10 years in Guantánamo Bay, Shaker Aamer held under the harshest conditions

reprieve.org.uk

Shaker Aamer has been held in Guantánamo Bay since 2002. He is a legal permanent resident of the UK, married to a British national, with four British children living in London.

Shaker has long been cleared for release by the United States. He has never been charged by the United States with a crime and has never received a trial. However, he has been repeatedly abused and subjected to extended isolation in Guantánamo Bay.

Shaker grew up in Saudi Arabia with his four siblings. His parents divorced when he was a child and his father remarried. Shaker’s step-mother was unkind to her new family and at the age of seventeen, he ran away to America to join a family he had known from home.

He spent the next few years travelling in Europe and the Middle East, before moving to London where he met his wife and married. Their first child, Johina, was born in 1997.

Shaker was a hands-on dad. He changed nappies without complaint, and as time passed, the Aamer family grew and grew. Michael was born in 1999, Saif a year later and little Faris in 2002- after his father had been imprisoned. Shaker has never set eyes on his youngest son.

Shaker is a natural leader who is known for his concern for others. While in London, he worked as an Arabic translator for the solicitor who advised him on his immigration case. Helping refugees put Shaker where he loved to be – as counsel, listening and advising. But in the end, it was his dedication to the welfare of others that led to his detention in Guantánamo Bay.

In June 2001, Shaker went to Afghanistan to do voluntary work for an Islamic charity. He stayed in Kabul, which was at peace at the time. But after September 11th, the bombing of Kabul began. Fearing he would be taken prisoner by the Northern Alliance, who were suspicious of all Arabs in Afghanistan he went into hiding with an Afghan family. But his freedom didn’t last long.

Soldiers arrived at the house, stripped Shaker of his belongings and took him away at gunpoint. For the next two weeks Shaker was sold to various groups of soldiers, who accused him of killing their leader and beat him mercilessly. The abuse continued, and when Shaker and four other Arab prisoners were driven out of Kabul one night, he thought the end had come and they were to be executed.

Instead, the sound of a helicopter and American accents filled him with relief. “Americans!” he thought. “We are saved!” In fact, his transfer to US forces marked the beginning of a new nightmare. Shaker arrived at Bagram Air Force Base at the end of December 2001 where he suffered terrible abuse.

Forced to stay awake for nine days straight and denied food, he dropped 60 pounds in weight. US personnel would dump freezing water him. This treatment, combined with the bitter Afghan winter, caused Shaker’s feet to become frostbitten. He was chained for hours in positions that made movement unbearable, and his swollen, blackened feet were beaten. He was refused the painkillers he begged for.

Shaker began to say whatever the US wanted, whether it was true or not. Satisfied with confessions made by a man desperate to end his torture, the US military transferred Shaker to Guantánamo Bay in February 2002. Despite the hardships he has endured, Shaker remains the kind and supportive man he was when he was captured, with a reputation for looking out for his fellow prisoners.

When the military police beat up a prisoner while he was praying, Shaker initiated the first hunger strike at Guantánamo. More than three hundred prisoners began refusing meals. The Americans negotiated with Shaker, promising changes in the camp conditions. But the promises were broken. When the hunger strike began again in September 2005, Shaker was placed in solitary confinement as punishment. He has remained alone in a six foot by eight foot windowless cell ever since and is one of a number of prisoners to have written about the conditions in Guantánamo.

After Reprieve took up his case, Shaker was cleared for release. The British government have requested he is returned to the United Kingdom, but negotiations with the US ceased in December 2007 and have not been renewed.

Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith visited Shaker in November 2011 and on departure, immediately penned a letter to Foreign Secretary William Hague listing numerous physical ailments that Shaker suffers – a list that had just been cleared through the US censorship process. The letter calls for Shaker's release and meanwhile Shaker waits alone in his cell, officially cleared of wrongdoing, but still paying the cruellest of costs for his kindness to others.

For further information, see the independent Save Shaker Campaign: http://saveshaker.org/

How you can help Shaker Aamer

Shaker is a permanent British resident, and is married to a British citizen. He has been cleared of any wrongdoing, but the US authorities will not allow him to return to his family in London.

Pressure from the British government is vital in securing Shaker’s release – please click below to write to your MP and ask them to take action on Shaker’s case.

writetothem.com

→ Shaker Aamer's case history

Downloads

• 2011_11_24 Clive SS letter to Hague re Aamer.pdf

Marking 10 years of Injustice at GTMO: Seeking Accountability for Torture & Unjust U.S. Detentions (in San Francisco / Bay Area)

Location

San Francisco, CA
See map: Yahoo! Maps

January 19, 2012

WHEN: Thursday, January 19, 2012 @ 7:00pm

WHERE: 518 Valencia: Eric Quesada Center for Culture & Politics, 518 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA

WHO:

Vincent Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights

Almerindo Ojeda, principal investigator for the Guantánamo Testimonials Project at UC Davis, the founding director of the university's Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, and the author of the article Death in Guantanamo: Suicide or Dryboarding? which raises more questions about the three 2006 deaths at Guantánamo, the families of two of whom are represented by CCR

James A. Nickovich, attorney who represents men detained at Guantanamo before federal courts and military commissions. Represented Sudanese national Mohammed Noor Uthman.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist and writer active in the anti-torture movement. He works clinically with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco, CA. His blog is Invictus, and he also regularly blogs at Daily Kos, Docudharma, American Torture, Progressive Historians, and elsewhere. In August he released a report titled "Despite New Denials by Rumsfeld, Evidence Shows US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture"
Leili Kashani, Advocacy Program Manager, Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative, Center for Constitutional Rights

WHY: In the month marking the shameful tenth anniversary of Guantánamo's opening, the Center for Constitutional Rights presents a panel discussion on Guantánamo, the lack of accountability for US torture practices, and the broader system of unjust U.S. detentions. Join us, and together let’s grow a movement to close Guantanamo and end all unjust US detentions.

This event is FREE and OPEN to the public.

Please RSVP and invite your friends on our Facebook event page.

Co-sponsored by: Center for Constitutional Rights, Berkeley No More Guantanamos, Codepink Women for Peace, Freedom Archives, National Accountability Action Network, World Can't Wait

The Guantánamos Next Door

January 11, 2012 Solitary Watch

by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

LA County Jail

The U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay turns 10 today, and activists are marking the anniversary with protests and petitions, reports and retrospectives. A decade after its founding, Guantánamo remains a dark stain on the national soul.

Even today, while the worst instances of torture may have ceased under the Obama Administration, prisoners are still subjected to solitary confinement and other forms of deprivation and abuse. According to a February 2009 report from the Center of Constitutional Rights: “The descriptions of ongoing, severe solitary confinement, other forms of psychological abuse, incidents of violence and the threat of violence from guards, religious abuse, and widespread forced tube-feeding of hunger strikers indicate that the inhumane practices of the Bush Administration persist today at Guantánamo.”

Then there’s the fact that the prisoners at Guantánamo have been deprived of their liberty without any semblance of due process. Over the last decade, 779 prisoners have been held at Gitmo; 171 remain. Only six have ever been convicted of a crime.

When it comes to depriving people of their human and civil rights, Guantánamo stands as an unprecedented extreme. But it is far from the only place where these things happen. Today, in our cities and towns, in every state in America, there are places where individuals are incarcerated without trial, and where they suffer deprivation and abuse. They are our local jails.

Take the issue of pre-trial detention. According to the Pre-Trial Justice Institute, a full 61% of U.S. jail inmates–nearly half a million in all–have not yet been convicted of any crime. Many have not even been accused of a violent crime. The majority of them are in jail because they cannot afford the modest bail required for their release. A 2010 study by Human Rights Watch looked at defendants in New York City arrested on nonfelony charges. ”Most were accused of nonviolent minor crimes such as shoplifting, turnstile jumping, smoking marijuana in public, drug possession, trespassing, and prostitution.” It found that “87 percent were incarcerated because they were unable to post the bail amount at their arraignment,” even though bail had been set at $1,000. These defendants faced weeks, months, or years in pre-trial confinement for no reason other than poverty.

While awaiting trial, these individuals face appallingly overcrowded conditions, inadequate food–and far worse. On New York City’s Rikers Island, nearly one in twelve prisoners is held in solitary confinement at any given time; the jail maintains two isolation units specifically for inmates with mental illness, and another for juveniles. Pre-trial solitary is routinely used on underaged inmates, to separate from the adult jail population; one report out of Texas found juveniles in the Harris County Jail spending a year or more in complete isolation. In the most extreme cases–such as that of Syed Fahad Hashmi, pre-trial detainees are held under “Special Administrative Measures” that constitute acute sensory deprivation.

Solitary confinement is not the only form of torment that detainees face in local jails. A recent report by the ACLU’s National Prison Project showed a pattern of brutal abuse, carried out by sheriff’s deputies, in the Los Angeles County jail system: “In the past year, deputies have assaulted scores of non-resisting inmates…Deputies have attacked inmates for complaining about property missing from their cells. They have beaten inmates for asking for medical treatment, for the nature of their alleged offenses,and for the color of their skin. They have beaten inmates in wheelchairs. They have beaten an inmate, paraded him naked down a jail module, and placed him in a cell to be sexually assaulted. Many attacks are unprovoked. Nearly all go unpunished: these acts of violence are covered up by a department that refuses to acknowledge the pervasiveness of deputy violence in the jail system.”

“America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace,” said Senator Jim Webb, using a phrase that has often been applied to Guantánamo Bay. But just as it has thwarted any attempts to close Gitmo, the U.S. Congress has blocked all of Webb’s attempts to propel the kinds of domestic criminal justice reforms that might have kept local jails from remaining Gitmos in our own backyards.

Guantánamo Prisoners Stage Peaceful Protest and Hunger Strike on 10th Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison

Tuesday, 10 January 2012 World Can't Wait

Prisoners in Camp 4 at Guantanamo in 2009 line up for morning prayers. These are some of the prisoners regarded as cooperative or not significant -- perhaps amongst the 89 who have been cleared for release, but are still held (Photo: Michelle Shephard/The Toronto Star). by Andy Worthington Today, prisoners at Guantánamo will embark on a peaceful protest, involving sit-ins and hunger strikes, to protest about their continued detention, and the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, three years after President Obama came to office promising to close it within a year, and to show their appreciation of the protests being mounted on their behalf by US citizens, who are gathering in Washington D.C. on Wednesday to stage a rally and march to urge the President to fulfill his broken promise. Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, and one of the attorneys for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, said that his client, who is held in isolation in Camp 5, told him on his last visit that the prisoners would embark on a peaceful protest and hunger strike for three days, from Jan. 10 to 12, to protest about the President’s failure to close Guantánamo as promised. He explained that the men intended to inform the Officer in Charge ahead of the protest, to let the authorities know why there would be protests, and added that the prisoners were encouraged by the “expression of solidarity” from US citizens planning protests on Jan. 11, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison. Kassem also said that another of his clients, in Camp 6, where most of the prisoners are held, and where, unlike Camp 5, they are allowed to socialize, stated that prisoners throughout the blocks were “extremely encouraged” by reports of the protests in Washington D.C. The prisoner, who does not wish to be identified, also said that banners and signs had been prepared, and that there would be peaceful sit-ins in the communal areas. He added that the prisoners were concerned to let the outside world know that they still reject the injustice of their imprisonment, and feel that it is particularly important to let everyone know this, when the US government, under President Obama, is trying to persuade the world that “everything is OK” at Guantánamo, and that the prison is a humane, state of the art facility. He also explained that the prisoners invited the press to come to Guantánamo and to request interviews with the prisoners, to hear about “the toll of a decade” of detention without charge or trial, and said that they “would like nothing more” than to have an independent civilian and medical delegation, accompanied by the press, be allowed to come and talk to the 171 men still held. In Camp 5, Shaker Aamer and the other men still held there will not be able to stage a sit-in, as they are unable to leave their cells, but they will participate in the protests by refusing meals. No one knows how the authorities will respond to the protests, especially as the new commander of Guantánamo, Navy Rear Adm. David Woods, has gained a reputation for punishing even the most minor infractions of the rules with solitary confinement. According to Kassem, prisoners have complained that the new regime harks back to the worst days of Guantánamo, between 2002 and 2004, when punishments for non-cooperation were widespread. Of the 171 men still held at Guantánamo, 89 were “approved for transfer” out of Guantánamo by a Task Force of career officials and lawyers from the various government departments and the intelligence agencies, and yet they remain held because of Congressional opposition and President Obama’s unwillingness to tackle his critics. 36 others were recommended for trials, and 46 others were designated for indefinite detention without charge pr trial, on the basis that they are too dangerous to release, but that there is insufficient evidence against them to put them on trial. That is a disgraceful position for the government to take, as indefinite detention on the basis of information that cannot be used as evidence indicates that the information is either tainted by torture, or is unreliable hearsay. It remains unacceptable that President Obama approved the indefinite detention of these men in an executive order last March, even though he also promised that their cases would be subject to periodic review. Just as disgraceful, however, is the fact that all of the 171 prisoners still at Guantánamo face indefinite detention, as none of them can leave the prison given the current restrictions. That ought to trouble anyone who cares about justice and fairness, and the protests by the prisoners, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, ought to convey, more eloquently than any other method, why the pressure to close the prison must be maintained. Note: For further information, to sign up to a new movement to close G, and to sign a new White House petition on the “We the People” website calling for the closure of Guantánamo, visit the new website, “Close Guantánamo.” Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Notes From a Guantánamo Survivor

January 7, 2012 By MURAT KURNAZ New York times

I LEFT Guantánamo Bay much as I had arrived almost five years earlier — shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, and ankles to a bolt on the airplane floor. My ears and eyes were goggled, my head hooded, and even though I was the only detainee on the flight this time, I was drugged and guarded by at least 10 soldiers. This time though, my jumpsuit was American denim rather than Guantánamo orange. I later learned that my C-17 military flight from Guantánamo to Ramstein Air Base in my home country, Germany, cost more than $1 million.

When we landed, the American officers unshackled me before they handed me over to a delegation of German officials. The American officer offered to re-shackle my wrists with a fresh, plastic pair. But the commanding German officer strongly refused: “He has committed no crime; here, he is a free man.”

I was not a strong secondary school student in Bremen, but I remember learning that after World War II, the Americans insisted on a trial for war criminals at Nuremberg, and that event helped turn Germany into a democratic country. Strange, I thought, as I stood on the tarmac watching the Germans teach the Americans a basic lesson about the rule of law.

How did I arrive at this point? This Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I am not a terrorist. I have never been a member of Al Qaeda or supported them. I don’t even understand their ideas. I am the son of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany in search of work. My father has worked for years in a Mercedes factory. In 2001, when I was 18, I married a devout Turkish woman and wanted to learn more about Islam and to lead a better life. I did not have much money. Some of the elders in my town suggested I travel to Pakistan to learn to study the Koran with a religious group there.

I made my plans just before 9/11. I was 19 then and was naïve and did not think war in Afghanistan would have anything to do with Pakistan or my trip there. So I went ahead with my trip.

I was in Pakistan, on a public bus on my way to the airport to return to Germany when the police stopped the bus I was riding in. I was the only non-Pakistani on the bus — some people joke that my reddish hair makes me look Irish — so the police asked me to step off to look at my papers and ask some questions. German journalists told me the same thing happened to them. I was not a journalist, but a tourist, I explained. The police detained me but promised they would soon let me go to the airport. After a few days, the Pakistanis turned me over to American officials. At this point, I was relieved to be in American hands; Americans, I thought, would treat me fairly.

I later learned the United States paid a $3,000 bounty for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently the United States distributed thousands of fliers all over Afghanistan, promising that people who turned over Taliban or Qaeda suspects would, in the words of one flier, get “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” A great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result.

I was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

After about two months in Kandahar, I was transferred to Guantánamo. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness. The interrogations continued always with the same questions. I told my story over and over — my name, my family, why I was in Pakistan. Nothing I said satisfied them. I realized my interrogators were not interested in the truth.

Despite all this, I looked for ways to feel human. I have always loved animals. I started hiding a piece of bread from my meals and feeding the iguanas that came to the fence. When officials discovered this, I was punished with 30 days in isolation and darkness.

I remained confused on basic questions: why was I here? With all its money and intelligence, the United States could not honestly believe I was Al Qaeda, could they?

After two and a half years at Guantánamo, in 2004, I was brought before what officials called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, at which a military officer said I was an “enemy combatant” because a German friend had engaged in a suicide bombing in 2003 — after I was already at Guantánamo. I couldn’t believe my friend had done anything so crazy but, if he had, I didn’t know anything about it.

A couple of weeks later, I was told I had a visit from a lawyer. They took me to a special cell and in walked an American law professor, Baher Azmy. I didn’t believe he was a real lawyer at first; interrogators often lied to us and tried to trick us. But Mr. Azmy had a note written in Turkish which he had gotten from my mother, and that made me trust him. (My mother found a lawyer in my hometown in Germany who heard that lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights represented Guantánamo detainees; the center assigned Mr. Azmy my case.) He did not believe the evidence against me and quickly discovered that my “suicide bomber” friend was, in fact, alive and well in Germany.

Mr. Azmy, my mother and my German lawyer helped pressure the German government to secure my release. Recently, Mr. Azmy made public a number of American and German intelligence documents from 2002 to 2004 that showed both countries suspected I was innocent. One of the documents said American military guards thought I was dangerous because I had prayed during the American national anthem.

Now, five years after my release, I am trying to put my terrible memories behind me. I have remarried and have a beautiful baby daughter. Still, it is hard not to think about my time at Guantánamo and to wonder how it is possible that a democratic government can detain people in intolerable conditions and without a fair trial.

Murat Kurnaz, the author of “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo,” was detained from 2001 to 2006.

A Tired Obsession with Military Detention Plagues American Politics

7.1.12 andyworthington.co.uk

Before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, there were only two ways of holding prisoners — either they were prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, or they were criminal suspects, to be charged and subjected to federal court trials.

That all changed when the Bush administration threw out the Geneva Conventions, equated the Taliban with al-Qaeda, and decided to hold both soldiers and terror suspects as “illegal enemy combatants,” who could be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, and with no rights whatsoever.

The Bush administration’s legal black hole lasted for two and a half years at Guantánamo, until, in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners seized in wartime, recognizing — and being appalled by — the fact that the administration had created a system of arbitrary, indefinite detention, and that there was no way out for anyone who, like many of the prisoners, said that they had been seized by mistake.

This was not the end of the story, as the Bush administration fought back, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF), and the Supreme Court had to revisit the prisoners’ cases in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, reiterating that they had habeas corpus rights, and that those rights were constitutionally guaranteed.

Unfortunately, although this ruling enabled some of the Guantánamo prisoners to secure their release via the US courts, by having their habeas corpus petitions granted, the appeals court in Washington D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court) has been fighting back, gutting habeas corpus as a remedy by insisting, ludicrously, that the government’s evidence, however obviously unreliable, should be given the presumption of accuracy.

While this continues to be fought over, the bigger problem is that the entire rationale for Guantánamo has never been adequately challenged. The basis for holding prisoners is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed the week after the 9/11 attacks, which authorizes the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

in June 2004, while granting the Guantánamo prisoners habeas rights, the Supreme Court also confirmed, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that the AUMF allows prisoners to be detained until the end of hostilities, thereby confirming the AUMF as an alternative to the Geneva Conventions, without anyone in a position of authority being required to explain why the Geneva Conventions no longer apply to soldiers, and why terror suspects are being held as “warriors,” rather than as criminals.

With this fundamental misconception — or this warped reshaping of the rules governing detention — which was at the heart of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” and is confirmed in the continued reliance on the AUMF by all three branches of the government, it is no wonder that it has become impossible to even mention the fact that wartime detentions used to accord with the Geneva Conventions, and it has also become impossible for advocates of federal court trials for criminals to win out over those calling for military commission trials instead, even though hundreds of terror suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal courts in the last ten years, as opposed to just six in military commission trials.

The result of this unilateral rewriting of the rules governing wartime detentions is that soldiers remain held at Guantánamo where they are lazily, but dangerously regarded as terrorists, and the wartime prisoners held in actual combat zones — at Bagram, for example — are not held according to the Geneva Conventions, but are detained arbitrarily, and are then subjected to invented review boards so that the military can decide what to do with them. This ought to be a cause for alarm, but it is apparently taken for granted.

In addition, the result of the insistence that terror suspects must not be tried in federal courts has had far-reaching effects that, in the last few weeks, have been causing great consternation to libertarians and liberals alike.

On the face of it, this consternation is well-founded. In provisions inserted by Congress into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers insisted on creating legislation that makes it mandatory for terror suspects to be held in military custody, without charge or trial, and not to be allowed anywhere near the federal court system.

The mere fact that lawmakers could have worked themselves up into enough of a frenzy to pass this legislation is profoundly depressing, of course, but as Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck explained in an article for the Lawfare blog on December 31, intense negotiations between the administration and Congress, with input from numerous deeply concerned groups and individuals, succeeded in watering down the intent behind this provisions so that it is not really appropriate for critics to wail that the NDAA will allow Americans to be held indefinitely in military custody. As they explained:

[S]ection 1022 purports to establish a presumption in favor of indefinite military detention, rather than criminal arrest and prosecution, for some future foreign al-Qaeda suspects. In the President’s words, it is in this respect “ill-conceived and will do nothing to improve the security of the United States,” and “is unnecessary and has the potential to create uncertainty.” Fortunately, amendments adopted late in the legislative process … will, we think, ensure that section 1022 is mostly hortatory, and will in practice allow the President to adhere to his commitments that “suspected terrorists arrested inside the United States will — in keeping with long-standing tradition — be processed through our Article III courts, as they should be”; that “our military does not patrol our streets or enforce our laws — nor should it”; and that “when it comes to US citizens involved in terrorist-related activity, whether they are captured overseas or at home, we will prosecute them in our criminal justice system.”

Even so, as Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck also explained, drawing on comments made by Raha Wala of Human Rights First, “the very existence of section 1022 might give a future Administration a slight measure of political cover if it decides to reverse President Obama’s policy and begin to detain in military custody persons such as another Abdulmutallab, who are captured in the United States.”

This is a reference to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas 2009 plane bomber, whose recent trial and successful conviction confirmed that the advocates for military custody are driven not by common sense but by irrational fears — or cynical fearmongering. The courts are perfectly capable of safely and effectively prosecuting terror suspects, and lawmakers’ attempts to insist otherwise, if left unchallenged, were likely to have been dangerously counterproductive rather than helpful.

Nevertheless, while obvious disaster appears to have been averted, the huge outpouring of alarm regarding the perceived plan to imprison Americans indefinitely without charge or trial ignores two fundamental issues that still need addressing: firstly, that President Obama has shown himself more than willing to dispose of US citizens he regards as troublesome not by imprisoning them, but by assassinating them in drone strikes; and, secondly, that the foreign victims of the indefinite detention that lawmakers have shown themselves so desperate to revive still need Americans to care about their plight, to bring to an end the unjust situation that has existed for the last ten years, and to cut off the possibility that lawmakers, or the executive branch, can decide in future to revisit these dreadful policies and to revive them again.

As Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck noted, drawing on an article in the New York Review of Books by David Cole:

David Cole is surely correct that Subtitle D (“Counterterrorism”) [PDF] of the NDAA contains some very troubling provisions — especially sections 1026 and 1027, which continue the deeply unfortunate and counterproductive authorities in current law prohibiting the use of funds to build a facility in the US to house GTMO detainees and to transfer any such detainees to the US for any reason, including criminal trial; and section 1028, which continues the current statutory requirement that the Secretary of Defense must make onerous certifications regarding the receiving nation’s security measures before any GTMO detainee can be transferred to another country. These provisions will continue to prevent the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo, notwithstanding the President’s view, which we share, that “the prison at Guantánamo Bay undermines our national security, and our nation will be more secure the day when that prison is finally and responsibly closed.”

These are valid points indeed, and with the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo taking place next week, it is important for US citizens to recall that the fount of the recent hysteria directed, initially, at Americans as well as foreigners, is the enduring legacy of the Bush administration at Guantánamo, where these dark desires have been inflicted on foreign Muslims for the last ten years, and where the will to close this dangerous aberration is lacking in both the administration and in Congress.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Hearing tomorrow 1030am Court of Appeal: Bagram prisoner Yunus Rahmatullah v British Government

23 November 2011

Lawyers representing a prisoner held illegally at the US military prison at Bagram Airbase will today seek to force the British Government to secure his release.

Yunus Rahmatullah was picked up in Iraq by British forces in 2004 and handed over for rendition by the US to Afghanistan. He has been held without charge or trial in the notorious Bagram Theater Internment Facility for over seven years.

In a compelling habeas case, Mr Rahmatullah's legal team will argue in the Court of Appeal that the British Government has the power to secure his release and is duty-bound to do so.

All welcome.

Yunus Rahmatullah vs Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Others
1030 am Thursday 24th October
Court 71, Court of Appeal
The Master of the Rolls; Lord Justice Maurice Kay; Lord Justice Sullivan

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. For further information please go to http://www.reprieve.org.uk/cases/yunusrahmatullah/ or contact Donald Campbell in Reprieve’s press office on +44 (0)20 7427 1082

2. Yunus Rahmatullah has been held beyond the rule of law for over seven years in Bagram Airforce Base. He is said to be in a very grave mental and physical condition.

In February 2009, after years of government denials that the UK had been involved in any rendition operations, then-Secretary of State for Defence John Hutton announced to Parliament that UK forces had captured two men in Iraq in February 2004, and handed them to US forces. In subsequent statements to Parliament, the government revealed that in March 2004, British officials had become aware of the US intention to transfer the men from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The British government admitted its complicity in crime (kidnapping, otherwise called rendition), admitted it was wrong, and appeared to apologize. Yet it did not and refused to identify the men - a crucial step if they are to be reunited with their basic human rights. Indeed, the government has apparently done nothing over the past seven years to ensure that they receive legal assistance.

Reprieve led a complicated and expensive search for the identity of these men, which covered three continents over ten months. One of the men has been identified as Amanatullah Ali and the other as Yunus Rahmatullah.

Yunus Rahmatullah, also known by his nickname 'Saleh Huddin', was raised in the Gulf states. For six years, he was held incommunicado, unable to even contact his family. Reprieve has been told by multiple sources that, as a result of his abuse in UK and US custody, he is in catastrophic mental and physical shape, and now spends most of his time in the mental health cells at Bagram.

Yunus's family insist on keeping their current location confidential. They are legally in their country of residence, but fear that they will suffer reprisals if they are known to be opposing the British and US governments.

Yunus’s mother Fatima Rahmatullah issued the following statement on April 15, 2010:

“Yunus is the youngest and closest son to my heart. I lost my other son, his only brother, in a tragic accident. Now, Yunus is my only hope in life. I see him in my dreams; I pray daily that I will see him in my waking hours again.

“Our family was shocked when we learned that the British government might have been behind Yunus’ disappearance. I am told the British government has refused even to confirm that Yunus was the person they seized six years ago. As a mother, this is a position that I struggle to understand."

Reprieve sued the UK Government to formally identify Yunus Rahmatullah, and is now suing for habeas relief in the British courts. The case is now in the Court of Appeal.

3. Originally used to process prisoners captured during Operation Enduring Freedom, Bagram Theater Internment Facility has become backlogged with prisoners who are held for years without charge, trial or legal rights.

Hamidullah Khan, for example, was picked up while travelling from Karachi to his father's village in Waziristan to salvage the family's possesions during the ongoing military operation. He was just fourteen. He is currently being held at Bagram and his family are desperate for his return.

Unlike detainees at Guantánamo, prisoners at Bagram are still being held in a legal black-hole; they have no access to lawyers and thus are unable to challenge their detention, despite the fact that between 2002 and 2008 several prisoners who had undergone torture were released without having even been put on trial.

As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama unequivocally rejected the "false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus". Yet when his adminstration took office it chose to stand by Bush's legal arguments concerning Bagram detainees: as enemy combatants they had no constitutional rights.

Prisoners have been subjected to beatings, stress positions, sexual abuse and humiliation, sensory deprivation, sleep, food and water deprivation, exposure to cold temperature, dousing with cold water and blaring of loud music.

Tariq Dergoul, a British National, was injured by the Northern Alliance and then sold to the US for $5,000. While detained at Bagram, he suffered frostbite for which he was denied medical care. He ultimately required the amputation of the affected limb.

Dilawar was a taxi driver, known to be innocent by his interrogators, who was murdered by his captors in December 2002. He was subjected to over 100 sadistic blows to his legs by various guards, strikes performed as "a kind of running joke". As a result, his legs became "pulpified", according to the autopsy report, and the blunt trauma killed him.

Reprieve's local partner Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) is fighting a ground-breaking case filed on behalf of seven Pakistanis imprisoned in Bagram Air Base, which challenges the Pakistan Government over their role in renditions. Awwal Khan, Hamidullah Khan, Abdul Haleem Saifullah, Fazal Karim, Amal Khan, Iftikhar Ahmad and Yunus Rahmatullah were abducted from Pakistan and taken to Bagram, where they have been kept without charge or trial since 2003. One prisoner is merely 16 years of age and was seized two years ago at the age of 14. Another was not permitted to speak to his family for six years, and is believed to be in a grievous physical and psychological condition.

For the BBC's reporting on allegations of abuse and neglect at Bagram please click here.

Bagram prison originally consisted of crude pens fashioned from metal cages surrounded by coils of razor wire. Roughly twenty people shared a cage, sleeping on foam mats and using plastic buskets as toilets. Military personnel described it as "far more spartan" than Guantánamo.

Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military began refurbishing the prison and installed flush toilets. As of 2005, the US Army claimed that Bagram had a maximum capacity of 595 prisoners. The basic infrastructure, however, remained the same. Hundreds of detainees were still held in wire-mesh pens and exercise, kitchen and bathroom space was minimal.

In August 2008 the US government awarded a $50 million contract for a new prison. This is now completed, but in the wake of the redevelopment reports still circulate of an undisclosed part of the site (sometimes referred to as a "Temporary Screening Facility") where abusive practices continue.

4. Reprieve, a legal action charity, uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantánamo Bay. Reprieve investigates, litigates and educates, working on the frontline, to provide legal support to prisoners unable to pay for it themselves. Reprieve promotes the rule of law around the world, securing each person’s right to a fair trial and saving lives. Clive Stafford Smith is the founder of Reprieve and has spent 25 years working on behalf of people facing the death penalty in the USA.

Reprieve’s current casework involves representing 15 prisoners in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, assisting over 70 prisoners facing the death penalty around the world, and conducting ongoing investigations into the rendition and the secret detention of ‘ghost prisoners’ in the so-called ‘war on terror.’

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Ex-Guantánamo prisoner seeks amnesty from Egyptian military

August 2, 2011 Reprive

Reprieve is calling on Egypt's Military Prosecutor to grant an immediate amnesty to Adel Al-Gazzar, a former Red Crescent volunteer erroneously held in Guantánamo for eight years and subsequently arrested on returning home to Egypt in June.

Adel remains imprisoned by the Egyptian military on the basis of an in absentia sentence handed down by the Mubarak regime in 2002, while Adel was in Guantánamo and unaware that the trial was even taking place.

Due to the flimsiness of the Mubarak-era charges, Adel’s lawyers are confident that his sentence would be overturned on appeal. However, 50 days of the 60-day window during which Adel has a legal right to appeal have now passed and the Military Prosecutor continues to create arbitrary obstacles, effectively preventing him from challenging his imprisonment.

Reprieve is alarmed by the Egyptian military's apparent attempt to strip Adel once more of his legal rights, and is now calling on the Military Prosecutor to grant compassionate release on the basis that he has already endured nearly decade of unlawful imprisonment without charge or trial.

While in US custody at Kandahar and then Guantánamo, Adel was subjected to torture – including routine beatings, exposure to freezing temperatures and sleep deprivation – and lost a leg to gangrene due to medical negligence.

Soon after Adel was sold into US custody, the US authorities realized that they had made a mistake and he was cleared for release. However, because the US deemed it unsafe for Adel to return to Egypt, he spent eight years in Guantánamo. He was eventually transferred to Slovakia where he was illegally imprisoned in an immigration detention centre for over six months.

It was urgent concerns about his family that forced Adel returned to Egypt in June, despite the risk of re-arrest and imprisonment. Adel’s family has been left extremely vulnerable by his decade-long absence. His four children whom he had last seen as babies are now teenagers and his elderly mother recently suffered a cerebral hemorrhage which has left her paralyzed and requiring full-time care.

Reprieve's Life After Guantanamo Project Officer, Katie Taylor said: “Adel has already suffered far too much in one lifetime. He has been unjustly detained for nearly a decade, and as a result, has suffered permanent injury and chronic health problems and his family now stands on the edge of poverty. The Military Prosecutor has the ability to finally give Adel and his family the justice that is long overdue by granting him amnesty and releasing him.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. For further information please contact Donald Campbell in Reprieve’s press office on +44 (0) 20 7427 1082 / (0) 7791 755 415

2. Adel Al Gazzar was injured in a US airstrike while volunteering with the Red Crescent in Afghanistan, and subsequently sold from his hospital bed in Pakistan to American security agents for a bounty; he was then brutally tortured in Kandahar, subjected to medical neglect so severe it resulted in the amputation of his leg, detained in Guantánamo Bay for eight years without charge or trial, and detained in a Slovakian immigration detention centre upon his release from Guantánamo—again without charge or reason. He returned to Egypt to be reunited with his family, hoping that Egypt’s revolution would have led to a transformation in the Mubarak-era judicial process, but was arrested on arrival at the airport and has been imprisoned ever since. His lawyers’ efforts to submit a memorandum of appeal—a right guaranteed under Egyptian law—have been thwarted by the Military Prosecutor. Further information on Adel can be found here: http://www.reprieve.org.uk/cases/adelalgazzar

Killing More and Imprisoning Less: Obama and Rendition

By V. NOAH GIMBLE Counterpunch June 24, 2011

The day after Barack Obama took office, he signed a series of executive orders mandating the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as the global network of secret, CIA-run "black site" prisons. In addition, he committed the United States to observe the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. The Bush administration had exempted U.S. interrogators from these two treaties, arguing that the Global War on Terror presented unprecedented intelligence-gathering challenges that had to be overcome by all means necessary.

Obama's stated commitment to ban torture also extended to the outsourcing of interrogations to countries where torture could be employed without the legal barriers that exist within the U.S. military and civilian justice systems. He vowed to end the "extraordinary rendition" program whereby terror suspects were disappeared by U.S. agents, transferred into the custody of third-party intelligence services and tortured by foreign agents asking questions provided by the CIA. The European Parliament estimated that the CIA flew at least 1,245 rendition flights between 2001 and 2007, but all information on those flights, including who the passengers were and how many people were abducted, remains shrouded in secrecy. Such a policy contrasts with "rendition to justice," a transfer that takes place at least nominally within the legal system. This kind of rendition requires that the detainee be arraigned and tried in court on arrival in the United States — without having been tortured during the capturing process.

More than two years later, the Obama administration has not followed through on most of these promises, even reversing several commitments. For one, the administration confirmed that Guantanamo not only remains open, but that it will even take in new "high-value" detainees in the event of their capture. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, at least 20 secret prisons are still actively torturing "short-term transfer" detainees. The only change Obama has brought to these classified prisons is granting access to the facilities by the International Committee of the Red Cross (their reports, issued to the executive branch of the detaining power, are seldom released to the public or even to Congress). Instead of operating directly under CIA control, they are run by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Nevertheless, CIA personnel still participate in the interrogations held within their anonymous concrete walls.

This evidence alone is enough to raise serious questions about the Obama administration's willingness and ability to reverse the Bush era's use of kidnapping, extrajudicial detention and torture in the fight against terrorism. Granted, the administration has faced vocal and vehement opposition from congressional Republicans on many issues, including the closure of Guantanamo, and it is no secret that the military and intelligence services of the United States are slow to accept changes, to say the least. But Obama's political about-face raises questions about the sincerity of the administration's professed desire to wield American power in a more principled manner that conforms to international law. In order to find out more about the current administration's re-branding of the so-called war on terror, it is necessary to delve deeper into what Dick Cheney famously called the "dark side." The culture of secrecy and impunity that has come to characterize the executive branch, which the Obama administration has continued to cultivate, poses a serious threat to democracy, pitting the state's definition of security against the security of individuals.

Torture and Rendition

Before becoming president, Obama was a professor of constitutional law. Before that, he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He knew that the United States under Ronald Reagan had signed the UN Convention Against Torture. He had read the Geneva Conventions and knew the obligations warring powers face regarding the treatment of detainees.

Because of this background, the president had to know that the United States was violating international law with its policy of extraordinary rendition, more than ever under the Bush administration. Under the Convention Against Torture, a country may not knowingly pass a detainee into the custody of a country where the detainee will "more likely than not" face torture. If there is any doubt about the recipient country's record on torture, the detaining country must receive assurance that the detainee will not be tortured. According to human rights attorney Scott Horton, the Bush administration "turned [the Convention's provisions] into a complete joke: people were being turned over to countries where they would be tortured, [constituting] a violation of both domestic and international law."

The agents who turned detainees over to foreign interrogators did obtain assurances from recipient countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and even Libya, that detainees would not be abused. But in practice, these assurances were as empty and dishonest as George W. Bush's repeated claims that the U.S. "government does not torture people." One rendition victim, Canadian-Syrian engineer Maher Arar, was rendered to Syria and imprisoned there for nearly a year where he was tortured regularly. After he was freed and cleared of all charges, the Canadian government lodged an official complaint against the United States for transferring a Canadian citizen into the custody of a country with a record of torture. Arar filed suit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft only to have the case thrown out due to the executive invocation of the "state secrets privilege," claiming that evidentiary information on the rendition program would endanger U.S. national security.

When the Obama administration came to power, it could have disclosed evidence necessary to bring justice for Maher Arar and other victims of the federal government's rendition program. Instead Attorney General Eric Holder followed his predecessor's lead, blocking Arar's case all the way to the Supreme Court. And indeed it wasn't long into the new administration's term before the continued practice of rendition came to light.

In April 2009, a 45-year old Lebanese businessman named Raymond Azar went to Afghanistan on behalf of his employer, Lebanese-based defense contractor Sima Salazar Group. Previously, his underling Dinorah Cobos had made arrangements to give $100,000 to an FBI agent posing as a contracts officer in order to secure contracts for Sima. The FBI was thus luring the pair to Afghanistan as part of a sting operation. In Kabul, eight FBI agents seized the two contractors, stripping Azar naked, subjecting him to a cavity search and blindfolding and shackling him. He was first transported to Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and later taken to Virginia where he was arrested and charged with fraud.

U.S. agents inside Afghanistan are only authorized to detain and transfer suspects out of the country if the suspect is deemed to pose an imminent threat, which Azar most certainly did not. Officials from the Departments of Justice and State claim that they received the consent of the Afghan government to conduct the rendition, but Afghan officials deny having ever been informed of the operation.

Azar pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, but his maximum five-year sentence was reduced to only six months due to the abusive treatment he received in U.S. custody. More than anything, the rendition of Raymond Azar was an embarrassment for the Obama administration. According to Scott Horton, the unwanted controversy surrounding the Azar will push the administration to proceed with caution with the kind of renditions that the Bush administration pursued. "I can't find any evidence of extraordinary renditions under Obama," Horton told me, "but there's really no problem with normal extradition."

Rendition — particularly extraordinary rendition — turned out to be a public relations nightmare for the Bush administration, and despite the media's lack of attention to the Azar case, it doesn't seem to be gaining any fans during the Obama administration either. Thus to avoid negative publicity, the Obama administration has pursued a different strategy toward suspected terrorists (and whoever else happens to be in their vicinity): killing them.

Kill More, Imprison Less

Despite the rhetorical shift that Obama heralded, and the promises made by executive order, the president chose not to dismantle some of the most legally questionable tactics that the Bush administration employed in the conduct of the so-called War on Terror. Perhaps most importantly, Obama has maintained the government's right to kill foreign nationals and American citizens alike, anywhere in the world, whom the president deems "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," evidence of guilt and constitutional rights notwithstanding.

The government's claim was recently challenged on behalf of one of the targets on the executive hit list, Anwar al-Awlaki. The Yemeni-American Muslim cleric has for some time been a celebrity lecturer amongst extremists and has a large online following. Allegedly, he inspired the Fort Hood shooter, as well as the failed Times Square and "underwear" bombers. His father, with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), filed a lawsuit against the government arguing that he did not pose an imminent threat. The judge threw out the case at the request of the executive. According to his lawyer, Maria Lahood, Judge John Bates called the issue of extrajudicial targeted killing "a political question which could not be adjudicated by the court. It was essentially up to the executive to decide if someone they'd identified as a terrorist should be killed and the court didn't have any place to review that." The judge also denied that al-Awlaki's father had legal standing to argue the case on behalf of his son.

More recently, the government and media alike have revived the policy of targeted killing to justify the murder of an unarmed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces. But even bin Laden's supposed guilt does not confer any legal legitimacy on his assassination.

Where the use of Special Forces is deemed impracticable, the CIA has a large fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — drones — to rain down Hellfire missiles on targeted suspects in various countries — by remote control from fortified bases thousands of miles away. Indeed, just days after bin Laden's death, a drone strike targeting al-Awlaki missed its mark, killing two bystanders instead.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times last month, the Obama administration has killed more alleged terrorists than it has imprisoned. Indeed, the Obama administration launched more drone strikes in two years than the Bush administration did during its entire eight years. In 2010 Agence France Presse reported a total of more than 100 drone strikes that killed over 670 people. With a rate of civilian casualties estimated to be as high as 90 percent, drone strikes have fueled anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

Africa: Exporting Torture

The practice of extraordinary rendition has not disappeared completely. When the practice of kidnapping people and sending them to unknown locations to be tortured struck a sour note with the American voting public, the White House stepped away from the policy. But, like lead paint, DDT and asbestos, domestic regulations haven't stopped the export of extraordinary rendition to poorer countries.

Washington has been fighting the war on terror in East Africa since the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings and it believes a significant network of al-Qaeda militants have been in league with local jihadist groups. The CIA presence in the region has ballooned, and much-needed humanitarian aid became linked to military cooperation with the Pentagon. And U.S. allies practiced what Washington preached in terms of fighting terrorism.

In 2007, U.S.-backed Kenyan security forces abducted more than 150 men, women, and children, mostly Somali Muslims, near the border between Somalia and Kenya. Racial profiling such as this has become all too common under regimes that oppress ethnic minorities to maintain power, and it has received the seal of approval from the United States and its allies under the auspices of counter-terrorism.

The arbitrariness of the 2007 mass arrests is evident. Only one detainee was charged in Kenya, and the rest were either deported back to their home countries or illegally rendered to Ethiopia via Somalia. Ethiopian forces subjected detainees to numerous human rights abuses, torturing several of them. FBI and British agents also interrogated the suspects, looking for terrorist connections, but just one more detainee was charged in Ethiopia, bringing the grand total to two out of hundreds. About half of the rendition victims were later released without charge, dumped at the Somali border untreated for medical issues resulting from torture. But some were held for years with no access to lawyers or their families — disappeared indefinitely. Many have been released thanks to the tireless efforts of human rights advocates in Kenya, but 22 are not accounted for according to the most recent Human Rights Watch report on the issue.

Last year, Kenyan authorities rendered several Kenyan Muslims to Uganda in connection with a suicide bombing in Kampala. In Uganda, the notorious Rapid Response Unit tortured the suspects in between interrogations by U.S. and British agents. One of the initial rendition victims, Omar Awadh Omar, is a prominent Kenyan human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the clampdown of repression in East Africa. Later, the U.S.-backed Ugandan dictatorship targeted Al-Amin Kimanthi, the leader of Kenya's Muslim Human Rights Forum and the loudest voice in the East African struggle against illegal rendition and torture. Even his colleague Clara Gutteridge, a British human rights lawyer with whom I communicated in researching this article, was detained and deported from Kenya for attempting to investigate matters further.

Increased U.S. military involvement in East Africa and the export of extraordinary rendition to that region have clear strategic motivations. The U.S. military has long kept a major base in Djibouti, where naval cruisers can monitor and secure oil shipments through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Moreover, the Horn of Africa is home to untapped oil reserves.

What's Next in the Search for Justice?

The Obama administration's approach to torture and rendition has been challenged, though the most meaningful dissenting voices come from outside the country. The U.S. Congress has failed to challenge the state secrets doctrine and the concomitant executive impunity it implies, and has actively sought to keep Guantanamo active. Despite the efforts of Congresspersons like Ed Markey (D-MA) to ban renditions, the legislative branch is not likely to effectively challenge the Obama administration. The Judiciary has similarly recused itself from checking the executive. Last month, in rejecting a case brought by five innocent torture victims against the CIA contractor that flew them to black-site prisons, the Supreme Court upheld an appeals court ruling affirming the president's right to kill any case he pleased if he felt that evidence would reveal state secrets.

However, in Britain, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, and Australia, investigations into the global kidnapping ring known as extraordinary rendition have been set in motion. The Italian case is perhaps the most notable, as Italian prosecutors were able to overcome intense pressure from both the U.S. and Italian governments in their pursuit of 26 conspirators involved in the kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan, who was tortured by the notorious Egyptian Mukhabarat. The Italian case blew the covers of 21 CIA agents, who were each sentenced in absentia to five years in prison. Robert Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, received an eight-year prison sentence. Although the judge granted diplomatic immunity to other defendants, including the ringleader of the operation, Rome station chief Jeff Castelli, prosecutors plan to challenge the merits of the designation. Meanwhile, the United States has refused to cooperate with the prosecutors of the case, and the Italian government, under U.S. pressure, is not seeking to extradite those convicted. But the European Union issued arrest warrants for the conspirators, which translates into an effective travel ban to Europe.

Elsewhere, as documented by WikiLeaks, the U.S. diplomatic corps under both the Bush and Obama administrations has worked hard to kill foreign investigations into CIA renditions. In Germany, U.S. arm-twisting succeeded in stifling the prosecution of 13 CIA agents involved in the rendition of German citizen Khaled al-Masri from Macedonia to Afghanistan, where he was tortured. In Spain, U.S. diplomats threatened Spanish politicians and political appointees with Uncle Sam's cold shoulder if they failed to prevent prosecutors from investigating allegations of illegal rendition and torture of Spanish citizens, but those cases remain open. Even the family of drone victims in Pakistan have filed suit against the United States for the wrongful deaths of two loved ones. The odds of success may seem nil, but the desire for justice is enormous.

The WikiLeaks revelations may empower foreign governments and judiciaries, with broad popular support, to continue to challenge Washington on its illicit record of kidnapping and torturing foreign nationals. But the United States won't give up the fight easily, whether the continued expansion of the renditions program in the Horn of Africa or the heavy-handed meddling in European jurisprudence.

V. Noah Gimbel is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Write to the Forgotten Prisoners in Guantánamo (Summer 2011)

June 22, 2011 andyworthington.co.uk

A year ago, two Facebook friends, Shahrina J. Ahmed and Mahfuja Bint Ammu, drew on my research about Guantánamo for a letter-writing campaign, in which they asked their friends and others on Facebook to volunteer to write to each of the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo. Shahrina announced the letter-writing campaign via a Facebook note entitled, “What if YOU were tortured … and no one knew about it??!” and I then publicized it via an article entitled, Write to the Forgotten Prisoners in Guantánamo.

Mahfuja revived that campaign two weeks ago, with a new Facebook note entitled, “Ramadhan and Eid spent tortured,” and a fresh appeal for people to write to the remaining 171 prisoners in Guantanamo — that’s just ten less than a year ago, and two of those ten left in coffins, having died at the prison.

This is how Mahfuja introduced the latest campaign:

Ever been tortured? Ever been held in a detention camp with “secret” evidence against you? Ever been kept away from your family for up to 9 years? Ever felt what it is like to be innocent yet treated like a criminal?

These brothers have — and one letter can bring them happiness beyond that which you can ever comprehend. One letter can give them the hope they need. One, just one letter can brighten their gloomy lives. All it will take from you is a half an hour of your time. We have timed this campaign in correlation with Ramadhan, so we can give them a lovely Ramadhan and Eid wish, insha’Allah, which they will receive in time.

Visitors to the Facebook campaign page will see who has already signed up, and can either add their names, or, if they wish, write independently. All the letters will be sent together on July 24. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off! For further information about this, see the note at the end of this article explaining how one US activist wrote to every single prisoner at Guantanamo, and, inexplicably, had 19 of those letters returned.

Please also note that for those still detained at Guantánamo, messages of solidarity are more important now than ever, as President Obama has so throughly failed to close the prison. Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident who was freed from Guantánamo in March 2007, has explained how letters of support from people who had written as part of Amnesty international’s letter-writing campaigns helped him:

Amnesty, and what it stands for, is a torch of hope; that is how it was when I was in Guantánamo, when I received letters of support through Amnesty. In that lonely cell, with nothing but emptiness, to hold a photocopy of a letter or a card and read the words on it meant so much. They opened up the walls and gave me hope, and whispered to me: “You are not forgotten.”

So please, go ahead and write. If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages, and if you want any more encouragement about the significance for prisoners of receiving letters, then please visit this Amnesty International page, which features a short film of former prisoner Omar Deghayes showing letters he received in Guantánamo and explaining how much they meant to him — and to his fellow prisoners. This was filmed as part of an interview with Omar that is featured in the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself), and available on DVD here — or here for the US. Also, please feel free to let me know if you have written a letter, and also if you receive a reply.

Please write to the remaining 171 prisoners in Guantánamo

When writing to the prisoners please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (the numbers before their names, i.e. Shaker Aamer ISN 239) and address to:

Camp Delta
P.O. Box 160
Washington D.C. 20053
USA

Also please note that the list includes one prisoner who has been released, but who I have been unable to identify, because his name has not been publicly disclosed. He is an Afghan released in Spain last July.

1. 004 Wasiq, Abdul-Haq (Afghanistan)
2. 006 Noori, Mullah Norullah (Afghanistan)
3. 007 Fazil, Mullah Mohammed (Afghanistan)
4. 026 Ghazi, Fahed (Yemen)
5. 027 Uthman, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed (Yemen)
6. 028 Al Alawi, Muaz (Yemen)
7. 029 Al Ansi, Mohammed (Yemen)
8. 030 Al Hakimi, Ahmed (Yemen)
9. 031 Al Mujahid, Mahmoud (Yemen)
10. 033 Al Adahi, Mohammed (Yemen)
11. 034 Al Yafi, Abdullah (Yemen)
12. 035 Qader Idris, Idris (Yemen)
13. 036 Idris, Ibrahim (Sudan)
14. 037 Al Rahabi, Abdul Malik (Yemen)
15. 038 Al Yazidi, Ridah (Tunisia)
16. 039 Al Bahlul, Ali Hamza (Yemen)
17. 040 Al Mudafari, Abdel Qadir (Yemen)
18. 041 Ahmad, Majid (Yemen)
19. 042 Shalabi, Abdul Rahman (Saudi Arabia)
20. 043 Moqbel, Samir (Yemen)
21. 044 Ghanim, Mohammed (Yemen)
22. 045 Al Rezehi, Ali Ahmad (Yemen)
23. 054 Al Qosi, Ibrahim (Sudan)
24. 063 Al Qahtani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
25. 088 Awad, Adham Ali (Yemen)
26. 091 Al Saleh, Abdul (Yemen)
27. 115 Naser, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
28. 117 Al Warafi, Muktar (Yemen)
29. 128 Al Bihani, Ghaleb (Yemen)
30. 131 Ben Kend, Salem (Yemen)
31. 152 Al Khalaqi, Asim (Yemen)
32. 153 Suleiman, Fayiz (Yemen)
33. 156 Latif, Adnan Farhan Abdul (Yemen)
34. 163 Al Qadasi, Khalid (Yemen)
35. 165 Al Busayss, Said (Yemen)
36. 167 Al Raimi, Ali Yahya (Yemen)
37. 168 Hakimi, Adel (Tunisia)
38. 170 Masud, Sharaf (Yemen)
39. 171 Alahdal, Abu Bakr (Yemen)
40. 174 Sliti, Hisham (Tunisia)
41. 178 Baada, Tareq (Yemen)
42. 189 Gherebi, Salem (Libya)
43. 195 Al Shumrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
44. 197 Chekhouri, Younis (Morocco)
45. 200 Al Qahtani, Said (Saudi Arabia)
46. 202 Bin Atef, Mahmoud (Yemen)
47. 219 Razak, Abdul (China)
48. 223 Sulayman, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
49. 224 Muhammad, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
50. 232 Al Odah, Fawzi (Kuwait)
51. 233 Salih, Abdul (Yemen)
52. 235 Jarabh, Saeed (Yemen)
53. 238 Hadjarab, Nabil (Algeria-France)
54. 239 Aamer, Shaker (UK-Saudi Arabia)
55. 240 Al Shabli, Abdullah (Saudi Arabia)
56. 242 Qasim, Khaled (Yemen)
57. 244 Nassir, Abdul Latif (Morocco)
58. 249 Al Hamiri, Mohammed (Yemen)
59. 251 Bin Salem, Mohammed (Yemen)
60. 254 Khenaina, Mohammed (Yemen)
61. 255 Hatim, Said (Yemen)
62. 257 Abdulayev, Omar (Tajikistan)
63. 259 Hintif, Fadil (Yemen)
64. 263 Sultan, Ashraf (Libya)
65. 275 Abbas, Yusef (Abdusabar) (China)
66. 280 Khalik, Saidullah (Khalid) (China)
67. 282 Abdulghupur, Hajiakbar (China)
68. 288 Saib, Motai (Algeria)
69. 290 Belbacha, Ahmed (Algeria)
70. 309 Abdal Sattar, Muieen (UAE)
71. 310 Ameziane, Djamel (Algeria)
72. 321 Kuman, Ahmed Yaslam Said (Yemen)
73. 324 Al Sabri, Mashur (Yemen)
74. 326 Ajam, Ahmed (Syria)
75. 327 Shaaban, Ali Hussein (Syria)
76. 328 Mohamed, Ahmed (China)
77. 329 Al Hamawe, Abu Omar (Syria)
78. 434 Al Shamyri, Mustafa (Yemen)
79. 440 Bawazir, Mohammed (Yemen)
80. 441 Al Zahri, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
81. 461 Al Qyati, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
82. 498 Haidel, Mohammed (Yemen)
83. 502 Ourgy, Abdul (Tunisia)
84. 506 Al Dhuby, Khalid (Yemen)
85. 508 Al Rabie, Salman (Yemen)
86. 509 Khusruf, Mohammed (Yemen)
87. 511 Al Nahdi, Sulaiman (Yemen)
88. 522 Ismail, Yasin (Yemen)
89. 535 El Sawah, Tariq (Egypt)
90. 549 Al Dayi, Omar (Yemen)
91. 550 Zaid, Walid (Yemen)
92. 552 Al Kandari, Faiz (Kuwait)
93. 553 Al Baidhani, Abdul Khaliq (Saudi Arabia)
94. 554 Al Assani, Fehmi (Yemen)
95. 560 Mohammed, Haji Wali (Afghanistan)
96. 564 Bin Amer, Jalal (Yemen)
97. 566 Qattaa, Mansoor (Saudi Arabia)
98. 569 Al Shorabi, Zohair (Yemen)
99. 570 Al Qurashi, Sabri (Yemen)
100. 572 Al Zabe, Salah (Saudi Arabia)
101. 574 Al Wady, Hamoud (Yemen)
102. 575 Al Azani, Saad (Yemen)
103. 576 Bin Hamdoun, Zahir (Yemen)
104. 578 Al Suadi, Abdul Aziz (Yemen)
105. 579 Khairkhwa, Khairullah (Afghanistan)
106. 680 Hassan, Emad (Yemen)
107. 682 Al Sharbi, Ghassan (Saudi Arabia)
108. 684 Tahamuttan, Mohammed (Palestine)
109. 685 Ali, Abdelrazak (Algeria)
110. 686 Hakim, Abdel (Yemen)
111. 688 Ahmed, Fahmi (Yemen)
112. 689 Salam, Mohamed (Yemen)
113. 690 Qader, Ahmed Abdul (Yemen)
114. 691 Al Zarnuki, Mohammed (Yemen)
115. 694 Barhoumi, Sufyian (Algeria)
116. 695 Abu Bakr, Omar (Omar Mohammed Khalifh) (Libya)
117. 696 Al Qahtani, Jabran (Saudi Arabia)
118. 702 Mingazov, Ravil (Russia)
119. 707 Muhammed, Noor Uthman (Sudan)
120. 713 Al Zahrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
121. 722 Diyab, Jihad (Syria)
122. 728 Nassir, Jamil (Yemen)
123. 753 Zahir, Abdul (Afghanistan)
124. 757 Abdul Aziz, Ahmed Ould (Mauritania)
125. 760 Slahi, Mohamedou Ould (Salahi) (Mauritania)
126. 762 Obaidullah (Afghanistan)
127. 766 Khadr, Omar (Canada)
128. 768 Al Darbi, Ahmed Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
129. 832 Omari, Mohammed Nabi (Afghanistan)
130. 836 Saleh, Ayoub Murshid Ali (Yemen)
131. 837 Al Marwalah, Bashir (Yemen)
132. 838 Balzuhair, Shawki Awad (Yemen)
133. 839 Al Mudwani, Musab (Musa’ab Al Madhwani) (Yemen)
134. 840 Al Maythali, Hail Aziz Ahmed (Yemen)
135. 841 Nashir, Said Salih Said (Yemen)
136. 893 Al Bihani, Tawfiq (Saudi Arabia)
137. 894 Abdul Rahman, Mohammed (Tunisia)
138. 899 Khan, Shawali (Afghanistan)
139. 928 Gul, Khi Ali (Afghanistan)
140. 934 Ghani, Abdul (Afghanistan)
141. 975 Karim, Bostan (Afghanistan)
142. 1008 Sohail, Mohammed Mustafa (Afghanistan)
143. 1015 Almerfedi, Hussein (Yemen)
144. 1017 Al Rammah, Omar (Zakaria al-Baidany) (Yemen)
145. 1045 Kamin, Mohammed (Afghanistan)
146. 1094 Paracha, Saifullah (Pakistan)
147. 1103 Zahir, Mohammed (Afghanistan)
148. 1119 Hamidullah, Haji (Afghanistan)
149. 1453 Al Kazimi, Sanad (Yemen)
150. 1456 Bin Attash, Hassan (Saudi Arabia)
151. 1457 Sharqawi, Abdu Ali (Yemen)
152. 1460 Rabbani, Abdul Rahim Ghulam (Pakistan)
153. 1461 Rabbani, Mohammed Ghulam (Pakistan)
154. 1463 Al Hela, Abdulsalam (Yemen)
155. 10001 Bensayah, Belkacem (Bosnia-Algeria)
156. 10011 Al Hawsawi, Mustafa (Saudi Arabia)
157. 10013 Bin Al Shibh, Ramzi (Yemen)
158. 10014 Bin Attash, Waleed (Saudi Arabia)
159. 10015 Al Nashiri, Abdul Rahim (Saudi Arabia)
160. 10016 Zubaydah, Abu (Palestine-Saudi Arabia)
161. 10017 Al Libi, Abu Faraj (Libya)
162. 10018 Al Baluchi, Ammar (Ali Abdul Aziz Ali) (Pakistan-Kuwait)
163. 10019 Isamuddin, Riduan (Hamlili) (Indonesia)
164. 10020 Khan, Majid (Pakistan)
165. 10021 Bin Amin, Modh Farik (Zubair) (Malaysia)
166. 10022 Bin Lep, Mohammed (Lillie) (Malaysia)
167. 10023 Dourad, Gouled Hassan (Somalia)
168. 10024 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh (Pakistan-Kuwait)
169. 10025 Malik, Mohammed Abdul (Kenya)
170. 10026 Al Iraqi, Abdul Hadi (Iraq)
171. 3148 Al Afghani, Haroon (Afghanistan)
172. 10029 Rahim, Muhammad (Afghanistan)

Please also note that an additional prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (ISN 10012, Tanzania) was transferred to the US mainland from Guantánamo in May 2009 and received a life sentence after a federal court trial in January this year. He is being held in the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, as the New York Times reported two weeks ago. To send a letter, the address is as follows (the number following his name is his unique prison number):

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (02476-748)
USP Florence Admax
U.S. Penitentiary
PO Box 8500
Florence, Co. 81226

Also note that earlier this year, one of my correspondents, Elizabeth, gave me some interesting feedback after writing to every single prisoner at Guantánamo. In two emails in February, Elizabeth told me that the following letters were returned, marked “not deliverable as addressed”:

038 Al Yazidi, Ridah (Tunisia)
168 Hakimi, Adel (Tunisia)
280 Khalik, Saidullah (China)
282 Aldulghupur, Hajiakbar (China)
290 Belbacha, Ahmed (Algeria)
684 Tahamuttan, Mohammed (Palestine)
702 Mingazov, Ravil (Russia)
766 Khadr, Omar (Canada)
838 Balzuhair, Shawki Awad (Yemen)
1094 Paracha, Saifullah (Pakistan)
1460 Rabbani, Abdul Rahim Ghulam (Pakistan)
10019 Isamuddin, Riduan (Indonesia)
10022 Bin Lep, Mohammed (Malaysia)
10025 Malik, Mohammed Abdul (Kenya)

Elizabeth also let me know that the following letters were returned marked “attempted — not known”:

239 Aamer, Shaker (UK-Saudi Arabia)
549 Al Dayi, Omar (Yemen)
894 Adbul Rahman, Mohammed (Tunisia)
10024 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh (Pakistan-Kuwait)
10026 Al Iraqi, Abdul Hadi (Iraq)

I publish this information to let people know that censorship and obstruction are still taking place at Guantánamo, for no apparent reason, and also to find out if any other people who have written to prisoners at Guantánamo have had their letters returned (and if any of the same prisoners are involved). Do let me know if you can shed any light on this.

Obviously, I find it alarming that letters were returned, marked “not deliverable as addressed,” even though they were sent to well-known prisoners whose names are spelled correctly — such as the celebrated former child prisoner Omar Khadr, and Ahmed Belbacha, a long-cleared Algerian with ties to the UK — and also that other well-known prisoners — such as Shaker Aamer, the last British resident, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind — were allegedly “not known.” In some cases, I suspect that this is just incompetence, or routine obstruction, but in others I wonder whether it is a targeted program designed to reinforce certain prisoners’ isolation. Your thoughts on this are welcome.

And finally, for further information on the prisoners, see my four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four) and if you want to check alternative spellings of the prisoners’ names, see the New York Times‘ Guantánamo Docket, or WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files (the Detainee Assessment Briefs), released in April, which also contain previously unknown information about the prisoners that I am gradually transcribing.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.