"Many observers had hoped that the handful of transfers in the beginning of 2023 were a sign of, and momentum toward, significantly more to come. Over the summer and into the fall, it looked that way. Until it didn't..."

Policy analysts Yumna Rizvi and Scott Roehm at the Center for Victims of Torture suggest that reason is political, https://www.justsecurity.org/91153/another-lost-year-on-guantanamo/: "If so, and absent some other compelling justification -- the need to focus on the situation in the Middle East would not be a compelling one, given it is unrelated to Guantanamo transfers and there will always be a crisis to manage -- the administration's decision [to allow prisoners to languish at Guantanamo] is as misguided as it is disheartening."

Meanwhile, conditions of confinement continue to deteriorate. 

The Biden administration tried to minimize the impact of a special 2023 UN report that "cumulative effects of certain structural deficiencies at Guantanamo amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law," disagreeing with those findings at a fifth periodic review of U.S. compliance

"Guantanamo continues to cause profound damage both inside and outside of its walls," charge Rizvi and Roehm. "The steps to close Guantanamo are there for the taking, and 2024 could be its last chance to take them."

 

Guantanamo 22 Years In

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How Should 'Rules Of War' Be Applied To The Israel-Hamas Conflict?

"Western strategists were not always so sensitive to civilian casualties," quips Federalist author.

8000 days and counting

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CLOSE GUANTANAMO NOW! 

Curt Wechsler of The World Can't Wait and Gavrilah Wells of Amnesty International
outside the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, as part of
the monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that have been
happening all year.
Photo: Phil Pasquini, Staff photographer, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied: Close Guantanamo NOW!

for multiple counts of attorney ethics violations, including attempt to overturn 2020 election results.

and remarkably similar, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ofer-israel-guantanamo-military-justice/?fbclid=IwAR0gWpsIua1PuMYgGkccwRjzs_narMBODv6C3SYs07BeFWO8_dgWlTGnO1 (you may have to copy and paste this link for free access)

Before the invention of the military commissions, the US government tried to change the definitions of torture to make it fit the law. In her book The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture, Lisa Hajjar explains how the Bush administration looked to Israel to help it generate legal rationales for torture. Israel, Hajjar points out, was "the first government to publicly claim the right to use violent interrogation techniques as a legitimate prerogative to protect national security."

Human rights defenders in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are subjected to acts of harassment, restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatisation, abductions, long periods of arbitrary detention usually under administrative detention orders, illegal searches of their homes and offices and killings, (copy and paste https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/profile/shatha-odeh-abu-fannouneh

Tomorrow, October 10th marks the World Day Against the Death Penalty. 

Muslim Counterpublics Labs logo of a red crescent with prayer beads wrapped around it and a black star

Join us online,
Tuesday October 10,
9 AM Pacific Time
RSVP Here

With no signs of the prison industrial complex abating in the US how can we tread the path towards abolishing not just the death penalty, but the carceral system altogether?

How can we imagine a country and a world that is committed to building healthy, safe, and stable communities that thrive, instead of systems that default to punishment and vengeance?

This panel will feature firsthand perspectives and an inside look on what it means to abolish the carceral state from those directly impacted by this system.

*Please note that ASL and CART Captioning will be provided.

Panelists:

Lyle May, an abolitionist journalist who is incarcerated on death row in North Carolina
Adama Bah, who was detained on suspicion of terrorism as a teenager
Mansoor Adayfi, a writer and advocate who spent more than a decade behind bars at the US' infamous Guantanamo Bay prison
Luke "Lucky" Harper, a Codefendant in Stop Cop City RICO indictment

Moderators:

Nawal Rajeh, an Advisory Board member of Muslim Counterpublics Lab
Khury Petersen-Smith, the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

This event is brought to you by Muslim Counterpublics Lab and co-sponsored by Witness Against Torture, Defending Rights and Dissent, and Aging People in Prison. Registration is free, but required.

In solidarity,

Dr. Maha Hilal
Founder and Executive Director

In 2005, Fernando Botero produced a series of graphic paintings based on photographs of prisoners abused at the American jail in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. He curiously bequeathed the lot to UC Berkely's law school, which harbors the author of torture techniques depicted in those paintings -- several of which have been displayed (may still be; I haven't visited in years) outside the office of Boalt's dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who continues to defend the employment of war criminal John Yoo.

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"They depict his nightmarish vision of the torture at Abu Ghraib," wrote one of his most vocal critics. "Many find this juxtaposition of proudly displaying the Abu Ghraib paintings, at the school which allows the lawyer whose work product enabled this grotesque, violent mistreatment and murder under official U.S. authority, just too bizarre for words. But we did end our visit to the dean, with a solemn presentation by Janet Weil (Code Pink) of a poem written by a Guantanamo prisoner, Mohammed el Gharani."

"These works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,"  explained Botero.

"When we think about the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us visualize his roly-poly people flaunting their fat, their fashionable headgear, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess," wrote novelist and critic Erica Jong. "I never thought of these as political images until I saw Botero's Abu Ghraib series." Now, she added, "I see all Botero's work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots."  

'WHAT PRISON?'

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Censorship Has Never Been Worse at Guantánamo Bay

"What they try to do is ensure that what is going on here does not impact the contemporary conscience of the American public," said former Naval Criminal Investigative Service counterterrorism special agent Mark Fallon. "Because if it does, there may be greater calls for accountability against those that tortured in our name. And the longer that you can keep that from occurring, the safer, not just [for] the torturers but [for] the torture advocates, the torture lobby. Those who believe that torture should be used as an instrument of national policy are in jeopardy. Their legacies are in jeopardy."

 

A large hole is seen in the side of a warship, as a smaller boat passes by with sailors aboard.

The military judge in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case on Friday threw out confessions the Saudi defendant Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri had made to federal agents at Guantánamo Bay after years of secret imprisonment by the C.I.A., declaring the statements the product of torture, reports Carol Rosenberg.

"Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs," wrote judge Col. Lanny Aco. "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."

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ON THE LAW OF TORTURE...

The President's Executioner

Detention and torture in Guantanamo





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