I was a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, but who is its biggest captive?
By Mansoor Adayfi | MEMO | February 23, 2023
It was 21 years ago this month that I was flown in the belly of a US cargo plane, hooded, blindfolded, gagged and chained in an orange jumpsuit, for over 40 hours. I didn’t know where I was being taken, or why.
My journey into the unknown started when I was sold to the CIA as an “Egyptian Al-Qaida general” in 2001 after the US invaded Afghanistan. I was 18 years old, and I am from Yemen. After I was imprisoned for around three months in a black site in Afghanistan, I was taken to Kandahar military prison, an airbase that served as a transit station to the unknown. I wasn’t the only one being held there.
When a huge cargo plane landed in Kandahar three weeks later, we all knew that some of us would disappear. Without being able to see, hear or speak, we were dragged to the first plane blindfolded, and then chained to the floor. It was a journey of pain and suffering. When the plane eventually landed, we hoped it would be the end to our suffering. It wasn’t. It was only the beginning of a longer, more brutal journey.
Soldiers never seem to get tired of the beating and shouting. When the second flight ended, it was still not the end of the journey. The US marines snatched and dragged me onto a bus, and then onto a ferry. Where was I going? The first clue came from the sea, which was the first friend who welcomed me. A marine shouted in English and an Arab marine translated: “You are under the control of the US marines!” They continued to shout and physically assault us for the rest of the way.
The ferry eventually docked and a bus took us on the final leg of the journey. We were disembarked by being snatched, one after another. I was forced to sit on my knees for hours. The duct tape over my mouth blocked my screams. Every cell in my body was screaming but no one could hear my cries. They could see the pain, and I felt like maybe their twisted humanity was screaming back, too.
After going through the processing station —where we experienced humiliation and degradation over and over again — soldiers dragged my naked body over sharp gravel to a cage where an IRF (Immediate Reaction Force) team piled on top of me and started removing the chains violently; then the hood, goggles, earmuffs and the duct tape. Soldiers shouted into my ears, “DETAINEE 441! STOP RESISTING!” Resisting? I was barely breathing. Without knowing it, what they did at that moment was introduce the word “resist” into my mental landscape. That’s what I needed to do; I just had no idea how.
At night, it took a while for my sight to come back, but it was still blurry. All I could see was an ocean of orange figures caged just like me, all I could hear were rattling chains, slamming doors, soldiers shouting in their loudest voice, “SHUT THE F**K UP, DON’T LOOK AT ME, LOOK DOWN, NO TALKING!” The dogs barking in the near distance sounded less aggressive than them. The barking never stopped. As in never. It sounded as though they were protesting at the inhumane treatment in their own way.
On my first morning in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp — for that is where I was — I took a long look around me. I found myself caged in a rose chain-link cage where even animals wouldn’t survive. There were many others there too. I could see swollen faces with bruises, black eyes, shaved heads and faces, split lips and bleeding wounds. We all looked the same. It was like a signature that the soldiers wanted to leave on us all. US President George W. Bush and his administration needed to prove that they were “winning” the “War on Terror”, so they called us the worst of the worst.
We were dragged to this unknown place from different parts of the world; some of us were sold for a bounty and some were handed over to the CIA by their own governments. It was the first time in history that such a thing was done: there we were; 800 men and children — yes, children — from 50 nationalities, speaking over 20 different languages, having different mindsets and cultures, snatched and flown to a dark hole hidden from the rest of the world. This American prison camp wasn’t even in America.
Everything was taken from us, and we became just orange figures with numbers printed on a bracelet locked on our wrists. Our captors stripped us of our freedom and imprisoned our bodies and wanted to control us and deny our humanity, but they failed to understand that what really makes us unique individuals are characteristics such as our names, values, relations, morals, beliefs, ethics, emotions, memories, language, knowledge, experiences, talents, feelings, dreams, nationalities and, of course, our innate distinctive humanity. These were part of another DNA, and a survival kit which the US government didn’t want to know about. They thought that they could control our bodies and freedom, but they would never control our hearts and souls.
Yes, we were isolated and disconnected from our families and the rest of the world, but even in America’s dark hole, life won. We created our own world. Yes, we were tortured and abused, but we also sang, danced, resisted and survived. Also, we soon found other generous guests at Guantanamo who came to visit us regularly, who challenged the US restrictions and never had CIA clearance to visit. They came to share our meals, to listen to us, and to tell us that everything will be okay. We became friends and families with the iguanas, cats, birds and banana rats.
Guantanamo started with a selection of Muslims from around the world, but it kept changing, evolving and growing. We lived through Camp X-Ray, Camp Delta, Camp 5, Camp 6, Camp Echo and others. We went through the torture programmes and abuse by interrogators, psychologists and a whole host of camp staff. We went on hunger strike to protest against the torture and injustice, only to be tortured more. We lived through all the years of Guantanamo: we lived through its Dark Age, its Golden Age, and back again to the Dark Age. With each year we grew older and our imprisonment only settled into us more deeply. Our captors got more creative in developing torture techniques to break us and to try to turn us into something we were not.
To survive through the darkness in that dark hole, we only had each other and whatever makes us human beings. We were fathers, husbands, brothers and sons from different parts of the world. Some of us were teachers, doctors, soldiers, commanders, journalists, lawyers, tribal elders, mafia men, poets and professors; and some were spies. We had no shared life before Guantanamo, nothing in common. At first, we started introducing ourselves to each other, and getting to know each other. I wish our captives had taken time to get to know who we really were as well, instead of just needing to prove that we were hardened terrorists.
The cycle of hardship and the torture we endured forged strong bonds of brotherhood and friendship that helped us to survive. We started developing a new shared life and a new “us” at Guantanamo. Our brains started constructing new memories, relations, knowledge and experiences, but everything related back to and was based on Guantanamo life. Sharing our knowledge, experience and culture with each other created a beautiful Guantanamo where we sang songs in different languages, danced dances from different cultures, and laughed and cried together. After years, we grew together and became part of each other’s lives and memories. Guantanamo became part of us and part of our life. Guantanamo kept growing, evolving and changing, feeding on our lives and humanity. With it, we grew old too.
We weren’t the only victims of Guantanamo: all Americans and America’s values and justice system were as well. There were many Americans who came to work in the detention camp, and they became victims too when they refused to abandon their humanity and treat us badly. Some took a stand against the system and were imprisoned; others were fired or demoted. We fought for them as much as we fought for each other because they were humans and victims too, regardless of their nationality or which side they were on. Injustice has no boundaries, colour or nationality. As we were living in Guantanamo, we didn’t want anyone else to experience it.
Through the Dark Age of 2002-2010, we protested and carried out hunger strikes for years. We fought back as much as we could; we learned from each other and taught each other. In Guantanamo’s Golden Age we learned English and art; we painted and we made ships, cabinets, trees, all from remnants of trash and leftover cardboard.
In Guantanamo, I grew up, from a young boy to a caged man. My world was Guantanamo and it’s where half of my life was taken, where days, months and years were the same.
Then after around 15 years, I was forced to leave Guantanamo the way that I was taken there, hooded and chained. When they came to tell me about my release, they told me, “You have no choice.” I made peace with Guantanamo in Guantanamo and made the decision that it wouldn’t change me; it’s part of me and of who I am.
The whole world agrees that Guantanamo is a stain on our humanity and one of the biggest human right violations of the 21st century. There are those who tortured and abused us at Guantanamo who are still bragging about their time there and their work. Their humanity was the first real victim of that place.
Despite all these reflections, though, Guantanamo hasn’t left us yet. Even today, there are 34 men still in Guantanamo, 20 of whom have been cleared for release. There are many calls for the closure of America’s black hole detention centre. For us, closing Guantanamo does not only mean shutting down the facility, but also there being full accountability for the US government for what happened there: acknowledgment of the cruel and inhumane treatment, a full and unreserved apology, and reparations for the victims.
Guantanamo symbolises oppression, injustice, torture and lawlessness. In this way, Guantanamo is now everywhere, and I can say — in the strangest of ironies — that even though we were prisoners of the US destructive “War on Terror”, the United States is and always has been a prisoner of its own violence. Guantanamo is yet another chapter of this violence and one whose legacy will live on long after the prison is closed. The United State of America itself is Guantanamo’s greatest captive.
CIA prisoner was used as torture prop to teach recruits – declassified documents
The US flag at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on August 7, 2013 © AFP / Chantal Valery
Samizdat | March 15, 2022
The US Central Intelligence Agency used a detainee in Afghanistan as a ‘prop’ to teach interrogators how to torture prisoners, leaving the man with brain damage, newly declassified documents have revealed.
According to the 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, published by The Guardian, 44-year-old Ammar al-Baluchi was used to teach interrogators how to perform a torture technique called ‘walling’. As explained by the CIA, walling is where an interrogator “pulls the detainee towards him and then quickly slams the detainee against [a] false wall.”
The document states that Baluchi was subjected to walling for up to two hours at a time, and a former trainee claimed that “all the interrogation students lined up to ‘wall’ Ammar” so their instructor “could certify them on their ability to use the technique.”
“In the case of ‘walling’ in particular the [Office of the Inspector General] had difficulty determining whether the session was designed to elicit information from Ammar or to ensure that all interrogator trainees received their certification,” the declassified report said, noting that it appeared “certification was key” during the torture sessions.
Baluchi – who was captured by the CIA in 2003 before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 – reportedly suffered from brain damage as a result of his detainment by the US intelligence agency.
The Kuwaiti-born man was detained for allegedly having a role in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and serving as a courier for Osama Bin Laden.
Baluchi remains in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, despite calls from the United Nations and human rights activists for his release.
A Saudi Arabian man was released from Guantanamo Bay to receive mental health treatment this month after nearly 20 years in custody. Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani, 46, was freed after US officials deemed his imprisonment “no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States.”
Qahtani was reportedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder after he was subjected to beatings, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
There are 38 detainees left in the military prison.
Political reformers will wallow in futility until they take aim at the real enemy
By Greg Felton | August 31, 2018
According to the Russian proverb, “Repetition is the mother of learning.” This positive message of perseverance and practice is doubtless known to every Russian schoolchild; however, it is a lost on reform-minded American politicians. Those who promise and fail to bring about fundamental reform show little capacity to learn from their failure. Instead, they chant the same slogans and pious incantations and start over as if nothing had happened, as if the promise to reform were enough. This fixation with rhetoric over realism gives rise to another saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
Those who pay the price for this insanity are Americans desperate for someone, anyone, to provide a viable alternative to the oligarchic establishment that has turned their country into a police state. Repeated failures are debilitating and disillusioning because they end up destroying hope and perpetuating oligarchic power. Two events illustrate this.
The first took place on Jan. 22, 2009, when President-elect Barack Obama signed an executive order that, among other things, made good on a bold campaign promise to close the Guantánamo Bay torture/detention facility. Throughout out his two terms in office, Obama made this promise repeatedly as if repetition would make it come about. Obama did so even as he approved the Pentagon’s appropriations for the coming fiscal year, knowing full well that it included Congressional obstructions to closing it. To register his disapproval, to say nothing of his acquiescence, Obama appended signing statements to the appropriations orders. Typical is this one from Dec. 31, 2011:
I have signed the [National Defense Authorization Act] … despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists. … Section 1027 renews the bar against using appropriated funds for fiscal year 2012 to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the United States for any purpose. I continue to oppose this provision, which intrudes upon critical executive branch authority to determine when and where to prosecute Guantanamo detainees, based on the facts and the circumstances of each case and our national security interests. (emphasis added)
According to Obama, the failure to close the facility was Congress’s fault, but since he tolerated Congressional obstruction, his protestations meant little. To make matters worse, Obama knew all along he had executive authority to close down Guantánamo Bay with or without Congress’s approval, as he implied at a December 2015 press conference:
I think we can make a very strong argument that it doesn’t make sense for us to be spending an extra $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, $500 million, a billion dollars, to have a secure setting for 50, 60, 70 people. And we will wait until Congress has definitively said no to a well-thought-out plan with numbers attached to it before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here. (emphasis added)
Congress had “definitively said no” numerous times, so this feint towards collaborative problem-solving amounted to empty posturing. Obama’s real opposition was not Congress but those who used Congress to sabotage the closure of Guantánamo Bay, which just happens to hold alleged terrorists associated with the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
The second failed promise of reform is most commonly associated with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. On Oct. 18, 2016, less than a month before the election, he announced plans to take action against lobbyists and the unseemly undemocratic power they wield in Washington D.C. Among other things, Trump planned to broaden the definition of “lobbyist” to include consultants and advisors, prevent lobbyists from raising campaign contributions and “bar senior executive branch officials from ever lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.” He saw such people as undemocratic and corrupt, especially the deep-pocketed foreign and domestic interests associated with the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation.
Trump’s campaign rallying cry for this reform was, “It’s time to drain the swamp,” and he seemed to be the ideal person to do it: an outsider who earned the Republican nomination because the party was so intellectually ossified and riddled with incompetents, it was incapable of putting forward a credible candidate. Even though the metaphor of a swamp for Washington D.C. is technically inaccurate, the image of a disease-generating wetland swarming with dangerous, predatory creatures was successful because it depicted the public’s long-standing image of the federal government.
“Drain the Swamp” is not unique to Trump or his party, though. On May 21, 2018, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Shumer used “swamp” against Trump in the run up to the mid-term elections: “The swamp has never been more foul, or more fetid, than under this president.” This, in turn, hearkened back to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s 2006 invocation to “drain the swamp” of Republican government. There are still other repetitions, one going back to Benito Mussolini!
Like Obama’s crusade to close Guantánamo Bay, Trump’s crusade to drain the swamp failed. This was to be expected. In 2000, independent presidential candidate Pat Buchanan gave the definitive explanation: ‘’Neither Beltway party is going to drain this swamp: it’s a protected wetland; they breed in it; they spawn in it.” There can be little doubt who Buchanan meant by “they”. Time and again on the public affairs show The McLaughlin Group, he spelled it out in unambiguous language, as in these excerpts:
- “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” (Aug. 26, 1990)
- “Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.” (June 15, 1990)
- “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at….” (Feb. 2, 2007)
Israel’s Proxies in Congress:
Note that almost all these legislators are Democrats.
Source: www.investmentwatchblog.com/89-of-our-senators-and-congress-hold-dual-citizenship-citizenship-with-israel (March 21, 2018).
Buchanan’s observations are common knowledge, as is the fact that U.S. politicians prostrate themselves annually before the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and that scores of legislators are Israel/U.S. dual citizens. Obama’s and Trump’s reforms did not and could not succeed because the U.S.’s Zionist overlords did not allow it. Closing Guantánamo Bay and bringing its inmates to U.S. prisons would have drawn attention to the U.S.’s sadistic treatment of Muslims to cover up Israel’s role in the Sept. 11 attacks. In the swamp, Israel-firsters are the apex predators and overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, so Trump’s promise to drain the swamp was a non-starter because it posed an existential threat to Israel.
It’s worth remembering that Trump was not Israel’s choice to be its new American satrap. The swamp had to co-opt him, and it did so successfully. Even though he ran on a campaign of ending counterproductive military aggression, in April 2017 and April 2018 Trump bombed Syria for Israel and received widespread approval in the pro-Israel mass media. He also reversed decades of U.S. policy by acceding to Zionist demands that the U.S. move its embassy to Jerusalem, thereby violating long-standing international law. The appointments of Zionists Mike Pompeo to Secretary of State and John Bolton to National Security Advisor in 2018 essentially confirmed his political surrender to the “swampocracy”.
Unless, a reformer is prepared to attack the impediments to reform instead of talking about its symptoms, any talk of fighting corruption or injustice is a cruel joke. One courageous, principled reformer who stands up to the Zionist imperial machinery is British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. For his efforts, he is vilified and subjected to Zionist-led subversion within his party, but despite these and other vilifications, like the empty, fabricated epithet “anti-Semite,” he will not back down. North Americans have nobody like Corbyn to look up to. It seems that only when politicians are about to leave office and have nothing to lose do they find the courage they lacked when their political careers mattered. As I wrote in The Host & The Parasite––How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America:
On May 20, 2004, retiring Sen. Ernest Hollings unleashed a fusillade from the Senate floor denouncing the coercive and corrosive power of The Lobby: “You can’t have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here… I can tell you, no President takes office—I don’t care whether it is a Republican or a Democrat—that all of a sudden AIPAC will tell him exactly what the policy is, and Senators and members of Congress ought to sign letters… I didn’t like to keep it a secret, maybe; but I can tell you now, I will challenge any one of the other 99 Senators to tell us why we are in Iraq, other than what this policy is here. It is an adopted policy, a domino theory of The Project For The New American Century.” (p. 482)
Taking aim at the Zionist infrastructure entails an element of personal and professional risk, but the price for acquiescence is slavery. Americans, and Canadians, will not regain control of their countries until Zionists are recognized as the enemy, and that entails not letting them get away with conflating “Zionist” with “Jew,” squawking “anti-Semitism” or invoking the “Holocaust ®”. In the next part, I will show how this admonition applies even more strongly to political activists, who seem to prefer flogging their own biases to working for the common good.
Opening Gitmo to the World
By Robert Koehler | CounterPunch | July 28, 2017
To read Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo is to run your mind along the contours of hell.
The next step, if you’re an American, is to embrace it. Claim it. This is who we are: We are the proprietors of a cluster of human cages and a Kafkaesque maze of legal insanity. This torture center is still open. Men (“forever prisoners”) are still being held there, their imprisonment purporting to keep us safe.
The book, by Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir — two Algerian men arrested in Bosnia in 2011 and wrongly accused of being terrorists — allows us to imagine ourselves at Guantanamo, this outpost of the Endless War.
“‘Take him outside,’ the interrogator told them. They led me up a flight of eight or nine concrete steps to a long gravel drive. It was pitch black out, and completely quiet. There was no one around. One of the soldiers grabbed my left arm, and another took my right. And then they started running.
“I tried to keep up, but my legs were shackled together. First, my flip-flops fell off, and after a few barefoot strides, my legs fell out from under me. The soldiers didn’t even slow down. They kept a firm grip on my arms while my legs bounced and scraped along the ground, gravel biting into them. When the run finally ended, the soldiers brought me back to the interrogation room, bloody and bedraggled.”
This is one fragment, one story of the seven years these two innocent men endured: these two fathers who were pulled away from their wives and children, yanked from their lives, stuffed into cages, interrogated endlessly and pointlessly, humiliated, force-fed (in Lakhdar’s case) . . . and finally, finally, ordered by a U.S. judge to be freed, when their case, Boumediene v. Bush, was at long last heard in a real court and the lack of evidence against them became appallingly clear.
The book is the story of the courage it takes to survive.
And it’s a story that can only be told because of the work of the Boston legal firm WilmerHale, which spent more than 17,000 pro bono hours litigating the case, “work that would have cost paying clients more than $35 million.”
Lakhdar and Mustafa were freed in 2008 and began rebuilding their lives. They eventually decided they wanted to tell their story — to an American audience. Daniel Norland, who was a lawyer at WilmerHale when the case was making its way through the court process (but was not part of the litigation team) and his sister, Kathleen List, who speaks fluent Arabic, conducted more than 100 hours of interviews with the two men, which were shaped into Witnesses of the Unseen.
In October 2011, the two men, who were living and working in Sarajevo, were among six Algerians who wound up being arrested by Bosnian authorities and charged with plotting to blow up the American embassy in Sarajevo. They were held for three months, then released. There was no evidence to back up the accusation.
But this turns out to be the beginning of their story, not the end of it. The men were released not back to their own lives but to an authority more powerful than the Bosnian judicial system: They were released to the Americans, who had begun rounding up Muslims . . . uh, terrorists. Evidence, or lack thereof, didn’t matter. These men were shipped to a new military prison, built at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba — an offshore prison, in other words, unencumbered by the U.S. Constitution. The detainees there allegedly had zero rights. That was the whole point.
Much of what Lakhdar and Mustafa describe is the efficiency of the U.S. military in dehumanizing its prisoners. The beatings and physical pain inflicted by guards, interrogators and even medical personnel were only part of it. The men also endured sexual humiliation, endless mocking of their religion — “I heard . . . that a soldier went into someone’s cell and flushed his Qur’an down the toilet” — and the cruel, teasing “misplacement” or censorship of letters from the prisoners’ loved ones.
Several years into his imprisonment, Lakhdar went on a hunger strike, which meant he was subjected to force-feeding, which the U.N. Human Rights Commission has called a form of torture:
“The soldier brought out an apparatus with a long yellow tube and started measuring out the length of tube he needed. He stopped when he got to a marking somewhere between 45 and 50 inches. That was the amount of tube he was going to insert through my nostril. . . .
“It’s almost impossible to explain what a feeding tube feels like to someone who hasn’t experienced it. I felt like I was choking, and being strangled, and yet somehow still able to breathe, all at the same time.
“The soldier taped the tube in place. I could see the Ensure trickling through the tube, one droplet at a time. It felt cold as it reached my stomach. I later learned that a full feeding normally takes fifteen to twenty minutes, but that first time they went exceptionally slowly. I sat in the clinic, chained to the chair, a tube protruding down my throat, for the rest of the afternoon and all through the night.”
It took no less than a Supreme Court ruling to start ending this nightmare.
In early 2007, a U.S. Circuit Court judge had refused to hear Boumediene v. Bush on the grounds that Guantanamo prisoners had no Constitutional rights. But the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal, and in June 2008 ruled that Guantanamo counted as part of the U.S. and, as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, the government couldn’t “switch the Constitution on and off at will.”
Thus the case went back to the Circuit Court and a real hearing got underway, leading to one of the most appalling revelations in the book: “Our lawyers had told us, in the days leading up to our trial, about a recent bizarre development in our case: the government had dropped its allegation that we had plotted to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. Just like in Bosnia seven years before, authorities were eager to toss around bomb-plot allegations right up until a court required them to provide evidence.
“Instead, our lawyers told us, the government now said that the reason it considered us ‘enemy combatants’ was that it had evidence — classified evidence that I wasn’t allowed to see — that we had made a plan to fly to Afghanistan and join Al Qaeda’s fight against American forces there. This was the first time I had ever heard this allegation. No one — no police officer, no Bosnian official, no American interrogator — had ever asked me a single question about it.
“And it was a ludicrous allegation. . . .”
And the judge ruled in their favor and they eventually were set free, to reclaim their lives, to see their children for the first time in seven years — and to give their story to the world.
But as long as Gitmo remains open and the Endless War continues — and no one is held accountable — there is no ending to this story, just an open wound.
Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.
‘US govt, MSM give no evidence to confirm ex-Gitmo detainees reengage in terrorist activities’
RT | June 12, 2016
The US government isn’t providing any evidence to confirm reengagement of former Guantanamo detainees in terrorist activities. They give numbers they allege are accurate but provide no facts, said Andy Worthington of the Close Guantanamo group.
The US government’s greatest fears about releasing Guantanamo Bay prisoners are that inmates might re-emerge on the ‘battlefield’ and re-engage in terrorist activities. Seventeen percent of former detainees, or 118, are confirmed to have re-engaged in militant activity, while 13 percent, or 86, are suspected of re-engaging.
Author of “The Guantanamo Files” and co-founder of the group Close Guantanamo, Andy Worthington, told RT America’s Simone Del Rosario that the US government isn’t supplying any evidence to confirm their fears.
RT: You’ve dedicated a chunk of your life to documenting files and stories from Guantanamo not as an attorney, but as an investigative journalist. After all of your research, what do you consider to be the most pressing reason to close Guantanamo for good?
Andy Worthington: From the very beginning it’s been a bad idea. If you’re going to deprive people of liberty, there are only two ways to do that, if you claim to respect the rule of law. That is that you either charge them with a criminal offence and put them on trial in a Federal court – that would be in the US; or they’re soldiers protected by the Geneva conventions and you can hold them until the end of hostilities.
But after 9/11 the US did neither of those things. So the men held in Guantanamo were held initially without any rights whatsoever. Human beings deprived of all rights, which is a really shocking thing. Although, over the years there have been various efforts to give them legal rights – going up to the Supreme Court, the situation still is that the people held in Guantanamo are effectively prisoners of the political system – we can almost describe them as political prisoners. There is no recognizable justice in their cases. The releases from Guantanamo end up being down to a political process. That is just an unfair way for a country like the US, which claims to be founded on the rule of law and to respect the rule of law, to behave.
RT: As Obama’s term comes to a close are you finding yourself more or less hopeful that he will fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo Bay?
AW: I am certainly more hopeful than I was a few years ago. There was a period in the middle of Obama’s presidency when he’d faced a lot of abstraction from Congress; he was unwilling to spend political capital overcoming that. And for a period of nearly three years only five men were released from Guantanamo.
In 2013, a massive prison-wide hunger strike brought Guantanamo back into sharp focus and put pressure on President Obama to do something about it. Since then he has been releasing many prisoners. We are now in the best position that we’ve been in during his presidency – only one tenth of the men held in Guantanamo is still held there – just 80 men. Thirty of those men have been approved for release by a variety of review processes under President Obama. We have a promise from the administration that they will be released by the end of the summer. Of the rest of the men – so the other 50 – just 10 are facing trials, or have had trials. The other 40 are undergoing this latest review process called the periodic review boards. We don’t know how many of those are going to be approved for release, but at the current rate of the reviews three out of four of the men have been recommended for release – there are currently 24 out of 33 men recommended for release.
Now these are men who were initially described as “too dangerous to release,” but the Task Force that looked at their cases said there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial; or they are men who were initially put forward for prosecution by a Task Force that President Obama set up in his first year in office. But the basis for prosecution has since collapsed. Appeals Court judges ruled that the war crimes for which the majority of the men were being convicted had actually been invented by Congress and were not internationally recognized. That is just a little summing up of the extraordinary ways in which Guantanamo is a shame and embarrassment on every level.
RT: A Washington Post article came out citing the Obama administration and the Pentagon saying that at least 12 released Guantanamo detainees are implicated in attacks on Americans that have resulted in American deaths. Do some of those Congressional members, who are against the closure, have a point in wanting to keep some of these men locked up?
AW: I think, first of all, they would have to provide us with evidence and they never do. In the early days of the defense department providing information on prisoners who they said have returned to the battlefield, or … have engaged in some kind of anti-American activity. They would provide information about who these men were. For around five years now they have provided nothing. They tell us numbers that they allege accurate, but they don’t provide any further information so that people can do some investigation to judge whether the information is correct or not. They have people that they say are confirmed of engaging in anti-American activities and ones that are suspected. Those figures generally get lumped together by the right-wing lawmakers and by most parts of the mainstream media – very irresponsibly… But, as I said, they don’t provide the information. This latest article in the Washington Post is unfortunately yet another lazy example of propaganda masquerading as journalism, without giving us the facts how are we supposed to accept that there is any truth to this.
Brother of ‘Guantanamo Diary’ author denied entry to US
Yahdih Ould Slahi holds up a photo of his brother Mohamedou in a May 2016 video by American Civil Liberties Union © acluvideos / YouTube
RT | May 24, 2016
US authorities detained, interrogated and sent back a German citizen flying in to campaign for the release of his brother – author of the best-selling “Guantanamo Diary,” who has been imprisoned and tortured at the US camp since 2002.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir, heavily redacted by government censors, was published in 2015 and quickly became a best-seller. The Mauritanian native was arrested in 2001 and rendered to Jordan for interrogation by the CIA. He was transferred to Guantanamo Bay the following year.
His younger brother Yahdih, a German citizen, has campaigned for Mohamedou’s release for years. Yahdih was supposed to attend a number of events in the US this week, seeking to persuade Guantanamo’s Periodic Review Board to set Mohamedou free at the June 2 hearing.
When Yahdih Slahi arrived at the John F. Kennedy airport in New York on Saturday, however, he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents, questioned for hours, and sent back to Germany the following day, The Intercept reported.
“He was asked questions about his family, his brother, and what he knew about why his brother was in Guantánamo,” said Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It was a harrowing, stressful, and exhausting experience.”
Yahdih Slahi is a German citizen who lives in Düsseldorf, and would have been able to enter the US under the visa waiver program that Germany participates in. The CBP gave no explanation for denying Slahi entry.
In his memoir, Mohamedou Slahi described being held in isolation and subjected to beatings, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, sexual abuse, a simulated kidnapping, and a simulated execution. At one point, his captors tried to trick him by showing him a forged letter from his mother, Yahdih recounted in 2015. The ploy failed because the forgery misspelled Slahi’s name – and because, unbeknownst to his jailers, Slahi’s mother was illiterate.
Mohamedou Slahi admits that he fought in Afghanistan in the early 1990s with what became Al-Qaeda– when the organization was backed by the US in its struggle against the socialist government in Kabul. While he had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda since 1992, Slahi did stay in touch with his cousin and former brother-in-law, Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, who served as a lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden.
Slahi was never charged with any crime, but the 2010 decision to release him has been held up by government appeals.
“The judge said there was no evidence in 2010 to hold him. There’s certainly not evidence now. The Chief Prosecutor said when he resigned in 2007, that there was no evidence then,” Slahi’s attorney Nancy Hollander told RT in January 2015.
Slahi’s family and friends hope the Periodic Review Board will recommend his release at the June 2 hearing. The inter-agency panel ruled on Monday to set free an Afghan man, known only as Obaidullah, who was held at Guantanamo for 14 years.
It took a decade of fighting with the government for the Guantanamo Diary, written in 2005, to see the light of day. Slahi is the first Guantanamo prisoner to publish a memoir while still at the camp. He has not been allowed to receive a copy of his book.
U.S. Government Secretly Destroyed Evidence in Trial of Accused “9/11 Masterminds”
By Derrick Broze | Activist Post | May 21, 2016
In another setback for the death penalty trial of the five men accused of aiding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, two defense lawyers for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed say the U.S. government secretly destroyed relevant evidence.
On May 11, defense lawyers for the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks asked for judge Col. James Pohl and the prosecution team to be recused from the trial, and for the case to be shut down. Defense lawyers David Nevin and Maj. Derek Poteet say that the U.S. government destroyed evidence related to the case, according to the New York Times. The two men are unable to provide further details because the issue is classified, but Mr. Nevin said the evidence was “favorable” to the defendants.
Major Poteet also told the Times that the defense was first informed in February that Colonel Pohl would provide them with a “summary of a substitute” for the original, classified evidence. The defense requested Colonel Pohl to preserve the evidence for the record and Pohl complied. Or so they thought.
“But they learned in February, they said, that about 20 months earlier, and without their knowledge, prosecutors had obtained from Colonel Pohl a secret order that reversed his previous decision,” the Times writes. “By the time they found out, the government had already destroyed the evidence, giving them no opportunity to challenge the move.”
Major Poteet said the situation created the appearance that Colonel Pohl was “colluding with the government.” The Times reports that the original, now destroyed evidence, may have been related to one of several foreign black site prisons operated by the Central Intelligence Agency in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Afghanistan, and at a secret site at the Guantánamo base. KSM was tortured for several years at one of these sites before being transferred to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in 2006.
The accusations are likely to delay upcoming scheduled hearings from May 30 to June 3. If there is a delay it will be latest in a long line of interruptions to this alleged pursuit of justice. Most recently, Col. Pohl canceled two weeks of hearings that were scheduled to begin on Friday, April 1st.
“The whole thing is really odd to me. I thought it was an April Fools’ joke,” said Chicago defense attorney Cheryl Bormann, who was already in Washington to travel to Guantánamo this weekend to represent alleged 9/11 plot deputy Walid bin Attash.
The destruction of evidence is, unfortunately, not the first controversy this trial has faced. Another conflict of interest became an issue in 2014 when the defense attorneys for Mohammed and the four alleged co-conspirators said they believed they were being spied on by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Foreign Policy reported,
the FBI had secretly conducted an investigation into possible wrongdoing on the part of one or more members of the five separate defense teams (one for each defendant). Such an investigation could put defense team members in the untenable position of having to provide information to defend themselves or others against possible criminal action — information that could be used against the interests of their own clients.
There was also the issue of interference from outside sources during the hearings. FP continues:
In January 2013, the court’s audio-visual feed, visible to a small set of commission observers, was abruptly cut off by someone other than Judge Pohl; previously, Pohl was believed to be the only person with the authority to use the unique-to-Guantanamo “kill-switch.”
Later, a clearly annoyed Pohl learned that something called the Original Classification Authority (OCA) — which is likely the CIA given that most of the information subject to censorship in the case is related to the agency’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program — had hit the kill switch. Judge Pohl promptly cut off their privileges.
In February 2013 it was revealed that listening devices were hidden within smoke detectors, possibly infringing upon attorney-client privileges. The defense also claimed their emails and work files were disappearing. Former defendant Ramzi Bin al-Shibh was also removed from the trial by the judge in an attempt to speed the process along after so many delays. However, critics argue that al-Shibh was removed because he refused to be quiet, complaining loudly of sleep deprivation.
Is this trial really about truth, justice, and upholding law and order? If the military court hopes to find something close to the truth they should open the hearings to the public, end the spying on the defense team, and be transparent about the treatment of the alleged hijackers. Only by allowing the truth to be released will the wounds of 9/11 begin to heal.
Derrick Broze is an investigative journalist and liberty activist. He is the Lead Investigative Reporter for ActivistPost.com and the founder of the TheConsciousResistance.com. Follow him on Twitter.
UK suppresses documents on Gitmo ‘torture collusion’
Press TV – March 6, 2016
The British government is withholding key documents which could shed light on allegations of UK’s involvement in the torture of detainees in Guantanamo prison, according to a new report.
A number of files have been recently found which reveal confidential exchanges between top former US and UK authorities on the torture and rendition of detainees.
Based on a lawsuit by a British parliamentary group, the US administration is obliged to make public documents which relate to Britain’s involvement.
Former Guantanamo detainees have previously said British officials have either been present at, or submitted questions for, “extreme” interrogation by US officials, according to the Independent.
The documents indicate that former UK prime minister Tony Blair and former US president George W. Bush had been in consultation about the treatment of detainees at the US-run prison in Cuba.
Now, the US State Department is said to have reported that all related documents have been withheld from public disclosure.
At least 12 documents, found in the US State Department’s search, relate to interventions by British politicians and officials over the treatment of detainees and torture techniques.
The State Department has reported, “After reviewing the documents, the UK Government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office requested that all 12 documents be withheld in full from public disclosure.”
Guantanamo was established by former president Bush in 2002 as a prison for alleged foreign terrorism suspects following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US.
As many as 775 suspects are said to have been brought to the facility ever since its establishment.
US President Barack Obama had promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison in his 2008 election campaign, citing its damage to America’s reputation abroad. However, he has so far failed to deliver on that pledge due to stiff opposition from Congress.
A US Senate report in December 2014 revealed that the CIA used a wide array of torture as part of its interrogation methods against Guantanamo prisoners.
President Obama, When It Comes to Human Rights, We Need More Action, Not Words
By Jamil Dakwar | ACLU | March 2, 2016
The Obama administration this week made new pledges and commitments to protect “human rights and fundamental freedoms” to the United Nations in advance of the U.S. re-election to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Yet while the U.S. has used its first six years of HRC membership to advance human rights overseas, its participation has had little direct bearing on human rights at home. Lack of accountability for torture and cooperation with U.N. human rights experts are just two examples of such double standards.
When he took office, President Obama promised to disavow many of the disastrous Bush administration policies, including by closing Guantánamo and ending the use of torture. Obama also promised to reassert U.S. global leadership on human rights by joining the HRC later that year.
While the president issued an executive order on his second day in office ending the CIA’s secret detention and torture program, he declined to support any meaningful measures of accountability for crimes that had taken place. His policy of “looking forward rather than backward,” as well as his administration’s continuing fight against transparency and any attempts to reveal the whole truth about Bush administration torture policies, will undoubtedly stain his human rights legacy.
That’s why it was surprising when the U.S. government released the following statement earlier this week:
“The United States is committed to upholding our international obligations to prevent torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The United States supports the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and the Committee Against Torture, and in 2015, the United States was proud to become a participant in the Group of Friends of the Convention Against Torture Initiative.”
This kind of rhetoric is emblematic of the Obama administration’s hypocrisy and cherry-picking when it comes to U.S. international legal obligations. The U.S. is obligated under the Convention Against Torture not only to prevent torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. It is also obligated to hold accountable those who ordered or perpetrated acts of torture and to provide legal redress to victims. On these fronts, our government’s record has been abysmal. Yesterday Human Rights Watch and the ACLU submitted a response to the U.S. one year follow-up report to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, which details the United States’ failure to meet its legal obligations to fully investigate acts of torture during the Bush administration.
When it comes to torture, the gap between rhetoric and action isn’t limited to the Bush administration’s record. While it is encouraging to see the U.S. expressing support for the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, consider the ways the U.S. has directly prevented this critically important institution from effectively doing its job.
The current special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, is about to end his six-year term. Since the early days of his mandate, he has repeatedly asked to visit U.S. prisons and detention facilities in order to examine the widespread use of solitary confinement, which often causes mental and physical suffering and can amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment — even torture. However, the U.S. has consistently stonewalled his requests and has so far failed to provide him with the minimum standards of access required by U.N. protocol for such visits. It is very likely that Mr. Mendez won’t be able to carry out his visit before the end of his term, which is exactly what the U.S. likely intended in delaying and dragging out the process. It’s simply outrageous that the United States won’t provide basic access to its domestic detention facilities, especially given that the U.S. is perhaps the only Western democracy that doesn’t have a permanent and independent monitoring system of all detention facilities.
American leadership on the world stage suffers when the country presents such a stark double standard on human rights and denies independent human rights monitors access to U.S. facilities abroad, like Guantánamo, and here in the United States.
This coming November, the U.S. will be on the ballot for a new three-year-term membership in the U.N. Human Rights Council. The Obama administration has another opportunity to demonstrate to the world that U.S. commitment to the universal prohibition against torture is serious and long-lasting. By upholding U.S. human rights obligations through action in addition to rhetoric, the Obama administration can send a strong message to future presidents that there will be consequences for breaking the law and more effectively press other governments to end torture abroad.
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The Paris Massacre of 40 Algerians on October 17th 1961 – Some were herded into the Seine River, others thrown from bridges
American Herald Tribune | October 16, 2016
Some 30,000 pro FLN (National Liberation Front) Algerians gathered for a peaceful demonstration in the Streets of Paris. Under orders from the head of the Parisian police, Maurice Papon, the French police attacked the demonstration. The Paris Massacre of 17 October 1961 appears to be intentional. After 37 years of denial the French government admitted the acts, and acknowledged 40 deaths in 1998. Estimates of deaths exceed 200.
Historian Jean-Luc Einaudi won a trial against Maurice Papon in 1999. The latter, according to official documents, seems to have directed the massacre. He assured officers in one station that they would be protected in prosecution if they participated in quelling the demonstration.
The protestors were killed in many different methods. Some were herded into the Seine River, others thrown from bridges after being beaten unconscious. Other still were delivered to the Paris police headquarters after being arrested and killed there.
The estimates of the deaths range between 70 and 200.
A few days after the massacre on 31 October, some anonymous policemen published a text stating… continue
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