Andy Worthington's Blog, page 106

Support Hoxton’s New Era Estate Tenants in Their Struggle Against Rapacious US Landlord Westbrook Partners

Congratulations to the tenants of the New Era Estate in Hoxton for mounting a major campaign to oppose attempts by the US property company that bought up their homes to price them out, in an act of naked greed that ought to make any decent person feel rather queazy about how greed has become the sole measure by which society as a whole measures success.

The New Era Estate — home to 93 families in several blocks of flats in Hoxton, where London’s hipsters mix with council tenants — was built in the 1930s as workers’ housing, a private enterprise by a socially responsible family whose activities echoed what was being undertaken at the time by the London County Council. The Lever family, which built the estate, ran it through a trust — and kept the rents genuinely affordable — until March this year, when it was sold to a consortium, led by the US firm Westbrook Holdings, in which Tory MP Richard Benyon’s family firm also had a stake — and the Benyons, it transpired, took over the running of the estate.

In June, the Daily Mirror reported how rents had already been put up by 10% and how, at a meeting with tenants — many of whom have lived on the estate for decades — Richard Benyon’s brother Edward “announced plans to ­refurbish the 1930s homes and build more flats on the roof,” as the Mirror put it.

“The goal, which is something I have had to say to all of you, is the fact that the rents will be going to market value,” he said, meaning, quite possibly, a tripling or quadrupling of the existing rents, because of the hipness of Hoxton and the complete absence of any kind of rent control. Landlords, if they can get away with it, can charge £2000 a month for flats whether they are new, refurbished or run-down (making a total of £24,000 a year), even though the average income in the UK is only £27,000.

Speaking about the 10% rent  hike, Edward Benyon said, “Bearing in mind the rents were so far below market value we ­considered a 10% rise to be fair,” which showed a complete failure to understand what kinds of wages ordinary Londoners earn. He added, “I’m not going to sit here now and tell you it’s going to be double, quadruple, whatever it’s going to be.”

The Mirror noted he also “caused uproar when he was asked about eviction and said, ‘We’ve never evicted anybody because when people haven’t been able to afford to pay the rent they’ve moved out.'” In response, one resident said, “What if they’ve got nowhere to go?” and another said, “You really don’t give a sh*t do you?”

The story rumbled on, largely in the local media, until it suddenly got a huge boost at the start of November, when Russell Brand, fresh from publicising the Focus E15 Mothers campaign in Stratford — where a group of single mothers, evicted from a hostel, occupied boarded up council flats — took up the cause. Under the heading, “Join me on our first action,” on his website, he wrote, “I am excited to invite you to participate in our first action. As you know property developers — in partnership with corrupt, inept or lazy politicians — have created a housing crisis for ordinary people all over the world. I bet your rent is soaring; I bet you are finding it hard to pay. It’s especially bad in cities, and for this first action we want to focus on London.” He proceeded to invite his supporters to sign a petition on Change.org, and to protest outside the Benyons’ offices, and stated:

If the Benyons get their way, an entire community will be forced into B&Bs all over the country. They will be sent hundreds of miles away, to places they’ve never been, where they don’t know anyone. Old people who have lived there their whole lives, working nurses with kids, single mums — They will lose all the work, money and love they have invested in their homes and their community. This is happening everywhere. Boris, their elected mayor (where did he go to school again?) is on the side of the property developers, not people like you. The New Era residents have decided to organise and fight back — and we can help them.

The story then took off — partly through Russell’s popularity, but also because, following on from the Focus E15 Mothers protest, the housing crisis in London and the increasing unaffordability of housing for more and more working Londoners has become a topic that cannot be ignored.

Hit with a wave of bad press, the Benyons withdrew from the New Era deal, but Westbrook, a rapacious New York company, which, ironically, aggressively pursues profits for US teachers and public sector employees through their pension savings, refused to back down. In a powerful article for the Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty explained how Westbrook’s expansion from New York to London is part of a disturbing trend whereby the homes of those who live on the New Era Estate, as well as numerous other homes throughout London, “have turned into an international asset class, to be bought and sold by speculators from across the world.”

As Chakrabortty noted, “By buying New Era, Westbrook has become a giant absentee landlord. No one from that firm will set foot on the Hoxton estate, of course. Indeed, since the Benyons’ exit, tenants report they have not heard a word from the Americans who now own their homes. Instead, it’s been the council who’s conveyed messages back and forth. This relationship is extreme, but it’s hardly anomalous. Rather, it’s the inevitable result of property developers and estate agents renting out hotel ballrooms in Asia to sell flats off-plan to Singaporean dentists and the like” — Singaporeans who, he explains, live in publicly funded housing in Singapore that is protected by the government, and so invest instead in London, whose citizens have no such protections extended to them by their own government, or their Mayor, Boris Johnson, whose decision to set affordable rents at 80% of market rents has made a mockery of the entire notion of what is affordable and what is not.

As Chakrabortty also explained:

[I]n London the problem is that it is now almost impossible for anyone coming to the city to buy here, or increasingly to rent somewhere decent, either.

Contrast that with the founding ethos of New Era: built by a charitable trust in the 1930s in order to offer working-class residents affordable private rented accommodation. Even when the blocks were sold this spring, residents say they were assured that the old tenets would apply. Within weeks, new owners told them that rents would rise to market values: spiralling from £600 a month for a two-bed flat to something closer to £2,400. That was meant to happen by summer 2016. After Benyon’s firm pulled out of the deal last week, residents were told that Westbrook would accelerate the process.

Westbrook has form in rough treatment of those people who pay it rent. Earlier this year the New York attorney general ordered it and a business partner to make up for thousands of building violations and to pay $1m to tenants, to make up for illegal fees and overcharging. Foreign money has long flowed into and out of London in volumes — but it’s no longer going into business or other investments up and down the country; it’s been diverted into the Shard, countless private high-rises (somehow so much better than the council equivalents) and all the other new developments turning the capital into a new and unaffordable zone off-limits to the people who’ve lived there for decades.

Academics call this process financialisation: the sudden creation of new financial markets and instruments. Molinari and the other residents of New Era used to have homes: now they merely live in financial instruments.

I can think of one other aspect of everyday life where this has happened recently: food. Over the past 10 years, wheat and other staples have become a financial asset class, to be speculated in by Goldman Sachs and Barclays. The result has been misery and even starvation for the poor of the Third World. For the poor of London, the financialisation of property spells homelessness.

However, because of the success of the New Era tenants’ campaign, the various players in New Era’s story — Hackney Council and Boris Johnson in particular — cannot duck the problem faced by the estate’s residents. The petition, signed by nearly 300,000 people, was delivered to 10 Downing Street on Monday afternoon, and earlier Russell Brand joined New Era tenants for a lively protest outside Westbrook’s Mayfair headquarters, which drew significant media attention.

That morning, Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary and shadow minister for London, weighed in, telling the Guardian, “The shameful New Era saga embodies everything that is wrong with London’s broken housing market. Ordinary Londoners are suffering, with their homes ripped from underneath them and their lives and families pulled apart, just so international investors can make a quick buck, with no regard to the community they are destroying. If Westbrook won’t provide affordable housing to families on the estate they should sell to a social landlord who can keep the community together.”

The Guardian also noted that there are ongoing “negotiations between senior London politicians and Westbrook’s managing principal, Mark Donnor,” adding, “Over the last ten days, the firm has held meetings with Richard Blakeway, the deputy mayor for housing, Meg Hillier, the tenants’ Labour MP, Jules Pipe, the elected mayor of Hackney, and Philip Glanville, the cabinet member for housing at Hackney.”

The Guardian also noted:

Hackney is proposing that Westbrook sells the homes to a social-housing organisation, but in the absence of clear powers to force the private company to act, the negotiations are understood to be delicate.

Pressure is now growing on the London mayor Boris Johnson. Last week, Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York, where Westbrook is based, spoke out against the firm.

“London is experiencing what New York City used to experience,” he said in an interview with Russell Brand on his Trews show. “Our city government found a huge number of violations of our law by Westbrook for unfair treatment of tenants and attempts to interfere with tenants who organised for their own rights. I can’t tell you that what you are experiencing is news to us … Sometimes it is fair to say there is a limit to the amount of profit you should make, because you shouldn’t want to dislocate people from their lives.”

Success for the New Era tenants is crucial, because, although their position is unusually vulnerable — as private tenants treated for years as though they were social tenants — if they are turfed out and many of them find they can no longer afford to live in London and have to move elsewhere, it will not only send a chilling message to hard-working Londoners, but will also reassure the leeches who are constantly seeking to destroy the capital’s social housing — primarily council housing and properties run by housing associations, as well as co-ops — that no one is safe.

I’ve lived in London — mostly in social housing — for almost 30 years, through the horrors of Margaret Thatcher, the doldrums of the John Major years (surprisingly, in retrospect, something of a golden age for freedom and dissent), the tacky housing-based greed and illegal warmongering of the Blair years, and Gordon Brown’s tenure during the banker-led collapse of the global economy (and its disgracefully rigged resurrection), but since the Tory-led coalition government of David Cameron seized power in May 2010 we have moved into a new era of cruelty, selfishness and greed that surpasses everything that has come before.

In all previous recessions, the housing market collapsed along with everything else, but after a brief dip in the fortunes of the wealthy after the 2008 crash, the housing market has rebounded, as a direct result of the Bank of England (with the full blessing of the government) maintaining interest rates at close to zero so that there is no point in people investing in anything other than property — especially as there is also very little willingness on anyone’s part to invest in British manufacturing, industry and, in general, the creative arts. It is true that this artificially inflated and artificially sustained housing bubble was also partly triggered by a general shortage of housing in London and the south east, but its main driver, I am sad to say, is greed.

In the last few years, house prices in London have exceeded the giddy heights they reached in the New Labour housing bubble, which reached its pre-crash peak in 2007, and with landlords unfettered by any legislation determining their actions, and greed the only measure of success in modern Britain, the cost of renting has also gone through the roof.

Across London, anyone who is young or who failed to get on the housing casino merry-go-round when it was affordable is now being bled dry, paying, in many cases, well over half their income for a roof over their heads. This one-on-one exploitation is generally accepted, when greed is the only measure of human worth, and in addition the younger and the poorer — in general — are subsidising the wealth of the older and richer, whose properties are now worth five, ten or even 20 times what they paid for them, and who, as a result, are massively cushioned in their old age while their children and grand-children suffer — unless the individuals in question are particularly rich.

Social housing — genuinely affordable rented housing — is the only way hundreds of thousands of people in London can afford to stay here, bearing in mind that Britain’s median income (the amount that 50% of workers earn less than, and 50% earn more than) is just £14,000. Genuinely affordable social housing — by which I mean socially rented housing costing about £50 per adult per week — is needed more than ever, if London is not to haemorrhage everyone who is not rich, leaving the rich with a scarcity of those required to serve them — and a savage lack of culture and creativity.

The Tories — in Parliament and City Hall — need to learn an important lesson from Bill de Blasio before it is too late. As he said, wisely, “Sometimes it is fair to say there is a limit to the amount of profit you should make.”

How sad that this is a line you hardly ever hear in Britain anymore.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Former Guantánamo Military Defense Attorney Todd Pierce Interviewed by the Talking Dog

I’m delighted to be cross-posting below an interview conducted by my good friend The Talking Dog (functioning below the radar under a pseudonym in New York City) with another good friend, Army Maj. Todd Pierce (retired), who, as a Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer, was part of the defense team for two Guantánamo prisoners charged in the military commissions — Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (still held) and Ibrahim al-Qosi (released in 2012).

Todd became fascinated by the philosophical origins of the Bush-Cheney military commissions in the Nazi era, and efforts to justify the commissions through a warped interpretation of US Civil War precedents. Since retiring, he has continued to pursue these interests, and has also become part of Sam Adams Associates, who describe themselves as “a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power,” and who, every year since 2002, have presented the Sam Adams Associates Award for Integrity in Intelligence to whistleblowers — most recently to Chelsea Manning, at an event in Oxford that I attended in February.

I do hope you have time to read the interview — which also includes Todd’s latest thoughts on the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who has been successfully appealing against his 2008 conviction and life sentence — with profound repercussions for the entire military commissions project, which, it should be noted, should never have been revived by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the first place.

If you enjoy it, please share it, and please also follow the links I’m posting at the end of this article to the Talking Dog’s extensive archive of interviews about Guantánamo and the “war on terror.”

TD Blog Interview with Todd Pierce

October 30, 2014

Major Todd Pierce (U.S. Army, Retired) is an attorney who served as a Judge Advocate General (J.A.G.) officer in the United States Army. In that capacity, he has served on the defense teams for two Guantánamo military commissions defendants. On October 13, 2014 I had the privilege of interviewing Maj. Pierce by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected by Maj. Pierce.

The Talking Dog: The customary first question is “where were you on Sept. 11th”. In your case, I know you were on active duty (in Army Reserve command), and I know you’ve described almost the gestalt of the world changing as the day went on … can you describe that day, in terms of where you were geographically, and anything else of note — either small picture or big picture or both?

Todd Pierce: I was stationed, and on duty, at Fort Snelling, MN with the 88th U.S. Army Reserve Command in Minneapolis, MN. The Command covered 6 Midwestern states. A fellow officer came into my office and told me that a plane had hit the WTC, and we thought, like everyone else, an accident, so I continued working until he came back in again and told me of the second plane hitting and we both knew then it was a terrorist act. I was the only JAG Officer in the Headquarters for most of the day as the senior JAG officer did not come in that day until about 3:30 pm, for some reason. Shortly after the second plane hit, a staff meeting was called where we discussed what had happened, and how to harden the many reserve centers in the command. Later in the day we knew we would be mobilizing soldiers for contingencies and preparations began to be made for that.

To me, there seemed to be a bit of hysteria taking hold of some of my fellow soldiers in their response as more details came in that day along with speculation on who was responsible. It was like being on the set of Fox News, which, unfortunately, was watched by far too many officers in their offices, guaranteeing an irrational, near-hysterical response from them. I thought if that was typical, there would be an over-reaction by the U.S. in many ways that would be detrimental to our interests. On the way home, I hit a traffic jam with the traffic backed up for about 5 miles. This turned out to be due to an elderly man standing on a highway overpass waving a flag frantically. I didn’t see that as unusual under the circumstances but he was out there the rest of the week backing up traffic so that I finally complained to him. After all, I was serving my country and appreciated getting home after some long days. But it was further evidence of the hysteria that had taken hold of too many people, and we saw how President Bush, Dick Cheney, and the neocons would exploit that in the succeeding years; all to the detriment of the United States as their “strategy” was the exact opposite of how to respond to terrorism.

The Talking Dog: As a JAG officer, you came to volunteer to defend those accused of violations of the law of war before the Guantánamo military commissions. If you can, what led you to volunteer for such service — was there anything particular in your own background that led you to do so? Please identify your clients, and their current whereabouts or dispositions (for example, we know that Mr. al-Bahlul’s address remains “Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, apparently serving life sentence”).

Todd Pierce: I have represented two prisoners as a member of teams: Ibrahim al-Qosi in his Military Commission (now back in his home country after serving an additional two years after his commission), and Ali al-Bahlul in the appeal of his convictions, which is still going on, and also served as resource counsel on a third case. I explained why I volunteered in an article which appeared in the National Law Journal in 2011, “Guantánamo at 10.” There, I explained that I had grown up learning about harsh and illegal treatment of prisoners who should be treated as POWs because my father was taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines 4 months after the beginning of World War II and survived the Bataan Death March and then three more years of captivity under the most gruelling of conditions. Though he didn’t talk about it except when I would ask questions as I got older, it was clear that he had suffered severely as a result of the Japanese violations of the International Law standards for treatment of POWs.

The Talking Dog: Segueing over to Mr. al-Bahlul, the D.C. Circuit recently issued a broad “en banc” opinion finding that some of what al-Bahlul was charged with and convicted of [during a proceeding where the defendant stood mute] aren’t exactly “war crimes”. Can you tell me, procedurally, where Mr. al-Bahlul’s case now stands (notwithstanding Mr. al-Bahlul’s refusal to participate in his own defense)?

Todd Pierce: Oral argument was heard October 22nd before a panel of the D.C. Circuit. The only issue is whether conspiracy to commit terrorism is a war crime. The court has already held that material support for terrorism and solicitation to terrorism are not war crimes, so only the conviction of conspiracy remains. The government’s theory of war crimes is based on conflating martial law — military governance over occupied territory or under a declaration of martial law in domestic territory — with other aspects of the law of war, in order to try to create “war crimes.” For purposes of the commissions, if the conduct alleged is not a war crime, then the commissions have no jurisdiction to try al-Bahlul, or anyone else, for that conduct. Again, after the Hamdan II decision, inchoate crimes of “material support” and “solicitation” associated with terrorism are no longer deemed war crimes. Traditionally, war crimes were thought to include conspiracy only if it was conspiracy to commit genocide or aggressive war — conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism has never before been a basis for war crimes jurisdiction. Procedurally, the en banc D.C. Circuit acting as a whole vacated al-Bahlul’s convictions for everything except conspiracy, and that is the issue in front of the Court now. While the government concedes that conspiracy is not a war crime under International Law, they have invented a “domestic common law of war,” taken mostly from the Civil War martial law cases.

The Talking Dog: Following up on that point, can you expand on “domestic common law of war,” and tie it to something you said that to me is the most succinct shorthand for developments in law these last dozen years: “national security law = martial law”? Please spend as much, or as little, time as necessary with Civil War precedents as a basis for these developments (though David Addington and John Yoo and the gang would have presumably gone to Hundred Years War or Peloponnesian War or Storage Wars if necessary to bring about Dick Cheney’s dream of a shining interrogation center on a hill), as well as discussing “we’re all Cheneyites now”.

Todd Pierce: The government is indeed relying on a conflation of the law of war and the application of martial law in the Northern states during the Civil War. Taking those cases as precedents, even though they only applied in U.S. Union territory under the declarations of martial law in certain areas of the North and then throughout the North with Lincoln’s declaration of martial law in September 1862, the U.S. government is essentially asserting they can exercise martial law throughout the world. It has to be noted that in the Civil War, martial law was only declared for the Union States, not the Confederates as the Confederates were treated as combatants and received belligerent rights so that they were not prosecuted even for killing Union soldiers.

But what the U.S. government has been doing since John Yoo and his cohorts invented the scheme is to constantly assert that we “are at war,” and therefore the President, as Commander in Chief, has virtual powers of a dictator under the law of war, to which martial law is a branch of. The apparent contention is that we don’t need a declaration of martial law, because a state of war in any non-constitutional country IS effectively a state of martial law. Of course, our Constitution prevents this. And so, the architects of the war on terror’s legal paradigm go back to the era of Lincoln and the Civil War, when, of course, the nation did face a genuine existential threat. Martial law was actually declared in September 1862 specifically to suppress “disloyal acts” in the North, which primarily was “speech” and as a result, military commanders had broad authority to pick up what they believed to be pro-Confederate sympathizers, with detention authority and trial by “drumhead courts,” military commissions. This is what government officials, such as Military Commissions Chief Prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins proudly hail as part of our legal traditions, even though they were thoroughly repudiated immediately after the Civil War by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Ex Parte Milligan case.

The new danger is that the “domestic common law of war” has crept into our overall statutory scheme: we now have Section 1021 which actually permits domestic military detention of persons, not excluding American citizens, merely suspected of “supporting” terrorism, without Bill of Rights protections. It has not been implemented, but we know, as a result of the position taken by the government in Hedges v. Obama that, under this provision, even a journalist such as Chris Hedges could find himself subject to military detention. This has introduced a degree of martial law into the ordinary course of daily life; it is very dangerous, and we do not know how it will play out. Certainly, Barack Obama has not used this provision for the purpose of detaining citizens (or journalists) for speech, but his Administration has asserted the right to do it, and we certainly have no idea how a future President would use these provisions.

The Talking Dog: Please discuss the revelations of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and/or Julian Assange — particularly in the context of law of war issues and the other items we’ve been discussing, and tell me, please, how a democracy can function when the government operates in secrecy?

Todd Pierce: The simple answer to that question is, it can’t. Without the people’s right to know, there is no meaningful democracy. The people under our Constitutional system as the ultimate sovereign cannot operate without critical information as to what their government is up to. Indeed, they cannot even make a meaningful judgment as to electing candidate A vs. candidate B when they have no access to real information. We just do not end up with a meaningful democracy without meaningful information that isn’t classified!

Snowden, Assange, Manning — all did a great service to this country. Going back to Vietnam, we have learned that our military leaders are not all-wise. Even an ultra-conservative like the American James Burnham understood this in recognizing that the World War II Germans had entrusted all information and decision making in the hands of a few individuals, all having only a military background as far as leadership, and who had internalized that way of thinking. With that background, too often they are incapable of thinking more broadly beyond just achieving an immediate military objective, with inevitable victory to follow in their eyes.

Unfortunately, we have been giving virtually unfettered discretion to similar minded militarists, such as when President Obama acceded to demands by Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and former military officers John McCain and Lindsay Graham, when they called for surges in troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, making matters worse. We are getting an idea of just how much the government and the military are trying to keep secret.

This amounts to a dereliction of duty in a democracy by both our political and military leaders, and it ends up being to the detriment of the conduct of the war against terrorism, and redounds to the benefit of our enemies. The Constitution is our greatest strength — not a weakness — and it gives we the people the absolute right to know what we need to know to make meaningful democratic decisions, especially vital issues of how to conduct foreign policy, contrary to John Yoo’s and Dick Cheney’s claims.

The Talking Dog: Anwar al-Awlaki … please discuss, particularly in the context of law of war issues and the other items we’ve been discussing (feel free to also discuss my college classmate Barack’s handling of legal issues associated with what used to be called “the war on terror”).

Todd Pierce: The government will not reveal the information associated with the decision to kill Mr. al-Awlaki, or its legal rationale for doing so, except a heavily redacted version. We know that they have determined that they can target “operational leaders” of al-Qaeda, and they have said al-Awlaki was designated as an operational leader, but we have to take everything that the military says with a grain of salt as it’s their policy to dissemble. It may seem to be funny to start characterizing a propagandist like al-Awlaki as an “operational leader.” But under the expansive meaning of “belligerency,” even propaganda amounting only to opinions contrary to U.S. policy can result in elevation to “operational leader” status and then personal targeting, which is similar to what was done under the Phoenix Program of assassination during the Vietnam War.

Once again, this is based on an expansive reading of military law precedent from the martial law context during the Civil War. Then, newspapermen, publishers, even just outspoken persons with opinions, who might “say something embarrassing about the army,” might end up being designated as “operational leaders” because their speech could “discourage enlistments” — an arguably hostile act!

I wrote about this in the context of Vietnam era generals … their ridiculous contentions that “discouraging speech” could serve to result in a loss of national will to fight. This is precisely the logic employed by Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and used in their infamous “people’s courts” and “special courts” and similar structures. “War treason” was found to be anything embarrassing to the regime.

Troublingly, it appears we have adopted similar legal forms as Nazi Germany for these principles. A German Jewish lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel, in a book called “The Dual State,” observed that martial law was the constitution of the Third Reich (he was writing in the late 1930’s, before the full brunt of the Holocaust and World War II had taken place). He analyzed the legal forms of the Third Reich as a prerogative state, which coexisted (albeit in a superior position) with the normative state. The prerogative state under der Fuhrer is, of course, martial law, or as our Supreme Court once called it: Martial Rule. Under Section 1021 of the NDAA, we have a degree of martial law baked into our system now. Of course, the Supreme Court’s case of ex parte Milligan rolled back the martial law of the Civil War, after it ended. Indeed, much of the conduct of Union Authorities during the Civil War violated the Constitution. But that was the one period of our history when there was an existential threat to the continuing existence of the U.S. as it was then known, unlike today.

The concept of the President as commander in chief with unlimited war powers is what amounts to a prerogative state as are any authoritarian states in history and was revived from that very brief and repudiated Civil War period by by legal authoritarian John Yoo and the Bush legal team; their notion that the President has unfettered dictatorial powers is obviously wrong — but it is shoving its way into legal doctrine still under the Obama legal team with opinions such as the Drone memo.

The Talking Dog: Can you tell me how your Guantánamo commission representation has affected you personally, professionally, ethically or any other way you’d like to discuss?

Todd Pierce: For me, working on these cases has revealed just how dangerous the government’s positions are. I have been outspoken in trying to “out” the government’s contentions, and in arguing as to why we should not be following this tack. Second, the government’s position actually puts us in greater danger. Our leaders are guessing — they actually do not know what they are doing. But as a result of these policies — attack everyone, anywhere based on any perception of threat — huge wealth transfers in favor of the military industrial complex (and allied corrupt foreign leaders) have taken place. And so, I am trying to become even more outspoken. Through getting together with others (like our friend Andy Worthington); and trying to form groups involved in upholding the rule of law.

The Talking Dog: Do you have a prediction for, say, five years out from now, and ten years out from now? Presumably, the Afghan war will technically be long over … other than the “high value” detainee commission trials still not being finished, do you have any other predictions for the Guantánamo project?

Todd Pierce: We have to acknowledge that our government contains genuine authoritarian militarists. Sure, there are the McCains and Grahams, but there is also the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. We have Leon Panetta, the former Defense Secretary, telling us that he anticipates that the wars coming up will entail thirty years of fighting! It is amazing that someone can look forward into the future and suggest exactly how long a war will last … But of course, if we plan on occupying so many countries, this is what happens.

The “Pentagon’s New Map” lays out the world into core countries, meaning the United States and allies Western Europe — and then we would put everything else into categories of the periphery, and then police the rest of the world. Of course, there might be some rebellion from this arrangement! As I’ve written before, we’re all Cheneyites now — the whole world is now subject to our military domination. We have actually decided to define rebellion against U.S. occupation as terrorism. (Another definition, of course, might be “blowback” as Chalmers Johnson defined it).

So when Panetta says we will be at war for thirty years, it means we will be looking for places to intervene, resulting in yet more “terrorism” resulting in yet more war. It will end catastrophically both constitutionally and financially.

In that context, Guantánamo is an ideal detention facility for authoritarians! Island prisons have historically been favored for this purpose. Bagram is working out to be another … the United States is now taking other prisoners from all over the world to Bagram — in the middle of a war zone! At this point, extra-legal “courts” and military detention apparatuses are now firmly in place. How far will this go? It’s anybody’s guess. It will continue to erode our basic protections, and, if unchecked, will bring about an end to our constitutional system (except for what Fraenkel would call “the normative state” — things like routine divorces, property conveyances and the like), while the “prerogative state” swallows everything else, in gross violation of both our Constitution and international law.

The Talking Dog: Please comment on the recent machinations re: “the Islamic State” (ISIS, ISIL, or whatever you want to call it) in the context of issues we have been discussing, particularly our nation’s apparent predilection to try to occupy every other country on Earth.

Todd Pierce: That’s just it — our response to ISIS appears to be part of our need to occupy everything everywhere! Our fingers are still all over Iraq! While Obama is accused of having a failed policy for withdrawing troops from Iraq, all he did was what Bush had previously agreed to do.

At a book signing by Thomas Ricks after he had exalted Petraeus for an hour, Ricks immediately conceded the surge had been a failure, agreeing with an audience member (me) that it was a failure because there was no reconciliation reached among the parties already there. And so we have a fiction about “success” in Iraq, but all American policies led to the creation of ISIS, beginning with the American invasion of Iraq, and actually before with the years of sanctions on Iraq which Madeline Albright admits killed at least 500,000 Iraqi children.

Now, of course, ISIL is being used as a pretext to go back in! This, of course, will only accelerate disaster. And as we ramp up, ISIS gets stronger, because demonizing of that group by the United States is an effective combat multiplier for them, as we go into a new war! ISIL is clearly willing to have this fight — and our demonizing only bolsters the position of those who see the United States as the cause of the problems over there and seeing ISIS as willing to confront American imperialism.

The Iraq war has been called the greatest strategic blunder in American history — by General William Odom! General Odom was once Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and seems to have been the last high ranking American General who understood real strategic interests and not confusing them with immediate, transitory tactical interests which always call for another war. Obama compounded the disaster by adopting Bush’s policy of trying to topple regimes we didn’t like. General Wesley Clark told us that the Bush Administration was planning exactly that — to topple regimes — and it was their intent to do so all along. So, this is what we’ve been doing — the line is continuous — Iraq, Libya, now a try for Syria … this led directly to the birth of ISIL, at the behest of Obama in trying to take out Assad, we created ISIL ourselves! The quandary of course, is that we’re now facing the inevitable blowback that this kind of activity creates. The more of it we do, the more we ultimately lose. Right now, giving up some of our “control” would be the best policy … instead we’re trying to find a “fix” that amounts to more of same.

The Talking Dog: Anything else I should have asked you but didn’t, or anything else you believe needs to be discussed on these issues?

Todd Pierce: As a military officer, the oath I took was not to the country, or to the President. It was to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Indeed, to defend this nation is to defend the Constitution as that has been shown to be our greatest strength in permitting dissent to government policy which has so often been misguided. This is particularly true during wartime, especially a feigned war as is the present. Americans had better take an interest in how their Constitution is being eroded before their eyes, or it will inure to all of our detriment. The people must demand a genuine rule of law, and an end to these continuing wars and their ongoing subversion of the Constitution. It damages all of us and diminishes national security, paradoxically.

The Talking Dog: I join all of my readers in thanking Major Todd Pierce for that fascinating and informative interview.

Readers interested in legal issues and related matters associated with the “war on terror” may also find talking dog blog interviews with former Guantánamo military commissions prosecutors Morris Davis and Darrel Vandeveld, with former Guantánamo combatant status review tribunal/”OARDEC” officer Stephen Abraham, with attorneys David Marshall, Jan Kitchel, Eric Lewis, Cori Crider, Michael Mone, Matt O’Hara, Carlos Warner, Matthew Melewski, Stewart “Buz” Eisenberg, Patricia Bronte, Kristine Huskey, Ellen Lubell, Ramzi Kassem, George Clarke, Buz Eisenberg, Steven Wax, Wells Dixon, Rebecca Dick, Wesley Powell, Martha Rayner, Angela Campbell, Stephen Truitt and Charles Carpenter, Gaillard Hunt, Robert Rachlin, Tina Foster, Brent Mickum, Marc Falkoff H. Candace Gorman, Eric Freedman, Michael Ratner, Thomas Wilner, Jonathan Hafetz, Joshua Denbeaux, Rick Wilson, Neal Katyal, Joshua Colangelo Bryan, Baher Azmy, and Joshua Dratel (representing Guantánamo detainees and others held in “the war on terror”), with attorneys Donna Newman and Andrew Patel (representing “unlawful combatant” Jose Padilila), with Dr. David Nicholl, who spearheaded an effort among international physicians protesting force-feeding of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, with physician and bioethicist Dr. Steven Miles on medical complicity in torture, with law professor and former Clinton Administration Ambassador-at-large for war crimes matters David Scheffer, with former Guantánamo detainees Moazzam Begg and Shafiq Rasul, with former Guantánamo Bay Chaplain James Yee, with former Guantánamo Army Arabic linguist Erik Saar, with former Guantánamo military guard Terry Holdbrooks, Jr., with former military interrogator Matthew Alexander, with law professor and former Army J.A.G. officer Jeffrey Addicott, with law professor and Coast Guard officer Glenn Sulmasy, with author and geographer Trevor Paglen and with author and journalist Stephen Grey on the subject of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, with journalist and author David Rose on Guantánamo, with journalist Michael Otterman on the subject of American torture and related issues, with author and historian Andy Worthington detailing the capture and provenance of all of the Guantánamo detainees, with law professor Peter Honigsberg on various aspects of detention policy in the war on terror, with Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch, with Almerindo Ojeda of the Guantánamo Testimonials Project, with Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, with Charles Gittings of the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions, Laurel Fletcher, author of “The Guantánamo Effect” documenting the experience of Guantánamo detainees after their release, and with John Hickman, author of “Selling Guantánamo,” critiquing the official narrative surrounding Guantánamo, to be of interest.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: Andy Worthington Promotes We Stand With Shaker on George Galloway’s Sputnik Show on RT

Today (November 29), We Stand With Shaker, the new campaign to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, got a big boost when campaign coordinator Joanne MacInnes and I were invited onto George Galloway’s Sputnik show on RT to discuss the campaign with George — and his co-host Gayatri. Please also follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and watch the campaign video here.

We were on the first half of the show, which was about 13 minutes in total, and as well as giving us the opportunity to promote the campaign and to tell Shaker’s story to a global audience, the interview also featured clips of music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd) and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell speaking at the launch on Monday.

I do hope you have time to watch the show, which is posted below via YouTube:

This is how George described the program on the RT website:

Shaker Aamer is the last British hostage held by our “closest ally” in the cells of Guantánamo, even though the British government has demanded his release and consecutive US governments have conceded that he has no case to answer. President Barack Obama ran for office with a pledge to shut down Guantánamo Bay, the United States’ own Gulag in an occupied corner of Cuba, but six years on it is still there and being expanded at great public expense. And, 12 years and nine months later, Shaker Aamer is still incarcerated. This week, Joanne Maclnnes and Andy Worthington join Sputnik to tell us about the fight for Shaker Aamer to come home.

After our interview, in the rest of the broadcast, George discussed the scandal engulfing Save the Children after Tony Blair was given an award honouring his “global legacy.” As he noted, “The award may well ruin the once admired Save the Children Fund; their staff around the world are in open revolt: a hundred thousand people, and rising, have signed the petition demanding the award be rescinded.”

Also, on Sputnik’s Facebook page, there’s rough footage of the launch of We Stand With Shaker, featuring the end of my speech introducing the campaign, plus — in their entirety — the great speeches made by Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, Roger Waters and Caroline Lucas MP, which I’m posting below:

Post by Sputnik on Russia Today.

Please keep sharing information about the campaign, on Facebook and Twitter (where we continue to post photos of high-profile supporters standing with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker that is at the heart of our campaign) and please also share it on whatever other platforms you use, and let’s make Shaker’s release a reality. As Joanne MacInnes said on the Sputnik show, when talking about what David Cameron should be doing for Shaker, “Get on the phone and bring him home.”

Details of how to contact the PM, and other UK officials, as well as Barack Obama and other senior US officials, are on the website here. Please also send photos of yourself holding up placards that read, “I Stand With Shaker,” to the campaign email, to be published on the website.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: Andy Worthington Speaks at the Launch of We Stand With Shaker, the Campaign to Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

Below is a short video, on Vimeo, of me (Andy Worthington) talking to doctor and filmmaker Saleyha Ahsan about the launch of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, to secure the release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, which took place outside Parliament on Monday. Please also follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and watch the campaign video here. [Click on the photo of me at the launch with Roger Waters and campaign co-ordinator Joanne MacInnes to enlarge it].

Saleyha filmed me after the launch, and I explained who had been there — Roger Waters, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, Caroline Lucas, John McDonnell, Jeremy Hardy and Peter Tatchell — and I also explained why the campaign is so important: because Shaker has twice been approved for release by the US (in 2007 and 2009), and his return to the UK has been requested by successive governments since August 2007, and therefore his ongoing imprisonment is completely unacceptable.

He continues to be held, it seems certain, because he is eloquent, and has always resisted the injustices of the US-led “war on terror” — with its torture, rendition, and indefinite detention without charge or trial — and because he is a fount of information about the crimes committed in the name of this “war,” but as both the US and UK governments have proven adept at preventing any court from holding them accountable for their actions, it would seems clear that he continues to be held solely because, on release, he may embarrass both governments.

Although the US appears to want to return him to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth, where he will be silenced, that is not an option, as he was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK, and the British government has a non-negotiable obligation to secure his return to his family in the UK. We call on David Cameron to call Barack Obama immediately to demand that he give 30 days’ notice prior to Shaker’s release, as required in US law (in legislation passed by cynical Republican politicians), and then send a plane to bring Shaker back. With immediate action Shaker could be back in the new year.

Andy at Stand With Shaker Launch from saleyha ahsan on Vimeo.

Also, this week, I spoke about We Stand With Shaker with Bay Area radio host Peter B. Collins, for his show “Processing Distortion” on whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post website. The show is only available to subscribers (for a minimum payment of $6, for which listeners get a whole month of broadcasts), but I can recommend it. Peter and I have spoken many times before, and he is a particularly well-informed host. A 90-second preview of me talking about the British government’s evasion regarding Shaker’s case is here.

This is how Peter described the show:

In the second of two reports on Guantánamo prisoners [the first was with Jon B. Eisenberg, one of the lawyers for hunger striking prisoner Abu Wa'el Dhiab], Andy Worthington details the new campaign to bring home Shaker Aamer, the last Briton at Gitmo. With a large, inflatable “Shaker” and a heartfelt endorsement from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, activists are demanding that the Cameron government negotiate the immediate release of Aamer, who has been held for 13 years without charge or trial, and was cleared for release 5 years ago. We talk about the recent transfer of 6 prisoners, with 10 more reported to be imminent, and the disappointing recent ruling about force feeding by Judge Gladys Kessler. Roger Waters makes a cameo appearance.

I made other media appearances in the week, but sadly most of them are not online. I was on RT’s main news at 6pm on Monday, and a film crew from the Islam Channel interviewed me at my house on Wednesday for a show broadcast on Wednesday evening that also featured my colleague on the campaign, Joanne MacInnes, and Katie Taylor of Reprieve‘s Life After Guantánamo project. As I say, though, neither is online.

However, a third appearance will definitely be online soon — mine and Jo’s appearance on RT’s Sputnik show with George Galloway, which we recorded on Thursday, and which is broadcast today (Saturday November 29) — at 1.30, 7.30 and 11.30pm.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Who Are the Five Guantánamo Prisoners Given New Homes in Georgia and Slovakia and Who Is the Repatriated Saudi?

On November 20, five men — long cleared for release — were freed from  Guantánamo to begin new lives in Georgia and Slovakia. Four of the men are Yemenis, and the fifth man is a Tunisian. Two days after, a Saudi was also released, repatriated to his home country. The releases reduce the prison’s population to 142, leaving 73 men still held who have been approved for release — 70 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established to review all the prisoners’ cases in 2009, and three this year by Periodic Review Boards, a new review process that began in October 2013. Of the 73, it is worth noting that 54 are Yemenis.

The Yemenis given new homes in Georgia and Slovakia are the first Yemenis to be freed in over four years — since July 2010, when Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a student seized by mistake, was released after having his habeas corpus petition granted by a US judge. Until Thursday’s releases, he was the only exception to a ban on releasing any Yemenis that was imposed by President Obama in January 2010 (and was later reinforced by Congress), after a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried and failed to blow up a plane from Europe to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Last May, President Obama dropped his ban on releasing any Yemenis, stating that their potential release would be looked at on a case by case basis, but it took until last Thursday for any of them to be released.

The release of these four Yemenis to Georgia and Slovakia strongly indicates that the entire US establishment’s aversion to releasing any Yemenis to their home country remains intact, which cannot be particularly reassuring for the 55 other Yemenis approved for release, because most third countries persuaded to take in former Guantánamo prisoners don’t take more than a handful.

18 other prisoners, from a variety of other countries, are also still held — one of whom is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose ongoing imprisonment, while two other men were found new homes in Europe, is unforgivable. The only consolation is that, while President Obama is engaged in a flurry of releases — with perhaps ten more to follow — the injustice of Shaker Aamer’s omission stands out all the more strongly, as campaigners (myself included) have been making clear through the newly-launched campaign I am directing, called We Stand With Shaker (Facebook here, Twitter here and the campaign video here).

Below is information about the six men released last week; firstly, the three Yemenis released in Georgia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, which took three former prisoners in March 2010.

The first of the three men is Salah Mohammed al-Thabi (ISN 572) aka Salah (or Saleh) al-Zabe, who is 42 years old, and was one of around 15 prisoners seized in a series of house raids in Karachi, Pakistan in February 2002, after traveling from Afghanistan where he had apparently been living with his family since 1999. As I explained in an article in January 2009:

The US authorities have maintained that they were all seized in a house belonging to Abdu Ali Sharqawi, a Yemeni known as Riyadh the Facilitator, who was apparently responsible for moving Arab recruits in and out of Afghanistan, but, as I report in The Guantánamo Files, a former interrogator in the US prisons in Afghanistan explained that they were actually “found in a couple of safe houses in an ethnically Arab district.” Nine of these prisoners — seemingly a mixture of foot soldiers and civilians — are discussed in Chapter 12 [of The Guantánamo Files], and these additional profiles also indicate that the “safe houses” were an impromptu system developed to help all Arabs evade capture by the opportunistic Pakistani authorities, and not just those who were connected with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

In September 2004 the military recommended al-Thabi to be “transferred for continued detention to his country of origin (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) if a satisfactory agreement can be reached that allows access to detainee and/or access to exploited intelligence,” although in fact, although he was born in Saudi Arabia, he was a Yemeni citizen, and had never been given Saudi citizenship.

The second of the three is Abdel Ghalib Hakim, (ISN 686), who is 36 years old.

As I explained in an article in October 2010 describing nine men, of whom Hakim was one, and who, at the time, were still held:

[The] nine men were seized in a … house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, at the Crescent Mill guest house, also known as the “Issa house,” after its Pakistani owner (who was not seized) or the “Yemeni house,” because most of its inhabitants were Yemenis. Although the house was purported to have a connection to Abu Zubaydah [a purported "high-value detainee" seized in another raid on the same night], the majority of the 15 prisoners known to have been seized in the [Issa] raid have always maintained that they were students at the nearby Salafia University, or that they had traveled to Pakistan for cheap medical treatment, and that the house was a student guest house.

One of the prisoners, Salah Ahmed al-Salami, died in mysterious circumstances in Guantánamo on June 9, 2006 (on the night that two other men died in what was described as a triple suicide), and five others have been released. In May 2009, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruling on the habeas corpus petition of one of the five, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who described himself as a student, savaged the government for drawing on the testimony of witnesses whose unreliability was acknowledged by the authorities, and for attempting to create a “mosaic” of intelligence that was thoroughly unconvincing, and she also made a point of stating, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.”

Ali Ahmed was finally released [in] September [2009], and in the meantime another student in the house, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, a Saudi who stated that he had traveled to Pakistan to receive cheap medical treatment for a back problem, was released [in] June [2009], following the deliberations of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. In addition, two other Yemeni students, Mohammed Tahir and Fayad Yahya Ahmed, were released [in] December [2009].”

In July 2010, a sixth man, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, was also released, after his habeas corpus petition was granted by a US judge. He had only been visiting the house the night it was raised, but by the time he had his habeas petition granted the ban on releasing Yemenis had been imposed by President Obama and by Congress, and he was only released because his case was picked up by the media  and threatened to embarrass the government if he was not freed.

In addition, as I explained at the time:

[An administration official] stated that the administration was prepared to release him because senior officials were “comfortable” with making an exception for him “because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen,” thereby admitting that the perception of a prisoner’s family background is now more important than whether he is innocent or not.

The third man is Abdul Khaled al-Baidani (ISN 553) aka Abdul Khaliq al-Baidhani, who is 31 years old. He was recommended for release by the military under President Bush in December 2006 and again by President Obama’s task force in 2009. He was only 18 when he was seized in Afghanistan, where, he said, he had traveled to undertake military training — although he arrived just before the 9/11 attacks, and never even got to visit a training camp.

The two men released in Slovakia follow three others released in January 2010, and another three in December 2013.

Both are recognizable names to anyone who has been following the story of Guantánamo closely — although not to anyone else. The Yemeni is Hussain (or Hussein) Almerfedi (ISN 1015), who is 36 years old (and was also identified as Hussein Salem Mohammed). He is one of dozens of the more unfortunate prisoners at Guantánamo in that he was held in secret CIA prisons prior to his transfer to Guantánamo.

In July 2010, a US judge in Washington D.C., District Judge Paul Friedman, granted his habeas corpus petition, and, as I explained at the time:

In Guantánamo, Almerfedi stated that he had been a student in Yemen, and had traveled to Pakistan in the hope of using members of Jamaat-al-Tablighi, an enormous missionary organization with headquarters in Pakistan, to help him emigrate to Europe. As the New York Times explained [after the habeas ruling,] he said “he left Yemen because life was intolerable there and that he wanted to go to Europe and seek asylum in a more open, Western society.”

When he found that the Tablighi organization was unable to help him, he “paid a smuggler to take him through Iran and into Turkey and then Greece,” but was seized in Tehran. He added that “he had never been in Afghanistan until the Iranians handed him over to the United States military.”

As I also explained:

In Guantánamo, Hussein Almerfedi also explained that he was held for a total of 14 months in three prisons in Afghanistan — “two under Afghan control and one under US control,” although he added that they all “seemed to be under US supervision.” One of these prisons was Bagram, and another was the “Dark Prison” near Kabul. Almerfedi stated that he was only interrogated on three occasions in Afghanistan, and that on each occasion he was told that the authorities knew he was innocent and would soon be released.

Although Almerfedi’s habeas petition was granted, the government appealed, and won — in a ruling in June 2011 by a biased panel of judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, who, from 2009-11, made a number of rulings gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners, for nakedly ideological reasons. I wrote about that ruling at the time, in an article entitled, “Judges Keep Guantánamo Open Forever.”

On his release, Brian Foster, a lawyer who helped represent him, said, as the New York Times described it, “that his client had initially been skeptical that he would be released, noting that a military review panel during the Bush administration, the Obama-era task force and the district court judge had all recommended his transfer.”

“It took him a long time, I think, to believe us,” Foster said. “This is a guy who has had his hopes raised and dashed so many times”

Hisham Sliti (ISN 174), who is 48 years old, was represented by the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, and clearly had nothing to do with either terrorism or militancy, although his story failed to convince District Judge Richard Leon, who refused to grant his habeas corpus petition in January 2009, apparently believing that he was associated with al-Qaeda.

As I explained at the time, calling Judge Leon’s conclusions “guilt by association”:

He may well have been connected with others who were involved in or interested in terrorism, but his own trajectory is that of a junkie rather than a jihadist, or, if you prefer, a tourist rather than a terrorist. Judge Leon disregarded Sliti’s own claim that he went to Afghanistan “to kick a long-standing drug habit and to find a wife,” but it was certainly true that he had been a drug addict in Europe (where he had been imprisoned in various countries on several occasions), and, as his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has explained, he has a worldly cynicism that is fundamentally at odds with the fanatical rigor of al-Qaeda.

In his book The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Fighting the Lawless World of Guantánamo Bay, Stafford Smith described Sliti reminiscing at length about the quality of the European prisons compared to Guantánamo. “In Italy the prison was wide open for six hours a day,” he explained. “You could have anything in your room — I had a little fornello, a gas cooker. Can you imagine the Americans allowing that? Here, we call a plastic spoon a ‘Camp Delta Kalashnikov,’ as the soldiers think we’re going to attack them with it.” And in a hearing at Guantánamo, Sliti recounted at length his various exploits in Europe, and told the board that he only ended up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending mosques in Belgium, where the country had been portrayed as “a clean, uncorrupted country where he could study Sharia and further his religious education,” but that what he found instead was that “I didn’t care for the country. It was very hot, dusty and [the] women were ugly. The atmosphere and environment didn’t agree with me.”

In January 2010, Sliti was one of the prisoners recommended for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office, although this information was only publicly revealed by the Justice Department in September 2012.

After his release, his attorney, Cori Crider of Reprieve, said, “I first met Hisham seven years ago. He no more belonged in prison then than today. This is a welcome day, if long overdue, and Hisham is looking forward to rebuilding his life and starting a family. Let us hope that the dozens of other cleared men left in Gitmo will soon follow.”

The last man to be released, the Saudi, was Muhammed (or Muhammad) al-Zahrani (ISN 713), who is 44 or 45 years old, and was seized in a house raid in Lahore, Pakistan, at the end of March 2002. Recruited as a low-level foot soldier for the Taliban, al-Zahrani had been a cooperative prisoner, and his release was approved in November by a Periodic Review Board, which was confident that he would not pose any problem on his release, and would take part in Saudi Arabia’s well-established rehabilitation program.

The latest in a series of review processes throughout Guantánamo’s history, the PRBs were established to review the cases of 71 men, the majority of the prisoners who were not cleared for release by Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. Nine have had their cases reviewed since last October, and the review boards — consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — have approved the release of five men, while recommending the ongoing imprisonment of four others. One of those recommended for release — Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti — was freed three weeks ago, and Muhammed al-Zahrani is the second.

The fact that a man approved for release last month has been freed before others who were told the US no longer wanted to hold them at least five years ago is obviously unfair, but these releases inarguably constitute progress, and it is to be hoped that they continue in the weeks and months to follow — and that they include Shaker Aamer.

Prior to his abrupt resignation, defense secretary Chuck Hagel, who had apparently been dragging his heels on approving releases throughout most of 2014, “had notified Congress that he had approved 11 other detainee transfers,” according to the New York Times, including six men who, it is expected, will be given new homes in Uruguay. There is no word on Shaker Aamer, but at the We Stand With Shaker campaign we refuse to be deterred, and will be putting as much pressure as we can on both the British and American governments to end the farce of his ongoing imprisonment — while his fellow prisoners are found new homes in Europe — and to bring him home to his family in London. Please join us.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 89 prisoners released from February 2009 to November 5, 2014 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians, 2 Saudis, 2 Sudanese, 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah).

Please Read My First Article for Al-Jazeera America, Asking Why Shaker Aamer Is Still in Guantánamo

[image error]Dear friends and supporters,

I’ve just written my first article for Al-Jazeera America, “Why is Shaker Aamer still at Gitmo?” and I’m very much hoping that you have the time to read it, and to share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Following yesterday’s launch of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, I’m delighted to be able to get the word out about Shaker’s plight via Al-Jazeera America.

In my article, I run through the history of the prison’s labyrinthine review processes and the reasons why the release of prisoners has become a shameful game of political football, and I look at the particular reasons why both the US and UK governments are not being honest about Shaker’s case.

I think this provides a succinct and powerful overview of why Shaker has not yet been released — and of what Guantánamo is and remains, and why it will always be a legal, moral and ethical abomination until it is shut down for good.

As we are pointing out through the We Stand With Shaker campaign, in Shaker’s case there is no excuse for the US government to continue holding him (having twice approved him for release) and no excuse for the British government not to demand his immediate release (having requested it since 2007). Indeed, there is no excuse for the Prime Minister, David Cameron, not to immediately send a plane to collect him to bring him home to his family in the UK.

So please, read and share my article, and continue supporting the campaign. Like and share us on Facebook (we’re currently aiming for 1200 likes), follow us on Twitter, send in photos of yourself holding placards in support of Shaker to the website, write to David Cameron, Philip Hammond, Barack Obama and other senior officials to demand his immediate release, phone Joanne MacInnes, the campaign coordinator, on 07867 553580 if you are a high-profile campaign supporter and you want to be photographed standing with our giant inflatable figure of Shaker, and please also watch and share the campaign video, posted below via YouTube, which features my “Song for Shaker Aamer” played by my band The Four Fathers, and which was filmed and edited by the talented young film student Billy Dudley:

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

We Stand With Shaker Website Launches, Plus Campaign Video Featuring My “Song for Shaker Aamer” With My Band The Four Fathers

What a day it’s been! A great launch, for We Stand With Shaker, the new campaign to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, including the launch of our website, which features photos of supporters all around the world holding their own signs that say “I Stand With Shaker.”

Also released today — and also on the website — is the campaign video, made by Billy Dudley, featuring my band The Four Fathers performing “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the song I wrote for the campaign, which is available below, via YouTube. Please watch it if you have three minutes to spare, and please share it if you like it:

Our special guest for the launch in Old Palace Yard, opposite Parliament, was Roger Waters (Pink Floyd’s chief songwriter), who told me last night that he was coming, but we were also delighted to welcome Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve (and Shaker’s lawyer for many years), Green MP Caroline Lucas, John McDonnell MP (who has organised a Parliamentary meeting tomorrow evening with the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, at which I’m speaking), the comedian Jeremy Hardy and, unexpectedly, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

Roger, Clive, Caroline and I addressed the crowd after a photo opportunity, as did John McDonnell when he arrived later, and Ray Silk of SSAC. I’ll be posting photos soon — and watch out for videos too — but in the meantime you’ll find some photos on our Twitter page and on our Facebook page, which we urge you to like, share and follow.

Today was also a good day for media coverage. It began with a hard-hitting column about Shaker’s case, justice and the law from Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph‘s chief political commentator, which included the following:

His continued incarceration in Guantánamo Bay is — by any standards of justice and decency — a stinking scandal. I suspect that British and American authorities fear that Mr Aamer, a highly articulate man, might well embarrass them upon his release. I hope he does. I have also heard suggestions that the United States would prefer to send him back to Saudi Arabia – but that is surely unthinkable because he would risk facing fresh maltreatment, illegal imprisonment and torture … This is a cause that demands the support of everyone who believes in justice, fairness and the rule of law.

Throughout the day, RT featured the launch as their major news story of the day, and at 6pm I was interviewed for their main news bulletin, which I’ll make available if/when it becomes available on YouTube. Thanks to those of you who saw it and said how much you enjoyed it. I did too!

There was also a Huffington Post article, and an article in the Guardian by Richard Norton-Taylor who came to the launch and learned from Clive Stafford Smith that Shaker is going to sue the British government for failing to secure his release:

Stafford Smith said he would sue the British government for failing to help get Aamer freed. He accused MI6 of “stabbing Shaker in the back” by giving US courts false intelligence. But he added: “There is no doubt the Foreign Office is honestly trying to bring Shaker back.”

He said the Foreign Office was responsible for MI6, the foreign intelligence service. “The [Foreign Office] needs to have a quiet conversation with MI6,” he said.

Norton-Taylor also noted:

Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, described Aamer’s continuing presence in Guantánamo as a “massive injustice”, that was “morally wrong”. He remained there “to save the blushes of successive governments”, she said.

Andy Worthington, of the “Stand with Shaker” campaign, described the case as a “travesty of justice”.

In conclusion, however, a Foreign Office spokesman told Norton-Taylor, “Mr Aamer’s case remains a high priority for the UK government and we continue to make clear to the US that we want him released and returned to the UK as a matter of urgency. Any decision regarding Mr Aamer’s release ultimately remains in the hands of the United States government” — the usual claims that have now worn so thin that they are more air than substance.

We call on the British government to abandon its excuses and to demand the immediate return of Shaker to his family in the UK.

To get involved, please visit this page on the website for details of how to send in photos and how to contact the British government to demand Shaker’s release — and also how to contact the Obama administration.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker” (calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

STOP PRESS! Roger Waters Flies into London to Support Monday Launch of We Stand With Shaker Campaign

Music legend Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s chief songwriter, flew into London this evening for the Monday lunchtime launch of We Stand With Shaker, a new campaign aimed at securing the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

The launch is at 12.30 today (Monday November 24) in Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament, by the statue of King George V. Roger will be there at 12.15 to answer questions and to stand for photos with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer that is a key part of the campaign.

Below is a powerful and moving video of Roger reading out a letter from Shaker this summer, provided to him by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve. Clive is also attending the launch, as well as John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington), Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion), comedian Jeremy Hardy, myself, and others tbc.

Shaker Aamer from Roger Waters on Vimeo.

For further information about the launch, please see my recent article, “We Stand With Shaker: Come to the Launch in London on Monday Nov. 24 Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo.” Please also like and share us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

And please be ready to visit the We Stand With Shaker website, launching very soon, featuring a promo video for the campaign — of me and my band The Four Fathers performing ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, the campaign song I wrote, as well as photos of celebrities standing with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, and photos of supporters from around the world holding up signs that read, ‘I Stand With Shaker.’

Let’s Stand With Shaker, and bring his long and unjust imprisonment to an end. He was first told that the US no longer wanted to hold him seven years ago — and seven years ago the British government began asking for his return, and yet he is still held.

There must be more excuses. Free Shaker Aamer now, and bring him home to his family in London!

Contacts:

Joanne MacInnes, campaign co-ordinator, on 07867 553580.

Andy Worthington, campaign director, on 07985 695338.

Please send photos to the campaign email address.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

We Stand With Shaker: Come to the Launch in London on Monday Nov. 24 Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

Initially published on the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner, as “We Stand With Shaker: New Campaign Launches on Nov. 24 Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo.” Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

On Monday Nov, 24, a new campaign, We Stand With Shaker, will be launched in London, calling for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and his return to his family in the UK. Shaker has twice been approved for release by the US authorities — under President Bush in 2007 and under President Obama in 2009 — and the British government has been calling for his return since 2007, and yet, inexplicably, he is still held.

The launch takes place from 12.30pm to 1.30pm in Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament, and will be attended by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington), Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion), comedian Jeremy Hardy, Andy Worthington, the director of the campaign, and others tbc. Those attending will be standing with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, designed to represent how he is the “elephant in the room” when it comes to Britain’s dealings with the US.

If you’re in London, or anywhere near, and want to bring an end to Shaker’s 13 unjustifiable years of imprisonment without charge or trial, please come along, in an orange jumpsuit if possible, and with a sign saying “I Stand With Shaker” to show your support, but if you don’t have any of these, or can’t get hold of them, don’t worry; please come along anyway and show your support. You will be warmly welcomed.

As well as those attending the launch, dozens of other lawyers, politicians, journalists, actors and comedians have already declared their support for the campaign by standing with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker, and photos will be released and circulated via social media once the campaign is launched officially on Monday. Celebrities and other well-known people in their fields who also want to show their support are invited to get in touch to Stand With Shaker.

Another key component of the campaign consists of photos of supporters standing with placards that read, “I Stand With Shaker” — or a more personalized message, if you like — which can be sent to us to be featured on the campaign website (launching on Monday) or on social media — our Facebook page is here, and our Twitter page is here.

Also on November 24, when the campaign launches, we will be releasing a promotional video, of Andy Worthington’s band The Four Fathers performing ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, a song he wrote for the campaign, and the day after the launch, on November 25 at 7pm in Committee Room 9 in the House of Commons, there will be a Parliamentary meeting, calling for Shaker’s release, organized by John McDonnell MP and supported by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, with speakers including Andy Worthington, solicitor Louise Christian and Shaykh Sulaiman Ghani, the imam of Tooting Islamic Centre.

Why now?

November 24, 2014 marks the 13th anniversary of the capture of Shaker Aamer, by bounty hunters in Afghanistan, where he had traveled with his family to provide humanitarian aid. He arrived in Guantánamo on February 14, 2002, the day his youngest son was born.

The reasons for Mr. Aamer’s ongoing imprisonment have never been adequately explained, but an independent medical expert recently confirmed that he has serious physical ailments and mental health issues as a result of his long imprisonment without charge or trial.

Any further delay is unacceptable, especially as, yesterday, five Guantánamo prisoners cleared for release (from Yemen and Tunisia) were given new homes in Georgia and Slovakia, while Shaker Aamer, who could easily be returned to the UK, is still held.

The ‘We Stand With Shaker’ campaign is encouraging celebrities and members of the public worldwide to take part in our photo campaign, to educate the public about Mr. Aamer’s plight, and to put pressure on the British government to demand his immediate release, and the US government to free him to resume his life in the UK.

For further information, please contact: Joanne MacInnes, campaign co-ordinator, on: +44 (0)7867 553580 or Andy Worthington, campaign director, by email.

Note: ‘We Stand With Shaker’ has the support of Reprieve, and other organizations including the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, Close Guantánamo, the London Guantánamo Campaign, Witness Against Torture, World Can’t Wait and Code Pink.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Victory for Labour MP’s Private Member’s Bill To Repeal the Tory Privatisation of the NHS and Exempt the NHS from the TTIP Agreement

Congratulations to Clive Efford, the Labour MP for Eltham and Plumstead, in south east London, and the 240 other MPs who voted for his Private Member’s Bill, the National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill, which aims to repeal the worst aspects of the privatising Health and Social Care Act that the Tory-led coalition government passed in 2012 (which I covered in detail at the time, prior to successfully campaigning to save Lewisham Hospital from destruction), and to protect the NHS from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a planned trade deal between the EU and the US, which, as the #noTTIP protest group explained, will, if it goes ahead, “grant corporations the power to sue governments, threatening to lock-in the privatisation of our schools and NHS. Rules that protect workers, the environment, food safety, digital rights and privacy would be undermined, with harmful industries like fracking encouraged.” See my article about TTIP here, and my media interviews here and here.

Only 18 MPs voted against the bill, and as the campaigning group 38 Degrees noted in an email to supporters, “It looks like the government told their MPs to boycott the vote. Maybe they realised they couldn’t win.” Or maybe they also realised how unpopular their privatising reforms are with the general public, who, for a change, seem to see through their lies. The bill can now move forward in the hope of becoming law — although that is a slim chance, as Private Member’s Bills rarely get that far. As Denis Campbell argued in the Guardian, however, “the admission by an unnamed cabinet minister last month that the [2012 Health and Social Care Act] was this government’s greatest folly (quoted on the front page of the Times) and the fact that 44% of the public think the NHS is under threat from private health companies suggests Efford’s bill has caught a mood.”

As the general political landscape shifts to the right, with UKIP promoted largely unchallenged by the media, the Tories opportunistically drifting further to the right to compensate and Labour suffering a damaging identity crisis, the stage is being set for an election campaign dominated by distractions about immigration, while a dangerous truth is obscured — that, if the Tories can somehow get into power again, perhaps through another Frankenstein’s Monster coalition, they may well take us out of the EU, destroying all our human rights legislation so that we can embark on a policy of ethnic cleansing (the enforced repatriation so beloved by UKIP), as well as furthering, unchallenged, their own disastrous mission, under the guise of austerity, to destroy the taxpayer-funded state and privatise almost everything except their own jobs, with disastrous effects for tens of millions of British people.

I’m short of time right now, as I’m preparing to launch a new campaign, We Stand With Shaker, to try to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and his safe return to his family in the UK, so I’m cross-posting below what Clive Efford wrote for Epolitix, which provides an informative take on the need for his bill:

The Tories fought the last election with a promise not to impose any top-down reorganisation of the NHS. Yet two years later they did exactly that with their 2012 Act which unleashed the full force of the market onto our NHS. The Act requires NHS services to be put out to competitive tender so that any company can bid for the contracts.

The result is that millions of pounds are now being wasted on lawyers and accountants to prepare and assess tenders for NHS services whilst patients are left waiting longer and longer for treatment. Since the Act was passed some 70% of contracts that have been tendered – worth £2.6 billion – have gone to private sector companies.

The 2012 Act also allowed NHS hospitals to generate up to 49% of their income from private patients. In one hospital where private income has increased ten-fold, the number of patients waiting too long for operations each month has risen from 70 in 2010 to 490 now.

Unison has recently revealed that at the same time as the NHS is being opened up to private companies, 64 government MPs, both Tory and Lib Dem, have links to companies with private healthcare interests including some of the most senior members of the cabinet like David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

People need to realise that this pace of privatisation means the NHS will not have the capacity to compete in the future leaving us all at the mercy of the private sector. Decisions are being made in the interests of competition and not NHS patients. My Bill will reverse that.

The Bill will also give Parliament sovereignty over the NHS and will protect it from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which threatens to allow private companies to use the courts to force the wholesale privatisation of the NHS.

My Bill will not save the NHS overnight — only the election of a Labour government can do that. But it does give all MPs the opportunity to accept that the 2012 Act has been a disaster and to begin to create an NHS which puts patient care at the centre of all it does, not private profit.

I’m also posting below what Dr. Onkar Sahota, a member of the London Assembly for Ealing and Hillingdon, a practising GP and the chairman of the London Assembly Health Committee, wrote about Clive Efford’s bill on Left Foot Forward:

As a Londoner, a politician, a doctor and a parent it is my view that we must support Clive Efford’s private members bill … to repeal the worst aspects of the Health and Social Care Act.

In just two years this unmandated and top-down reorganisation has fragmented our NHS. It squandered £3bn of tax payer money at a time when real term funding has been cut for five years; it has left our NHS on its knees.

The service is being forced to the brink of privatisation and is being pushed to engage in a race to the bottom, putting pounds above patient care.

Clive Efford’s bill … aims to save the NHS from complete atomisation, competition and what has been a privatisation by Jeremy Hunt [and his predecessor Andrew Lansley] in all but name.

I have always been open minded about reforming the NHS, but what happened two years ago was nothing short of vandalism.

The coalition’s Health and Social Care Act created an NHS that is open to complete unfettered free market competition. It asks doctors to manage huge commissioning budgets which they neither have the time nor the training for, and then blames them for all that is going wrong in the NHS.

Things have simply got worse under this government, and in London we are suffering crisis after crisis. Seeing a GP is getting harder. Being a GP is getting harder. Cancer waiting times and patient experience ratings are among the worst in the country. A&E waiting times are getting longer and ambulance response times are in free fall.

Under this government’s ‘reforms’ NHS London has been replaced by 32 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG). This fragmented commissioning across London causes massive inefficiencies, internal conflicts and confusion. The NHS is fragmenting structurally and financially, none of which is good for the patients it is there to serve.

Under this government there is no trade protection for the NHS. There are fears that once the EU-US trade agreement is signed next year, US health care companies will have more power over the NHS than our own elected government.

Clive Efford’s Bill would rewrite the rules and stop the NHS being held to ransom.

It would remove the power of the NHS Monitor to act as a competition enforcer.

It would remove the NHS from any free trade partnerships and thus protect our health service from huge international competitors.

Finally, it would return responsibility of the NHS back to the secretary of state for Health, reinstating democratic accountability for the decisions made in our health service.

This bill is about protecting the NHS as a unified service to all, free at the point of need regardless of income or ability to pay. It is time we took back our NHS.

Note: There’s an e-petition in support of Clive Efford’s bill here, which needs 150,000 signatures by March 2015 to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate. You can also support it here via the Labour Party. Also, please read Caroline Molloy’s more detailed analysis of the bill’s strengths and weaknesses for Open Democracy. And don’t miss veteran Labour back-bencher Dennis Skinner tearing into UKIP’s new MP, the Tory defector Mark Reckless, on the BBC’s website. As the BBC noted, Mark Reckless “suggested that some EU citizens living in the UK would only be able to stay for a ‘transitional period’ if the UK left the European Union.” In response, “[i]n a debate on the NHS in the Commons, Mr. Skinner said that he had had a ‘United Nations heart bypass’ carried out by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor and a Nigerian registrar.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.