January, 20 2015, 10:30am EDT
ACLU Launches "Free Slahi" Campaign, Actors Read Excerpts Online
In a first, a book written by a Guantanamo prisoner was published today in the United States and several other countries.
Mauritanian citizen Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been at the detention camp since 2002, and the U.S. has never charged him with a crime. The book, "Guantanamo Diary," is a first-person account of his rendition, torture, and interrogations, as well as day-to-day life and personal relationships at Guantanamo.
NEW YORK
In a first, a book written by a Guantanamo prisoner was published today in the United States and several other countries.
Mauritanian citizen Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been at the detention camp since 2002, and the U.S. has never charged him with a crime. The book, "Guantanamo Diary," is a first-person account of his rendition, torture, and interrogations, as well as day-to-day life and personal relationships at Guantanamo.
The American Civil Liberties Union is part of the legal team representing Slahi in his legal fight to be set free. In 2010, a federal district court judge ordered him released, but the Obama administration successfully appealed. The case was sent back to the district court with instructions to use looser standards to decide whether someone can be held, and the case is awaiting further action from the court.
"Today we're glad that Mohamedou Slahi's book is being released, and we hope that soon he will be free," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project and one of Slahi's lawyers. "With grace and humanity, the book tells the gut-wrenching story of an innocent man who has been tortured and held unlawfully for over a decade. Sadly, there are many more men like Mohamedou locked up under an unjust and counterproductive regime."
To coincide with the book's publication, the ACLU has launched a "Free Slahi" campaign on Facebook and Twitter. British publisher Canongate and The Guardian created a website featuring animated passages from the book narrated by Dominic West of "The Wire" as well as audio readings from actors Colin Firth, Stephen Fry, and others.
Slahi decided to write down his experiences to assist his lawyers in representing him in the legal challenge to his detention. His writing turned into an extensive memoir because, he said, he wanted the world to know his story. The 466-page handwritten manuscript was classified, and the government only allowed it to be released after a seven-year legal battle. The book is still censored and retains the government's black redaction bars. Editor Larry Siems added footnotes tying the narrative to publicly available information about Slahi's ordeal and the Guantanamo prison.
"What do the American people think? I am eager to know," Slahi wrote. "I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see Justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people. I know there is a small extremist minority that believes that everybody in this Cuban prison is evil, and that we are treated better than we deserve. But this opinion has no basis but ignorance. I am amazed that somebody can build such an incriminating opinion about people he or she doesn't even know."
Slahi was born in Mauritania in 1970, and he won a scholarship to attend college in Germany. In the early 1990s, when al-Qaeda was part of the Afghan anti-communist resistance supported by the U.S., Slahi fought with them. He worked in Germany for several years as an engineer and returned to Mauritania in 2000. The following year, at the behest of the U.S., he was detained by Mauritanian authorities and rendered to a prison in Jordan. Later he was rendered again, first to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and finally, in August 2002, to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, where he was subjected to severe torture.
Slahi was one of two so-called "Special Projects" whose treatment then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally approved. The abuse included beatings, extreme isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual molestation, frigid rooms, shackling in stress positions, and death threats against both Slahi and his mother.
The former chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo military commissions, Col. Morris Davis, has said that he was unable to find any crime to charge Slahi with. Another military prosecutor, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, withdrew from the case after determining that the U.S. military extracted statements from Slahi by torture.
Book excerpts, video and audio content, and the full 466-page handwritten manuscript are at:
https://www.guantanamodiary.com/
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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Big Pharma Drug Patent Abuses Cost Medicare Billions: Report
"As CMS negotiates the prices Medicare will pay for top-selling drugs, it should take into account the billions we've already lost due to these patenting tactics," said one researcher.
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When the Inflation Reduction Act became law in 2022, it included a historic provision that gave the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) the ability to negotiate maximum fair prices for select drugs. This means that CMS now has an important tool to resist high prices imposed by pharmaceutical companies and lower the cost that Medicare recipients pay for their drugs. So far, Medicare has negotiated the maximum fair prices for 10 drugs, which will go into effect January 1, 2026.
But according to a report released Wednesday by the watchdog group Public Citizen, the manufacturers behind these drugs are able to rely on another method to protect their profits: patent abuses and evergreening tactics.
The report defines "evergreening tactics" as the practice of "patenting trivial and/or obvious modifications of existing medications to lengthen exclusivity on branded medicines."
The makers of the drugs Eliquis, Imbruvica, Jardiance, Farxiga, and Entresto, for example, obtained patents on what constitute trivial or minor changes to earlier patent claims, "such as crystalline forms of drug compounds which would be discovered and managed during routine testing that is part of the drug approval process," according to Public Citizen. These new patents allow the manufacturers to extend their monopoly on these drugs.
"Big Pharma patent abuse is cheating Medicare enrollees of more affordable drugs and costing taxpayers billions," said Public Citizen Access to Medicines program researcher Jishian Ravinthiran in a statement.
"Patent abuses enable Big Pharma companies to unfairly extend their monopolies and keep prices artificially high. As CMS negotiates the prices Medicare will pay for top-selling drugs, it should take into account the billions we've already lost due to these patenting tactics," he added.
The report makes this same point, arguing that the agency's initial offers on pharmaceuticals should take into account how long-monopoly drugs have been able to obtain longtime exclusivities on medicines by manipulating patents.
This is paramount, Public Citizen argues, given the scope of lost savings. The group estimates that Medicare will lose somewhere between $4.9 and $5.4 billion in savings that should have accrued to taxpayers if four out of the 10 drugs did not take advantage of patenting tactics, and therefore would have faced greater competition prior to negotiation.
"These lost savings are nearly as much as what Medicare is expected to save if negotiated prices go into effect on all of the selected drugs in the first year of the program ($6 billion)," according to the report.
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Referencing analysis done in a separate report, Public Citizen estimated "that biosimilars could have entered the market after August 2019 were it not for Amgen's unwarranted patent exclusivities, and we calculated Medicare would have spent $1,891,500,836 less on a net basis had enrollees been able to use lower-cost alternatives by the time negotiated prices go into effect on January 1, 2026."
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Accepting the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the grassroots Japanese anti-nuclear group he co-chairs, Terumi Tanaka warned on Tuesday night that the world is moving in the opposite direction than the one hibakusha—survivors of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—have demanded for nearly seven decades.
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The group accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, with the Nobel Committee honoring Nihon Hidankyo "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons."
The organization aims to maintain a taboo around the use of nuclear weapons, which have only been used in combat by the U.S. in Japan in 1945.
Tanaka warned that there are currently 12,000 nuclear warheads in the arsenals of the U.S., Russia, China, and six other countries, and 4,000 of those "could be launched immediately."
"This means that the damage that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be multiplied by hundreds or even thousands," said Tanaka, who is 92. "Let us all strive together to ensure that humanity is not destroyed by nuclear weapons, and to create a human society where there are no nuclear weapons and no war."
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Tanaka said that "the nuclear taboo threatens to be broken," as evidenced by Israeli Heritage Minister Amihay Eliyahu's recent comment that a nuclear attack on Gaza would be "one way" to defeat Hamas.
"I am infinitely saddened and angered" by such statements, said Tanaka.
He described his experience as a 13-year-old when the U.S. bombed Nagasaki, just a couple of miles away from his family's house, which was crushed by the impact.
He said he later found the charred body of one of his aunts and saw his grandfather close to death from the burns that covered his body.
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"It was their courage that enabled the [Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons] to be adopted, which represents the first progress on nuclear disarmament in decades," said Melissa Parke, executive director of ICAN, referring to the treaty that's been ratified by 73 countries.
"Listening to Mr. Tanaka describe the horrendous effects on his family and city when the Americans dropped their atomic bomb should convince world leaders they have to go beyond simply congratulating the hibakusha of Nihon Hidankyo for this award. They must honor them by doing what the hibakusha have long called for—urgently getting rid of nuclear weapons," said Parke. "That is the only way to ensure that what Mr. Tanaka and the other hibakusha have been through never happens to anyone ever again. As long as any nuclear weapons remain anywhere, they are bound one day to be used, whether by design or accident."
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"She is on a shamelessness tour," journalist Jeremy Scahill said of American diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
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The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is facing backlash after delivering a speech earlier this week touting the universal "right to food" as the Israeli military—armed to the teeth with American weaponry—fuels widespread and increasingly deadly hunger in the Gaza Strip.
In remarks Monday at a gathering of U.N. and civil society leaders focused on global food insecurity, Thomas-Greenfield called hunger, starvation, and famine "man-made tragedies" that "can be stopped by us."
"Let me be clear: Every human being, everywhere, has the right to food," she continued. "For the United States, this is a moral issue. And it's an economic and national security issue."
Thomas-Greenfield's speech sparked derision given the Biden administration's continued military support for an Israeli government that has been accused of wielding starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, where—according to the latest U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization assessment—food aid has reached an all-time low under Israel's suffocating blockade.
"Hunger is a man-made tragedy that you helped make in Gaza."
Oxfam and other human rights groups have said that by arming the Israeli military as it obstructs humanitarian aid, the Biden administration is complicit in the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and Israel's repeated attacks on aid workers attempting to feed the enclave's hungry.
"She is on a shamelessness tour in her final weeks as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.," journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote Wednesday in response to Thomas-Greenfield's speech. "She presided over numerous cease-fire vetoes as part of an administration that facilitated Israel's starvation policy against the Palestinians of Gaza. Listen to her remarks on 'hunger' in that context."
Yesterday, @USUN brought together humanitarian leaders to discuss solutions to the global food insecurity crisis.
Hunger is a man-made tragedy. But if it caused by man, that means it can be stopped by us, too.
Every human being, everywhere, has the right to food. pic.twitter.com/zczlerRHEc
— Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield (@USAmbUN) December 10, 2024
Middle East scholar and analyst Assal Rad, wrote that Thomas-Greenfield's vetoes at the U.N. "have helped Israel continue its genocide and deliberately starving people."
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Despite Thomas-Greenfield's insistence that addressing global food insecurity has long been a priority for the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation, the U.S. and Israel were the only two countries to vote against a U.N. committee draft on the right to food in 2021.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration welcomed to the White House former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who—along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—is facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare," among other crimes.
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