Andy Worthington's Blog, page 125

European Court of Human Rights Hears Evidence About CIA Torture Prison in Poland

[image error]On Monday and Tuesday, an important step took place in the quest for those who ordered and undertook torture in the Bush administration’s “war on terror” to be held accountable for their actions, when the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg held a hearing to examine the role of the Polish authorities in the extraordinary rendition, secret detention and torture of two men currently held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Both men are amongst the 14 “high-value detainees” who arrived at Guantánamo in September 2006 after years of incommunicado detention and torture in a variety of CIA “black sites,” one of which was in Poland, and as Interights, the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, explained in a news release, “This historic court hearing [is] the first time a European country has been taken to court for allowing the CIA to run a torture site on its territory and comes after years of silence from the Polish government about the CIA’s prison there.”

The cases of these two men are enormously significant for everyone seeking accountability, as they are two of only three prisoners whom the US had admitted were subjected to waterboarding, the ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning. With another “high-value detainee,” Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they were the only men held at a CIA “black site” in Thailand prior to their transfer to Poland in December 2002. In October 203, they were moved to a secret “black site” within Guantánamo, identified as Strawberry Fields, and were then moved around a number of other CIA “black sites” in Romania, Lithuania and Morocco until their eventual return to Guantánamo in 2006.

The Bush administration’s torture program was initially designed for Abu Zubaydah, a stateless Palestinian seized in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002. He was initially touted as al-Qaeda’s number 3, although in reality he was nothing more than the gatekeeper for a training camp that was not affiliated with al-Qaeda. He is apparently in dreadful shape, and suffers regular seizures, although, as befits his downgraded status, he has never been charged. Jason Leopold of Al-Jazeera recently obtained his diaries, which reveal in detail his mental state and confirm that he was never a member of al-Qaeda (please also read this powerful article about him by one of his lawyers, Brent Mickum, written nearly five years ago).

Al-Nashiri, who was seized in the United Arab Emirates in October 2002, has been charged with being the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and has been put forward for a trial by military commission, in which he faces the death penalty if convicted. However, in March 2007, at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in Guantánamo, his military-appointed personal representative told the tribunal, “The detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him. Also, the detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop.”

Interights is just one of a number of organizations and individuals representing Abu Zubaydah, the others being Joseph Margulies of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School, Jankowski & Co. in Poland (where Bartlomiej Jankowski is Abu Zubaydah’s counsel), Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity, and Helsińka Fundacja Praw Człowieka, the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland. Al-Nashiri is represented by the Open Society Justice Initiative.

Describing the case before the ECHR, Interights stated, “Poland stands accused of facilitating Abu Zubaydah’s extraordinary rendition onto its territory, being complicit in his incommunicado detention, and subjecting him to torture and ill-treatment. Poland is also accused of complicity in his transfer to another state despite being aware Abu Zubaydah was at substantial risk of further torture and ill treatment. A pre-trial criminal investigation initiated by Polish prosecutors in 2008 purporting to examine these events has proven to be ineffective and as a consequence Poland is accused of breaching its legal obligation to properly and promptly investigate the claims made against it.”

Describing al-Nashiri’s case, the Open Society Justice Initiative stated that al-Nashiri “accuses Poland of allowing him to be held incommunicado and tortured at a secret CIA base at Stare Kiejkuty in the northeast of the country,” and argues that Poland violated his rights under European law, and also “by allowing his transfer out of the country despite the risk of further ill-treatment,” and, after his transfer to Guantánamo, “an unfair trial and possible death sentence.” The complaint “also accuses Poland of failing in its duty to properly investigate what happened, as required by European law.”

Before the hearing, Amrit Singh of the Open Society Justice Initiative said, “Poland must account for its complicity in CIA torture and for rendering Mr. al-Nashiri to face the death penalty after a trial by a Guantánamo military commission that does not meet international standards. In the face of Polish and US efforts to draw a veil over these abuses, the European Court of Human rights now has an opportunity to break this conspiracy of silence and to uphold the rule of law.”

“Overwhelming and uncontested evidence” of the existence of the secret prison in Poland

In a press release following the first day of the hearing, which, unusually and unacceptably, was held in private, Reprieve stated that the ECHR heard “overwhelming and uncontested evidence” of the existence of the “black site” in Poland — at Stare Kiejkuty, in the north east of the country — which explicitly involved the Polish government having knowledge of it.

Reprieve investigator Crofton Black, who has been researching the issue of secret prisons in Europe during the “war on terror,” and was allowed access to the secret session, said, “We have now heard overwhelming and uncontested evidence that the CIA was running a secret torture prison on Polish soil, with the Polish government’s knowledge. Despite being given many opportunities to do so, the Polish government has failed to contest that it knew prisoners were being held beyond the rule of law and tortured by the CIA inside their own country. It has also become clear that the Polish government’s investigation into the issue was in reality nothing more than a smoke-screen, which was neither designed nor intended to get to the truth.”

He added, “European support for the CIA’s torture programme is one of the darkest chapters of our recent history. It is encouraging that the court now looks set to bring it to light, where the government has sought to sweep it under the carpet.”

As the Guardian noted, Amrit Singh added, “The court heard expert testimony [on Monday] confirming how Polish officials filed false flight plans and assisted in the cover-up of CIA operations. In a secluded villa, hidden from sight, CIA interrogators subjected him to torture: to mock executions while he stood naked and hooded before them; to painful stress positions that nearly dislocated his arms from his shoulders; and to threats of bringing in his mother to sexually abuse her in front of him.”

Reporting on the second, open day of the hearing, the Guardian also noted that the court heard a submission from Ben Emmerson QC, the UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, who argued that where gross or “systematic human rights violations are alleged to have occurred, the right to know the truth is not only an individual right that belongs to the immediate victim of the violation, but also a collective right that belongs to the whole of society.”

I certainly hope that the European Court of Human Rights will find that the Polish authorities acted unlawfully in hosting a CIA “black site” on its territory, although I am prepared for disappointment. After all, anyone who knows anything about the Bush administration’s torture program knows that the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to shield any Bush administration officials (up to and including the former president, his vice president Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld) from accountability for their actions.

In Poland’s case, this has involved a blanket refusal to cooperate with the Polish prosecutor investigating the cases of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and it is sadly significant that this week’s ECHR hearing had to rely on publicly available information about the two men, in large part because of US obstruction, but also because the men’s lawyers are prevented from divulging any information about their clients’ cases. As the Guardian described Abu Zubaydah’s predicament, “Communication with his lawyers is restricted, making it impossible to pass on information or evidence directly from him to the ECHR. The presentation of his case is principally based on publicly available sources.”

Noticeably, a Polish official also cited problems with the US, telling the court that “his country was the only European state that was ‘conducting a real investigation’ and that the inquiry had been hindered by the fact that it was difficult for the prosecutor to talk to the complainants,” as the Guardian described it. He added that relations between Poland and the US “were subject to secrecy.”

The absolutely unacceptable blanket censorship of the “high-value detainees” in Guantánamo — involving the censorship of every single word that takes place — and has taken place — between the men and their lawyers, since their arrival at Guantánamo in 2006, is, however, essentially unchallenged in the US, where there is also very little outrage — or even commentary — about the fact that, in Europe, mechanisms are underway to try and secure justice for two men tortured by the CIA, while, in Guantánamo, one man is facing a kangaroo court trial and the death penalty, and the other is permanently locked away with no trial in sight.

When this kind of injustice goes unchallenged, it is hard to see that the European Court of Human Rights will be able to land a blow on the US, but a ruling against Poland would be a powerful message to the US, that not everyone is content to “look forwards as opposed to looking backwards,” as President Obama said before taking office in January 2009.

Note: Interights has filed a separate complaint before the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Abu Zubaydah, against Lithuania, where he was also secretly detained and abused at a CIA “black site.” To date, as Interights describe it, “European states alleged to have been involved in the extraordinary rendition programme have failed to properly address allegations relating to their involvement. This case presents the Court with an opportunity to ensure States understand their obligations to the public and to victims in such cases.” The Open Society Justice Initiative has also filed a separate ECHR complaint on al-Nashiri’s behalf against Romania, where he was also secretly detained and abused at another CIA “black site.”

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 four-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 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.

Meet the Cleared Algerian Prisoners in Guantánamo Who Fear Being Repatriated

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. 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 Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story by Jess Bravin looking at an important  — and depressing — development at Guantánamo, concerning the Obama administration’s plans to repatriate two Algerian prisoners against their will.

As Jess Bravin described it, he had spoken to people familiar with the stories of the two men — Belkacem Bensayah and Djamel Ameziane — who had told him that both men “fear that Islamist extremists will try to recruit them and may attack or kill them when they discover [they] don’t share their commitment to violence.”

Robert Kirsch, one of the attorneys for Belkacem Bensayah, said that the US government has “ignored the protests” of his client and of Djamel Ameziane. He called the proposed repatriation “the most callous, political abuse of these men.”

Kirsch added that the repatriation was being speeded up so that the Obama administration “can show progress on its troubled campaign” to close Guantánamo, as Jess Bravin decribed it.

Both men were approved for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office in 2009. They are just two out of of 84 cleared prisoners still held, out of 164 prisoners in total, but it is completely unacceptable for them to be forcibly repatriated just so that President Obama administration can look as if he is fulfilling his promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, which he made in a major speech on national security issues in May.

As Bravin explained, both men have persistently made it clear that they fear being returned to Algeria.

Djamel Ameziane, 46, is, as he put it, “an ethnic Berber who left Algeria to avoid oppression,” and lived in Austria and Canada, where he was well regarded as a chef, prior to his capture in Pakistan in 2001. He is represented by lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, and we told his story here last year. Bravin noted that court documents indicated that “he has been fighting repatriation to Algeria since at least 2009, and has applied for resettlement in Canada” (see this Toronto Star report from June).

Bravin failed to mention that, last March, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued what was described as “a landmark admissibility report” in his case.

As CCR explained in a press release:

This ruling marks the first time the IACHR has accepted jurisdiction over the case of a man detained at Guantánamo, and underscores the fact that there has been no effective domestic remedy available to victims of unjust detentions and other abuses at the base. The IACHR will now move to gather more information on the substantive human rights law violations suffered by Djamel Ameziane — including the harsh conditions of confinement he has endured, the abuses inflicted on him, and the illegality of his detention.

The IACHR will specifically review the US government’s failure to transfer Djamel Ameziane or any man detained at Guantánamo for more than a year — the longest period of time without a transfer since the prison opened in January 2002. This failure has moved the United States further out of compliance with international human rights law and the precautionary measures issued by the IACHR to Djamel Ameziane (2008) and other detained men (2002).

Belkacem Bensayah, 51, is one of six Algerians kidnapped by US agents in Bosnia — where they had been living and working for many years — and taken to Guantánamo in January 2002. All six had been seized in October 2001, at the request of the US authorities, in connection with an alleged plot to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo — a plot that turned out to be groundless. As Jess Bravin put it, “The Sarajevo government handed them over to the US in January 2002, despite Bosnian court orders that there were no grounds to hold them.”

In November 2008 five of the men had their habeas corpus petitions granted by Judge Richard Leon in the District Court in Washington D.C., after Leon — a George W. Bush appointee — found that the government had failed to demonstrate that they were connected to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Bensayah, however, had his habeas petition denied, after Judge Leon was swayed by the government’s arguments that he was some sort of al-Qaeda “facilitator”, who, as Jess Bravin put it, “had planned to go to Afghanistan to take up arms against the US and assist others in the same.”

Crucially, the appeals court in Washington D.C. later ordered the District Court to reconsider Bensayah’s case, after the government “backed away from some of the claims it had made” against him, but by this time he had already been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Significantly, Kirsch said that Bensayah “wishes to be returned to Bosnia, where his wife and daughters are citizens and still live, or some third country where he could be reunited with his family,” and not to Algeria. However, a US official responded by telling Jess Bravin that “Washington’s preference is to repatriate detainees to the country where they are citizens.”

Nevertheless, it seems that plans for sending Belkacem Bensayah and Djamel Ameziane home are well advanced. Alarmingly, Kirsch said that both men had been given “exit interviews” by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which Jess Bravin described as “a routine procedure ahead of transfer from Guantánamo.” Kirsch added that both men made their objections to their proposed repatriation clear to the Red Cross representatives, and that the ICRC, in turn, “has asked the US to reconsider its decision.”

Bravin noted that officials refused to comment on individual cases, but said they were concerned to “ensure security and humane treatment” when prisoners are transferred.” They added that, over the last few years, they had “put off repatriation to several countries, including Tunisia, Syria and Uzbekistan, as well as Algeria,” when prisoners “said they feared mistreatment at home.”

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale told Bravin, “Consistent with the Convention Against Torture and our own commitment to human rights, the United States is firm in its commitment to not transfer detainees to countries where we believe they would face torture. The United States takes seriously all credible claims of mistreatment.”

Bravin sought a comment about the men’s cases from Cliff Sloan, the State Department’s special envoy for Guantánamo closure, who was appointed by President Obama in June. Bravin noted that it was Cliff Sloan who had “arranged for the repatriation of two other Algerians in August” — the only two prisoners released since President Obama’s promise, in May, to resume releasing prisoners — although Sloan wouldn’t comment on individual cases. All he would say is, “We are moving ahead on the president’s commitment to close Guantánamo responsibly, and we are making progress.”

Others commentators were as critical as Robert Kirsch of the decision to forcibly repatriate the two men. Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch said, “When you hear people say they would rather spend the rest of their lives in Guantánamo than go to a particular place, you have to take that seriously.”

She pointed out that Aziz Abdul Naji, who was forcibly repatriated in 2010, had been imprisoned upon his return. In fact, as I explained recently, he was convicted in January 2012 of “belonging to a terrorist group abroad,” and is now serving a three-year sentence.

Andrea Prasow explained that the Obama administration’s focus on repatriating prisoners to Algeria “stemmed from a determination that the country met the security conditions for transfer Congress imposed” in recent years, but stressed that it was unacceptable that, “while the US moves to forcibly repatriate the Algerians, cleared detainees from other countries haven’t been released.”

That is certainly true, and it needs to be asked why some of these other men — including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, for example — are not freed instead of the unwilling Algerians. Other prisoners long cleared for release — five Tunisians; the Mauritanian Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz; Salem Gherebi, a Libyan; Saad Qahtani, a Saudi; and Ibrahim Idris, a severely mentally ill Sudanese prisoner — also need to be freed, regardless of whether the administration will need to make certifications to Congress to do so.

As Belkacem Bensayah and Djamel Ameziane continue to try and resist their enforced repatriation, Robert Kirsch told Jess Bravin that he had written to the Algerian ambassador in Washington, “imploring his government not to accede to an involuntary repatriation,” as Bravin put it.

Kirsch wrote, “Mr. Bensayah fears he will be targeted by Muslim extremists in Algeria. He believes those extremists will expect him to sympathize with them — only because he was held at Guantanamo — and that they will attack or even kill him when they learn he opposes their violent ways.” He added, significantly, that those fears “have been confirmed to us by a representative of the Algerian government.”

I can only state, in concluding, that I hope the Obama administration will think again about its unacceptable plans to repatriate Belkacem Bensayah and Djamel Ameziane, and hope that arrangements can be made for them to be returned, instead, to Bosnia and, preferably, Canada.

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 four-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 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.

Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers

[image error] Buy The Battle of the Beanfield here.

Yesterday, December 1, 2013, was a cheerless anniversary of sorts — 28 and a half years since the Battle of the Beanfield, on June 1, 1985, when 1,300 police from six counties and the MoD trapped and violently decommissioned a convoy of several hundred travellers — men, women and children, the new nomads of the UK, including free festival goers, anarchists, and anti-nuclear activists — en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. From humble origins in 1974, the festival had grown, by 1984, into a month-long counter-cultural extravaganza attended by tens of thousands of people, and in 1985, fresh from her success in suppressing the miners, Margaret Thatcher turned her attention to the festival and its loose network of organisers, planning to destroy it as ruthlessly as she was destroying British industry.

in 2005, to mark the 20th anniversary of this key event in the modern state’s clampdown on dissent, I compiled and edited a book about the Battle of the Beanfield, drawing on transcripts I made of interviews with travellers and witnesses to the events of the day and the months building up to it that were recorded for a 1991 TV documentary, “Operation Solstice” (screened on Channel 4 and available to buy here); the police log, liberated from a court case brought by some of the victims of the Beanfield; and other relevant information, book-ended with essays putting the Beanfield in context, written by myself and Alan Dearling, whose publishing company, Enabler Publications, launched the book in June 2005.

Eight and a half years later, The Battle of the Beanfield is still in print, and, to slightly contradict the heading of this article, it has never actually been out of print, although in summer, when Alan and I reprinted it, I was down to my last few copies. You can buy it here, in time for Christmas, if you, or anyone you’re hoping to buy a present for, was there, was affected by it, or is simply interested in knowing more about one of the key events that shaped the relationship between the state and those perceived as difficult. I should note that my previous book, “Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion,” is also still available, as is my third book, “The Guantánamo Files.” 

After years of exclusion from Stonehenge on the solstice, revellers secured a court victory in 1999 that allowed their return to the great stones on the solstice in 2000, for a programme of “Managed Open Access” that takes place every year, attended by tens of thousands of people.

Elsewhere, though, the assault on the traveller community and the laws that followed it paved the way not only for the permanent oppression of travellers and gypsies, but also the rolling back of the British people’s ability to gather freely and to collectively challenge the status quo. Although the Beanfield was followed by unexpected movements of dissent — acid house and warehouse raves, the road protest movement, Reclaim the Streets, the massive anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s — it seems to me that the 21st century has brought to an end the kind of dissent that played such a prominent part in post-war Britain, and, particularly, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Following on from the laws enacted from the Beanfield to the 1990s, the 9/11 attacks allowed the government of Tony Blair to further curtail civil liberties, to an alarming degree, and to enshrine the erosion of human rights as a key element of modern government. And of course, Blair also drove the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the state of permanent war and jingoistic nationalism that we now seem to be stuck with. In addition, housing — a basic necessity for all — has become, instead, the key driver of the economy, manifested through a bubble that is artificially maintained by the government and the banks, working to further enrich the rich, and to make sure that what would be best for people and the economy as a whole — a massive programme of social homebuilding, to create genuinely affordable homes for rent — is not going to happen.

Making a property bubble into the main focus of the economy is a dangerous and disgustingly greedy distortion of a well-functioning economy, but it is not surprising given that it is part of the overall criminal behaviour of the financial markets, unregulated and still out of control, even though they crashed the global economy in 2008 — and, it must be noted, their largely unquestioning and complicit backers in government.

Since the time of the Beanfield, when the status quo was permanently challenged, experimentation and iconoclasm were rife, money was not the only arbiter of existence, and, for various reasons, the doors of perception were wide open, it seems to me that life has shrunk, and has had its spirit crushed. It is impossible now to imagine tens of thousands of people responding to massive unemployment by taking to the road in old coaches and buses and former military vehicles, although for many people today — and especially young people, plagued with massive unemployment  — it would make even more sense than it did in the 1970s and 1980s.

That, however, looks extremely unlikely. 28 years ago, it was unimaginable that the present would look like it does now, but what we are currently living through has no room for nomadic romanticism and iconoclasm on a shoestring. Instead, the world now demonstrates the triumph of excessive materialism, in which everything has been commodified, and far too many of my fellow human beings seem to have become nothing more than dead-eyed, gym-pumped machines. In this world, driven by shark-toothed, insatiable greed on an unthinkable scale, in institutions that like to pretend they are lawful and appropriate when they are no such thing, I long for the return of the kind of dissent that I experienced at Stonehenge in 1983 and 1984, or in 1995 at the first “Reclaim the Streets” event in Camden High Street, when dissenters crashed two old cars and took over Camden High Street for the day, taking back “our” spaces from the cars that dominated us then and that dominate us even more completely now — or any of the events that followed, including the takeover of the M41 in Shepherd’s Bush in July 1996, the massive J18 Carnival Against Capital in the City of London in June 1999, and the other anti-globalisation protests that took place around the world at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.

Ditch the car, stop being greedy, unplug yourselves from your i-Pods and your smart phones and interact with the world around you: these are messages that could have been beamed to the present from 1985, from the world I commemorated in The Battle of the Beanfield, and the spirit whose absence pains me as Britain, my home, descends into hard, harsh, tiny-minded xenophobia and racism and flag-waving pea-brained nationalism, and the only perceived virtues are greed, exploitation, worship of the rich and hatred of the poor.

Below is an excellent 50-minute “Reclaim the Streets” documentary, via YouTube, chronicling the protest movement of the 1990s:

For further information, see my articles “Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present” (2008), “In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield” (linking to my 2009 Guardian article, “Remember the Battle of the Beanfield”), “It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival” (2010), “New Photo Book on the 1994 Solsbury Hill Road Protest,” “The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby” (featuring one of the chapters from the book), “Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield,” “RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart,” “Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?” (2011), “Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society” (2012), “Radio: On Eve of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, Andy Worthington Discusses the Battle of the Beanfield and Dissent in the UK,” “It’s 28 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Crushed Travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield” and “Memories of Youth and the Need for Dissent on the 29th Anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival” (both 2013).

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 four-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 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.

Abandoned in Guantánamo: Mohammed Taha Mattan, an Innocent Palestinian

As we approach the 12th anniversary of the opening of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (on January 11, 2014), it remains profoundly unacceptable that, of the remaining 164 prisoners, 84 were cleared for release nearly four years ago, in January 2010, by a high-level, inter-agency task force appointed by President Obama shortly after he took office in 2009.

These men are still held because of legislative obstacles raised by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act, which are designed to prevent prisoners from being released, and because President Obama has been unwilling to spend political capital challenging Congress or bypassing lawmakers using a waiver in the NDAA.

In the cases of two-thirds of the cleared prisoners, an additional complication, until recently, was that they are Yemeni citizens, and after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a NIgerian recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a bomb on a plane bound for Detroit in December 2009, President Obama imposed a ban on releasing Yemenis from Guantánamo, which he only lifted in May this year, in a major speech on national security issues.

The president lifted his ban in response to intense criticism domestically and internationally, which had been prompted by the prisoners embarking upon a prison-wide hunger strike to remind the world of their plight. As well as lifting his ban on releasing Yemeni prisoners, he also promised to resume releasing cleared prisoners. However, despite this promise, just two prisoners have been released since his speech — two Algerians released in August.

While 56 Yemenis await a decision about their future (with some high-level discussions taking place regarding the possible establishment of a rehabilitation center in Yemen), many of the 28 others could be released tomorrow — Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, for example, the five remaining Tunisians, four Afghans, and Ibrahim Idris, a severely ill Sudanese prisoner. In October, Idris had the distinction of being the first Guantánamo prisoner not to have his habeas corpus petition challenged by the government, and yet he is still held.

For a handful of other cleared prisoners, third countries are required to offer them a new home, as they cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be persecuted by their home governments (as is the case with the three remaining Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), or because they cannot go home.

The case of Mohammed Taha Mattan

This is the case for Mohammed Taha Mattan (aka Tahamuttan), a Palestinian national who needs a new country to offer him a home because, like the handful of other Palestinians who were held at Guantánamo (and who have all been released in third countries), he cannot be repatriated without the cooperation of the Israeli government, which has no interest in doing so.

Mohammed was recommended for release in October 2007, as was revealed in one of the formerly classified military documents (the Detainee Assessment Briefs) that were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and was recommended for release again by President Obama’s task force in January 2010. In September 2010, he was close to being released, and given a new home in Germany, but although three prisoners had been considered for repatriation, only two were accepted - a Syrian, and another Palestinian, Ayman al-Shurafa. Mattan was the prisoner who was turned down, and, sadly, his resettlement was only refused for domestic political reasons.

Back in June, in an article I couldn’t manage to cover at the time, because I was devoting most of my energies to reporting on the hunger strike at Guantánamo, Lauren Carasik, the Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Western New England University School of Law (and one of four attorneys working on his case), wrote about his story for Al-Jazeera.

Carasik began by describing Mattan as “a compelling, peaceful and singularly gracious man,” who, nevertheless, is “caught up in a vortex of politics beyond his control.” She noted that June 19 marked the 11th anniversary of his arrival at Guantánamo, almost three months after his capture, with 15 other young men, in a raid on a university guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Although Mattan is a tall man, Carasik noted that he “has always exuded a preternatural tranquility,” and that “his gentle and dignified spirit has somehow survived the years of brutal physical and emotional torture, isolation, humiliation and despair,” in which he has “missed the milestones we all take for granted, from the marriage of his siblings to the birth of nephews and nieces.”

In fact, Mattan was “in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” even though he had only traveled to Pakistan in “pursuit of a peaceful and erudite life.”

Explaining how Mattan ended up in Pakistan, Carasik noted that he was born in Burqa, a village in the West Bank, in January 1979, and was the second oldest of 15 children. Described as being “a dutiful and intellectually curious child,” he apparently “passed his time reading, studying and assisting his parents with raising his 13 younger sisters and brothers.” As he grew older, he joined Jamaat al-Tablighi, the global missionary organisation, which has millions of members worldwide, but although he wanted to continue his education after graduating from high school in 1997, the situation in the West Bank was too unsettled. He managed to find work in construction, “hoping,” as Lauren Carasik put it, “to provide some meager economic support to his struggling family.”

In 2000, when the second intifada began, and life became even harder, Mattan, who was 21 years old, decided that the only way forward was to leave home. As Carasik described it, “Encouraged by his fellow Tablighis, Mattan planned to study, pray and fulfill the mission required by his faith.”

In September 2001, he traveled to Pakistan, and specifically to the Tablighi center in Raiwind, where he undertook missionary work. He stayed there for four months, and then traveled west, in the direction of Afghanistan. At a mosque in Quetta, he met a man who warned him not to travel to Afghanistan because the authorities would “suspect him of involvement in the fighting there.”

He then decided to return to Raiwind, but on the way, while worrying about how little money he had left, he met a man who told him about the student guesthouse in Faisalabad, where he said, there were other Arab students “who might be able to advise him about how he could pursue his studies.” However, soon after his arrival, on March 28, 2002, the Pakistani security services raided the house, seizing all the young men who were there, and then handing them over to the US military, who took them first to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and then to Guantánamo.

Lauren Carasik closed her article by stating, “Mattan’s dreams of books, learning and a family of his own have faded against a harsh reality that bears no resemblance to the life he set out to find 12 years ago.” She added, “If the US acts now, perhaps Mattan can resurrect some normalcy, reunite with his loved ones, start a family, and find hope and solace in the rhythms of life and the laughter of children he has not heard in 11 long years. The US can never restore to Mattan his youth, return his lost years, or make him whole for all he has suffered, but it can and must stop compounding this egregious mistake and move him out of Guantánamo without further delay.”

An appeal to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention

Last month, as Mohammed Taha Mattan continued to languish at Guantánamo, Gordon Woodward of the law firm Harrison, Schnader, Segal and Lewis LLP, who is lead counsel in the team representing him, wrote an article for the McClatchy-Tribune News Service in which he provided an update on his story. Poignantly, he noted that the US justice system “was created to ensure that the rights of the accused are protected; through the guaranteed right of access to counsel, the guarantee of a fair and speedy trial and, perhaps most important, the placement of the burden on the accuser to prove his case.” In Mohammed Taha Mattan’s case, however, as he explained, the US “is violating those foundational principles in the name of the war on terror, ensnaring an innocent man in its vast reach.”

Woodward added that, because he has been “[u]nable to obtain relief by any legal process in the United States,” Mattan “has turned to the United Nations, filing a petition with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.” That petition was submitted by Mattan’s lawyers in July, and alleges that his arbitrary and indefinite detention “violates principles of international law, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

Woodward noted that the UN Working Group had recently issued an opinion in another Guantánamo case, stating, as he put it, that a prisoner’s detention contravened international law, and requesting that the US “effectuate his release and provide appropriate reparations for his wrongful detention.”

I had missed that opinion, in the case of Obaidullah, an Afghan prisoner whose innocence has been established by his lawyers (although President Obama’s task force recommended him for prosecution). The opinion was issued on July 2, and was discussed by Ranjana Natarajan, Clinical Professor of Law, and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, on the website of the International Justice Resource Center.

It remains to be seen if Mohammed Taha Mattan’s submission to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention will also be successful, but I can find no reason to suppose that it will not be. The shame, for the US, is that the Obama administration has ignored the opinion regarding Obaidullah, and will presumably do so again, in the event of another unfavorable opinion. As Ranjana Natarajan stated, “In conformity with its working methods, the Working Group transmitted Mr. Obaidullah’s complaint to the US government and sought a response. The US government failed to respond for four months, after which time the Working Group issued its opinion.”

As Gordon Woodward stated towards the end of his article, “The fact that an innocent man continues to sit in a cell after 11 years — in the absence of charges, a speedy and fair trial and virtually any other due-process protections — is a violation of our nation’s core values.”

That is indeed true, but it is uncertain what it will take for President Obama to act. With a shred of optimism, Woodward concluded his article by stating, “The injustice occurring at Guantánamo Bay undermines how the world views our moral foundation. For our nation’s interests and in the interest of the remaining detainees, who over the last 11 years have all but lost hope, it must end now. If the United States is unwilling to ensure that justice is served, perhaps the international community can.”

Obaidullah’s case suggests that the international community is paying attention, and perhaps in Mohammed Taha Mattan’s case the Obama administration can be shamed into action. In May, President Obama promised to appoint two envoys — in the State Department and the Pentagon — to deal with the resettlement of prisoners. Those men — Cliff Sloan and Paul Lewis — have now been appointed, and last week they paid a visit to Guantánamo together. I hope they are paying attention to Mattan’s case — and that of Obaidullah — and I hope that they are recommending Obaidullah for release, and are looking into finding a third country to take Mohammed Taha Mattan, and to do so as swiftly as possible.

The time for justice for this young man, who, like many other prisoners, has lost over a third of his life in Guantánamo, is now. Not in the future, but now.

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 four-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 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.

Penny Lane: What We Learned This Week About Double Agents at Guantánamo

[image error]On Tuesday, out of nowhere, the Associated Press ran a story about a secret prison at Guantánamo that attracted a huge amount of attention from the media around the world — more attention, in fact, than at any time since the prison-wide hunger strike earlier this year, which, surprisingly, managed to retain much of the media’s attention for several months.

That, however, was a current story, whereas the AP’s story dealt with a secret facility that apparently existed between 2003 and 2006, in a now overgrown clearing at the end of a dirt road behind a ridge near the administrative offices of the prison.

There, in eight small cottages, the CIA housed and trained a handful of prisoners they had persuaded to become double agents, according to Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, who spoke to around ten current and former US officials for their story. All spoke anonymously “because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the secret program.”

Goldman and Apuzzo described the program as “a risky gamble,” because although the double agents might locate terrorist leaders for them, they might also turn against their employers. That, of course, is always a problem with double agents, although the AP was correct to note the stench of hypocrisy when it came to recruiting double agents at Guantánamo. “At the same time the government used the threat of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely,” Goldman and Apuzzo wrote, “it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA.”

As they described it, “only a handful” of prisoners, from a variety of countries, “were turned into spies who signed agreements to spy for the CIA,” although dozens of prisoners were evaluated for the program. The officials told the AP that some of these men “helped the CIA find and kill many top al-Qaida operatives,” while others “stopped providing useful information and the CIA lost touch with them.”

According to Goldman and Apuzzo’s sources, there were a number of reasons that prompted prisoners to cooperate. “Some received assurances that the US would resettle their families,” they wrote, adding, “Another thought al-Qaida had perverted Islam and believed it was his duty as a Muslim to help the CIA destroy it.”

Another only agreed to cooperate “after the CIA insinuated it would harm his children,” according to a former official, which, the AP claimed, was similar to threats made against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the five prisoners currently at Guantánamo who are charged with involvement in the 9/11 attacks. This, however is not an accurate statement, as Mohammed’s children were captured in September 2002 and interrogated before their father was seized six months later, and, according to a statement by the father of Majid Khan, another “high-value detainee” at Guantánamo, were “denied food and water,” and had “ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.”

Goldman and Apuzzo also noted that all the double agents were paid for their services, with payments totaling millions of dollars, which, officials said, “came from a secret CIA account, codenamed Pledge,” that is “used to pay informants” — which is rather ironic, given that Tariq al-Sawah and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, two of the most useful informants at Guantánamo, according to the authorities, have been paid nothing, are still held, and, in 2010, were recommended for prosecution by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009.

According to the AP, both the program and the agents “had various official CIA codenames,” but the secret camp was generally known as “Penny Lane.” For anyone aware of Guantánamo’s darker secrets, this was obviously a play on another secret camp at the prison, codenamed “Strawberry Fields,” whose name was exposed in another Associated Press report by Goldman and Apuzzo in August 2010. In existence from September 24, 2003 until March 27, 2004, it held four “high-value detainees,” according to the AP — Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh — and was closed when the Bush administration realized that the Supreme Court was likely to grant habeas corpus rights to the prisoners at Guantánamo (which it did in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, opening the prison’s doors to lawyers for the first time). Sent to the prisons the CIA operated in eastern Europe and Morocco, these four men men did not return to Guantánamo until September 2006, when they were flown back with ten other men, emptying — or mostly emptying — the CIA’s “black sites.”

While the “Strawberry Fields” reference was horribly clear, as a “forever” prison, from the lyrics, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the reference to “Penny Lane” might only have been because both songs were on a double A-side single issued by the Beatles in 1967. It’s rather disturbing, I think, to imagine Guantánamo’s unpleasant experiments being dreamt up by people who enjoyed the Beatles, and who, perhaps, when their work was done, went home and listened to these songs with their families.

Unlike “Strawberry Fields,” “Penny Lane” was apparently intended to replicate the feeling of a hotel. Officials told Goldman and Apuzzo that the cottages in the camp “had private kitchens, showers and televisions,” and each one “had a small patio.” The biggest luxury, they said, was “a real bed with a mattress.” They also spoke of privileges being made available to some of the men — pornography, for example. Officials also told Goldman and Apuzzo that some CIA officials “jokingly referred to” the cottages as “the Marriott.”

The AP article also noted that the double agent program had drawn the attention of both President Bush and President Obama. Bush, apparently, “personally interviewed a junior CIA case officer who had just returned home from Afghanistan, where the agency typically met with the agents.,” and, shortly after taking office, Obama “ordered a review of the former detainees working as double agents,” because, apparently, “they were providing information used in Predator drone strikes.”

I’m not quite sure what to make of the whole “Penny Lane” story. Clearly, there were double agents at Guantánamo. Omar Khadr’s brother, Abdurahman, was one, and his file was one of 14 that were missing when WikiLeaks obtained classified military files on almost all the prisoners, which were published in April 2011. I wrote an article about the missing files, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files,” and it may be that some of these men were also used as double agents, although it seems unlikely in most of these cases. Over the years, I have had my suspicions about other prisoners, and there have been a variety of rumors about others, but nothing that I would want to commit to print.

Now that I have had a few days to reflect on this story, I find a few aspects of it to be troubling — beyond its unexplained timing. The first, noted by my friend and colleague Jeff Kaye, is that the location of “Penny Lane” corresponds with the location identified in 2009 as “Camp No” by a number of soldiers working at Guantánamo, who told Scott Horton that they believed it was connected to the deaths of three prisoners in June 2006, allegedly as the result of a triple suicide. Horton subsequently wrote an award-winning article for Harper’s Magazine about the men’s claims, although the establishment closed ranks and refused to acknowledge the story.

To be honest, I don’t know what to make of this information although it unnerves me. If “Camp No” is “Penny Lane,” for example, then where was “Strawberry Fields” located, as some observers have thought that “Camp No” was “Strawberry Fields”? What I do know, however, is that I am saddened that a story relating to events that took place many years ago attracted the attention of the world’s media in a way that the plight of the men still held at Guantánamo no longer does. After the interest sparked by the hunger strike earlier this year, when, for a moment, it seemed as though, in newsrooms all around the world, journalists and their editors had remembered the injustice of Guantánamo we are now back to square one, with the media, for the most part, interested only in stories that have a whiff of scandal.

The men still held at Guantánamo — the 84 long cleared for release but still held, and the 80 others, for whom, in most cases, justice has gone AWOL — deserve more than this as the 12th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaches, on January 11, 2014. I will be interested to see if more information emerges about the story of Penny Lane and the double agents, but I now intend to turn my attention back to the men who are still held — and I invite you to join me.

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 four-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 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.

Save the NHS and Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo: Protest Photos, October and November 2013

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Save the NHS and Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, a set on Flickr.

I just wanted to make available a few photos — and a bit of explanatory text — from two of the campaigns that are closest to my heart: the campaign to close Guantánamo (and, specifically, to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison), and the campaign to save the NHS from savage cuts and privatisation at the hands of both the Tory-led coalition government and senior NHS managers who have forgotten what the NHS is for.

The first photo in this set is from the regular weekly vigil outside Parliament for Shaker Aamer, held by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign on most Wednesdays, from noon until 2pm, and the second — of some Close Guantánamo cupcakes, featuring Shaker’s prison number, 239 — is from the recent march and rally for Shaker in Battersea, which I spoke at on Saturday.

Shaker Aamer is one of 84 men who are still held despite being cleared for release by a high-level, inter-agency task force established by President Obama shortly after he took office in 2009. These men are still held, however, because of obstruction by Congress, and an unwillingness on the part of President Obama to spend political capital overcoming those obstacles.

In addition, although the British government has been calling for Shaker’s release since 2007, and David Cameron spoke to President Obama about him at a recent G8 summit, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that he is still held because of President Obama’s inaction, and because the British government has not been pushing the US hard enough.

As I explained on Facebook after a friend posted this photo of me speaking at Saturday’s event, “Due to family obligations, I couldn’t get there until 3.30, so I missed seeing the majority of the speakers, unfortunately, but there was still a good crowd by the time I got to speak, and I had the opportunity to talk to lots of people afterwards.” I added, “Nevertheless, I am disappointed that, as usual, the mainstream media failed to pay attention to the event, as though the imprisonment without charge or trial for 12 years of a British resident, who has twice been cleared for release by representatives of the US government, isn’t worthy of discussion.”

I also stated, “When I spoke, I was unable to disguise my frustration that Shaker is still held when the UK claims it wants him back and has been trying to secure his return, and the US has stated it no longer wants to hold him. How are we meant to accept that he is still held, when he could be put on the first plane home tomorrow morning?”

Save the NHS!

The other photos are of yesterday’s NHS protest outside the Department of Health onWhitehall, where the nursing campaign group, the 4:1 Campaign, was highlighting recently announced plans by the NHS to downgrade between 70 and 100 of the 140 A&E Departments in the country, and also to call for the 20,000 current nursing vacancies in England to be filled.

The 4:1 Campaign was established to call for for “a mandatory minimum ratio of nurses, so there will be no more than 4 patients to 1 nurse,” and I was happy to go along to support the campaign, and also to give a talk based on my experience of why senior NHS managers are deluded to think that massive cuts to A&E departments will improve services overall, when that is obviously untrue.

In my talk (and thanks to my friend Ruth for taking the photo of me), I explained how the plans for A&E would replicate, throughout the country, the problems we identified in Lewisham, where we recently forced the government and NHS managers to abandon plans to close the A&E department and severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital to pay off the debts of a neighbouring hospital trust that were accrued in part because of ruinously expensive PFI deals.

As I stated in the detailed article I published just before the protest, “The planned closure of A&E (which means that all frontline acute services close) would have meant that tens of thousands of Lewisham residents (including thousands of pregnant women) would have had to leave the borough to be treated, or to give birth. If the senior NHS managers and the government had their way, this would have meant seriously ill people and pregnant women having to undertake a long journey to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on a remote heath in Woolwich. This, alarmingly, can take nearly two hours by public transport, and would not be easy by car — or even by ambulance — at rush hour.”

I hope you enjoy the photos, and I also hope that, if these topics are of interest to you, you will join the groups and individuals campaigning to close Guantánamo and to save the NHS.

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 four-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 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: Omar Khadr’s US Lawyer, Sam Morison, Explains Why His Guantánamo War Crimes Conviction is a Disgrace

If you have the time to watch a 46-minute video about Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner held at Guantánamo for 11 years, then I heartily recommend the recording of a recent talk in Canada by Sam Morison, a civilian lawyer working for the US Department of Defense, who recently submitted an appeal against Khadr’s 2010 conviction in his trial by military commission, as I explained in an article two weeks ago entitled, “‘He Didn’t Commit a War Crime’: Omar Khadr’s US Lawyer Challenges His Conviction at Guantánamo.”

The video of the talk, which took place at The King’s University College in Edmonton, was posted on the website of the Free Omar Khadr campaign, and is posted below, via YouTube. It was organized by the University of Alberta’s Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life and the Micah Centre at The King’s University College, and a previous talk (also posted below) featured Retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, MD, a psychiatrist who spent hundreds of hours with Omar Khadr at Guantánamo. Both events took place under the heading “Omar Khadr: The Man – The Law.”

Morison, who “has practiced law for more than 20 years and is a nationally recognized expert on federal executive clemency and the restoration of civil rights,” as his website describes him, delivered a compelling explanation for why Khadr is not guilty of war crimes, when the appeal was submitted. Khadr accepted a plea deal in October 2010, pleading guilty to five crimes, including killing a US soldier by throwing a grenade during the firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002 that led to his capture, but there is no evidence that he actually threw the grenade, and he only accepted the plea deal as a way to leave Guantánamo, receiving an eight-year sentence in exchange.

As I explained two weeks ago when Khadr’s appeal was submitted:

Sam Morison … told Colin Perkel [of The Canadian Press] that, in challenging Khadr’s conviction on all five counts, “the main argument turns on whether what Khadr is accused of doing as a 15 year old in Afghanistan was in fact a war crime under American or international law.”

Morison said, “These things weren’t crimes, at least in 2002. They weren’t crimes at the time of the charged conduct. Even if you take the government’s allegations at face value, he still didn’t commit a war crime.”

As Perkel explained, “The basis for charging [Khadr] for the battlefield death was that he was not in uniform, and was therefore an ‘unprivileged combatant,’” but Morison pointed out, as Perkel put it, that “there is no authority under international law to elevate what Khadr did to the status of a war-crime, which includes such egregious acts as deliberately targeting and killing civilians as the 9/11 terrorists did.”

As Morison described it, “Merely being an unlawful combatant is not by itself a war crime. War crimes still have to be war crimes. It has to do with what you do.” And on this basis, of course, even if Khadr had thrown the grenade that killed US Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer, who died in the firefight, it was not a war crime.

This was noted by Paul Koring in an article for the Globe and Mail, in which he stated that Khadr’s legal team “will argue that even if he tossed the grenade that killed a US special forces soldier, it wasn’t murder and his other activities weren’t war crimes.” Koring cited Morison as saying, “He is, in fact, an innocent person because he never committed a crime.”

In his talk in Edmonton, Sam Morison delivered an even more compelling explanation of why Omar is not guilty of war crimes, why his trial was a sham, and why what the US government is doing is rewriting, in a truly alarming manner, the laws of war, so that anyone who allegedly raises arms against the US — even on a battlefield in an occupied country — can be caught and convicted as a war criminal.

After the war crimes convictions against two other prisoners — Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul — were thrown out by the conservative court of appeals in Washington D.C. last October and in January this year, because the judges correctly concluded that the war crimes for which they had been convicted had been invented by Congress, other legal challenges were to be expected. David Hicks, the first to accept a plea deal, in March 2007, recently launched an appeal, and Omar Khadr’s followed shortly after.

I believe that Sam Morison is absolutely correct to call for Khadr’s conviction to be overturned, although it is clear that, just as dark forces are arrayed against him in Canada, in the form of the Canadian government, which continues to treat him shamefully, so there are dark forces that continue to support his unjust treatment in the US.

As Paul Koring explained in the Globe and Mail last Friday, the United States Court of Military Commission Review “has demanded his legal team establish that it should even hear the case.” Koring added, “While the right of others convicted at Guantánamo to appeal have been routinely accepted by the Court” — including David Hicks’s recent appeal – the same court “has turned Mr. Khadr’s case into a two-step process that could add months, perhaps years, of delay.”

Koring further explained that the court “has ordered the issue of whether Mr. Khadr’s appeal should be heard first and decided separately from the underlying merits of whether Mr. Khadr was wrongfully convicted for acts that weren’t war crimes under international or US law.”

Dennis Edney, Khadr’s long-term civilian lawyer in Canada, responded to the news by calling the commission system “a fundamentally corrupt system that is not good enough for an American citizen but good enough for a Canadian.” He added that it was not a “judicial process but a politically cynical process constituted to shield itself from public scrutiny,” and also stated, “Our government knows this and should have the courage to challenge this process for all Canadians.”

In Washington D.C., Sam Morison and the rest of Khadr’s US legal team have challenged the Court of Military Commission Review’s order, stating in a motion that “the requirement to litigate the issue of jurisdiction” before the substance of Mr. Khadr’s appeal “needless bifurcates the case to [Mr. Khadr’s] obvious disadvantage.”

Koring explained that, if the court rules that it is unable to hear Khadr’s appeal, “that ruling would in turn be appealed, meaning it might take years before there is a determination over jurisdiction, and without any consideration of the merits of the case.” As Sam Morison noted in his challenge to the court’s ruling, “The practical effect of the Court’s order is thus to indefinitely position meaningful judicial review, thereby ensuring that [Mr. Khadr] will remain in prison unless and until his full term expires.”

The court’s position is unacceptable, as the filing on Khadr’s behalf explained. As Paul Koring described it, Sam Morison “raised the vexed issue of legitimacy that continues to cast a pall over the entire Guantánamo process.” In the filing, he stated, “Rather than expediting these proceedings, the court … unnecessarily protracts the resolution of this case, transparently tips the tactical scale in the government’s favour and thus case a pall of illegitimacy over any decision.”

The motion also stated, “If the government cannot defend the charges it brought against the appellant today, then there is no good reason to believe that it will articulate a winning argument years from now.”

Morison also argued that the wording of the direction “creates an appearance that the court has prejudged the outcome of this appeal.”

Speaking to Colin Perkel of The Canadian Press, Morison said, “It’s terribly unfair to Khadr. The court’s supposed to be neutral. That’s what’s most troubling.”

It is difficult to argue with Sam Morison’s conclusions, although, unfortunately, this kind of lawlessness is familiar to all of us who have been watching the moral, ethical and legal abuse of Omar Khadr for the last eleven years.

See below for the video of Stephen Xenakis’s talk at the University of Alberta on October 22:

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 four-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 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.

Save the NHS: Demonstrate in London to Save A&Es and Call for More Nurses

This is rather last minute, but I hope it will be useful. The nursing campaign group, the 4:1 Campaign, has organised a protest outside the Department of Health (on Whitehall, almost opposite 10 Downing Street), tomorrow lunchtime (Tuesday November 26, 2013), from noon until 2pm, and I am going to go along as one of the speakers.

The “Rally for the NHS” is described on Facebook as a response to “disastrous news about the NHS” in recent weeks, “from the RCN [Royal College of Nursing] revealing the NHS has over 20,000 nursing vacancies, to the Department of Health’s decision to downgrade (effectively close) 100 A&E departments.”

The campaigners add, “We believe those who support the NHS, its staff and patients need to provide an alternative vision for the future of the NHS. That’s why we are going to be outside the Department of Health on the 26th with our own proposals for how to protect and improve the NHS. The rally will last from 12-2 outside the DoH in Whitehall, with speakers and stunts to highlight different aspects of the crisis afflicting the NHS, while giving an opportunity for health workers and patients to give their solutions to the crisis being created in the NHS.”

The figure of 20,000 nursing vacancies emerged on November 12, when the RCN released its latest report, “Running the Red Light.” The figure is an estimate, but one based on detailed investigation, in the absence of reliable figures from the government,. I was shocked to read that the government “stopped collecting data on NHS staff vacancies in 2011, with the last available data suggesting the vacancy rate for nursing posts was 2.5% in 2010.” The RCN added that “responses from 61 acute and mental health trusts suggest this figure is now running at an average of 6% — though in some places it is as high as 16%.”

This is a troubling situation, and one that chimes with the concerns of the 4:1 Campaign, which describes its aims as follows: “We are arguing for a mandatory minimum ratio of nurses, so there would be no more than 4 patients to 1 nurse, with variations according to your hospital ward’s or unit specialty. For example, on a typical acute medical or surgery ward there would be one nurse for every four patients on a typical day shift. We are calling only for a mandatory minimum, not a limit, so nursing numbers can and should be increased to meet higher patient need in areas with extremely unwell patients like High Dependency and Intensive Care.”

Although there are signs that aspects of the nursing crisis are being addressed, with Nursing Times reporting that 73 of 102 trusts that responded to requests for information stated that they “had allocated more money to employing nurses in 2012-13, compared with the previous financial year,” the other main point of tomorrow’s rally — the threat to downgrade 100 A&E departments — is even more troubling.

Last week, NHS England’s Urgent and Emergency Care Review Team issued a report, through its National Medical Director, Sir Bruce Keogh, entitled, “Transforming urgent and emergency care services in England,” in which, as the Guardian explained, plans for “a two-tier accident and emergency service, with specialist expertise in areas such as stroke and trauma concentrated in fewer hospitals,” were put forward. As the Guardian put it, Keogh “said it was absolutely necessary to rethink under-pressure A&E services because too many people turn up there who do not need emergency care.” The Guardian added, “While 40% leave without any treatment, frail and elderly people end up waiting for hours and sometimes could have been better cared for at home.”

This is evidently not the best use of services, but the problem with Keogh’s intentions is that they do not inhabit the real world, and, instead, live in a fictional world in which the 40% who do not require treatment magically do not turn up at A&E at all. In reality, of course, although NHS managers talk of increased community care to reduce pressure on A&E departments, it is only an aspiration, and not reality. Just a glance at the media over the last few months reveals that A&E departments are under greater pressure than ever before — see, for example, “Top doctors warn of ‘worst winter’ in hospitals as A&E crisis grows,” in the Observer on November 2.

In its article last week, the Guardian — rather cynically, I thought — noted that Keogh’s proposal “attempts to sidestep the fundamental political problem inherent in any NHS reorganisation: communities and their MPs take to the streets at any mention of a hospital closure.” The article added, “Under the two-tier plan, none of the current 140 A&E departments in England would close.”

Instead, a large number of A&E departments — between 70 and 100 — are to be downgraded, or, as the Guardian put it, “will be seen to be downgraded.”

This is simply disingenuous reporting, as the closure of emergency services inevitably leads to people having to travel much greater distances to hospitals that retain emergency services. As someone deeply involved, over the last year, in the campaign to save Lewisham Hospital from being downgraded — to pay off the debts of a neighbouring hospital trust, accrued in part because of ruinously expensive PFI deals — it is clear to me that Lewisham’s case is typical.

The planned closure of A&E (which means that all frontline acute services close) would have meant that tens of thousands of Lewisham residents (including thousands of pregnant women) would have had to leave the borough to be treated, or to give birth. If the senior NHS managers and the government had their way, this would have meant seriously ill people and pregnant women having to undertake a long journey to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on a remote heath in Woolwich. This, alarmingly, can take nearly two hours by public transport (see video here), and would not be easy by car — or even by ambulance — at rush hour.

In the Guardian‘s misguidedly breezy reporting about the plans to downgrade A&E departments, it was noted that 40 to 70 of the existing 140 A&E departments “will become ‘major emergency centres,’ where the seriously sick and damaged are taken by ambulance for hi-tech treatment for heart attacks, stroke and trauma, bypassing other closer hospitals on the way.” There is nothing to complain about this part of the plans, of course, and it is to the credit of the NHS that, in recent years, the decision to focus on certain key health issues — heart attacks and strokes, for example — at specific hospitals has been very successful.

This was dealt with in detail in the Guardian‘s article, in which it was noted, correctly, “Advances in science have led to the concentration of stroke services, for instance, in just eight of the 32 London hospitals. An ambulance would take a stroke patient to University College London hospital, but not to the Royal Free.”

However, it does not follow that more and more services should be moved to “major emergency centres,” as the case of Lewisham again demonstrates. Whilst it is wonderful that some key services are dealt with at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, and at King’s, the 270,000 people of Lewisham need and deserve — and can pay for, through taxation — a wide range of other services, including A&E (for children as well as adults), some acute services and maternity services. If the Keogh proposals go ahead, millions of people across the country will be travelling long distances for treatment — and the more people have to travel, the more there will be deaths in transit.

The Guardian‘s attempt to downplay what will happen to the other A&E departments — the 70 to 100 that will not become “major emergency centres” – is that they “will become ordinary emergency centres, which will cope with problems requiring less specialised care” — again, a way of avoiding the reality of hollowing out services to such an extent that many hospitals will be unable to operate as they need to, to remain as suitably functioning establishments. This is something we were very aware of in Lewisham, and there is no reason to presume — despite Sir Bruce Keogh’s hopes that helplines and GPs will keep people away from A&E departments — that downgrading half of England’s A&E departments will have anything other than a truly disastrous effect on the health needs of millions of people.

Note: For further information about “The Keogh Urgent and Emergency Care Review,” see here.

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 four-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 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.

Andy Worthington: An Archive of Guantánamo Articles, Other Writing and Photos – Part 13, July to December 2012

Please support my work!

Next March it will be eight years since I gave my life over to chronicling Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there, and campaigning to get the prison closed. I did this initially through my book The Guantánamo Files, and, for the last six and a half years, I have continued to seek the prison’s closure — and to educate people about the men held there and the lies told in the “war on terror” — as a full-time independent investigative journalist.

Nearly four years ago, I began to put together chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the 2100 articles and pages I have published since May 2007. Unfortunately, I have found it difficult to keep up to date with this project for the last two years, hence this belated entry covering all the articles I wrote from July to December 2012.

In this period, as well as relentlessly covering Guantánamo, I continued to be involved in campaigning to resist the age of austerity cynically introduced by the Tory-led government here in the UK, which is being used to wage a disgusting and disgraceful civil war against the poor, the unemployed and the disabled, and whose main aim being to almost entirely destroy the state provision of services. In the period covered in this article, my previous efforts to save the NHS from privatisation fed into a campaign even closer to home, as the government and senior NHS managers proposed to severely cut services at Lewisham Hospital, my local hospital in south east London, to pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust that had got into financial difficulties — in part because of ruinous private finance (PFI) deals, providing unjustifiable profits to private companies building hospitals for the government.

It was also in this period that a side line to my writing — cycling around London and taking photos for a huge archive recording the city at this difficult time in its history — began. This took up much of my time, as the 77 photo sets available here reveal, although this year, even though I continue to cycle and record London on an almost daily basis — for health reasons, and to satisfy my curiosity — I haven’t been publishing many photos here (via my Flickr account), and have, instead, been building up an archive for a new website, “The State of London,” that I will be launching soon. I continue to post protest photos, and it’s an aspect of my work that, I have found, complements my writing.

As with most of my work today, the majority of the 89 articles I wrote in this period were made available without any financial backing, an exercise in reader-funded journalism that has only been made possible through the generosity of you, my readers and supporters. If you want to donate to help me to keep working as an independent researcher and commentator, please click on the “Donate” button above. All donations are welcome.

As I explained last month when I published the list of articles I wrote between January and June 2012:

I hope this archive is more than a largely pointless exercise in nostalgia, and that it will be of some use. On Guantánamo, my intention all along has been to puncture the Bush administration’s propaganda about the prison holding “the worst of the worst” by telling the prisoners’ stories and bringing them to life as human beings, rather than allowing them to remain as dehumanized scapegoats or bogeymen.

This has involved demonstrating that the majority of the prisoners were either innocent men, seized by the US military’s allies at a time when bounty payments were widespread, or recruits for the Taliban, who had been encouraged by supporters in their homelands to help the Taliban in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war (with the Northern Alliance), which began long before the 9/11 attacks and, for the most part, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism.

As I explained in the introduction to my four-part Definitive Prisoner List (updated in April 2012, I remain convinced, through detailed research, through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, and, most recently, through an analysis of classified military documents released by WikiLeaks, that “at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total” had no involvement with terrorism.

The articles I wrote — and the photos I published — between July and December 2012 are listed below, separated into three categories: articles about Guantánamo, articles about British politics, and photos. I hope you find the list useful.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part 13, July to December 2012

July 2012

1. Drone attacks, Guantánamo: In Appeal for Moral Leadership, Jimmy Carter Calls for an End to Drone Attacks and the Closure of Guantánamo

2. Kuwaitis in Guantánamo: My Photos on Flickr: Visiting Kuwait to Campaign for the Last Two Kuwaiti Prisoners in Guantánamo

3. Extradition: Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad: “Extradition” Film Screenings in London, and an Appeal to the European Court of Human Rights

4. Afghans in Guantánamo: US in Talks to Return the 17 Afghan Prisoners in Guantánamo

5. Omar Khadr: Andy Worthington Speaks at Screening of Omar Khadr Film, “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo,” at Amnesty International, London, July 12

6. Omar Khadr: Bring Omar Khadr Home from Guantánamo: Please Sign the Petition to the Canadian Government

7. Medical abuse at Guantánamo: Pentagon Report into the Drugging of Guantánamo Prisoners Is Released

8. Ibrahim al-Qosi, prisoners released from Guantánamo: US Honors Deal to Release Convicted Bin Laden Cook from Guantánamo to Sudan; 87 Cleared Men Still Await Release

9. Omar Khadr: Free Omar Khadr from Guantánamo! Please Support Senator Roméo Dallaire’s Campaign

10. Extradition: Six Years without Charge or Trial: An Evening of Poetry, Film and Tributes to Talha Ahsan in London, July 19

11. Drone attacks: Families of US Citizens Killed in Drone Attacks in Yemen Take Obama Officials to Court

12. Bagram: Bagram: Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners

13. Guantánamo campaigns: For Ramadan, Write to the Forgotten Prisoners in Guantánamo

14. Close Guantánamo: At Guantánamo, Another Bleak Ramadan for 87 Cleared Prisoners Who Are Still Held

15. Bagram, radio interviews: I’m Off to WOMAD, Back on Monday: Please Listen to Me Discussing Bagram on the Radio with Scott Horton

16. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, military commissions: Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri: The Torture Victim the US Is Desperate to Gag

August 2012

17. Torture: On the 10th Anniversary of Yoo and Bybee’s “Torture Memos,” Col. Morris Davis Reminds Americans About Justice and the Law

18. Torture: Ten Years of Torture: Marking the 10th Anniversary of John Yoo’s “Torture Memos”

19. Shaker Aamer: Close Guantánamo: A Reminder of Why We Demand the Prison’s Closure, and a Call for Support for Shaker Aamer

September 2012

20. Guantánamo, 9/11: Eleven Years After 9/11, Guantánamo Is A Political Prison

21. Guantánamo, 9/11, Bagram, radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Bagram on the BBC World Service, and 9/11 and Guantánamo with Scott Horton

22. Close Guantánamo, 9/11: A Call for 90 Men to be Freed from Guantánamo on the 11th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks

23. Adnan Latif, deaths at Guantánamo: Lawyers for Adnan Latif, the Latest Prisoner to Die at Guantánamo, Issue A Statement

24. Adnan Latif, deaths at Guantánamo: A Premonition of Death at Guantánamo: Adnan Latif’s Hunger Strike Poem

25. Adnan Latif, deaths at Guantánamo: Obama, the Courts and Congress Are All Responsible for the Latest Death at Guantánamo

26. Omar Khadr: Video: On Omar Khadr’s 26th Birthday, Supporters Call for his Return to Canada from Guantánamo

27. Aafia Siddiqui: Andy Worthington Speaks at Event in London Marking Two Years Since Aafia Siddiqui’s Barbaric 86-Year Sentence

28. National Defense Authorization Act: Why Does the Government So Desperately Want Indefinite Detention for Terror Suspects?

29. Adnan Latif, deaths at Guantánamo, Omar Khadr, Nabil Hadjarab:
30. Aafia Siddiqui, Guantánamo: Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Horrors of Guantánamo at Aafia Siddiqui Protest in London

31. Guantánamo media:

October 2012

32. Video, extradition: Video: The Great Extradition Swindle

33. Omar Khadr, prisoners released from Guantánamo: Finally, Omar Khadr Leaves Guantánamo and Returns to Canada

34. Guantánamo media: Andy Worthington and Omar Deghayes Speak about Guantánamo at Peace Conference in Sheffield on October 5, 2012

35. Guantánamo, torture, Presidential election: In US Election, No Time for Guantánamo, But Torture Rears Its Ugly Head

36. Shaker Aamer: EXCLUSIVE: A Demand for “Freedom and Justice” from Shaker Aamer in Guantánamo

37. Extradition: America’s Extradition Problem

38. Video, Shaker Aamer: Video: Andy Worthington Asks Supporters to Sign UK Petition Calling for the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

39. “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”: “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”: Amnesty Screening in Lewes with Andy Worthington, Omar Deghayes, Caroline Lucas and Norman Baker, October 21, 2012

40: Military commissions, 9/11: The 9/11 Trial: Torturing Justice

41. Guantánamo media: Who Are the 55 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners on the List Released by the Obama Administration?

42. Military commissions, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri: Another Torture Victim on Trial at Guantánamo

November 2012

43. Shaker Aamer: When Justice Fails: US Refuses to Confirm that Shaker Aamer Will Be Freed from Guantánamo

44. Military commissions: Conservative Judges Demolish the False Legitimacy of Guantánamo’s Terror Trials

45. Close Guantánamo: President Obama, It’s Time to Fulfill Your Promise to Close Guantánamo

46. Radio, Close Guantánamo: Andy Worthington Discusses the Need to Close Guantánamo on the Michael Slate Show

47. Adnan Latif, deaths at Guantánamo: The Banality of Evil: How the US Killed an Innocent Man at Guantánamo

48. Shaker Aamer, Guantánamo events: Guantánamo: Andy Worthington Discusses Shaker Aamer at Hull University Amnesty Society, November 27, 2012

49. Guantánamo media: On Guantánamo, the New York Times Abdicates Responsibility

50. Shaker Aamer: A Photo of Shaker Aamer After Eleven Years in Guantánamo

51. Torture: The Long Pursuit of Accountability for the Bush Administration’s Torture Program

December 2012

52. Adnan Latif, deaths at Guantánamo: An Impossible Suicide at Guantánamo

53. Close Guantánamo: Will Guantánamo Ever Be Closed?

54. Guantánamo events: Supermaxed: Andy Worthington Speaks at Stop the War Guantánamo Event, Goldsmith’s College, December 12

55. Guantánamo media: Andy Worthington and David Remes Discuss Guantánamo on Revolution Truth

56. Shaker Aamer: Free Shaker Aamer: Last British Resident in Guantánamo Sues British Government

57. Torture, extraordinary rendition, film reviews: Torture, Torture Everywhere

58. Guantánamo, radio interviews: Andy Worthington Discusses the Urgent Need to Close Guantánamo with Peter B. Collins

An archive of articles about British politics, July to December 2012

July and August 2012

1. Banking crisis: When Will Immoral, Unprincipled Bankers Be Held Accountable for Their Crimes?

2. Banking crisis: Criminal Bankers Are Not Above the Law

3. Save the NHS: NHS Chief Quits, Calls Austerity a Weapon to “Dismantle the State”

4. UK austerity, disability: Doctors Urge Government to Scrap Callous Disability Tests

5. Housing crisis: Unaffordable London: The Great Housing Rip-Off Continues

6. Olympics: Olympics Disaster: The G4S Security Scandal and Corporate Sponsors’ £600 Million Tax Avoidance

7. Olympics: The Dark Side of the Olympics: Kettling Cyclists and Telling Fairytales About Our Heritage

8. UK austerity, disability: Where is the Shame and Anger as the UK Government’s Unbridled Assault on the Disabled Continues?

September 2012

9. UK austerity, disability, photos: Photos of the Paralympics Demonstration Against Atos Healthcare in London

10. Save the NHS: Disgusting! As Tories Lurch to the Right, Criminal Jeremy Hunt Takes Over Health

11. Occupy Wall Street: On Occupy’s First Anniversary, We Are Still the 99 Percent, and the 1 Percent Are Still the Problem

12. Occupy movement, housing crisis: A Future for Occupy? Why We Need A Campaign for Genuinely Affordable Housing

13. Housing crisis: The First Squatter Is Jailed Since Being Homeless Was Criminalised by the Tories

October 2012

14. UK austerity, disability: Call Time on This Wretched Government and Its Assault on the Disabled

15. UK austerity, protest: Kick This Government Out! March for “A Future That Works” in London on October 20

16. UK austerity, protest, photos: Photos: The Best Placards and Banners from “A Future That Works,” the TUC March and Rally in London

17. UK austerity, protest, photos: Photos: A Riot of Colour, Solidarity and Indignation on the TUC March in London

18. Save Lewisham Hospital: Save the NHS: Act Now to Stop the Hatchet Falling on South London Accident and Emergency Services

November 2012

19. Save Lewisham Hospital: Please Sign the Petitions to Prevent the Closure of Lewisham Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Department

20. Save Lewisham Hospital: Save Lewisham A&E: As Petition Nears 5,000 Signatures, I Tell South London Press, “People Will Die”

21. Save Lewisham Hospital: Lewisham Residents Rally to Save Hospital from Tory Butchers

22. UK politics, education: Protest Groups Challenge the Tories’ Mission to Wreck England’s Schools and Universities

23. UK austerity, benefit reform: Ex-Children’s Minister Sarah Teather Condemns Government’s Benefit Cap as Cruel and Immoral

24. Save Lewisham Hospital: Save Lewisham Hospital from Tory Destruction: Huge Rally on Saturday, Public Meeting Next Wednesday

25. Save Lewisham Hospital: Save Lewisham Hospital A&E: Photos of the Massive Protest on November 24, 2012

December 2012

26. UK austerity, disability: The End of Decency: Tories to Make Disabled People Work Unpaid for Their Benefits

27. Save Lewisham Hospital: Save Lewisham Hospital: Photos of the Protest and Sham Consultation on December 4, 2012

28. UK austerity, benefit reform: The Death of Empathy in Cruel, Heartless Britain

29. Save Lewisham Hospital: Save Lewisham Hospital: Last Chance to Respond to Consultation – and Vigil on Thursday

30. Housing crisis: Wake Up to the Injustice of Britain’s Housing Crisis

31. UK austerity, disability, benefit reform: End the Tory Butchers’ Assault on the Disabled: For New Year, Please Sign the War on Welfare Petition

My photos of London (and other places in UK and Europe)

July 2012

1. My Photos on Flickr: Bermondsey and the River Thames, June 2012

2. My Photos on Flickr: The Isle of Dogs and Regent’s Canal, July 2012

3. My Photos on Flickr: London At Night – Canary Wharf, Millwall, Greenwich and Deptford

4. The Power of Greed: Photos of Canary Wharf

5. In Search of the Olympics: Photos of a Journey from Limehouse to Stratford

6. Rivers at Dusk: Photos of My Journey from Stratford to Canary Wharf

7. Street Art, Sunshine and the River: Photos of Deptford and Greenwich

8. Green London: Photos of Nunhead, Dulwich and Blythe Hill

9. Docks, Wharves and Water: Photos of a Journey Along the Thames from Deptford to Tower Bridge

10. Sun, Sky and Property: A Photographic Journey along the Thames from London Bridge to the Isle of Dogs

11. Photos: The Olympic Torch in Lewisham, and Some Last Thoughts on the Dodgy Games

12. Real Life in South London: Photos of a Journey through Nunhead, Peckham, Walworth and Borough

13. The Olympics Minus One Day: Photos from the Frontline in Stratford

August 2012

14. Photos from WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival, Wiltshire, July 2012 (1/2)

15. Big Skies and Global Beats: Photos from WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival (2/2)

16. The Wealth of Empire: Photos of the City of London in the Rain

17. Union Jack Summer: Photos of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics

18. Jamaican Independence and a Giant Tent: Photos of a Visit to the Olympic Site at the O2

19. Photos of a Journey Across the Thames on the Olympics Cable Car

20. Real London: Photos of New Cross, Bermondsey and the Old Kent Road

21. Photos of London At Night: From the Olympics at Greenwich to Deptford and Surrey Quays

22. A Place to Call Home: Photos of Brockley from Winter to Summer

23. Architecture on an Epic Scale: Photos of Arriving in Rome, Visiting St. Peter’s and the Vatican

24. Photos of Rome: A Storm, the Hills and the Tiber at Night

25. Churches, Temples, Fountains and Piazze: Photos of the Historic Centre of Rome

26. Parks, Water and Dreams: Photos of a Journey from Surrey Quays to Central London

27. Photos of The Pantheon and Il Vittoriano in Rome: Transcendental Illumination and a Show of Power

28. Echoes of Ancient Rome: Photos of the Roman Forum, the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill

29. Glass, Light and Fantasies: Photos of the City of London At Night

30. Photos of the Olympics: In Search of the Paralympic Torch

31. Photos of Lewisham: Hills, Rivers, Secret Corners and Blatant Skyscrapers

September 2012

32. Green London: Photos of Surrey Quays, Brockley, Telegraph Hill, Blackheath and One Tree Hill

33. Chasing Clouds in Greenwich: Photos of a Journey East Along the Thames

34. Industry and Decay: Photos of a Journey Along the Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich

35. Lost Glories: Photos of a Thames Journey from Woolwich to Thamesmead

36. Prisons and Abandoned Factories: Photos of a Journey from Belmarsh to Plumstead

37. Visiting Abruzzo: Photos of a Journey by Train from Rome, the Valle Peligna and Torre dei Nolfi

38. A Photographic Journey around Fitzrovia, Central London’s Former Bohemia

39. Retail Frenzy: Photos of Oxford Street on a Saturday

40. Crowds and Culture: Photos of Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross and the Southbank Centre

41. The Old and the New: Photos of a Journey through Waterloo, Borough and Bermondsey

42. Photos of Deptford: A Life By The River Thames

43. London Skies: Photos of Big Fluffy Clouds

44. The Road North: A Photographic Journey from Tottenham Court Road to Camden

October 2012

45. Alternative London: Photos of Camden High Street

46. At Dusk: Photos of the Regent’s Canal from Camden Lock to St. Pancras Basin

47. Development Frenzy: Photos of the Regent’s Canal from St. Pancras Basin to King’s Cross

48. Photos of Blackheath and Greenwich: Olympic Memories and Other Journeys

49. Green London: Photos of Crystal Palace, the Isle of Dogs, Ladywell and Brockley

50. Sunny Sunday: Photos of the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf

51. Photos of Limehouse, Shadwell and Wapping: Art, History and the Summer Sun

52. Beautiful Dereliction: Photos of the Thames Shoreline by Convoys Wharf, Deptford

53. The Colours and Characters of Soho: Photos of Berwick Street and Around

54. Back Streets and Shop Fronts: Photos of Soho

55. Between Bridges: Photos of Wealth and Loss in Bankside, Between Blackfriars and London Bridge

56. Eating and Commuting: Photos of Borough Market and London Bridge

57. Photos: The Open-Air Street Artists of Ashby Mews, Brockley

November 2012

58. Pumpkins and Skeletons: Photos of Halloween in London

59. Photos: Autumn on Hilly Fields, Brockley

60. Beside the River Thames: Photos of a Journey from Clink Street to Butler’s Wharf

61. Photos of the River Thames: The Solace of the Shore and the Fire of Sunset

62. Reflections on Mortality: Photos of Autumn in Brockley Cemetery

63. From Deptford to Bermondsey: Photos of a Summer Journey Through London’s History

64. Photos of Commercial Road: The 21st Century Rag Trade

65. Photos of Shadwell: School, Street Art, Studios and Railway Bridges

66. Development and Decay: Photos of Commercial Road in Stepney and Limehouse

67. Shops, Ships and Union Jacks: Photos of a Surreal Tour Around Canary Wharf

68. Photos: Autumn Sunset in Hilly Fields, Brockley

69. When Night Falls: Photos of Lewisham, Greenwich and Deptford

December 2012

70. Photos: Greenwich Early and Late

71. Photos: Early Morning Amongst the Graves of St. Alfege Park, Greenwich

72. Photos of South East London At Night: Tunnels, the River and the Surrey Canal

73. Blue Skies and Golden Light: Photos of the River Thames in September

74. Top of the World: Photos of Nunhead Allotments, and the View from the Hill-Top Reservoir

75. Memories of Summer: Photos of the Thames Festival on London’s South Bank

76. Photos: Christmas in London, 2012

77. A Winter Wonderland: Photos of the Scottish Highlands in Perthshire

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 four-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 and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign.

Senate Passes Bill to Help Close Guantánamo; Now President Obama Must Act

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. 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.

It’s rare that there is good news about Guantánamo, and even rarer that the good news involves Congress. However, on Tuesday, the Senate accepted a version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which originated in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and was put forward by the chair, Sen. Carl Levin, along with Sen. John McCain.

The Levin-McCain version of the NDAA is intended to make it much easier than it has been for the last three years for President Obama to release cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, and to seriously revisit his failed promise to close the prison once and for all, and we note, with thanks, the efforts of Senators and officials in the Obama administration to secure this victory.

This important version of the NDAA contains provisions relating to Guantánamo which allow President Obama to release prisoners to other countries without the onerous restrictions imposed by Congress for the last three years. These restrictions have led to the number of released prisoners dwindling to almost zero, even though 84 of the remaining 164 prisoners were cleared for release from the prison in January 2010 by a high-level, inter-agency task force appointed by President Obama shortly after he took office in 2009.

Congress had obliged the president and the defense secretary to certify that any prisoners they wanted to release would, after release, be unable to engage in terrorist activities against the US — a certification that was, frankly, impossible or almost impossible to make. Lawmakers had also banned the release of prisoners to any country where there was an alleged claim of recidivism; in other words, of a former prisoner “returning to the battlefield.”

As the Washington Post explained yesterday, supporters of Guantánamo regularly draw on, and distort, recidivism claims made by the DoD or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, like Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga), during the Senate debate on the NDAA. Conflating two figures — those for ex-prisoners confirmed of recidivism, and those suspected of doing so — Sen. Chambliss claimed that the recidivism rate is “nearly 29 percent” of former prisoners, when in fact only 16 percent are “confirmed” by the government. Moreover, evidence has never been provided to back up more than a fraction of these claims, and in independent research, which we endorse, the New America Foundation found that a more realistic recidivism rate was just 8.8 percent.

In the revised version of the NDAA passed by the Senate, the defense secretary is no longer blocked by these huge obstacles, and is only required to “substantially mitigate the risk” of any released prisoner “engaging or reengaging in any terrorist or other hostile activity that threatens the United States or United States persons or interests.” The defense secretary is also permitted to release prisoners if he determines that “the transfer is in the national security interest of the United States.”

The Levin-McCain version of the NDAA also allows the president to transfer prisoners to the US mainland to face trial, or to be imprisoned, thereby making the closure of Guantánamo possible. This version of the NDAA also allows prisoners to be temporarily moved to the US mainland for medical treatment that cannot be provided at Guantánamo.

The struggle to make progress towards the closure of Guantánamo is not over, of course. In June the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a version of the NDAA that still includes the onerous transfer restrictions, and that also introduced a complete ban on releasing any prisoners to Yemen. This was a direct snub to President Obama, who, in a major speech on national security issues in May, dropped his own ban on releasing any cleared Yemeni prisoners, who make up two-thirds of the 84 clear prisoners. This was a ban he had first imposed in January 2010, after a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had tried and failed to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a flight from Europe to the US.

In the Senate on Tuesday, Senators also voted down, by 55 votes to 43, an amendment to the NDAA by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), which was similar to the House version, and would have maintained the current ban on moving prisoners to the US for any reason. Sen. Ayotte’s amendment would also have made permanent the current restrictions on transferring prisoners to other countries, as well as explicitly banning the release of any prisoners to Yemen. This defeat showed the extent to which Senators have understood that the status quo on Guantánamo — largely of their own making, although with a lack of robust opposition from President Obama — is no longer acceptable.

This is a far cry from the position taken by Senators for the last four and half years, beginning in May 2009, when the Senate voted, by 90 votes to 6, to eliminate $80 million from planned legislation intended to fund the closure of Guantánamo, and to specifically prohibit the use of any funding to “transfer, relocate, or incarcerate Guantánamo Bay detainees to or within the United States.”

The two versions of the bill will now have to be reconciled in conference, where tough negotiating will be required on the part of the supporters of the Senate’s version. Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we believe that President Obama needs to speak out very publicly in support of the Senate version of the bill, but we also wish to stress that, whatever Congress decides, the president already has the power, through a waiver in the existing legislation, to bypass Congress and release prisoners if he believes it to be in America’s national security interests to do so.

On this point, the president clearly does believe that releasing cleared prisoners and revisiting his failed promise to close Guantánamo is “in America’s national security interests,” because, in April, speaking about Guantánamo, he said, “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”

Tom Wilner, the co-founder of “Close Guantánamo,” and counsel of record for the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008, noted this when he said, following the result, “The vote in the Senate on Tuesday shows progress in the attitude toward Guantánamo. But it should be clearly understood that the president has the power now to send these men home and he should use his existing authority to do so.”

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 four-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 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.