SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
January, 19 2017, 10:00am EDT
Contact:
Reprieve's London office can be contacted on: communications [at] reprieve.org.uk / +44 (0) 207 553 8140.,Reprieve US,, based in New York City, can be contacted on Katherine [dot] oshea [at] reprieve.org
Cleared Guantanamo Prisoner Files Last-Ditch Lawsuit Seeking Immediate Release
A cleared Moroccan who should have been released months ago has begged a federal judge to cut through the red tape keeping him stranded in Guantanamo Bay.
Abdul Latif Nasser, 51, was unanimously cleared by the Periodic Review Board for transfer home to Morocco on July 11, but remains imprisoned because the government's transfer process has been too slow. He now faces indefinite detention at the mercy of the Trump Administration.
A cleared Moroccan who should have been released months ago has begged a federal judge to cut through the red tape keeping him stranded in Guantanamo Bay.
Abdul Latif Nasser, 51, was unanimously cleared by the Periodic Review Board for transfer home to Morocco on July 11, but remains imprisoned because the government's transfer process has been too slow. He now faces indefinite detention at the mercy of the Trump Administration.
According to court documents filed this week, the Moroccan government's final agreement to repatriate Abdul Latif arrived on December 28, 2016, which was too late for President Obama to give the 30-days notice required by the US Congress. There is no evidence that the Obama Administration did anything to hurry the agreement along.
Last Friday, Abdul Latif filed an emergency request asking US federal court to either order his habeas writ granted, or an exception to the 30-day Congressional notice requirement met. Either would allow Abdul Latif to return home before President-elect Trump takes office.
Sold for a bounty to the US military in 2002, Abdul Latif is famous across the Guantanamo military base for drafting his own 2,000-word English-to-Arabic dictionary by hand. His Reprieve attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis describes him as "introspective, intelligent, and kind-hearted". Abdul Latif plans to live in his family home in Casablanca, where his brother has offered him employment at his successful water treatment company.
Morocco has already accepted 13 former Guantanamo detainees, and Abdul Latif would be supported by Reprieve's Life After Guantanamo program, which assists ex-prisoners after release to ensure their successful reintegration.
Reprieve attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis said: "Leaving Abdul Latif to languish at Guantanamo under Trump is as pointless as it is cruel. He has been cleared for release for over six months, and everyone involved in his case - including both governments - wants him to go home. We are begging the court to allow common sense and natural justice to prevail."
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
LATEST NEWS
Denmark Taking Greenland Threats 'Seriously' as Trump Eyes More Military Interventions
"If the United States attacks another NATO country, everything stops," said Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
Jan 05, 2026
With the Trump administration signaling that its kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro could be followed by more military actions in countries President Donald Trump has threatened in the past, the prime minister of Denmark on Monday said his continued threats, however outlandish, were being taken seriously by her government.
"Unfortunately, I think the American president should be taken seriously when he says he wants Greenland," Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told Danish public broadcaster DR.
Frederiksen emphasized that Denmark and Greenland, which is autonomous but part of the Danish kingdom, are also resolute in their repeatedly stated opposition to Trump's goal of taking over the mineral-rich Arctic island nation, and their commitment to fighting back against any military action by the US.
"I have made it very clear where the kingdom of Denmark stands, and Greenland has repeatedly said that it does not want to be part of the United States," she added. "If the United States attacks another [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] country, everything stops."
On Sunday, Trump repeated that "we need Greenland from the standpoint of national security," drawing rebukes both from Frederiksen and the prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, who called Trump's rhetoric about the country "completely unacceptable."
"Our country is not an object in the rhetoric of a superpower," said Nielsen in a social media post. "We are a people. A country. A democracy. That must be respected. Especially by close and loyal friends."
"Threats, pressure, and talk of annexation have no place between friends," he added. "This is not how you talk to a people who have repeatedly demonstrated responsibility, stability, and loyalty. Enough is enough. No more pressure. No more insinuations. No more fantasies about annexation."
Frederiksen and Nielsen's comments followed remarks from Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio about potential US interventions in a number of countries that the administration has previously threatened.
"Enough is enough. No more pressure. No more insinuations. No more fantasies about annexation."
Rubio told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that Cuba is "in a lot of trouble."
While declining to detail the White House's plans for the country, where the Cuban-American secretary of state has long advocated for regime change, Rubio said Cuba had been "propping up" Maduro before Saturday's military operation in which the US bombed Venezuela and arrested the president and his wife.
“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned," said Rubio.
The secretary of state echoed comments from Trump, who said soon after Maduro's capture that "Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about."
"It’s very similar [to Venezuela] in the sense that we want to help the people in Cuba, but we want to also help the people that were forced out of Cuba and are living in this country," said Trump.
The president also expanded his threats in Latin America to Mexico and Colombia, whose leaders he accused of allowing the drug trade to flourish in their countries.
Trump accused Colombian President Gustavo Petro of having "cocaine mills."
"He’s making cocaine. They’re sending it into the United States. So he does have to watch his ass," Trump said, adding that a US military operation against Colombia "sounds good to me."
The Trump administration's claims that it aims to protect the US from drug trafficking have been central to its rapid escalation in Venezuela in recent months. While accusing Maduro, Petro, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum of allowing drugs to flow into the US, the president pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted to ensuring more than 400 tons of cocaine were sent to the US.
Petro responded Monday with a warning to Trump, should he carry out an operation like the kidnapping of Maduro.
“If you detain a president whom much of my people want and respect, you will unleash the people’s jaguar," said Petro.
In Denmark, the government was reportedly treating Trump's latest comments about the strategically located Greenland with urgency, with one official at the political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group writing in a LinkedIn post that "the Danish government is in full crisis mode."
"A possible US intervention in Greenland is now the biggest source of risk to the transatlantic alliance and intra-NATO and intra-EU cohesion, arguably far greater than those presented by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine," said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group.
Other European leaders signaled their intention to come to the defense of Greenland and Denmark should Trump take military action against the Arctic island.
European Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper said regarding Trump's latest comments that the European Union "will continue to uphold the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the inviolability of borders and the [United Nations] Charter.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer also expressed support for Frederiksen's demand that Trump "stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people who have said very clearly that they are not for sale."
"I stand with her, and she’s right about the future of Greenland," Starmer told the Guardian on Monday. "Greenland and the kingdom of Denmark are to decide the future of Greenland, and only Greenland and the kingdom of Denmark."
But European leaders have been far more muted in their comments about the US military intervention that is already underway in a sovereign nation: Venezuela.
A spokesperson for 10 Downing Street suggested the UK would abstain in the UN Security Council vote on a resolution condemning the Venezuela attack, and declined to denounce Trump's threats against Cuba and Colombia.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that "the legal assessment of the US intervention is complex," while EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas called for "restraint" but noted that "the EU has repeatedly stated that Maduro lacks legitimacy."
The EU Green Party called on leaders in the bloc to "defend international law consistently."
French entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand added that "when EU leaders legitimize what Trump did in Venezuela, they're preemptively justifying him taking over Greenland, as he keeps saying he will."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Critics See Echoes of Iraq as Corporate Media Carries Water for Unlawful Act of War Against Venezuela
“None of these acts of brazen aggression, violence, and violations of international law have, in any sustained or meaningful way, been referred to as acts of war, a coup, or invasion in US mainstream media reporting."
Jan 05, 2026
By the time the Trump administration began its operation this weekend to illegally kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before taking control of the country and its oil reserves, two of the United States’ most storied media outlets were well aware that the attack was about to happen.
According to a Saturday report from Semafor, “the New York Times and Washington Post learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night—but held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering US troops, two people familiar with the communications between the administration and the news organizations said.”
Semafor wrote that the decision "to maintain official secrecy is in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions." But critics say it's part of a different tradition: One in which corporate media outlets act as dutiful stenographers for the US military establishment to help legitimize lawless, imperialist military adventures.
Prior to this weekend, the leading example of this deference was seen during the lead-up to then-President George W. Bush's war in Iraq, where legacy media outlets had been criticized for parroting the government's claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be false.
In 2023, the 20-year anniversary of the invasion, which led to the deaths of an estimated half a million people, Adam Johnson wrote for the Real News Network that many of the journalists who pushed the lies that led to war—including the Atlantic's now-editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, the marquee MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) morning host Joe Scarborough, and New York nagazine and Atlantic contributor Jonathan Chait—never suffered career consequences for helping to midwife a historic foreign policy crime, and have since seen their careers blossom.
Johnson wrote in the Intercept on Sunday that the Western media's reaction to yet another regime change war in Venezuela has been similarly uncritical of the Trump administration's justifications, even as it states, overtly this time, that its primary aim is to commandeer another country's natural resources:
The administration invaded Venezuela’s sovereign territory, bombing several buildings, killing... its citizens, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their bed, and announcing they will, henceforth, "run" the country.
And yet none of these acts of brazen aggression, violence, and violations of international law have, in any sustained or meaningful way, been referred to as acts of war, a coup, or invasion in US mainstream media reporting.
He added that the media has spent months adopting a "pseudo-legal framing" of President Donald Trump's threats against Venezuela and his seizure of its oil tankers.
In particular, he noted that both the Times and CNN had referred to “international sanctions” against Venezuela, which are actually just US sanctions. The Times also cited a Navy lawyer who claimed that by stopping Venezuela from trading its oil by seizing its vessels, the US was enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a convention that the US itself has not signed.
"It needed to feel vaguely rules-based and international-y, so unilateral US dictates were passed off as ersatz international law," Johnson wrote.
As numerous legal scholars have pointed out, Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter plainly states that "all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations," making Trump's actions against Venezuela a blatant violation of the nation's sovereignty.
However, since Trump's invasion of Venezuela on Saturday, many media outlets have continued to adopt the dubious framing that US law, which has remained the Trump administration's sole justification for its kidnapping of Maduro—whom the Department of Justice indicted for alleged drug trafficking—somehow applies across borders and entitles the US to take over the country.
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC and a frequent critic of US media coverage of foreign interventions, noted on social media that many outlets—including the Times, as well as Reuters, CNN, and the Associated Press—ran headlines framing the legality of Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro and subsequent assertion of authority to “run” the country as open questions.
"This framing is meant to cast doubt on the most basic principles of international law and sovereignty," Rad said.
Other outlets have simply denied that Trump's actions constituted acts of war at all. CBS News said the US had simply "ratcheted up" its "campaign" against Maduro. The Wall Street Journal used similar euphemistic language, describing it as a “pressure campaign” rather than a war. And others, including CNN, described the attack as a limited law enforcement "operation," rather than the opening salvo of what the White House itself has suggested may be a years-long project of ruling Venezuela for the purpose of converting it into a client state.
While the New York Times editorial board has since criticized Trump's action in Venezuela as "illegal and unwise," the Washington Post's editorial board—which was given a directive by its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earlier this year to use its pages to promote "free markets," issued unconditional support for Trump's attack and plans to govern Venezuela on Saturday, calling it a "triumph" and a "a major victory for American interests."
Other outlets have given explicit directives to use whitewashed language to refer to the US's unilateral snatching of Maduro.
Owen Jones, an independent British journalist and columnist, reported that the BBC had directed reporters not to refer to Maduro—who was whisked away in the dead of night by US soldiers along with his wife and shown bound and blindfolded by the US government—as having been “kidnapped” by the US, but rather “seized” or “captured.”
According to Johnson, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who has previously spiked stories damaging to the Trump administration at the behest of the network's new owners, directed the network's newly installed "Evening News" anchor to always refer to Maduro as a "dictator," echoing the government's line.
Johnson pointed out that the owner of CBS, Trump-aligned billionaire David Ellison, “recently partnered with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates” as part of his bid to take over CBS parent company Paramount, “so rest assured these dictatorships will not be getting the label.”
The New York Times has since updated the death toll from Trump's bombing of Caracas and other sites in Venezuela to at least 80 civilians and military personnel.
Sarah Lazare, an investigative reporter for Workday magazine, questioned why the Times and Post were concerned with the safety of US personnel, but "the danger posed to the Venezuelans killed in the bombing did not enter into the equation" when they decided to keep the story from public view until after the damage was done.
"This kind of fealty to perceived US interests is so ordinary because it's rewarded—it's the surest way to rise as a foreign policy reporter," Lazare added. "Makes me think of all the Iraq War cheerleaders who failed upward, now helm major news outlets, and narrate the events unfolding today. Being wrong about WMDs, being on the wrong side of history, did not hurt them professionally, and probably helped."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Despicable Act of Political Retribution': Pentagon to Cut Kelly's Retirement Pay Over Illegal Orders Video
"I will fight this with everything I've got," Sen. Mark Kelly said, slamming Pete Hegseth as "the most unqualified secretary of defense in our country's history."
Jan 05, 2026
On the heels of the Trump administration abducting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday announced a move to reduce Sen. Mark Kelly's retirement pay over a video in which the Arizona Democrat reminded service members of their duty not to obey illegal orders.
The retired Navy captain is the only veteran in the November video still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice—which, as he and the other former military and intelligence community members highlighted, does require active-duty troops to refuse to follow illegal orders.
President Donald Trump swiftly lashed out over the video—released as his administration continued bombing alleged drug smuggling boats and ramped up threats against Venezuela—by accusing the six Democrats of "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" Hegseth launched a probe into Kelly and threatened to call him back to active duty to face a court-martial.
Describing the fact-based recording as "a reckless and seditious video that was clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline," Hegseth said on social media Monday that Department of Defense is attempting to reduce Kelly's retirement pay and "has also issued a formal letter of censure."
"These actions are based on Captain Kelly's public statements from June through December 2025 in which he characterized lawful military operations as illegal and counseled members of the Armed Forces to refuse lawful orders," Hegseth added, noting that the senator has 30 days to appeal the decision and the case should be finalized within 45 days.
According to Politico: "Kelly receives about $6,000 a month in military retirement pay, based on his 25 years of military service and his rank as a Navy Captain. A reduction in rank, from O-6 to O-5, could cost him about $1,000 a month in payouts."
Kelly—also a former astronaut—responded with a lengthy statement on social media Monday:
Over 25 years in the US Navy, 39 combat missions, and four missions to space, I risked my life for this country and to defend our Constitution–including the First Amendment rights of every American to speak out. I never expected that the president of the United States and the secretary of defense would attack me for doing exactly that.
My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife Gabby recovered from a gunshot wound to the head—all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder. Generations of service members have made these same patriotic sacrifices for this country, earning the respect, appreciation, and rank they deserve.
Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired service member that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn't like, they will come after them the same way. It's outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that.
If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified secretary of defense in our country's history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn't get it. I will fight this with everything I've got—not for myself, but to send a message back that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump don't get to decide what Americans in this country get to say about their government.
Others also jumped to his defense, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said: "Mark Kelly is a hero and a patriot committed to serving the American people. Pete Hegseth is a lap dog committed to serving one man—Donald Trump. This is a despicable act of political retribution. I stand with Sen. Kelly, who will always do the right thing no matter the consequences."
Kelly and the other video participants—Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.) and Reps. Jason Crow (Colo.), Chris Deluzio (Pa.), Maggie Goodlander (NH), and Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.)—also face a probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular