LGC Newsletter – August 2020

 Guantánamo Bay

A federal judge disallowed a US government appeal to extend the delay in seeking an independent medical review for Saudi prisoner Mohammed Al-Qahtani due to his delicate health situation, stating that the “risk of delay to the prisoner “far outweighs” any potential harm to the government from dispatching a team of doctors to evaluate him.”

Al-Qahtani, who suffers from schizophrenia, was tortured in secret CIA detention before arriving at Guantanamo and thus the US government is unlikely to want to have him meet independent doctors who can verify parts of his ordeal and order his release. His lawyers are seeking “a Mixed Medical Commission, consisting of one doctor chosen by the government and two others from neutral third countries, to confirm the health condition of the prisoner. and eventually secure his release to Saudi Arabia for treatment.” Saudi Arabia has agreed to have him return. He remains a "forever prisoner" at Guantánamo.

https://apnews.com/502cee9c4bf01073d3ca7276aeb89bbf

More scheduled pre-trial hearings and prisoner reviews set for October and November this year have been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

 

The CIA has unredacted parts of a memoir by a former high-profile counterterrorism official about the CIA’s torture program following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. According to The New York Times, the intelligence agency has relented almost 10 years after blocking the release of much of the sensitive information in former FBI official Ali Soufan’s 2011 book The Black Banners: How Torture Derailed the War on Terror After 9/11. The book’s publisher, W.W. Norton, plans to next month print the original uncensored version, which paints a raw and highly skeptical first-person picture of the CIA’s torture program. According to the Times, the newly declassified bits include detailed information about the agency’s brutal interrogation techniques of now infamous detainees including Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cia-uncensors-fbi-official-ali-soufans-brutal-first-person-account-of-terrorist-torture

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/us/politics/ali-soufan-memoir-cia-torture.html

 

LGC Activities:

With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the London Guantánamo Campaign’s monthly Shut Guantánamo! demonstration will be held virtually at 12-2pm on Thursday 3 September. To take part, please email a photo/video of your banner to us at london.gtmo@gmail.com before 12pm on 3 September or share your picture/video to our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/London-Guantánamo-Campaign-114010671973111/ or via Twitter (or just a message – some possible messages available through the link below) @shutguantanamo between 12 and 2pm on Thursday 3 September. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/792008441567984/

London Guantánamo Campaign

london.gtmo@gmail.com

http://londonGuantánamo campaign.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/London-Guantánamo-Campaign-114010671973111/  

http://twitter.com/shutGuantánamo  

 

LGC Newsletter – July 2020

Guantánamo Bay:

With pre-trial hearings cancelled and travel restrictions in place due to the Covid-19 pandemic, family members of people who died in the attacks in New York City in 2001 are concerned that this will set the trial of the five defendants, held at Guantánamo, back even further. The previous judge had set a trial date of January 2021 in the case but that appears increasingly unlikely with weeks of pre-trial hearings cancelled. In addition to cancelled hearings, family members of victims of the 2001 attacks have been told they cannot travel to the proceedings until the pandemic ends. No new judge has been appointed to replace former judge Colonel Shane Cohen, who announced his retirement on 17 March. The pandemic has also “disrupted the assignments and training of American military judges across the globe”. The case is in its eighth year of pre-trial hearings and the pandemic is the latest in a string of delays. In addition, there is an information blackout at Guantánamo “on how many people have contracted the virus since the military disclosed the first two cases in the spring”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/coronavirus-guantanamo-911-victims.html

Earlier plans for hearings to resume were considered unworkable and cumbersome and would have involved over a hundred people, including lawyers, witnesses, journalists and family members coming to the base and having to quarantine for two weeks before proceedings start, taking into consideration that there are limited accommodation and medical facilities at the base.

A new plan being considered by military prosecutors would “airlift about 100 people from across the United States to Guantánamo on Sept. 5 — everyone bound for the courtroom, except the defendants — and then isolate them for two weeks at the makeshift site called Camp Justice. Then the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would be brought from the prison to the courtroom to begin six weeks of hearings in the case, from Sept. 21 to Nov. 3, the height of hurricane season.” The plan would then consolidate the cancelled hearings. However, it is unclear “how, during their two weeks of quarantine, the legal teams would prepare for pretrial hearings in the death-penalty case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men on charges they conspired in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Even in the best of times it is not easy to hold war court hearings at Guantánamo Bay. The coronavirus crisis has magnified the challenge”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/us/politics/guantanamo-bay-coronavirus.html

The last hearing to take place at Guantánamo was a sentencing hearing for Majid Khan, convicted of war crimes through a secret plea bargain in 2012. On 13 July, the military commission judge granted him one year of credit toward his sentence, which is yet to be given. Khan was granted the credit “as a sanction against the government for its discovery abuses in Khan’s suit seeking recusal of retired Adm. Christian Reismeier, who is serving as the convening authority. In response to Khan’s attorneys’s request for documentation concerning Reismeier’s application to serve as convening authority, Judge Watkins found that the government omitted information about Reismeier’s service in three government offices”.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/military-commission-judge-grants-one-year-sentencing-credit-majid-khan-case

Extraordinary rendition:

In a historic decision released on July 8, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights determined that four survivors of the U.S. secret detention and torture program have the right to present their case before the regional tribunal. Binyam Mohamed, Abou Elkassim Britel, Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, and Bisher al-Rawi are victims of the U.S. extraordinary rendition program — the post-9/11 coordinated global enterprise of kidnapping, bounty payments, incommunicado detention, and torture. Their landmark complaint was lodged with the Inter-American Commission in 2011 after a federal case they filed was thrown out on the basis that allowing the case to proceed would have revealed “state secrets.”

In ordering the case to move forward, the Inter-American Commission found that “insurmountable obstacles within the U.S. legal system” prevent victims of U.S. counterterrorism operations from obtaining remedies before U.S. courts. The four individuals are jointly represented by the NYU Global Justice Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Unlike U.S. courts, the Commission found that victims of U.S. extraordinary rendition and torture can have their claims heard,” said Steven Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Human Rights Program. “Our clients’ decades-long pursuit of justice has finally paid off.”

Mohamed, Britel, Bashmilah, and al-Rawi filed their joint petition before the Inter-American Commission after U.S. federal courts dismissed their lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that provided flight support services to the CIA as part of the extraordinary rendition program. During rendition flights, victims were often stripped naked, sexually assaulted, diapered, chained, and strapped down to the floor of an airplane as part of a brutal procedure known as “capture shock” treatment. The U.S. government intervened in the lawsuit to invoke the state secrets privilege, leading to the lawsuit’s dismissal.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/survivors-us-torture-and-rendition-be-heard-international-tribunal

LGC Activities:

With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the London Guantánamo Campaign’s monthly Shut Guantánamo! demonstration will be held virtually at 12-2pm on Thursday 6 August. To take part, please email a photo/video of your banner to us at london.gtmo@gmail.com before 12pm on 6 August or share your picture/video to our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/London-Guantánamo-Campaign-114010671973111/ or via Twitter (or just a message – some possible messages available through the link below) @shutguantanamo between 12 and 2pm on Thursday 6 August. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/316968509344933/  

LGC Newsletter – June 2020

Guantánamo Bay

On 4 June, a military judge ruled that Guantánamo military judges can reduce the prison sentence to be given to Majid Khan, who pleaded guilty in 2012 “to delivering $50,000 of Qaeda money that helped finance the 2003 bombing of a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed 11 people, and plotting other, unrealized terrorist attacks.” His sentencing has been delayed since then as in his plea bargain he agreed to act as witness against prisoners to get a more lenient sentence. Under his “plea agreement, his sentence is to end in 2031. But the judge could shorten that if he decides Mr. Khan should get credit for having been tortured.” The evidence against Majid Khan, 40, was obtained through severe torture he was subject to during three years of CIA detention at various sites around the world, following his kidnapping in 2003 in Pakistan: “During his time in the C.I.A. black sites, Mr. Khan says, he was hung from his wrists and kept naked and hooded to the point of wild hallucinations. He was held in darkness for a year, isolated in a cell with bugs that bit him until he bled. A Senate investigation disclosed that in his second year of C.I.A. detention, the agency “infused” a purée of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus into his rectum because he went on a hunger strike.”

No date has been set for sentencing, even though Majid Khan has given his witness statements. This ruling may have an effect on other cases where defendants have been tortured at CIA black sites, such as the five men awaiting trial for their alleged involvement in attacks in New York City in September 2001.

“The chief defense counsel, Brig. Gen. John G. Baker of the Marines, cast it as a watershed decision. “It is about time that we see a means to hold the government accountable for the reprehensible torture of Mr. Khan and other commissions defendants in a court a law.” he said. “While it may seem obvious that being tortured by government actors should have some effect on a defendant’s ultimate sentence, the prosecution has disagreed every step of the way.””

https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/torture-can-be-considered-sentencing-guantanamo-prisoners-judge-rules

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871126166/guantanamo-judge-rules-tortured-prisoner-could-get-reduced-sentence

Uzair Paracha, who was convicted in a federal court in relation to this case in 2005, for supporting terrorism, was exonerated and released earlier in 2020.

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=5706

Extraordinary rendition:

A judicial review into the decision by former Prime Minister Theresa May’s government not to hold a judge-led inquiry “into the involvement of British intelligence in torture and rendition following 9/11” brought by two MPs and an NGO found that 15 more potential cases of “torture or rendition involving British intelligence at the height of the “war on terror” were examined last year in a secret Whitehall review”. The files emerged in “a witness statement made by an MI6 officer known only as AA as part of disclosure proceedings” and “might require further investigation.” The hearing held on 9 June was to decide whether the judicial review should be heard in secret: “The government argues that because the charity and the two MPs are not victims, there is no need for them to hear the detail of the case in open court” but no judgment has yet been made on this matter, with the applicants seeking open justice.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/whitehall-held-secret-review-15-possible-cases-torture-or-rendition

On 11 June, Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions and visa restrictions on International Criminal Court (ICC) officials carrying out an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, including those committed by the USA (CIA torture and rendition and others), after the ICC appeals chamber authorised the investigation in March. The order extends to their family members too. In announcing the order, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the ICC a “kangaroo court”, with Pompeo making it very clear that impunity for human rights violations and war crimes by its agents is US state policy. The ICC has condemned the sanctions, calling them "unacceptable attempt to interfere with the rule of law".

https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2020/06/trump-sanction-icc-officials-investigating-alleged-us-war-crimes-afghanistan/166084/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53012783

LGC Activities:

With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the London Guantánamo Campaign’s monthly Shut Guantánamo! demonstration will be held virtually at 12-2pm on Thursday 2 July. To take part, please email a photo/video of your banner to us at london.gtmo@gmail.com before 12pm on 2 July or share your picture/video to our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/London-Guantánamo-Campaign-114010671973111/ or via Twitter (or just a message – some possible messages available through the link below) @shutguantanamo between 12 and 2pm on Thursday 2 July. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/949045892185085/