My first weekly newsletter

Links to, and discussions of my articles and other posts over the last week - about Guantánamo, the ICC ruling against Benjamin Netanyahu, and a new song by my band The Four Fathers.

Welcome to my first weekly newsletter here on Substack, where I’ll be providing links  to my writing — largely about Guantánamo, but also about climate collapse, and, for the last 14 months, about Israel’s genocide in Gaza — as well as my campaigning for Guantánamo’s closure, and my protest music with my band The Four Fathers. 

For those of you who are new to my work, I’ve been an independent journalist for nearly 20 years, with a particular focus on the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which I began by researching and writing a book about the men held there, The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007.

Ever since, I’ve written over 2,500 articles about Guantánamo on my website, have worked for the UN and with WikiLeaks, and have campaigned relentlessly for the prison’s closure, both via my own website, and the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I established 12 years ago.

I have, however, never had a mailing list, and recently it became apparent to me that Substack might be the best way to fulfil that function, while also remaining engaged in a wider creative community, without the pitfalls that have become increasingly apparent on social media — of censorship on the one hand, and algorithmic suppression on the other.

In the last week, I’ve published two articles about Guantánamo, the first particularly dealing with the fallout from the recent election of Donald Trump, and the need for President Biden to take urgent action on Guantánamo before Trump takes office and seals it shut for four years, as he did in his first term.

The most pressing need, as I discussed in my article, Free the Guantánamo 16: A Message to President Biden as His Time Runs Out, is for him to resettle 16 of the 30 men still held who have long been approved for release — for between two and four years, and in three outlying cases for nearly 15 years.

The scandal of these men’s ongoing imprisonment is that the decisions taken to approve them for release were made by high-level administrative review processes, which have no legal weight, meaning that no mechanism exists to compel the government to actually free them if they find it inconvenient to do so. 

An additional complication is that most of them are Yemenis, and US law prevents the return of prisoners to Yemen. However, over a year ago, a plan to resettle them in Oman was finalized, but was called off after the October 7 attacks in Israel. That plan urgently needs reviving, or, if that isn’t possible, another country needs to be found that will offer these men new homes. 

Also of significance, in relation to Guantánamo, are the military commissions, in which ten of the 30 men still held are charged (three others are “forever prisoners”, still held without charge or trial, while one other is facing a life sentence in solitary confinement).

For nearly 17 years, the US government has been trying unsuccessfully to prosecute men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but, because the torture to which they were subjected in CIA “black sites” before their arrival at Guantánamo is so fundamentally at odds with the pursuit of justice, their cases have been struck in pretrial hearings for over a decade.

In my article, Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago, I examined the plea deals negotiated by prosecutors and the defense teams for three of these men, which took the death penalty off the table, in exchange for life imprisonment, and, crucially, involved confessions that would constitute some kind of closure for the 9/11 victims’ families. 

This is the only sensible solution to the intractable problems raised by the use of torture, but defense secretary Lloyd Austin disagreed, claiming that he had the power to revoke the plea deals when they were announced nearly four months ago. Now, however, the judge in the 9/11 case has overruled the defense secretary, issuing a devastating ruling in which he found that he had no right to revoke the plea deals, having handed responsibility to the Convening Authority, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan Escallier (previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), who had full authority to approve them. 

It is now to be hoped that the government doesn’t appeal, so that the plea deals can be finalized before — again — Donald Trump takes office with his wrecking ball.

On the media front, I was delighted to be interviewed last week by Kevin Gosztola, for his “Unauthorised Disclosure” podcast — a deep and detailed hour-long discussion that is included in my article, Video: The Shame of Guantánamo – My One-Hour Interview with Kevin Gosztola for Unauthorized Disclosure.

On Israel and Palestine, just as I, and countless other people, had started sinking into despair at how Israel’s ongoing genocidal aggression might be stopped, yesterday brought some wonderful news, as the long-promised ICC arrest warrants were issued for Israel’s leaders, as I immediately wrote about in my latest article, An Extraordinary Day for International Justice: ICC Issues Arrest Warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.

This is the biggest blow ever dealt to Israel by the legal mechanisms established by the international community to prevent atrocities like those that have been taking place in Gaza for the last 14 months, and it will be interesting to see how, with the particular exception of the increasingly unhinged US, which refused to sign up to the ICC, all the other western countries who are signatories negotiate the gulf between their deranged allegiance to Israel and the International legal obligations that they’ve so far idiotically ignored, but which are now returning to haunt them, and to remind them of what complicity means when it comes to humanity’s gravest crimes.

On a related front, in closing, feel free to to check out the video, recorded at a gig in London last weekend, of my band The Four Fathers playing my song ‘O Palestine’, a poignant, prayer-like call for peace in Gaza, an end to Israel's ongoing genocide, and self-determination for the Palestinian people. The gig was the launch event for our new album, ’Songs of Loss and Resistance’, which you can find on Bandcamp here.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week — or earlier if any pressing stories emerge in the meantime.