LGC Newsletter – December 2020

 LGC Newsletter – December 2020

Guantánamo Bay

Yemeni prisoner Said Salih Nashir, 46, is the only prisoner who has been cleared for release by the periodic review board throughout the Trump presidency. In the 18 years Said Salih Nashir has spent at Guantánamo, he has never been charged or tried. The decision recognised his “low level of training and lack of leadership position in Al Qaeda or the Taliban” and while his lawyer considers this progress in a long process, it is unclear if and when he will be released. Five other prisoners were cleared for release by the previous Obama administration but remain at Guantánamo. Only one prisoner has been released – to further detention in Saudi Arabia – by the Trump administration.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945565473/u-s-clears-for-release-long-time-guantanamo-inmate-never-charged-with-a-crime

While the media and NGOs have expressed optimism over the election of Joe Biden who will become US president in January 2021 and the possibility of Guantánamo closing as a result, his team has yet to make any comments on what his policy will be with respect to the extralegal detention centre which enters its 20th year on 11 January 2021.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/13/guantanamos-last-inmates-detect-a-glimmer-of-hope-after-19-years-inside

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/26/950360626/will-biden-shut-down-guantanamo-bay

At the same time, outgoing President Donald Trump has used his final month in power to issue pardons for allies and war criminals, including four security guards from private military contractor Blackwater, convicted of the deaths of 14 Iraqi civilians, including two children, in Baghdad in 2007 in a massacre, when as part of a “armoured convoy […they] opened fire indiscriminately with machine-guns, grenade launchers and a sniper on a crowd of unarmed people in a square in the Iraqi capital”. One was given a life sentence and the other three sentenced to 30 years in jail. Blackwater was created by Erik Prince, brother of former Trump education secretary and close ally, Betsy DeVos.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/23/trump-pardons-blackwater-contractors-jailed-for-massacre-of-iraq-civilians

 

Extraordinary Rendition

International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, has said she is dropping the preliminary inquiry into alleged British military war crimes in Iraq, “even though she found a reasonable basis to believe they committed atrocities”. A full investigation was never carried out and the ICC has “concluded that British authorities had examined the allegations”. The allegations include claims of murder, wilful killing, torture and rape. UK investigations have led to the majority of claims being dismissed.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/9/icc-prosecutor-drops-probe-into-alleged-uk-war-crimes-in-iraq

 

LGC Activities:

The London Guantánamo Campaign will hold a special day of protest via social media on Monday 11 January 2021 to mark the nineteenth anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre on 11 January 2002 and ahead of the inauguration of the new US president. Please check out our website for further details of how you can get involved via Facebook and Twitter.

LGC Newsletter – October 2018

Guantánamo Bay

On 12 October, the US Court of Military Commissions Review backed the former judge in the USS Cole trial, where Abd Al-Nashiri is being tried for the 2000 bombing of a US naval vessel in the Gulf of Aden, by ruling that his defence lawyers did not have the authority “to quit the case over ethics questions raised by their discovery of a secret microphone in their meeting room” after they quit the case last year. The pre-trial hearings in the case have been suspended since February and can resume, although no date has been set for that and what the three lawyers concerned plan to do is unknown. The ruling also held that the “chief defense counsel, Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, did not have the authority to let the civilian lawyers quit the case a year ago”; he was fined $1000 by the judge and “confined to his quarters for 21 days in a conviction that was subsequently overturned”.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article219918265.html

 

US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has appointed Col. Douglas K. Watkins, 56, as the new chief judge at the Guantánamo war court after Army Col. James J. Pohl, the chief judge for over the past 9 years, retired in September. A military judge with experience of terrorism cases going back to the 1980s, Watkins is already handling hearings in the case of Majid Khan, who was convicted in a secret plea deal in 2012, and is due to be sentenced in 2019. He will oversee the case of five defendants accused of involvement in the September 2001 attacks in New York.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/10/20/mattis-names-army-colonel-guantanamos-chief-war-court-judge.html

Extraordinary Rendition

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has dismissed appeals by Lithuania and Romania who were found guilty earlier this year of running secret torture facilities for the CIA – claims the two states still deny – and ordered to pay the plaintiffs, current Guantánamo prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Nashiri, respectively, €100,000 in damages.

https://www.france24.com/en/20181009-european-court-rejects-appeal-lithuania-romania-cia-prisons

The North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture, a citizen-led initiative looking at the state’s involvement in the CIA’s rendition programme over the past few years has produced an 82-page report on torture flights and North Carolina’s role in the CIA rendition and torture program http://www.nctorturereport.org/ and particularly the liability of Aero Contractors Ltd., a local private company whose aircraft were used to transport rendition victims in breach of international laws the US is party to. The report calls for the accountability and prosecution of key players.

https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article219562335.html

An American-Saudi prisoner, who was detained in Syria and later transferred to Iraq after being captured by Kurdish forces in Syria and handed over to the US military in 2017, has been released to a third country. The American Civil Liberties Union won an important court case to have his constitutional rights upheld in court after the US government “kept his detention secret, denied his requests for a lawyer, and attempted to forcibly transfer him to a dangerous war zone.” In doing so, the Trump administration made it unnecessary for the court to rule on the legality of the detention of prisoners by the US in Iraq and Syria without charge, trial or due process rights.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/detention/us-citizen-detained-without-charge-trump-administration-year

LGC Activities:

The LGC held its monthly Shut Guantánamo! demos outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms on 4 October at 12-2pm. Our next monthly demo for November is on Thursday 1 November at 12-2pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/235710460476481/ and is just days before the US mid-term election.