth of rage and indignation at Guantánamo’s continued existence into four minutes, my speech begins around 55 minutes in.

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See my photos on Flickr here!

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.

It’s now nine days since the 17th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo — a day that I marked by flying to New York, taking the bus to Washington, D.C., appearing at an annual panel discussion at the New America think-tank (broadcast live by C-SPAN), and taking part in another annual event: a vigil outside the White House, featuring members of the campaigning group Witness Against Torture and speakers from over a dozen rights groups, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve US. The video of the entire vigil is here.

I also took over 40 photos of campaigners with posters showing how Guantánamo had been open for 6,210 days on the anniversary — posters I had made via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded seven years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner — and I published them on our website and on social media, and on my return to New York I undertook a number of TV and radio appearances. I wrote about some of these events, TV shows and radio appearances here and here, and will be posting another article bringing the story up to date in a few days’ time, but for now I wanted to share with you another project I undertook during the vigil — taking photos, which are available on my Flickr page, to add to previous sets I posted in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

I know that the best opportunity for there to be interest in these photos was as soon as possible after the event — or even tweeted or posted to Instagram or Facebook at the time — but the problem with fixating on the media moment is that, nine days later, no one notices that the problem that needed highlighted has now been forgotten. 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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

I wrote the following article (as “Close Guantánamo Events Marking the 17th Anniversary of the Opening of 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.

As 2019 began, the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay marked a shameful milestone. January 1 was the 6,200th day of operations at the prison, and we marked the occasion with the latest stage of our ongoing photo campaign, in which supporters take photos with posters showing how long Guantánamo has been open and urging Donald Trump to close it, based on our Gitmo Clock project, which counts in real time how long the prison has been open.

In seven days’ time, the prison will reach another appalling milestone: the 17th anniversary of its opening. This is on January 11, and to mark the occasion Close Guantánamo’s co-founders, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney Tom Wilner and the London-based journalist Andy Worthington (making his 9th annual visit for protest and events on and around the anniversary) will be taking part in a panel discussion at the New America think-tank, and will also be part of an annual vigil outside the White House organized by and attended by representatives of a dozen rights groups. Andy is also discussing Guantánamo in New York, two days after the anniversary, and both Andy and Tom are available for media interviews, and for further events, throughout the duration of Andy’s visit, from January 7-17.

Details of the events are below: Read the rest of this entry »