I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January with 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. 

CORRECTION: Please note that the panel discussion at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. On January 11 will now take place at 10am, and not at 3pm, as listed below.

As the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay approaches, we at “Close Guantánamo” are making our preparations for being in Washington D.C. to call on President Obama to fulfill the promise he made four years ago, when he took office, to close the prison for good.

At 12 noon on Friday January 11, 2013, the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, the attorney Tom Wilner and the journalist Andy Worthington, who make up the steering committee of “Close Guantánamo,” will be joining members of 24 other groups outside the Supreme Court to call for the closure of Guantánamo. See Amnesty International’s page here, and the flyer here. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: Please feel free to visit the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I founded in January with the attorney Tom Wilner, and please join us to receive updates — just an email address required.

On Monday, in an editorial entitled, “Close Guantánamo,” which, I am pleased to note, drew on my recent report, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, the Saudi Gazette called for President Obama to honor his promise to close Guantánamo, which, of course, he made on his second day in office in January 2009, issuing an executive order promising that the prison would be closed within a year. As the editors urged, “This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. He still has six months in office and can right a wrong and set out to close Guantánamo which he pledged to do even before he became president.”

The Saudi Gazette also took unerring aim at the recent decision by the Supreme Court not to accept appeals by seven prisoners whose cases had been dismissed by politically motivated judges in the court of appeals in Washington D.C., which I wrote about here and here (and discussed on TV here and here). The judges, led by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who supported every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation under George W. Bush that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, have been rewriting the rules governing the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions to such an alarming extent that judges are now obliged to believe any dubious submission put forward as evidence by the government unless it can specifically be refuted, and, as a result, no prisoner has had his petition granted since July 2010.

The Saudi Gazette also claimed that defense secretary Robert Gates had “asked Obama to keep a little more than 100 detainees in indefinite detention … because they constituted an immediate danger to the security of the US but could not be put on trial” — a statement that requires some additional observations, and some corrections. The advice almost certainly came not from Gates but from the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama to review the cases of all the prisoners, whose final report recommended that 84 prisoners should either be tried or held indefinitely. Read the rest of this entry »

In the small hours of this morning, I posted the first set of photos on my new Flickr account, of my wanderings in New York in January, at the start of my two-week US tour to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison.

My tour — my fifth visit to the US to call for the closure of Guantánamo, and to publicize the stories of the men held there — was organized by the campaigning group The World Can’t Wait, and in New York and Washington D.C., I spent a lot of time with The World Can’t Wait’s National Director, Debra Sweet, a relentless  campaigner for justice, who, very deservedly, recently won an American Humanist Award as a “Humanist Heroine.” Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January with 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.

This week, the Supreme Court took a decision not to accept appeals by seven Guantánamo prisoners who, over the last few years, either had their habeas petitions denied, or had their successful petitions overturned on appeal. The ruling came the day before the 4th anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 case in which the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

That led to a number of stunning court victories for the prisoners between 2008 and 2010, but in the last two years no prisoners have had their habeas petitions granted, because judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, a bastion of Bush-era paranoia about the “war on terror,” where the deeply Conservative Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph holds sway, have unfairly rewritten the rules in the government’s favor, so that it is now almost impossible for a habeas petition to be granted. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, when the Supreme Court decided to turn down seven appeals submitted by prisoners held at Guantánamo, without providing any explanation, a particularly low point was reached in the prison’s history.

The decision came just one day before the fourth anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, the hugely significant 2008 ruling granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

That ruling reaffirmed a previous Supreme Court ruling, Rasul v. Bush, in June 2004, granting the prisoners habeas rights, and involved the Court establishing that Congressional attempts to strip habeas rights from the prisoners — in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — had been unconstitutional.

Boumediene led to a flurry of activity, as long-frozen cases were revived. District Court judges in Washington D.C. then decided the evidentiary standards required, assessing that the government needed only to establish its case by a preponderance of the evidence, and not beyond a reasonable doubt, as is required in criminal cases. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I made my way to a TV studio opposite the Houses of Parliament to take part in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! — my first since last April, when the classified military files released by WikiLeaks, on which I worked as a media partner, were first published.

I was joined by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and I was delighted that the story was the main feature on yesterday’s show, and that so much time was devoted to it, and to analyzing the sweeping failures, across the entire US administration, that have led to a situation in which, although 87 of the remaining 169 prisoners have been cleared for release, only two prisoners have been freed in the last 18 months, and there are no signs of when — if ever — any of these 87 men will be released.

The interview, like my interview with RT on Monday, was scheduled last week, following the publication of my report, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, but it assumed alarming new significance on Monday, when the Supreme Court refused to consider any of the appeals that had been submitted over the last year by seven of the 169 remaining prisoners in Guantánamo. It’s posted below, via YouTube: Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday evening in London (and at 4pm Eastern time), I was delighted to be interviewed by Kristine Frazao, via Skype, for the news on RT (Russia Today) from Washington D.C., and specifically for an eight-minute feature entitled, “In Limbo at Gitmo,” which is available below. (Click to enlarge the photo on the left, showing me addressing campaigners for the closure of Guantánamo outside the Supreme Court, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, on January 11 this year, and see here for a video of my talk).

I was invited to appear on the show because of my report last week, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, which was published exclusively on my website and on the website of “Close Guantánamo,” the campaign that I established in January with the attorney Tom Wilner. This report, establishing that at least 40 of the 87 prisoners cleared for release, but still held at Guantánamo, were cleared between 2004 and 2007, was discussed on RT last week, and my scheduled appearance also coincided with the depressing news that the Supreme Court had refused to accept any of the seven appeals submitted by various Guantánamo prisoners, on the eve of the fourth anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, when a more principled Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights. Read the rest of this entry »

In the long struggle to close Guantánamo, protests took place in Washington D.C. and across America on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison on January 11, and the newly established “Close Guantánamo” campaign (of which I am a member of the steering committee) launched a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website, calling on President Obama to fulfill his promise to close the prison, which he made when he took office three years ago, and pointing out how fundamentally unjust it is that 89 of the remaining 171 prisoners have been cleared for release, and yet are still held.

That petition needs to secure 25,000 signatures by February 6, to oblige the President to respond, and at the time of writing, over 4,300 people had signed it. Many groups have been asking their supporters to sign it, and yesterday the Center for Constitutional Rights publicly added their voice to the campaign, sending out an email alert to all their supporters, asking them to sign the petition, and also asking visitors to the “Close Guantánamo” page on their website to sign it.

The embedded clock above [Note: removed after the petition reached its time limit] was also created by CCR, and, in further publicity, three videos featuring speeches made outside the Supreme Court on January 11 — by Andy Worthington, by conscientious objector Daniel Lakemacher, who worked as a guard at Guantánamo, and by CCR’s executive director Vince Warren — have also been made available on CCR’s “Close Guantánamo” page, and are posted below. Read the rest of this entry »

In the final article following my 12-day visit to the US to join protestors calling for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of its opening, I’m posting below three videos by filmmaker Ed Haas of the protests in Washington D.C. on the actual anniversary, January 11, 2012, which I wrote about here.

In the first video, Ed asked me about how I became interested in exposing the injustices of Guantánamo and I explained how I became the custodian of the prisoners’ stories, and he also filmed my brief speech to the crowd, as well as the speeches made by the Guantánamo attorney Tom Wilner (my colleague in the newly-launched “Close Guantánamo” campaign), Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center of Constitutional Rights, Stephen Olesky, the attorney for Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian still held in Guantánamo, and a very powerful speech by Daniel Lakemacher, a former Guantánamo guard and conscientious objector, who was noticeably moved by the presence of other people who care about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, and the continuing dehumanization of the men still held there.

In the second video, Ed captured part of the rally outside the White House, and the march to the Supreme Court, via the Justice Department, as well as the speech made outside the Supreme Court by Debra Sweet, the director of The World Can’t Wait, and the facilitator of my visit. The third video features the very moving recitation, by Leili Kashani of the Center for Constitutional Rights, of “Is It True?” written during his detention by a former Guantánamo prisoner, the Jordanian national Usama Abu Kabir, which the crowd echoed using the “call and response” method of transmitting information, which has been a hallmark of the Occupy movement, and was a very powerful experience, which I was delighted to find that Ed had filmed. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I was in the US for a series of events to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which I wrote about here and here. I also made three TV appearances, and undertook seven radio interviews, one of which was covered here. Three other appearances took place while I was in Washington D.C. On January 10, I was obliged to leave the Q&A session following a screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (the documentary film that I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash) to speak to the veteran progressive radio host Dennis Bernstein on his “Flashpoints” show on KPFA in Berkeley. The interview is available here (or here), and it starts just before 6 minutes in and lasts for ten minutes, with me talking to Dennis in the entrance of Busboys and Poets, with a cellphone clasped firmly to my ear, as people entered and left the premises, often speaking far louder than me.

I’ve also embedded the interview below: Read the rest of this entry »