Dear friends, I do hope you have time to read my first article for Al-Jazeera English, “It’s time to end the injustice of Guantánamo and Bagram,” in which, the day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I run through the story of America’s dreadful innovations in the wake of the attacks — with particular reference to Guantánamo, where 164 men remain, and Bagram in Afghanistan, where 67 non-Afghan prisoners are still held, despite the handover of the majority of the prisoners to the Afghan authorities.
In the article I point out how, by discarding the Geneva Conventions after 9/11, the Bush administration embraced indefinite detention without charge or trial, and also opened the floodgates to the use of torture. The latter was eventually curtailed (as official policy, at least), but the indefinite detention continues under President Obama, both at Guantánamo and Bagram, which is unacceptable policy under any circumstances.
I also point out how another baleful legacy of the Bush administration’s lawless policies is the largely worthless information masquerading as evidence, which is used to justify the ongoing imprisonment of the men at Bagram, and around half of the remaining men at Guantánamo. As I explain in the article:
[T]he Bush administration set about justifying the unjustifiable at Guantánamo, in its Afghan prisons and in the “black sites” run by or on behalf of the CIA, through interrogations in which torture and other forms of coercion were used, along with bribery (offering prisoners comfort items, ranging from food and cigarettes to DVDs and even their own gardens) or simply grinding prisoners down through relentless interrogations, until they began telling their interrogators what they wanted to hear. In one particular case, a single prisoner made false or untrustworthy allegations against at least 120 of his fellow prisoners.
The result, predictably, was an intelligence operation of extraordinary worthlessness, composed, to an alarming degree, of false statements made by prisoners about their fellow prisoners, although that has never been officially admitted.
It should also be noted that, although this worthless intelligence continues to exert a baleful influence on around half the prisoners still at Guantánamo, the other half of the remaining 164 prisoners should be beyond its malevolent reach, as they were cleared for release in January 2010 by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he first took office. However, they are still held because of Congressional restrictions, and the president’s own unwillingness to spend political capital pushing for their release — an unacceptable situation that is highlighted on the GMTO Clock website that I established in August, and which will also be a major part of the campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo that will be building up from now to the 13th anniversary of the prison’s opening in January.
If you like my article for Al-Jazeera, please like it, share it, tweet it, and also feel free to comment on it.
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and 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. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.