One of the most remarkable webinars I’ve attended since the start of corona – and I’ve covered many of them – was last month’s online reunion of seven ex-convicts from the infamous American detention camp Guantanamo Bay. Plus one of their lawyers. Reason for me to write about Guantánamo again here. Just the idea: seven men who, according to the American authorities, are in the top division of international terror, just live on my screen.
I’ll name a few. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, you know him from the movie The Mauritania and perhaps also from his performance in De Balie last month. He was imprisoned in Guantánamo for fourteen years and now makes dance performances for the Noord-Nederlands Toneel. Omar Khadr, a Canadian who, at 15, was such a dangerous terrorist in American eyes that he had to be imprisoned for ten years before being released with the greatest Canadian effort. Moazzam Begg, the organizer of the meeting, a Pakistani Briton who was released in 2005 because the then Labor government did not accept that its citizens were detained without rights. The Johnson administration would then have stripped him of his nationality, as happened with Shamima Begum in the Syrian camp Al-Hol†
Since his release, Begg has been performing with his organization Cage action for his former inmates, and now for the closure of the entire Guantánamo, which President Obama promised in 2009 and Biden has repeated, but is not very successful. This webinar was part of Begg’s campaign. 39 of the once 780 prisoners are still incarcerated. Of them, two have been charged and found guilty (2008), ten are to be tried in the next few years, and nineteen of the remaining 27 will be allowed to leave if there is a country not too close to America that wants them. And that can take years. They have never been charged, and they have all been tortured in captivity – US authorities have confirmed this themselves. Also read: Guantanamo Bay: 20 years outside the rule of law
The men on that webinar seemed very ordinary men. They reminisced and laughed at each other’s jokes. But they also told how they were literally sold to the Americans in Afghanistan in 2001 and tortured first by the CIA in Afghanistan and later in Guantánamo. British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who has assisted most of them, said his tactic had been to “bring out as much information as possible about the real horrors” and get it published in British newspapers – the law as such should not be here. go to work.
Most are still not really free; they were not allowed to return to their country of birth and were detained in a third country or did not receive a passport. In that regard, the Saudi Arabian Mohammed al-Qahtani is lucky. He was told last week that he will be released and will be transferred to his own country next month. But Qahtani is of course not a lucky guy at all. The alleged twentieth 9/11 hijacker, who was arrested on arrival in the US at the time, is so mentally confused that he is no longer considered a threat to American security. The point is, he was schizophrenic from a young age and may not have even known about the hijacking plans. He too was horribly tortured to get a confession.
Moazzam Begg is doing his utmost to get Guantánamo empty and closed. There is no indication that Biden will cooperate.
Carolien Roelants is a Middle East expert and here she separates the facts from the hypes every week.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 14, 2022