LGC Newsletter – April 2024

Guantánamo Bay 

Pre-trial hearings took place in two cases over the past month: in early April, in the USS Cole case in which Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri is accused of involvement in an attack that led to the death of 17 sailors off Yemen in 2000, the first hearing took place in the case since June last year with a new judge, who is understood to want to start the trial in the case in 2025. A five-week hearing is also currently underway in the case of four men accused of involvement in the September 2001 attacks in New York City. The hearing was paused for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Hearings continued where they left off previously, hearing prosecution witnesses from the FBI and other bodies, with some sessions held behind closed doors. On 26 April, “In an apparent historic first, the military judge presiding over the Sept. 11 military commission on Friday left his highly secure courtroom here to travel five miles to the former black site on Guantanamo Bay where the CIA secretly interrogated detainees between 2003-2004 and the FBI later attempted to get "clean" statements for use in a criminal case.

“The location – Camp Echo 2 – was commandeered following the black site detentions in an effort to sanitize coerced statements extracted on this same ground, or at black sites that defense attorneys say were eerily similar. The government claims the subsequent statements, given in January 2007 to the FBI, constitute clean recountings made without coercion and should be admissible at trial. Roughly four months before the statements the Bush administration had announced the transfer of the accused and other high-value detainees to Guantanamo Bay from CIA custody.

“The groundbreaking visit was led by the fourth judge to preside over pretrial hearings, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall. Earlier this week, he explained in an order that a “a site visit” to Echo 2 “would be beneficial for determining” whether he should suppress the contested statements to the FBI. The defense teams claim any disclosures to the FBI resulted from the CIA's prior torture and relentless conditioning of their clients. The prosecution claims the defendants gave their 2007 statements voluntarily.

“The site visit was “historic” as “the first time a judicial officer has visited a former CIA black site,” said James Connell, the lead lawyer for defendant Ammar al Baluchi. Echo 2 is a fulcrum on which the judge will decide if the 2007 statements given to the FBI were sufficiently attenuated from the preceding years of incommunicado detention by the CIA.””

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2024-04-26-judge-on-9-11-case-visits-former-cia-black-site-on-guantanamo-bay

A new $US4 million second courtroom has also opened to allow two consecutive hearings to take place, although attendants of one were not allowed to switch over to the other in different sessions.

 

Extraordinary rendition

 

Lithuania has decided not to appeal a European Court of Human Rights ruling finding it complicit in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme with respect to current Guantánamo prisoner, Saudi Mustafa al-Hawsawi. The ruling thus became final on 16 April. “In late January, the ECtHR awarded 100,000 euros to Mustafa al-Hawsawi for his unlawful detention in the alleged secret facility, and another 30,000 euros to REDRESS, the non-governmental organisation that represented the Saudi national. The Strasbourg court found that al-Hawsawi’s detention in Lithuania had violated various articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, such as the prohibition of torture, the right to a fair trial, the right to life, liberty, and security.”

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2256614/lithuania-opts-not-to-contest-ecthr-ruling-on-cia-prison

 

Twenty years after US prisoner torture and abuse at the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison was revealed, three former prisoners have had their day in a US court, in a long-running case against US military contractor CACI, Al-Shimari v. CACI. The victims were able to make statements and share their experiences, including post-release trauma and illness, with CACI claiming that the victims were not in the infamous torture pictures and cannot prove they were tortured by its staff, and that ultimately the US military is responsible, to wash its hands of liability. Two weeks after the hearing, the jury has still not delivered its verdict in the case.

https://apnews.com/article/abu-ghraib-trial-iraq-virginia-9e6eae5c7ea05fac90d8541efdd15562

LGC Newsletter – October 2023

Guantánamo Bay

In a ruling on 27 October, the British investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) “said it will open a second investigation into allegations that the intelligence services” were involved in the mistreatment of a current Guantánamo prisoner, Yemeni Abd Al-Nashiri, and would examine a complaint filed on his behalf.

“Lawyers for Nashiri have argued that there is an “irresistible inference” that the UK’s intelligence agencies, including MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, participated in intelligence sharing relating to al-Nashiri and “were complicit in his torture and ill-treatment”.

“The IPT’s decision to investigate the claims comes after it agreed in May to examine a similar complaint by another man held at Guantánamo, Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

“In its latest ruling, the IPT – a specialist judicial body that hears complaints against the intelligence services – said the underlying issues in both cases “are of the gravest possible kind”.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/29/second-investigation-to-open-into-role-of-british-spies-in-torture-of-guantanamo-detainee

 

Lawyers for two Malaysian prisoners, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, 48, and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, 46, have negotiated plea deals with prosecutors, to be entered early next year, along with their sentencing. They agreed to “plead guilty to war crimes charges for being accessories” to the 2002 Bali bombings. Charged along with Indonesian prisoners “Hambali”, Encep Nurjaman, the former CIA secret torture prison detainees have had their case severed from his. They are accused of having served as money couriers and providing support to Hambali, who now faces trial alone. The maximum punishment is a life sentence.

“The military disclosed the existence of the deal this week with the release of a court filing by prosecutors and lawyers for Mr. Bin Amin, which scheduled a hearing starting Jan. 15 for the entry of a plea, assembling a military panel and sentencing. The terms were under seal, including any limits on his prison sentence, where he would serve it and whether his testimony was sought against Mr. Nurjaman. Less is known about when Mr. Bin Lep will be sentenced. On Thursday, his lawyer, Brian Bouffard, said only that “Mr. Bin Lep will fully cooperate with the U.S. government.” Christine Funk, the lawyer for Mr. Bin Amin, declined to discuss the deal. But people with knowledge of the agreements said the men were seeking to be sent to a rehabilitation program for Muslim extremists in Malaysia.”

LGC Newsletter – August 2023

 Guantánamo Bay

The periodic review board (PRB), the mechanism set up to decide whether prisoners should continue to be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, decided to uphold the detention of Palestinian prisoner Abu Zubaydah, whose torture, including waterboarding, at the hands of the CIA has been litigated successfully in several countries. The US also decided as early as 2006 that he did not pose any threat to it, however having suffered some of the worst torture in the post-9/11 war on terror, the US is reluctant to release him, even though he has never been charged and faces no charges.

The last Afghan prisoner held at Guantánamo, Muhammad Rahim, held since 2007, had his review on 15 August. It is the first time that he had a lawyer present with him at such a hearing. https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/rights-freedom/the-last-afghan-in-guantanamo-pressure-mounts-on-us-to-deal-with-the-remnants-of-its-war-on-terror/

 

The family of former Russian prisoner Ravil Mingazov, who was transferred to the UAE by the Obama administration in 2017, where he has since remained imprisoned and with little communication with the outside world, delivered a letter to the UK Home Office calling for the UK to grant him asylum. His son and his mother are refugees in the UK.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ex-guantanamo-inmate-detained-uae-pleads-uk-grant-asylum

 

In a ruling on 18 August, evidence obtained through the use of torture was excluded from the capital case of Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri. A “military judge in Guantanamo Bay overseeing the pretrial capital prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi national accused of organizing the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, excluded Mr. al-Nishiri’s confessions as the product of torture. “Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” said the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., in a 50-page decision. “However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.” This decision raises serious questions about the admissibility of confessions made under similar circumstances by the five detainees accused of the 9/11 terror attacks and may affect the plea negotiations currently underway for these men.” With a new judge appointed to the case, Marine Lt. Col. Terrance Reese, the prosecution has decided to appeal the decision to the US Court of Military Commission Review. Excluding confessions forced through the use of torture, the US may not have enough real evidence for its case.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/confessions-of-guantanamo-detainee-in-death-penalty-case-excluded-as-product-of-torture

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2023-08-18-judge-excludes-gitmo-defendants-confession-because-of-cia-torture

 

A military medical board has come to the conclusion that one of the five defendants accused of involvement in the September 2001 attacks in New York City, Ramzi Binalshibh, is not fit to face trial; he has a “mental illness that makes him incompetent to either face trial or plead guilty in the death penalty case”, according to a report filed with the judge hearing the case. “The question of Binalshibh’s sanity and capacity to help his lawyers defend him has shadowed the 9/11 conspiracy case since his first court appearance in 2008. Then, a military lawyer disclosed that her client was restrained with ankle shackles and that the prison had him medicated with psychotropic drugs. He has disrupted pretrial hearings over the years with outbursts, and in court and in filings complained that the CIA torments him with noises, vibrations and other techniques to deprive of him sleep.” The report was commissioned by the judge in April and it is now up to him to decide whether Binalshibh will be dismissed from the case. “According to their lawyers, at least four of the defendants have sleep disorders, brain injuries, gastrointestinal damage or other health problems they attribute to the agency’s brutal interrogation methods during their three to four years in CIA custody before their transfer to Guantánamo Bay in 2006”.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/man-accused-in-9-11-plot-is-not-fit-to-face-trial-board-says/

LGC Newsletter – June 2023

Guantánamo Bay

Ahead of the resumption of pre-trial hearings in the case of Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri, in early June, the UN working group on arbitrary detention condemned the US and seven other countries “- Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Thailand, United Arab Emirates - which allegedly transferred or detained him between 2002-2006” for the torture and human rights violations he has suffered in detention: “The United Nations working group on arbitrary detention said he had been arbitrarily detained for more than 20 years and it voiced concern about his physical and mental well-being.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/un-body-condemns-us-others-treatment-guantanamo-inmate-2023-06-05/

During the pre-trial hearing, in a case which could see this CIA torture victim face the death penalty, the judge heard the last few witnesses on the issue of the admissibility of evidence from torture-tainted interrogations and the impact of years of torture on the statements he made admitting to terrorist acts. “The judge’s ruling is on track to be the first major decision at the war court about the admissibility of interrogations by federal agents who were brought to Guantánamo Bay to build a fresh case against former C.I.A. prisoners.” According to the final defence witness, former CIA officer Retired Colonel Steven M. Kleinman, “prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and brutality like that experienced by the C.I.A. prisoners degrades memory and leads to false confessions. Such treatment impairs a prisoner’s “ability to answer reliably” even years later, he said, adding that a prisoner “may be willing but is no longer able to correctly recall events.””

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/us/politics/guantanamo-torture-cia-cole-prisoner.html

“The motion to suppress al Nashiri’s Guantanamo statements are among several critical motions pending before [Judge] Acosta, who intends to issues a series of rulings prior to his retirement later this summer. Al Nashiri’s team has asked Acosta to suppress the hearsay statements of Salim Hamdan elicited by federal agents in 2002, when Hamdan was a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. (Hamdan was freed shortly after his transfer to Yemen in 2008. An appeals court later overturned his military commission conviction.) The team has also moved to suppress the statements that a current Guantanamo Bay detainee, Walid bin Attash, made to FBI and NCIS agents in his interrogations in early 2007. Bin Attash, who is charged in the separate military commission over the Sept. 11 attacks, is suspected of playing a role in the USS Cole bombing. Both Hamdan and bin Attash have given information that implicates al Nashiri. Defense lawyers are also challenging more than 100 hearsay statements made by Yemeni witnesses and possible suspects to federal agents in the months and years after the attack on the USS Cole.”

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2023-06-16-cia-abuse-rendered-future-statements-unreliable-expert-testifies

 

On 26 June, International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, presented her report on her visit to Guantánamo Bay and other sites involved in the war on terror and meetings with victims and their families. She is the first UN Special Rapporteur to be given access to Guantánamo Bay since it opened over 21 years ago. In the report, she states that “The U.S. Government is under a continued obligation to ensure accountability, make full reparation for the injuries caused, and offer appropriate guarantees of non-repetition for violations committed post-9/11”. With respect to Guantánamo, she “concludes that the foregoing conditions constitute a violation of the right to available, adequate, and acceptable health care—as part of the State’s obligation to guarantee the rights to life, freedom from torture and ill- treatment, humane treatment of prisoners, and effective remedy—have resulted in the significant deterioration of the physical and mental health of detainees, compounding post-traumatic symptoms and other severe and persistent health consequences co-related to temporal continuities of healthcare provision at Guantánamo Bay. She finds that the cumulative effects of these structural deficiencies amount to, at minimum, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law. Moreover, the U.S. Government’s failure to provide torture rehabilitation squarely contravenes its obligations under the Convention against Torture.” She also calls for prisoners to have better access to their families, equal access to lawyers and fair trial rights and urged the US government to apologise to the prisoners. The US government has issued a one-page response which is covered here: https://www.justsecurity.org/87093/takeaways-from-the-un-special-rapporteur-report-on-guantanamo/

The report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-terrorism/us-and-guantanamo-detention-facility

 

LGC Newsletter – May 2023

Guantánamo Bay

“The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday [9 May] that former Guantánamo Bay detainee Omar Ahmed Khadr waived his right to appeal his war crime convictions under the Military Commissions Act. Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson authored the opinion of the court.

“The court ruled that Khadr waived his right to appeal his convictions in his pretrial agreement with the federal prosecutor on his case. In the agreement, Khadr agreed to plead guilty to all his charges and waive his appeal rights for a sentence not to exceed eight years. The court ruled Khadr “knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily” waived his right to appeal his conviction. Additionally, the court decided that Khadr “expressly waived the right to appeal his conviction, sentence and detention.” The court also noted the importance of allowing criminal defendants to waive their rights to appeal as a “bargaining chip to use in negotiating a plea agreement with the Government.””

A dissenting opinion was given by Judge Robert Wilkins who said that the court did not have the jurisdiction to review the plea agreement between the military commission and the Canadian former prisoner.

https://www.jurist.org/news/2023/05/us-appeals-court-rules-that-al-qaida-member-waived-right-to-appeal-war-crime-convictions/

 

In a new case before the secretive investigatory powers tribunal in the UK, lawyers for Abd Al Nashiri have argued that the UK secret services – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – were involved in his rendition and torture by the CIA. “In papers submitted to the tribunal, al-Nashiri’s barrister, Hugh Southey KC, said: “The complainant’s case is that the UK agencies aided, abetted, encouraged, facilitated and/or conspired with the US authorities in his mistreatment.” […]The lawyers allege the UK’s involvement in al-Nashiri’s mistreatment probably included allowing Luton airport to be used to refuel a private jet used in his rendition from Thailand to Poland in December 2002.” The UK government argued that the court did not have the jurisdiction to hear the case.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/28/guantanamo-detainee-accuses-uk-agencies-of-complicity-in-his-torture

 

The 10-year sentence for association with a terrorist organisation, involved in recruiting for ISIS, given to former Algerian prisoner Saber Lahmar in France, who was never charged or tried at Guantánamo, was upheld on appeal on 25 May. The sentence includes a 2/3 custodial sentence and a permanent ban from French territory. His lawyers have stated that the charges were based on hearsay and intend to appeal to the French Supreme Court.

https://www.7sur7.be/monde/peine-de-10-ans-de-prison-confirmee-en-appel-pour-un-ex-detenu-de-guantanamo~adf87186/

A new report by Prof Mark Denbeaux and his students at the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University law school, “American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo,” includes new drawings by his client “forever” prisoner Abu Zubaydah of the torture he received. These images provide “the most comprehensive and detailed account yet seen of the brutal techniques to which he was subjected. Abu Zubaydah has created a series of 40 drawings that chronicle the torture he endured in a number of CIA dark sites between 2002 and 2006 and at Guantánamo Bay. In the absence of a full official accounting of the torture program, which the CIA and the FBI have labored for years to keep secret, the images give a unique and searing insight into a grisly period in US history. The drawings, which Zubaydah has annotated with his own words, depict gruesome acts of violence, sexual and religious humiliation, and prolonged psychological terror committed against him and other detainees. They were sketched from memory in his Guantánamo cell and sent to one of his lawyers, Prof Mark Denbeaux.”

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/may/11/abu-zubaydah-drawings-guantanamo-bay-us-torture-policy

LGC Newsletter – April 2023

Guantánamo Bay

In the ongoing appeal case of Yemeni prisoner Abdulsalam Al-Hela, 55, who was cleared for release by the periodic review board in June 2021, in an opinion in the case, “the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the authorities may not be allowed to keep a man imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay after he is no longer deemed a threat.” However, that does not mean that he will be released any time soon. He is one of 16 prisoners who have been cleared for release and remain at Guantánamo as the US has not found safe third countries to resettle them in; 10 of them are from Yemen and in spite of recent peace efforts in the country, the US has not made any efforts to repatriate or release any of these Yemeni prisoners. The outcome of this case will impact on all of the 16 men, some of whom have been cleared for release for many years.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230413-guantanamo-yemeni-man-will-remain-in-prison-despite-us-court-ruling-he-is-no-threat/

 

Pre-trial hearings were held in April in the case of Abd Al-Nashiri. In the kind of  “justice” that can only be found at Guantánamo and under US patronage, Al-Nashiri’s torturers and former FBI agents were invited to give evidence, not at their trial for war crimes, but for the prosecution in respect to whether certain torture evidence should or should not be included in his trial. Al-Nashiri’s torture has already been well documented and prosecuted successfully twice at the European Court of Human Rights. One of the prosecution witnesses was CIA torture programme architect and psychologist Dr Bruce Jessen, who gave a demonstration of some of the “approved” torture techniques used against the defendant and others “at a secret interrogation site in Thailand in late 2002”. The judge allowed the demonstration “to show practices that C.I.A. officials had destroyed video evidence of two decades ago”. According to Jessen’s testimony, these practices “including waterboarding, nudity and isolation — were not meant to rob a prisoner of his will but to gain his cooperation and disclose Al Qaeda’s secrets to the C.I.A.” “Prosecutors have already agreed that nothing Mr. Nashiri said at the so-called black sites can be used at trial because evidence derived from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is unlawful. But they defend as untainted his 2007 law enforcement interviews, which took place at Guantánamo at a former C.I.A. prison where Mr. Nashiri was held by the agency in 2003 and 2004.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/cia-torture-guantanamo-saudi-detainee-nashiri.html

Another witness called by prosecutors was forensic psychiatrist Dr Michael Welner who claimed that Al-Nashiri “voluntarily confessed to having a role in the attack after four years in the C.I.A.’s secret [torture] prison network.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/cia-prisoner-confession-uss-cole.html

“Abd al Rahim al Nashiri made incriminating statements to agents of the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service in late January and early February 2007 about his alleged role in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. The sessions took place in the detention center on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base nearly five months after al Nashiri’s transfer from CIA black sites, where he endured waterboarding, threats of execution, nudity, stress positions, sleep deprivation, cramped confinement and other abuses. […]The government team hopes to introduce the incriminating statements at al Nashiri’s as-of-yet unscheduled death penalty trial for the attack that killed 17 sailors off the coast of Yemen. His defense team contends that al Nashiri’s years of torture and isolation at CIA black sites conditioned him to say whatever his interrogators wanted, rendering his subsequent statements to the FBI and NCIS in 2007 involuntary. They have asked the judge, Army Col. Lanny Acosta, to suppress the statements.”

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2023-04-20-government-witness-testifies-to-free-will-of-uss-cole-suspect-in-guantanamo-interrogations

The next hearing is scheduled for June.

 

Pre-trial hearings also took place in the trial of an Indonesian and two Malaysian prisoners accused of involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing. The hearing of the three men who were subject to extraordinary rendition in 2003 and have been in US detention since, although they have only been recently charged, saw prosecutors seek a 2025 trial for the case as much of the evidence is national security evidence (meaning it was probably obtained through the use of torture) and is secret. Lawyers for the defendants said that this timeline is too long, given that the defendants have been held by the US for over 20 years already and that prosecutors have yet to share the evidence they have almost two years after the case was first opened and the defendants brought to court. This hearing was their first since August 2021 when they were arraigned. The defendants protested about the use of interpreters, a persisting problem in the case with the wrong language being used, interpreters using English words – “For example, an interpreter could not remember how to say “interpreter” in Malaysian dialect” – which the defendants did not understand and could thus not follow the proceedings. “Separately, the judge declined to excuse an interpreter who had previously remarked that the U.S. government was “wasting so much money on these terrorists. They should have been killed a long time ago.” Instead, the judge cautioned the interpreters — who were working from a remote location — that he expected their translations to be “neutral, sanitized, surgical.””

According to the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA Torture Programme, in 2003, a CIA interrogator told one of the defendants “that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you”; the CIA is one of the agencies withholding the evidence in the case. One of the defendants’ lawyers “accused the U.S. government of misplaced priorities. It spent millions of dollars on “a systemic torture program,” she said. “But when it comes to administering justice, we want to penny pinch. We want to say, ‘We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the computers. It’s complex.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/us/politics/guantanamo-trial-bali-bombing.html

 

In rare and open criticism of prisoner conditions at Guantánamo, to whom it has access, a senior official at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that prisoners are showing signed of “accelerated ageing” and that “physical and mental health needs are growing and becoming increasingly challenging” for current prisoners. The statement followed a visit in March by the ICRC to Guantanamo. The ICRC called for better healthcare provision and an improvement in “the quality of contact with families, most notably in terms of frequency and length of calls, while bearing in mind the total absence of in-person visits.” It stated that “the sooner the US can overcome the political and administrative deadlock to responsibly transfer out those detainees deemed eligible, and determine the fate of all other detainees, the better it can shape whatever plans are required.”

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/guantanamo-detaining-authorities-must-adapt-needs-rapidly-ageing-population

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/22/guantanamo-bay-prisoners-show-signs-of-accelerated-ageing-icrc

 

The last Algerian prisoner Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush was repatriated to Algeria just before the Islamic Eid holiday. His is the sixth release in six months and brings the prisoner population down to 30, over half of whom are eligible for release. He was detained in Pakistan in March 2002 and was never charged or tried. He was cleared for release by the periodic review board in April 2022. Release from Guantánamo is not freedom and involves ongoing US surveillance and restrictive measures on travel and contact with other persons.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/guantanamo-us-releases-algerian-detainee-bringing-population-down-30

 

On 24 April, MPs, peers, human rights activists and former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi started a new all-party parliamentary group to close Guantánamo.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ukguantanamo-new-all-party-parliamentary-group-call-notorious-camps-closure

 

LGC Newsletter – February 2023

 Guantánamo Bay

Majid Khan, who officially completed his sentence following conviction through a secret plea bargain on 1 March 2022, was released to the Central American state of Belize in early February. He has been joined by his family. A survivor of physical, sexual and psychological torture in the CIA’s illegal secret network of prisons worldwide, he is the only “high-value” prisoner to be released and the only prisoner to be resettled in a third country since the Obama administration. Khan, a Pakistani citizen, cannot return there due to safety concerns.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64504846  

 

Two other Pakistani nationals, brothers Abdul, 55, and Mohammed, 53, Rabbani, were repatriated to Pakistan on 24 February. They have returned to their hometown of Karachi, where they were arrested and handed over to the US military by Pakistani officials in 2002. Held at Guantánamo for over 20 years, they were never charged or tried. “The brothers alleged torture while in CIA custody before being transferred to Guantanamo. US military records describe the two as providing little intelligence of value or recanting statements made during interrogations on the grounds they were obtained by physical abuse.” Mohammed Rabbani was allowed to return home with paintings he produced while at Guantánamo, following a recent change in policy allowing prisoners to keep their artwork.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/2/24/two-pakistanis-leave-guantanamo-after-20-years-without-charges

There are currently 32 prisoners held at Guantánamo.

 

The UN has reported that the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, undertook a visit to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and the US on 6-14 February and over the coming months, she will “carry out a series of interviews with individuals in the United States and abroad, on a voluntary basis, including victims and families of victims of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and former detainees in countries of resettlement/repatriation”. This is the first time that a UN technical expert has been granted access to the facility, after two decades of such requests being made.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/02/un-counterterrorism-expert-visit-united-states-and-guantanamo-detention

The Pentagon has reversed a Trump-era ban, in place since 2017, on released prisoners taking some or all of the artwork they have produced at the prison with them. As a result, Mohammed Rabbani’s lawyers have reported that he has been allowed to take a considerable number of the paintings he produced during his detention with him to Pakistan.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-guantanamo-bay-detainees-2253127

 

Pre-trial hearings took place in February in the cases of Hadi Al-Iraqi, which were mostly administrative and slowed down as the prisoner recovers from surgery last year, and Abd Al-Nashiri, in which the judge continued to sum up what evidence can be considered admissible in the case. Witnesses included former FBI agents who have not been able to find the people who provided them with testimonies in the case in Yemen over 20 years ago.

In an attempt to exclude some of the evidence obtained through the use of torture on Al-Nashiri while in secret CIA detention, one of the witnesses, Dr Sondra S. Crosby, in her testimony, “offered some of the most graphic details made public about the C.I.A.’s shadowy use of rectal feeding on its prisoners, a discredited practice kept secret long after other torture methods had been exposed”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/us/politics/cia-torture-guantanamo-nashiri-doctor.html

Documents and transcripts in the cases can be viewed here: https://www.mc.mil/CASES.aspx

LGC Newsletter – October 2022

Guantánamo Bay

Pre-trial hearings took place this month in the capital USS Cole bombing case involving Abd Al Nashiri. The hearings focused on how much hearsay evidence the judge is allowed to admit in the trial as many witnesses are unavailable for the trial of this attack on a US naval vessel which took place near Yemen in 2000. An FBI agent told the court that 20 years earlier Yemeni eyewitnesses had described the attack to investigators and identified Al Nashiri as being involved. However, “Confronted with the image on cross-examination, the former agent, Ammar Barghouty, said he was mistaken. The eyewitness had identified one of the suicide bombers, not Mr. Nashiri, as the tenant. [of property rented to the bombers]” As they cannot find the 100 or so Yemeni witnesses who provided the information at the time, the judge now has to decide whether FBI agents can testify what they were told instead. Many are now retired. The judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., must also decide which of the statements “are reliable enough to be presented to the military jury that will someday hear the death-penalty case.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/us/politics/uss-cole-bombing-case.html

Initial pre-trial hearings in the case of Indonesian prisoner Hambali and two Malaysian prisoners accused of involvement in the 2003 Bali bombing were due to take place in late October and early November but have been cancelled by the judge.

 

The oldest prisoner held at Guantánamo, 75-year old Pakistani national Saifullah Paracha, has been repatriated following efforts by the Pakistani government. He was detained in Thailand in 2003 and accused of financing Al Qaeda. In his 20 years at Guantánamo, he was never charged or tried. He was cleared for release by the periodic review board in May 2022. 35 prisoners remain at the facility, including fellow Pakistani citizen Majid Khan, who had served his military commission sentence by 1 March this year but is awaiting release to a safe third country.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/29/oldest-guantanamo-bay-prisoner-released-to-pakistan-ministry

 

LGC Newsletter – May 2022

Guantánamo Bay

In a pre-trial hearing in early May in the capital case of Abd Al-Nashiri, accused of involvement in an attack on a military vessel in the Gulf of Aden in 2000, CIA torture architect, contract psychologist Dr James Mitchell, testified how “how he and his partner in building the CIA interrogation program, Dr. Bruce Jessen, conducted three waterboarding sessions of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri over multiple days in November 2002 in an effort to stop what the Bush administration believed was “a second wave” of terrorist attacks to follow those on Sept. 11, 2001.” They stopped as the victim was too small in size to continue; at the time, Al-Nashiri weighed only 120 lb. Providing more of the kind of confessional testimony that should be used in his own war crimes trial, “Mitchell said that al Nashiri began providing useful intelligence in subsequent interrogation sessions at Location 3, leading the interrogation team to “taper off” from what the CIA referred to as its “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or “EITs.” For al Nashiri, Mitchell said these techniques also included sleep deprivation, slapping, periods of confinement in a box and a process of being repeatedly pushed hard against a wall known as “walling.” According to his testimony, Mitchell based the techniques on those he used as an instructor in the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, program, which puts trainees through abusive situations to prepare them for capture by hostile forces.

“Mitchell said Monday afternoon that al Nashiri would crawl into the confinement box to get away from the bright lights in his cell that were on 24 hours a day.

“Nashiri actually liked being in the box,” Mitchell said.”

In the same hearing, another Guantánamo prisoner, Yemeni Abd al Salam al Hilah, who has been cleared for release, was due to give two days of testimony against Al-Nashiri, however on the morning of his testimony, he refused to attend court. Attending the following day, he stated “he had “nothing to hide” but was concerned that the government would “manipulate” his answers and use them against him. His voice rising at times, al Hilah said that both he and his family have suffered during his 20 years in U.S. custody.

“Lyness [al Hilah’s lawyer] rose to say that his client’s statement was a “clear invocation” of his right against self-incrimination. [Judge] Acosta agreed and decided that the deposition would not go forward. He recessed the commission until the next hearing, scheduled to start July 25”.

https://www.lawdragon.com/news-features/2022-05-03-architect-of-cia-interrogation-program-testifies-to-repeated-abuse-of-uss-cole-suspect

Former British resident, Ugandan Jamal Kiyemba, who was released from Guantánamo without charge or trial in 2007, has been charged and faces trial for alleged membership in 2021-2022 of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group designated a terrorist organisation in Uganda, along with others. He has been remanded in custody pending investigation. He denied the charges.

https://observer.ug/news/headlines/73623-ex-guantanamo-bay-inmate-remanded-to-luzira-prison-over-adf-terror-links

 

LGC Newsletter – February 2022

Guantánamo Bay

In a brief filed by the Biden administration at the end of January in the case of Abd Al Nashiri, facing the death penalty for his alleged role in the 2000 bombing of a US naval vessel in the Gulf of Aden, it made an important U-turn on the use of torture bringing it into line, in this military commission, with international law, by categorically rejecting “the use of statements obtained through torture at any stage in the proceedings and promis[ing] that the government will not seek to admit any statements the petitioner made while in CIA custody”. Al Nashiri, who was kidnapped and rendered in the UAE in 2002, has already successfully brought claims for torture collusion against Poland and Romania, where he was held illegally and secretly and tortured, among other countries, before he arrived at Guantánamo in 2006.

https://www.justsecurity.org/80047/biden-team-gets-it-right-on-inadmissibility-of-torture-evidence-in-al-nashiri-case/

 

The US government has agreed to repatriate Saudi prisoner Mohammed Al-Qahtani, who suffers from severe mental health problems following his torture and detention by the US, to Saudi Arabia for treatment at a specialist facility there. He was cleared for release by the periodic review board and may return to Saudi Arabia in March. His legal team have been calling for him to be released and to receive psychiatric care for a long time. While the board calls for continuing security and surveillance upon release, his lawyers stated: "Despite the severity of his illness, Mohammed has never posed a risk to anyone but himself. In recent years the voices in his head have increasingly told him to harm himself—by doing things like swallowing broken glass and not disclosing it to his doctors—making his transfer out of Guantánamo an urgent matter. We are hopeful that Mohammed's torment will be lessened when he is in the care of trusted psychiatrists who speak his native language, far from the scene of his torture, and where he can receive vital support from his family."

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/08/politics/guantanamo-detainee-saudi-arabia/index.html

The review board also cleared fellow Saudi prisoner Ghassan Al-Sharbi, who was detained in Pakistan in 2002, for release. He has never been charged or tried. A majority (20) of the remaining 39 prisoners are now cleared for release.

 

Pre-trial hearings in the case of an Indonesian and two Malaysian prisoners due to be held at the end of February and early March were cancelled after prosecutors informed the judge that they could not comply with his order to produce two adequate court Malay and Indonesian interpreters who are security cleared for the hearing. Problems with biased interpreters and/or speaking the wrong language have already marred this case. Prosecutors have also announced that they are seeking to start the trial at the end of December 2023.

LGC Newsletter – January 2022

Guantánamo Bay

The periodic review board has cleared five prisoners for release, although this does not mean they are likely to leave Guantánamo Bay in the near future. The number of prisoners now cleared for release, from among the 39 remaining after 20 years of arbitrary detention, is 18. A further 9 prisoners face no charges or trial and are held as “forever prisoners”. The five men are: Somali Guleed Hassan Ahmed (also called Guled Hassan Duran); Kenyan Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu; and Omar Muhammad Ali al-Rammah, Moath Hamza al-Alwi, and Suhayl al-Sharabi from Yemen. Somali Guleed Hassan Ahmed is the first prisoner who was previously held and tortured at secret CIA sites and alleged to be a “high-value” (or most tortured) detainee by the US military to be cleared for release.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/12/us-approves-release-five-more-guantanamo-detainees

 

In a rare and strongly-worded statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has had rare access to the prisoners almost since Guantánamo opened in January 2022, called for the release of the remaining prisoners. To mark the 20^th anniversary of this engagement on 18 January, the ICRC put out the following statement calling on the US authorities to close the prison and release the prisoners: “The ICRC is gravely concerned that the remaining people held at Guantanamo Bay have been behind bars for so many years with little or no clarity as to what will happen to them. The ICRC notes that some detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay today despite the fact they were deemed eligible for transfer more than ten years ago.

“The detainees deemed eligible by the US government should be transferred today," said Patrick Hamilton, the ICRC's head of delegation in the United States and Canada. "After 20 years and well over 100 visits, we see that the more time passes for these detainees, the more they and their families suffer. The humanitarian rationale for enabling those to leave who are cleared to do so is obvious, and all the more so for those whose departures have been delayed for so long.”

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-calls-transfers-eligible-guantanamo-detainees

 

A February hearing into the case of Abd Al-Nashiri, accused of involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in 2000, has been adjourned due to the “heightened risk of Covid” at Guantánamo at present. The next scheduled hearing is due to take place from 28 February in the case of an Indonesian and two Malaysian prisoners accused of involvement in the Bali bombing in 2002. The three were arraigned in August 2021 but problems arose with the interpreters whom the defendants could not understand and who were accused of bias, thus they did not enter a plea at the time. A report into the case has shown that the military judge, Commander  Hayes C. Larsen, agrees with the defendants that the interpreters were biased and has given the government until February to find adequate and security-cleared interpreters for the case to proceed, with two for each language (Malay and Indonesian), and has ordered the government to analyse the problems with the Malay interpreting at the August 2021 hearing.

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2022/01/26/report-guantanamo-bay-terror-trial-judge-agrees-with-two-malaysians-asserti/2037658

 

LGC Newsletter – December 2021

Guantánamo Bay

In early December, a senate hearing was held on closing Guantánamo, the first of its kind in over 6 years. As Guantánamo heads towards its twentieth anniversary, having opened in its current incarnation on 11 January 2002, senators from both Congress and the Democrats broadly rehashed arguments on why Guantánamo should remain open or close they have made over the past two decades. Both, however, expressed dissatisfaction at the Biden administration’s stance on the facility. Although Biden’s administration has stated that closing Guantánamo is a goal, it has not taken any measures or set out any plans to this end. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Chief Defense Counsel for Military Commissions Brig. Gen. John Baker who “argued that the ongoing cases must be brought to "as rapid as a conclusion as possible […] Notice I don't say as just a conclusion as possible. It is too late in the process for the current military commissions to do justice for anyone," he said, calling the proceedings a "failed experiment" and noting they had only resulted in one final conviction.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/guantanamo-detention-camp-hearing-parties-express-disappointment-biden/story?id=81609487

The New York Times has also reported that the Pentagon is reportedly building a second courthouse at Guantánamo scheduled for completion by 2023, even though no trial dates have been scheduled in any of the pending cases, some of which remain at pre-trial stage a decade after charges were pressed. In its almost 20 year history, more prisoners have died than have been convicted at Guantánamo, and the majority of those convictions have been overturned on appeal. More than half of the current 39 remaining prisoners face no charges or trial. Trials held at Guantánamo do not meet internationally recognised general standards for a fair trial or justice.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10356855/Pentagon-building-SECOND-secret-courtroom-Guantanamo-Bay.html

 

A two-week pre-trial hearing was held in the case of Yemeni prisoner Abd Al-Nashiri, accused of attacks on a US naval vessel in the Gulf of Aden in 2002. Part of the hearings were held in closed session and considered evidence in the case and the ability of the defendant, who faces the death penalty, to attend these hearings as the journey to and from the courtroom to his prison cell have long caused him severe pain and discomfort: “His lawyers are seeking a court order to let him spend the night before a hearing at a specially equipped holding cell at the court, as a disabled prisoner in another case has done”. His lawyers called in a torture expert in an attempt to have him excused from attending as the defendant “who was subjected to waterboarding and a mock execution by the C.I.A. in 2002 still has nightmares of drowning, sleeps with a light on in his cell and can shower only in a trickle of water. When he has been driven to court in a standard windowless detainee transport van, the defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 56, also gets nauseated and vomits from flashbacks to a period when agents confined him nude and shivering inside a chilled, cramped box, part of the “enhanced interrogation” program at the agency’s secret sites.” The testimony given by Dr Sondra Crosby highlighted how Guantánamo “still has no formal program for providing care to torture victims”. The hearing revealed some details of the torture he suffered while in CIA custody.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/us/politics/guantanamo-bay-abd-al-rahim-al-nashiri.html

 

Lt. Col. Michael D. Zimmerman, the fourth judge in the case of Abdul Hadi Al-Iraqi, who was charged in 2014, has stepped down from the case after being offered a fellowship at the FBI. “Unlike federal judges, who are given lifetime appointments, military judges generally serve for a few years at military commissions and then move on to other legal roles or retire, creating delays and disrupting continuity in cases.” Before leaving the case, he cancelled the next scheduled pre-trial hearing set for 4-7 January 2022. Al-Iraqi’s defence lawyers “Monday called on Colonel Zimmerman to quit and to vacate rulings he had made since being assigned to the case in September 2020” but he declined to do that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/us/politics/guantanamo-judge-quits.html

LGC Newsletter – June 2021

Guantánamo Bay

A military judge in the case of Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, facing the death penalty at Guantánamo in relation to his alleged connection to the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000, has allowed an application by the prosecution to admit information obtained through torture to be used as evidence in his case. Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. ruled in May to allow prosecutors to use torture evidence “in a limited capacity at pre-trial hearings”. Evidence obtained through the use of torture is generally illegal and inadmissible in almost all countries around the world. Lawyers for Al-Nashiri are now appealing to the United States Court of Military Commission Review board to reverse this ruling, stating “'No court has ever sanctioned the use of torture in this way”. Such a decision and request by the prosecution and its attempts to withhold evidence from Al-Nashiri’s defence team show desperation in its efforts to prosecute him. Al-Nashiri has successfully prosecuted European states for their role in his torture and rendition. The next pre-trial hearings in his case are scheduled for September.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9650835/Military-judge-allows-information-obtained-TORTURE-used-case-terror-suspect.html

https://www.justsecurity.org/76985/how-the-biden-administration-should-take-torture-derived-evidence-off-the-table/

 

Two Yemeni prisoners held at Guantánamo since 2004 have been cleared for release by the Periodic Review Board, bringing the number of prisoners held at Guantánamo who can be transferred to 11 out of 40 prisoners. The two men are Abd al-Salam al-Hilah and Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/two-yemeni-men-held-guantanamo-approved-transfer-2021-06-18/

Three Guantánamo prisoners – Indonesian Hambali and Malaysians Mohammed Nazir bin Lep and Mohammed Farik bin Amin – who all arrived at Guantánamo in 2006 following years of detention in secret CIA torture facilities around the world will be arraigned on 30 August on charges of involvement in the Bali bombing of 2002 and a bombing in Jakarta in 2003, formally starting proceedings in the case which was reportedly postponed due to coronavirus. All are charged with “conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, terrorism, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, and destruction of property” and the two Malaysians face an additional charge of “accessory after the fact”. The case does not carry the death penalty. In spite of US detention for 18 years and at Guantánamo for 15 years, this will be the first time they are formally charged. The evidence obtained in their cases was obtained through torture in secret CIA torture facilities.

https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/indonesian/arraignment-scheduled-06282021161907.html

 

Extraordinary Rendition

The US Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by US military contractor CACI International Inc. against a 2019 judgment that ruled that the company was not immune from prosecution as a government contractor. This means that a 2008 case brought by three Iraqi men against the company for directing their torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq is closer to going ahead: “The three plaintiffs - Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and As'ad Al-Zuba'e - are Iraqi civilians who said they were detained at Abu Ghraib and eventually released without charge. CACI has called the lawsuit baseless”. The case is brought under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-rebuffs-defense-contractors-abu-ghraib-torture-appeal-2021-06-28/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/28/us-supreme-court-rejects-contractors-abu-ghraib-torture-appeal

 

LGC Activities

The LGC joined the G7 protest outside Downing Street on 12 June and the People’s Assembly protest on 26 June where we handed out leaflets and raised awareness about the continuing situation at Guantánamo Bay, where 40 prisoners remain almost 20 years on.

The LGC is also resuming its physical presence outside the US Embassy London with our regular Shut Guantánamo! protests (which we have held since 2007) on Thursday 1^st July at 12-2pm outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms (Nine Elms Lane, SW11 7US, nearest underground: Vauxhall). We are usually found away from the main road in the pedestrianised area outside the embassy and near the housing development opposite it; please walk around the embassy to find us. We can provide orange jumpsuits and banners but you are welcome to bring your own. For more details: https://www.facebook.com/events/379910286772908