Andy Worthington's Blog, page 144

Prison-Wide Hunger Strike Still Rages at Guantánamo

Three weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled, “A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo,” in which I reported the stories emerging from Guantánamo of a prison-wide hunger strike, the most severe since George W. Bush was President, and the gulf between what was being reported by the prisoners, via their attorneys, and what the US authorities were saying.

At the time, the authorities stated that just six of the 166 men still held were classified as hunger strikers, and that five were being force-fed, through tubes inserted up their nose and into their stomachs — these men all being long-term hunger strikers, at least one of whom has, alarmingly, been on a hunger strike since 2005.

It was, to be frank, inconceivable that the hunger strike had been invented by the prisoners, when attorneys reported visiting their clients, and seeing that they had lost 20 to 30 pounds in weight. However, it took until March 15, as Carol Rosenberg reported for the Miami Herald, for “the first admission of a protest” to be made by the authorities. Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the prison authorities, denied “a widespread phenomenon, as alleged,” but conceded, “for the first time after weeks of denial,” as Rosenberg put it, “that the number had surged to 14 from the five or six detainees who had for years been considered hunger strikers among the 166 captives at Guantánamo.”

Since the blanket denials were dropped, and the media began to take an interest in the story, focusing the world’s attention on the problems at Guantánamo to a greater degree than has happened for many years, the authorities have steadily acknowledged that more and more prisoners are on a hunger strike. Last week, the numbers went up to 21, and ended the week at 26, and this week the latest tally is 31 [Note: Since writing this article, the figure has been revised up to 37]. That, however, is still a far cry from the claims made by the prisoners and their attorneys, who state that the majority of the prisoners in Camp 6 — 130 men in total — are involved in the hunger strike.

Whatever the exact figures, transparency and honesty are not attributes that the US government can claim when it comes to Guantánamo, and it is difficult to see why the authorities should be trusted. As well as disputing the figures, the government also claims that the main reason given for the hunger strike is a lie. 51 attorneys wrote to defense secretary Chuck Hagel on March 14, explaining that the hunger strike “was precipitated by widespread searches of detainees’ Qur’ans — perceived as religious desecration — as well as searches and confiscation of other personal items, including family letters and photographs, and legal mail, seemingly without provocation or cause. We also understand that these searches occurred against a background of increasingly regressive practices at the prison taking place in recent months, which our clients have described as a return to an older regime at Guantánamo that was widely identified with the mistreatment of detainees.”

Chuck Hagel has not responded, but the authorities deny the prisoners’ claims.

However, there is another reason for the hunger strike that is rather harder to deny; namely, that the prisoners despair of ever being released, over four years after President Obama promised to close Guantánamo, and despite 86 of the remaining prisoners being cleared for release by an interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that the President established in 2009.

The President himself is to blame for imposing a blanket ban on the release of two-thirds of these men — all Yemenis — after a Nigerian man,Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for the US on Christmas Day 2009. Abdulmutallab was recruited in Yemen, but the President’s ban imposes an unjustifiable life sentence on the Yemenis on the basis of their nationality alone.

Also to blame is Congress, where lawmakers introduced legislation designed to block the release of prisoners, including an obligation on the defense secretary to certify that any released prisoner would not subsequently be able to engage in anti-American activities — a certification that seems to me to be impossible to make. As a result, only four prisoners have been released in the last two years, and during that same time period three prisoners have died. The prisoners also understand these statistics: at present there is a 43 percent probability that if they manage to leave Guantánamo, which is unlikely, it will be in a coffin.

The authorities have not spoken officially about the prisoners’ despair, although in Congressional testimony last week, Gen. John F. Kelly, the naval commander at Guantánamo, acknowledged the reality of it when he said, “They [the prisoners] had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed. They were devastated, apparently … when the president backed off — at least their perception — of closing the facility. He said nothing about it in his inauguration speech. He said nothing about it in his State of the Union speech. He has said nothing about it. He’s not — he’s not restaffing the office that … looks at closing the facility.”

What happens next is unclear. People will die unless action is taken to bring the hunger strike to an end, and President Obama needs to stir himself from his torpor and act to bring to an end the disgraceful situation whereby prisoners cleared for release by the government may be imprisoned for the rest of their lives because it has proven to be politically inconvenient to release them. One of these men, Adnan Latif, a Yemeni, died at Guantánamo last September, and there are now understandable fears that others will die.

Instead of responding, however, President Obama is doing nothing — or rather, just watching as officials establish that nearly $200 million is required to renovate the facilities at Guantánamo, including, as Gen. Kelly let slip, $50 million to replace Camp 7, the secretive camp where the 16 “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are held. The President, I’m sorry to note, escaped the scrutiny he deserved when these figures emerged, because the cost, of course, includes the figures for the cleared prisoners. It was established in November 2011 that it costs $72 million a year to hold the cleared prisoners; and to that can be added half of the $150 million that is not being spent on the “high-value detainees.” With the annual cost, that is $150 million that will be spent this year on holding men that the US government decided three to four years ago it no longer wished to hold.

When asked about the reasons for the hunger strike, Capt. Durand stated that it was an “orchestrated event intended to garner media attention.” That is marginally less insulting than when, in 2006, the death of three prisoners, reportedly by suicide, was greeted by the prison’s commander as “an act of asymmetrical warfare,” but only just. If prisoners die as a result of this hunger strike, their deaths will be real, and not a ploy to “garner media attention.”

Capt. Durand is just a mouthpiece, of course, but the powerful institutions he represents — the Obama administration and the Pentagon — have no excuse to criticise those who, after over 11 years in an abominable experimental prison that should never have existed, and should not still be open, are starving themselves to protest the injustice of their imprisonment and their dashed hopes that they will ever be released.

In response to the ongoing hunger strike, the International Committee of the Red Cross announced on Wednesday that it was bringing forward a planned prison visit by a week. Its representatives need to not only see the prisoners; they also need to see that plans are underway to free some of those 86 men who were cleared for release at least three years ago but are still held.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Voices from the Hunger Strike in Guantánamo

[image error]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.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are deeply concerned about the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, which we first wrote about here, and its effect on prisoners already ground down by what, for the majority of them, is eleven years of indefinite detention without charge or trial, with no end to their imprisonment in sight after President Obama failed to fulfill his promise to close the prison.

The President has been hindered by the intervention of Congress, where lawmakers, for cynical reasons, intervened to impose almost insurmountable restrictions to the release of prisoners, but President Obama is also to blame — through his refusal to make Guantánamo an issue, since that promise to close it on his second day in office, and through his imposition of an unjustifiable ban on releasing Yemenis cleared for release by his own inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Of the 166 men still held, 86 were cleared for release by the Task Force, and two-thirds of these men are Yemenis, consigned to Guantánamo, possibly forever, because, over three years ago, a Nigerian man, recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for the US and a moratorium on releasing Yemenis was issued by President Obama. The others are either hostages of Congress, or men in need of third countries to offer them a new home, because they face torture or other ill-treatment their home countries.

The hunger strike began seven weeks ago in response to aggressive cell searches, which also included the seizure of personal items, and, in particular, manhandling of the prisoners’ copies of the Koran. In a letter to the new defense secretary Chuck Hagel on March 14, 51 lawyers described a set of “regressive practices at the prison taking place in recent months, which our clients have described as a return to an older regime at Guantánamo that was widely identified with the mistreatment of detainees.”

These complaints, added the the despair brought on by the prisoners’ perception that they have been abandoned by the Obama administration, explains why over a hundred prisoners are engaged in a hunger strike, even though they are risking their lives by doing so.

Sadly, the indifference of the administration to their plight also explains why the authorities refused to acknowledge that a hunger strike was taking place until the media started to focus sufficient attention on the prison that it was impossible to ignore, and also why they have, to date, only conceded that 31 prisoners are on a hunger strike.

On Monday, for example when the authorities acknowledged that 28 men were on a hunger strike, Capt. Robert Durand, a prison spokesman, said that ten men were being force-fed, and that three men had been hospitalized for dehydration, as the New York Times explained.

In contrast, however, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, who represents several Guantánamo prisoners, said he spoke by telephone on Friday with two of his clients who are participating in the hunger strike — Moaz al-Alawi, a Yemeni who is held in Camp Six, and Abdulhadi Faraj, a Syrian who is held in Camp Five.

As the New York Times reported, Kassem said that each man said they had lost about 30 pounds. Apart from “a few elderly prisoners,” they told him, “no one is accepting food from prison authorities.” He added, “Prisoners are not eating anything, surviving only on water. Any supplies left on cellblocks and with prisoners have now been exhausted.”

Carlos Warner, a federal public defender from Ohio who represents Fayiz al-Kandari, one of the last two Kuwaitis in the prison, agreed. Last week, following a visit to his client, he released unclassified notes in which he described al-Kandari as “gaunt” and “too weak to stand,” and noted that he had stated that “all men are striking” and also, as the Times put it, that they were also “refusing prescribed medication, except for two elderly detainees in Camp Six.”

Warner also spoke to CBS News. On March 23, he explained that al-Kandari, whose case we have covered here, “appeared to have lost 20 percent of his body weight due to a hunger strike that began six weeks ago,’ as the broadcaster described it.

In Warner’s words, “Fayiz could not stand yesterday. Today, he was a bit stronger and stood to greet me. He had sallow cheeks. His waist was shockingly thin. His waist looked like the waist of my six-year-old child. He was skin and bones. He was disoriented and exhausted both days.” He added, “He refused honey I brought him. He drank only water during the meetings.”

This week Carlos Warner also spoke to CNN. In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday, he bluntly described conditions at the prison as “dire.” He explained that Army Col. John Bogdan, a military police officer and the joint detention group commander at GTMO since June 2012, had “sparked the current situation.”

In his words, “Col. Bogdan lit the fuel on fire by his oppressive search of the men and taking away the things that they had grown accustomed to for years, like isomats,” the prisoners’ insulated bed mats. The Koran searches, he added, took place in this context, and, as a result, “This is about frustration; this is about the Obama administration ignoring Guantánamo in every way, shape and form.”

Warner told Christiane Amanpour that he was “a liberal who supported President Obama, but is disappointed that Obama has completely ignored Guantánamo and blamed Republicans in Congress.” That, he said, was an argument he rejected. “There’s not one person in this administration that I can call and say I need to talk somebody in the White House about the hunger strike,” he said, pointing out that President Obama had appointed a special envoy for the closure of Guantánamo, Daniel Fried, but had just closed his office and reappointed him, leaving no one in charge of Guantánamo issues.

Appointing someone in charge of closing Guantánamo is one of three demands that we at “Close Guantánamo” issued last month.

The loss of Fried, and his office, Warner said, leaves his clients in “indefinite detention for life,” adding, “It leaves them with the prospect of the only way we leave Guantánamo is death. And unfortunately, I think the men are ready to embrace this. And I don’t see the military backing off.”

CBS News also spoke to Army Capt. Jason Wright, the appointed military defense counsel for Obaydullah, an Afghan put forward for a trial by military commission under President Bush, but cleared for release under President Obama, whose innocence we wrote about here. Capt. Wright explained that he was on a hunger strike and had written, “I am in jail for almost 11 years, and still I do not know about my fate.”

Capt. Wright also said he “was ‘shocked’ by Obaydullah’s appearance two weeks ago and again when he returned to see him this week.” He told Capt. Wright that “his weight had dropped from 167 to 131 pounds after refusing meals for 45 days.”

In Capt. Wright’s opinion, “He had clearly lost weight and was visibly distressed. I think this is a manifestation of sheer desperation and hopelessness.”

Can the desperation and hopelessness be dealt with before prisoners die? President Obama needs to wake up to what is going on, and address it by, at the very minimum, lifting his ban on releasing cleared Yemenis (another of our demands) and sending them home.

Doing nothing is no longer an option. Lt. Col. Barry Wingard is the military defense attorney for Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah, the other Kuwaiti still held, and he was the first attorney to publicise the hunger strike. Speaking to RT about Fayiz on March 24, he said, “at this point it’s official that he’s lost almost 40 pounds (18kg) — one third of his body weight from 147 pounds (67kg).”

Telling RT that “we’re running out of time,” he added that the prisoners “have figured out that probably the only way for them to go home — cleared or not — is in a wooden box.”

When the prison’s spokesman, Capt. Durand, spoke to the New York Times last week, he acknowledged that, as the Times put it, “a significant underlying condition for the recent unrest was the collapse of hopes that the United States government would at some point let them go.” Capt. Durand said, “I think there was great hope that there would be fresh movement, and there was at the beginning [of the Obama administration]. But the movement in the last year is not encouraging. I don’t dispute that there is frustration over that.”

In Congressional testimony last week, Gen. John F. Kelly, who became the naval commander at Guantánamo in November, went further. “They [the prisoners] had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed,” he said, adding, “They were devastated, apparently … when the president backed off — at least their perception — of closing the facility. He said nothing about it in his inauguration speech. He said nothing about it in his State of the Union speech. He has said nothing about it. He’s not — he’s not restaffing the office that … looks at closing the facility.”

When the general in charge of the naval base at Guantánamo recognizes so clearly what is happening at Guantánamo, and what is wrong with the administration’s inactivity, President Obama needs to pay attention.

So please, Mr. President, wake up to the need to clear the 86 released prisoners, to review the cases of the 46 others you designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial in an executive order two years ago, and make sure that the rest of the men designated for trials are given trials.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

TV and Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo, the Hunger Strike and Shaker Aamer

It’s been a busy week, with the prison-wide hunger strike still raging at Guantánamo, and the government’s denials about it taking place crumbling under sustained media interest.

I’m delighted that the major US newspapers have picked up on the story, and also that CBS News and CNN have finally deigned to cover it, although in general, as was noted at the start of the week by RT — which is engaged in the kind of sustained coverage of the story that ought to be undertaken by the US networks — US TV remains a Guantánamo-free zone.

I appeared briefly on RT’s show on Monday about the hunger strike — part of a short interview that replaced a larger segment planned for last Friday that was scuppered by technical problems — but what I particularly liked about the show was how RT succinctly exposed the shallowness of most US broadcast news, and the ignorance of the American public when it comes to Guantánamo.

In the streets of New York, a reporter for RT asked residents if they knew that over half of the 166 men still in Guantánamo — 86 in total — had been cleared for release but are still held  — only to be met with surprise and, in some cases, evident shock and indignation.

RT’s show is available below, via YouTube:

Following up, Alexandre Antonov, an editor at RT, contacted me to ask me about the hunger strike being undertaken, in solidarity with the prisoners, by activists with Witness Against Torture, many of whom I am proud to count as my friends. That report is here, and below are the key sections:

Activists join Guantánamo hunger strike in week of fast

RT, March 25, 2013

In a gesture of solidarity with Guantánamo Bay prisoners, who are continuing their month-long hunger strike, activists across the world have launched a week-long fast. The campaign will also include protest rallies and vigils.

The action, organized by the Guantánamo prisoners support group Witness Against Torture (WAT), began on Sunday and is to last through March 30. Some activists plan to continue fasting every Friday until the prison is closed, the group says.

The fast will be accompanied by public gatherings to protest against the existence of Guantánamo prison and the condition of people held there.

“We will gather for action in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities domestically and internationally next week to denounce the barbaric practice of torture and indefinite detention and to demand justice for the men at Guantánamo,” WAT says.

The activists also released a list of 166 names of Gitmo detainees, calling on supporters of solidarity and remind the management “that the world has not forgotten the hunger strikers.” [see a template for a letter here].

Human rights advocate Andy Worthington believes demonstrations like the recent one are crucial for changing the situation in Guantánamo, stating inactivity “would be a victory” for those whose aim is to keep the prison open.

“Those of us working to close Guantánamo are up against powerful forces of indifference or hostility to our cause, despite the obvious justice of our position. People should not — must not — be put off by this indifference or hostility,” Andy Worthington told RT.

WAT organized similar fasts of solidarity annually since 2010. The group itself was formed back in 2005 and has since been trying to make the US government close the notorious prison through vigils, marches, nonviolent direct action and other measures.

*****

In another Guantánamo-related activity, I was interviewed for Friday Nights Fusion, a regular weekly show on Birmingham’s Unity FM, which was broadcast a week ago. The Muslim broadcaster put together a 1 hour and 45 minute “Shaker Aamer Special,” available here, for which I was interviewed along with Sheikh Suliman Gani, the Imam of Tooting Islamic Centre, the mosque that Shaker attended prior to his capture and rendition to Guantánamo 11 years ago, plus Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and Jane Ellison, the MP for Battersea, where Shaker lived, and where his wife and children still live. Also taking part were the Green MP Caroline Lucas, a tireless campaigner for justice, and the human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Joy, Jane and I also appeared together at a day of action for Shaker in Tooting the day after the Unity FM show was first broadcast, which I wrote about here, and which was primarily designed to secure more signatures on an e-petition to the British government calling for renewed action to bring Shaker home from Guantánamo. 100,000 signatures are needed on the e-petition by April 20 for it to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate. The-petition is for UK citizens and residents only, but there is no lower age limit, so children can sign as well as adults, and for those who are not British, a global petition, which can be signed by anyone anywhere in the world, is available here.

During the week, I also spoke about the hunger strike, and the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, to my old friend and colleague Peter B. Collins, for his San Francisco-based show. Peter and I spoke for about 50 minutes, an in-depth analysis that I recommend to anyone wanting detailed information about what is happening, and about Guantánamo in general. Information about the show is here, which you can listen to by paying just $1 for 24-hour access — although Peter also has other, longer subscription offers which I recommend.

This is how Peter described the show:

Journalist Andy Worthington on the widespread hunger strike by prisoners at Guantánamo … Worthington is a journalist and photographer, and author of The Guantánamo Files. His website provides the most comprehensive coverage of America’s offshore prison colony. Over a month ago, lawyers for prisoners reported a hunger strike spreading, and now more than 100 of the 166 inmates is reported to be refusing food. The Pentagon admits that at least 28 are on a hunger strike, and that at least 10 are being force fed.  Mainstream media like the New York Times suggest that the Obama administration is under-reporting the situation.

We also talk about the proposal to spend almost $200 million on facilities at Gitmo, and the recent decision by the administration to hold Abu Ghaith, bin Laden’s son-in-law, at a lockup in Manhattan (not at Gitmo) and to arraign him in federal court (not a military commission). And Worthington comments on Jeh Johnson, Harold Koh and Neal Katyal, who have all worked in the administration and have histories of advocating for human rights and detainee rights.

And finally, if there are any Slovenian readers out there, you may want to check out an interview I undertook with Marko Kraševec for Radio Student in Ljubljana, Slovenia in which I spoke about the hunger strike.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Protest Photos: Shaker Aamer and Guantánamo, and an NHS Roadblock Outside Parliament

Protest Photos: Shaker Aamer and Guantanamo, and an NHS Roadblock Outside Parliament, a set on Flickr.

This photo set collects a few photos from events over the last week and a half that I haven’t included in any other sets — three relating to the ongoing campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and to bring him back to the UK to be reunited with his wife and children, and four of a “die-in” for the NHS, involving a roadblock outside the Houses of Parliament, during a protest that took place prior to a Parliamentary lobby on Tuesday.

I have been writing about Shaker Aamer’s case — and campaigning for his release –  for many years, not just because Guantánamo has been a legal, moral and ethical abomination since its creation over 11 years ago, and remains so to this day, but also because his release is so long overdue. He was first told that he would be released under President Bush, in 2007, and again under President Obama in 2009, but, disgracefully, he is still held.

Free Shaker Aamer!

Last week, I took part in three events to highlight Shaker Aamer’s case, and to call for action to secure his release. The first, last Tuesday, was a talk to the Westminster University Amnesty International Society, with the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, which was packed out, and full of articulate enthusiasts for justice, and the second, last Thursday, involved a day trip to Birmingham to talk to the Birmingham University Amnesty International Society. At both events, I spoke about the history of Guantánamo, the many disgraceful reasons it is still open, Shaker’s case, and the ongoing hunger strike, and encouraged everyone who attended to sign the e-petition to the British government calling for renewed action to secure Shaker’s return.

On Saturday, I joined campaigners from the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign at Tooting Islamic Centre for a meeting at which I spoke along with Jane Ellison, Shaker’s MP, and Jean Lambert, the Green MEP for London, and which about in an article entitled, “Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo: Photos and Report from Saturday’s Day of Action in Tooting.” The meeting we spoke at — a very moving event attended by Shaker’s family — was part of a day of action to secure more signatures for the e-petition, which currently has 57,265 signatures, but needs 100,000 by April 20 to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate. Only British citizens and residents can sign it, but there is no lower age limit, so all family members can sign.

At the event, I discovered that there are thousands of signatures on paper petitions that need imputing, so if you can help to input the signatures, please email the organisers or text or phone 07949 178942 to offer your help, and to arrange for how you can do so. Anyone anywhere in the world can help out, because the paper petitions have been scanned, so please get in touch if you can help, and also, if you’re not a UK citizen or resident and want to support Shaker through a petition,  there’s an international petition here that anyone can sign.

Save the NHS!

This week, while maintaining my focus on Guantánamo through various interview about the hunger strike, I also took part in a protest and Parliamentary lobby to save the NHS from further legislation designed by the Tory-led coalition government to lead to its privatisation, through regulations relating to Section 75 of the wretched Health and Social Care Act, passed last year, which oblige almost all NHS services to be put out to tender, thereby enabling corporations to take over most of the NHS, as those commissioning services — the Clinical Commissioning Groups of MPs, who will be taking over 80 percent f the NHS budget on April 1 — will not want to risk legal challenges from corporate providers.

I wrote extensively about the lobby, accompanied by photos, in an article entitled, “Save the NHS: Photos and Report from the Lobby of Parliament on March 26 to Scrap the New Regulations Enforcing NHS Privatisation,” and I’m glad to have an opportunity to mention the article again, as there has been no coverage of the lobby in the media at all, even though the issues are hugely important. As John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, stated at the meeting in the House of Commons, “Within 18 months, the NHS could be gone,” if we don’t act now.

The four photos included here are from a brief episode that took place after the protest and before the lobby, when there was a rather photogenic “die-in” on the road in front of Parliament.

If you can take action to support the NHS, and to oppose the government’s plans, then please, please do so. As I explained in my article, “The need to oppose the implementation of the Section 75 regulations is hugely important, and we only have until the third week of April to persuade members of the House of Lords (and particularly Lib Dem and cross-bench peers) to join with Labour peers in striking down the legislation. Opponents of the government’s plans are also encouraged to write to their MPs to ask them to sign an Early Day Motion (EDM 1188) calling for the regulations to be overturned. Find out how to write to members of the House of Lords — and what to say — on the Save Lewisham Hospital website here, and contact your MP here to ask them to sign EDM 1188, calling for the Section 75 regulations to be annulled.”

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Save the NHS: Photos and Report from the Lobby of Parliament on March 26 to Scrap the New Regulations Enforcing NHS Privatisation

Save the NHS: The Lobby of Parliament on March 26 to Scrap the New Regulations Enforcing NHS Privatisation, a set on Flickr.

Yesterday, in the Houses of Parliament, a passionate and packed-out meeting took place in one of the House of Commons committee rooms, attended by well over a hundred campaigners for the NHS, at which MPs, doctors and activists spoke, and there were also intelligent contributions from the audience, as, collectively, we tried to work out how, in the short term, to resist the government’s latest plans to privatise the NHS, and, in the longer term, how to save the NHS and build a successful movement to oppose the whole of the wretched age of austerity imposed on us by the Tory-led coalition government for malignant ideological purposes; in short, in an effort to destroy the state provision of almost all services — with one exception, of course, being their salaries and expenses.

The spur for the meeting, and the rally outside that preceded it, is the government’s plan to push through privatisation of the NHS — despite explicit promises not to do so — through secondary legislation relating to Section 75 of the wretched Health and Social Care Act that was passed last year, in which almost all NHS services will have to be put out to tender by the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), the groups of GPs who will be responsible for 80 percent of the NHS budget from April 1.

Although 350,000 people recently signed a 38 Degrees petition opposing the plans (which I wrote about here), and Lib Dem minister Norman Lamb promised that the key regulations on competition in the NHS would be rewritten, the rewritten regulations have barely changed, and they still oblige the NHS to put almost all NHS services out to tender, allowing private companies to begin to devour the whole of the NHS or face legal challenges that they will probably lose, because enforced competition will have been made into a key component of the provision of NHS services.

The need to oppose the implementation of the Section 75 regulations is hugely important, and we only have until the third week of April to persuade members of the House of Lords (and particularly Lib Dem and cross-bench peers) to join with Labour peers in striking down the legislation. Opponents of the government’s plans are also encouraged to write to their MPs to ask them to sign an Early Day Motion (EDM 1188) calling for the regulations to be overturned. Find out how to write to members of the House of Lords — and what to say — on the Save Lewisham Hospital website here, and contact your MP here to ask them to sign EDM 1188, calling for the Section 75 regulations to be annulled.

At the meeting, speakers included the Green MP Caroline Lucas, the Labour MPs Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Heidi Alexander, and the Labour peer Philip Hunt (Baron Hunt of Kings Heath). After spending some time queuing to get in, I was in time to catch Caroline Lucas, who spoke about how, under the government’s plans, “competition will be the norm” in the NHS, and that it is now clear that, when Andrew Lansley explicitly promised that the NHS would not be subjected to enforced privatisation, during the passage of his wretched legislation dealing with the NHS, he “was lying because the government’s intention all along was to privatise the NHS.”

Dr. Brian Fisher, a GP in the London Borough of Lewisham, and a key player in the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, spoke next. The Lewisham campaign is a huge movement in my home borough, resisting plans to disembowel Lewisham to pay for debts at a neighbouring NHS trust, which attracted 25,000 supporters for a march and rally in January, although Brian spoke more generally about how services will be destroyed if privatisation goes ahead, as the government plans. The health service, he said, “will look more like dentistry,” as services are cut or reduced by GPs in the CCGs, where, he also noted, there will be a potentially huge conflict of interest as GPs become responsible for commissioning services  which can include those they own or in which they have an interest.

Brian also pointed out that, if the plans do go ahead and almost all NHS services are put out to tender, corporations will win the lion’s share of contracts because CCGs will fear legal challenges if they do not appoint them. As he put it, the provision of NHS services will be decided by the law courts and not those commissioning services. He stressed that the markets will run everything, and that private companies’ concerns will “trump all other considerations.”

He also pointed out that, via the CCGs, those GPs who do not wish to cash in on the possibilities offered by privatisation will be the fall guys, blamed for what is out of their hands, and concluded with a resounding defence of the NHS as a service offering “equal access to universal healthcare regardless of income,” based on general taxation — something everyone in the room applauded.

Next up was the Labour peer Philip Hunt (Baron Hunt of Kings Heath), who explained how the revised regulations are still poisonous, because, under regulation 5, the only legitimate reason those commissioning services have for not putting services out to tender is if there is only one provider. He explained how he was “convinced that the CCGs will be forced to put everything out to tender to avoid legal action,” and explained how services will be broken up, and millions of pounds will be spent on tendering and on legal advice that should be spent on services.

He also explained how the only realistic chance of annulling the regulations is in the House of Lords, and he encouraged everyone to write to Lib Dem and cross-bench members of the House of Lords to urge them to vote against the regulations when they came under discussion in about three weeks.

Barry Brown, of Unite, spoke next, pointing out that 175 NHS organisations — the Primary Care Trusts and related organisations — will be dissolved on April 1, when the CCGs and other organisations take over. However, putting the lie to government claims that it is reducing bureaucracy, he also explained that there will be over 400 new organisations in total, and, crucially, that 300 of them will be dealing with commissioning — the core of the privatisation sought by the government. He also explained that it has cost the government £3 billion to set up the new regime, despite David Cameron promising no to-down reorganisations of the NHS, and that this, plus the £2.2 billion that the NHS underspent last year, which was sent back to the Treasury, to be swallowed up elsewhere, would have been more than enough to ensure the smooth running of the NHS, had the government not been obsessed with privatising it. He also spoke about how campaigners need to be looking at how these exchanges only affect England, and to watch how the health service in Scotland, Wales Northern Ireland survives without being subjected to the hatchet of privatisation.

Diane Abbott then turned up, to encourage everyone to continue with the struggle to save the NHS, and to point out that, although, as shadow health minister, she was proud to be defending the NHS, she was even more proud to have fought against New Labour’s obsession with privatising the NHS when they were in power.

After taking issue with Jeremy Hunt’s recent, and outrageous lie about immigrants being to blame for the pressures faced by A&E Departments, she warned the audience about a further threat to the NHS currently being planned by the government — a proposal to set up an NHS inspector to grade hospitals, on the basis, of course, that those judged to be “poor” could then be handed over to private companies.

John McDonnell also found the time to visit, and delivered a rousing call to action. After noting some important facts about the potential for the corruption of GPs in the CCGs — and specifically talking about one instance in which the chair of a London CCG and three colleagues have already made £2.5 million each selling a private health company they established — he delivered the starkest warning of the day. “Within 18 months,” he said, “the NHS could be gone.”

His suggestion for further action was to declare a National NHS Day in Parliament to call on MPs to state publicly whether they are for or against the NHS, and for campaigners to surround Parliament at the same time, which strikes me as a wonderful idea. He also pointed out that campaigners need to say to the Labour Party that we need a commitment from them that anything privatised will be nationalised under a Labour government, and left us with three tips for campaigning — the need for determination, courage and solidarity.

There were other speakers both before and after, plus useful comments from the audience — from Richard Taylor of the National Health Action party, for example, who called for support for their plans to put forward candidates in marginal seats at the next election, and one speaker who raised the question of the horrendous PFI debts crippling parts of the NHS, which need to be written off as naked, criminal profiteering. I also took the opportunity to discuss the role not just of politicians, but of the medical directors of the NHS, whose fingerprints are all over the plans to cut services, departments and hospitals, and who need to be called to account for their betrayal of the health service — our health service — that they work for.

For now, please follow up on the urgent need to write to members of the House of Lords and write to MPs asking them to sign EDM 1188. Please also sign the 38 Degrees petition if you haven’t already, and keep telling people what’s happening. far too many people don’t know and will only be weeping when the NHS has gone. As Philip Hunt pointed out, even the professional medical bodies are slow to recognise the threat from the Section 75 regulations (the BMA’s recent position is here, for example, but other bodies, disappointingly, are not yet on board).

The NHS remains the single most important institution in the UK, providing, as Brian Fisher put it, “equal access to universal healthcare regardless of income,” based on general taxation. It must be the issue on which, along with the disgraceful treatment of the disabled, this government falls, but it must be saved from destruction before then, and the Labour Party, if it wishes to be credible, must make cast-iron guarantees that it will run an NHS for the people according to what the people need.

As I am fond of saying, we would all pay more for the NHS out of taxation if it was audited openly and no savings could be made that didn’t involve cutting frontline services. Instead, however, we have politicians and some medical professionals intent on privatising the NHS for their own gain, and for the benefit of their corporate chums, and their financial gain will be everyone else’s loss unless we fight to resist them.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo: Photos and Report from Saturday’s Day of Action in Tooting

Please sign the e-petition calling for the British government to secure the return to the UK from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who has been cleared for release since 2007 but is still held. 100,000 signatures are needed by April 20. This is for UK citizens and residents only, but there is no lower age limit, so children can sign as well as adults. A global petition, for anyone anywhere in the world, is available here.

On Saturday, despite the snow and the bitterly cold weather, campaigners from the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign held a Day of Action in Tooting for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who is still held, despite having been cleared for release from the prison under George W. Bush (in 2007) and again under President Obama (in 2009). Shaker has a British wife and four British children, and lived just down the road in Battersea before his capture and his long imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo.

The Day of Action included a meeting at the Tooting Islamic Centre, at which the speakers were myself, Jean Lambert MEP (London representative of the Green Party) and Jane Ellison MP (the Conservative MP for Battersea), as well as Sheikh Suliman Gani, the Imam of the Tooting Islamic Centre, and Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, who chaired the meeting.

The Day of Action also included campaigners encouraging the people of Tooting to sign the e-petition to the British government calling for renewed action on the part of ministers to secure Shaker’s immediate return from Guantánamo.

The e-petition was launched by Shaker’s family last April, and has just one more month to go to secure the 100,000 signatures needed to make Shaker’s case eligible for a parliamentary debate. At the time of writing, it has over 51,000 signatures, and it was announced on Saturday that there are 30,000 more signatures on paper petitions, which need to be submitted to the e-petition website before the petition ends on April 20.

So please, if you haven’t yet signed the petition, and encouraged everyone you know to sign it, do so now, and if you can help to input the signatures — preferably if you’re in London, and within reach of Tooting — please email the organisers or text or phone 07949 178942 to offer your help, and to arrange for how you can do so.

Saturday’s meeting was a powerful event, attended by his wife and children, and his brother-in-law. Although I had met Johina, his daughter, at an event in 2008, I had never met his wife or his three other children (Mikhail, Saif and Faris — all boys), and it was very moving for me to meet Zennira, his wife, after so many years writing about and campaigning for her husband.

I have never met Shaker, but I feel that I know him. His charisma and eloquence and compassion for his fellow prisoners is well-known, both to his supporters, and to the US authorities, and last year he did me the honour of requesting that declassified notes from meetings with one of his lawyers be made available to me to write about and publish (also see here and here). However, on Saturday, I felt that, in some ways, I learned more about him than I had in my seven years of writing about Guantánamo, publicising the prisoners’ stories, and campaigning for the prison’s closure, through meeting his wife, and through hearing first-hand, from his brother-in-law Souban, who spoke about his great kindness and concern for others, as did others who knew him.

At the meeting, Jane Ellison read out a letter she had just received from Alistair Burt MP, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, responsible for counter-terrorism. In the letter, dated March 18, Alistair Burt stated that the government had a “continuing commitment to seeking the release” of Shaker, and pointed out that Philip Hammond, the Secretary of State for Defence, had spoken to Leon Panetta, the US defense secretary, in January, even though foreign secretary William Hague had not had time to discuss Shaker’s case with John Kerry, the new Secretary of State, when they met recently.

In his letter, Alistair Burt also wrote in detail about the current legislative problems in the US relating to Guantánamo, describing how, since Congress included provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act severely restricting the release of prisoners in late 2011, no prisoners have been released except two men who negotiated release as part of plea deals in their trials by military commission in 2010, and, although he didn’t mention it, two others who won their habeas corpus petitions in 2008.

There is, as Burt noted, a waiver provision in the NDAA, whereby the administration can release a prisoner without having to go through Congress. Lawmakers told the administration that no prisoner can be released to a country they regard as dangerous unless the defense secretary states that they will not engage in anti-American activities. This, of course, is an impossible promise, but the waiver allows the administration to bypass Congress if the President regards it as being important to America’s national security.

As Burt also noted, that waiver has not been used, and the implication, perhaps, is that the British government acknowledges that it could be used in the case of Shaker Aamer, whose return to the UK could not conceivably trigger allegations that he is being returned to a country that could be regarded as dangerous.

In her talk to the audience in the mosque, Jean Lambert spoke about the need for the 27 countries in the European Parliament to deal with Guantánamo, which she described, accurately, as still being an important issue for Europe as a whole. She also spoke about how the countries need to pursue accountability for their involvement in rendition and torture during the Bush administration, and how, in Europe and globally, there is still a need for countries prepared to provide resettlement for cleared prisoners in Guantánamo who cannot be safely repatriated.

She also spoke about how Guantánamo is “an enormous stain on America’s reputation” regarding human rights, and noted how violent regimes around the world always use Guantánamo, and America’s actions there, as justification for their own brutality and lawlessness, and she concluded by stressing the importance of public protest not just to the victims of injustice, but also to governments seeking to address those injustices, because those involved in protests provide governments with evidence of those who care about the issues involved.

When I spoke, I encouraged people to sign the petition and I also ran through the recent history of Guantánamo — mainly about how 86 of the 166 men still held, including Shaker, were cleared for release between three and four years ago by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, but, disgracefully, are still held, because of Congressional obstruction described above, but also because of failures on the part of President Obama — especially in the unjustifiable ban on releasing any cleared Yemenis from the prison (who make up two-thirds of those cleared from release) which he imposed in the wake of a filed bomb plot involving Yemen over three years ago.

I also spoke about the hunger strike which is currently raging at Guantánamo, and how this hunger strike — a cry of despair by the prisoners, and of protest against a harsh new regime at the prison which reminds the men of the old days of brutality under George W. Bush — ought to be mentioned by campaigners writing to William Hague, to show how lives are at risk at Guantánamo, and why the need to secure Shaker’s release is more pressing than ever.

My thanks to the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign for organising the event, and to Sheikh Suliman Gani and the Tooting Islamic Centre for hosting it. In conclusion, let’s reach that 100,000 target for signatures by April 20. And please, if you can help with inputting signatures, do get in touch with the organisers. It would be a great shame if these signatures didn’t count because enough people weren’t able to help out.

“No Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo,” US Claims, Defying Reality

[image error]We live in surreal times. President Obama, who promised “hope and change,” has, instead, proven to be a worthy successor to George W. Bush as a warmonger and a defender of those in positions of power and authority who authorized the use of torture.

In addition, when it comes to another hallmark of Bush-era crimes — indefinite detention without charge or trial, for those that the Bush administration identified as “enemy combatants” — President Obama has gone further than his predecessor.

After the sustained paranoia of the first few years after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush found his policies challenged by the Supreme Court, and subjected to international criticism, and began to back down. Obama, however, having promised to close Guantánamo, but then having discovered that it was politically difficult to do so, has contented himself with finding justifications for continuing to hold the 166 men still at Guantánamo, possibly for the rest of their lives.

This is in spite of the fact that over half of them (86 men in total) were cleared for release by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established in 2009 by President Obama himself, consisting of around 60 officials from the main government departments and the intelligence agencies, who met every week to examine the prisoners’ cases, and to decide who should be released, who should be tried, and — shockingly — who should continue to be held without charge or trial, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

That was unacceptable, as the supposed evidence is no such thing if it cannot be used in a court of law, and this injustice was compounded when President Obama issued an executive order, which, first of all, specifically authorized the indefinite detention of these men (48 in total, reduced to 46 when two of them died in the prison), and, secondly, promised them periodic reviews of their cases, which, as was reported in December, have not taken place two years later.

Worse still, though, is the realization that almost everyone still held at Guantánamo is being detained indefinitely without charge or trial. As well as the 46 mentioned above, most of the 30 or so men who were supposed to face trials will not do so, after the court of appeals in Washington D.C. –a notoriously Conservative court — nevertheless quashed two of the only convictions achieved in the military commission trial system, after pointing out that the alleged crimes — providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy — were not crimes when the legislation was enacted, and are not recognized war crimes.

Moreover, the 86 men cleared for release are not going anywhere either. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb in his underwear, President Obama responded to the hysteria that greeted this news by announcing a ban on the release of any Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo, which is still in place over three years later.

This is in spite of the fact that two-thirds of the men the President’s own Task Force recommended for release are Yemenis, and even though continuing to hold them constitutes imprisonment by nationality alone. If the tables were turned, and some other nation was holding Americans solely on the basis of their nationality, having undertaken a process that had previously led to them being recommended for release, there would be national outrage.

The rest of the cleared prisoners have had their releases blocked by Congress, where lawmakers have imposed onerous conditions on the release of prisoners, primarily obliging the defense secretary to guarantee that any prisoner released to a country they regard as dangerous will not be able to engage in any kind of anti-American activities — a condition that seems to be impossible to fulfill.

However, instead of standing up to Congress, or revisiting his ban on the Yemenis, President Obama has been content to retreat to the safety of the laws passed under his predecessor to justify the detention of prisoners seized in the “war on terror” — in particular, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which gave the President the right to pursue anyone he deemed to be connected to 9/11, al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban and imprison them. In 2004, the Supreme Court confirmed that the President’s power to detain prisoners under the AUMF was until the end of hostilities — whenever that might be in a seemingly unending “war on terror.” When courage was required, President Obama retreated into a shell and comforted himself that the AUMF means that he can continue to hold everyone at Guantánamo, for the rest of their lives, if no one makes it a pressing concern for him do anything about the men abandoned on the naval base in Cuba, and if lawmakers continue to make life difficult for him.

Just last week, attorneys for the prisoners at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, tried to break through this deadlock by calling the Obama administration to account at the only location available to them –  the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), part of the pan-American Organization of American States (OAS), based in Washington D.C. Although the IACHR cannot compel the US to do anything it doesn’t wish to do, it was, at least, as  the IPS News Agency reported, “the first time since President Barack Obama’s re-election that the US government has had to publicly answer questions concerning Guantánamo Bay.”

IPS added, “Legal representatives for the detainees also presented disturbing eyewitness accounts of prisoner despair at the facility, brought on by prolonged indefinite detention and harsh conditions that has led to a sustained hunger strike involving more than 100 prisoners at the US base in Cuba,” which I reported here two weeks ago, when the government was claiming that there was no hunger strike. By last week, when the hearing took place, the growing media interest in the story had led to a concession that there were now 14 hunger strikers, and, by Wednesday this week, that number had risen to 25.

Although the IACHR has repeatedly called for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and has requested permission to meet with the prisoners, its requests have been ignored. last week’s hearing was to enable the IACHR to learn more about what attorney for the men held at Guantánamo described as an “unfolding humanitarian crisis” and, as IPS put it, “calling for an end to ongoing human rights violations they say are being committed against the detainees.”

As well as attorneys, the commission heard “testimony from experts in law, health and international policy, covering the psychological impact of indefinite detention, deaths of some suspects at Guantánamo, the lack of access to fair trials, and US policies that have restricted the prison’s closure.”

Omar Farah, a staff attorney at CCR, told IPS, “In the 2008 campaign, both [John] McCain and Obama were squarely opposed to Guantánamo and agreed that this ugly hangover from the Bush/Cheney era had to be abandoned. But four years later, the political whims have completely reversed and there is almost unanimity that Guantánamo needs to remain open aside from occasional platitudes from the president.”

Farah was, however, “clear in his view that reversing this trend is still well within President Obama’s power.” As he stated, “This is something that really calls for leadership from the president — he needs to decide if he wants Guantánamo to be part of his legacy. If the US isn’t willing to charge someone in a fair process and can’t produce proper evidence of their crimes, then those prisoners have to be released. There is just no other way to have a democratic system. We’ve never had this kind of an alternative system of justice, and yet that’s what we have in Guantánamo.”

Despite the litany of complaints against President Obama — his broken promise to  close Guantánamo, the continuation of of indefinite detention without charge or trial, the use of discredited military commissions, a refusal to hold anyone accountable for torture, and his embrace of drone strikes, a form of extrajudicial assassination from afar, as a replacement for any form of detention — the State Department’s representative last week, Michael Williams, a senior legal advisor, refused to accept that anything was amiss.

As IPS described it, he “made extensive note of the health facilities and services that the US government has made available for the detainees,” but, as the Miami Herald described it, he refused to answer a direct question by IACHR Commissioner Tracy Robinson, of Jamaica, about “whether the administration had any specific plans to close the camps.” Instead, he “reverted to his notes about the administration’s efforts to transfer detainees,” stating that the administration “remains committed to transferring to other countries detainees at Guantánamo who’ve been cleared for release” — although not, evidently, the Yemenis, as he also said that the administration has no plans in the “foreseeable future” to lift the moratorium on transferring Yemenis cleared for release that the President announced in January 2010.

Wiliams also refused to accept that indefinite detention was taking place at Guantánamo. He claimed, as IPS described it, that the United States “only detains individuals when that detention is lawful and does not intend to hold any individual longer than is necessary.”

Kristine Huskey, a lawyer with Physicians for Human Rights, was appalled. “The hopelessness and despair caused by indefinite detention is causing an extremely pressing and pervasive health crisis at Guantánamo,” she told IPS, adding, “A person held in indefinite detention is a person deprived of information about their own fate. They are in custody without knowing when, if ever, they will be released. Additionally, they do not know if they will be charged with crimes, receive a trial, or ever see their families again. If they have been abused or mistreated, they also do not know if this will happen again.”

For Omar Farah, Williams’s testimony was “very disheartening” and “shocking.” As he explained, “They [the US government] explicitly denied that there is indefinite detention, despite the fact that most of the prisoners there have been there for more than a decade without charge or trial.”

Farah added, “We are looking for the IACHR to remain actively engaged and hope that they will continue to put pressure on the US government to comply with their international legal obligations toward these prisoners.”

While the hunger strike continues to rage, it may be that international pressure — not just from the IACHR, but from other concerned bodies, from media organizations, and from concerned citizens — may stir President Obama from his inertia. It is to be hoped for, as it is also to be hoped that some just resolution can be found before any other prisoners die, like Adnan Latif, the Yemeni who died last September and was the ninth prisoner to die at the prison.

Note: For further information, see the CCR page on the hearing, which contains links to numerous documents.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo with Dennis Bernstein on Flashpoints, on 10th Anniversary of Iraq War

As the world’s media marked the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on Tuesday, I was honoured to be asked to speak to Dennis Bernstein, the veteran progressive radio host at KPFA in Berkeley.

Dennis and I have spoken before, and it’s always a pleasure to talk with him, but I was particularly pleased that I was asked to speak about Guantánamo as part of a program about Iraq, as far too few people in the media make the connections between the invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, the use of torture and “black sites.”

The show is available here, or you can listen directly to the MP3 here.

At the start of the show, Dennis spoke to Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi exile who works for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and who delivered a searing indictment of the apologist for the Iraq war, ten years on, who pretend that it was, on an level, worthwhile, when, as he pointed out, it led to “one million dead, five million displaced, and the country in a shambles.”

My segment starts at 28 minutes in and last for a quarter of an hour, and began with Dennis asking me to recap how I researched the story of Guantánamo, and got to know about the stories of the men held there (through an analysis of 8,000 pages released by the Pentagon as the result of an FOIA lawsuit), and why the lies told about them — that they were “the worst of the worst” — were so outrageous: primarily, because the majority of the prisoners were bought for bounty payments from their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and because most of what purports to be evidence against them consists of dubious or patently false statements made by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, through the use of torture, abuse, or bribery (the promise of better living conditions).

Dennis also asked me specifically about torture, and we discussed the key role played by “torture memo” author John Yoo, who, disgracefully, is a law professor at Berkeley, as well as other key lawyers in the Bush administration — including Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s senior lawyer, who became Attorney General, David Addington, Dick Cheney’s senior lawyer, and Jim Haynes at the Pentagon, and we also discussed the shameful lack of accountability for torture under President Obama, who has blocked — and continues to block — all attempts to hold the Bush administration accountable for its crimes. I also had the opportunity to mention the torture program introduced by Donald Rumsfeld at Guantánamo, as his response to the CIA torture program allegedly justified by John Yoo’s “torture memos.”

We then, of course, spoke about the widespread hunger strike at Guantánamo, involving up to 130 of the 166 men still held, whose existence the government is only slowing acknowledging, after weeks of blanket denials, and which I have written about in my articles “A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo” and “How Long Can the Government Pretend that the Massive Hunger Strike at Guantánamo Doesn’t Exist?” and spoken about in an appearance on RT, which I wrote about here, and an appearance on Press TV, which I wrote about here.

As I also explained, the important lessons to be learned from the hunger strike are that people’s lives — the prisoners’ lives — are in danger, as many of them have lost 20 to 30 pounds in weight, and now weigh less than 100 pounds, and that it is understandable that they should be in despair after 11 years of imprisonment in an experimental prison that should never have been opened.

It is now four years since President Obama promised to close Guantánamo, and three to four years since an interagency Task Force that he established concluded that 86 of the remaining prisoners should be released — recommendations subsequently overruled by the President himself (in the case of the Yemenis, who make up two-thirds of the remaining prisoners), and blocked by Congress.

As ever, it was a pleasure to talk with Dennis. I hope you have time to listen to the show, and I also hope to find the time in the next few days to write something about the dreadful anniversary of the start of the illegal invasion of Iraq, but if not, my articles, “Remember Abu Ghraib?” and “Book Review: Road From Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía” and my Guardian article from 2009 — also about the Abu Ghraib scandal — may be useful.

Please keep the story of the hunger strike in the news, if you can, by sharing my articles and my TV and radio interviews, as well as sharing reports by all the other journalists, lawyers, human rights advocates and activists covering the story. The men’s best hope is for their struggle to remind the world what is happening to them — by risking their own lives — to not be in vain.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Guantánamo Hunger Strike on Press TV

For the last fortnight I have been writing about, and discussing the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, in my articles “A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo” and “How Long Can the Government Pretend that the Massive Hunger Strike at Guantánamo Doesn’t Exist?” and in an appearance on RT, which I wrote about here.

Below, via YouTube, is my most recent TV appearance to discuss the hunger strike, which involved a late night Skype call from Press TV at 2am on March 20.

I hope you have the opportunity to watch it, and to share it if you find it useful.

To recap briefly on the situation at Guantánamo, it is clear that, for the last six weeks, over 100 of the remaining 166 prisoners — and perhaps as many as 130 — have been refusing meals, in protest at deteriorating conditions at the prison, including aggressive cell searches, the seizure of their possessions and correspondence (including supposedly confidential correspondence with their attorneys), and mistreatment of their copies of the Koran.

However, it is also clear that one of the main drivers of the hunger strike is the despair induced by eleven years of imprisonment without charge or trial, with no end to the prisoners’ ordeal in sight, after President Obama failed to fulfill his promise to close the prison, and abandoned the men.

Although 86 of them were cleared for release by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama himself, their release has been blocked by Congress, and, in the cases of the Yemenis, who make up two-thirds of the cleared prisoners, by President Obama himself, who imposed a ban on releasing any of them — on the basis of their nationality alone — in January 2010, after a would-be plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian recruited in Yemen, was seized on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

46 others were designated for indefinite detention by President Obama’s Task Force, on the basis that they are too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. This was a disgraceful position for the Obama administration to take, as “insufficient evidence” is shorthand for unreliable evidence, consisting of untrustworthy statements made by other prisoners, both in Guantánamo and in the CIA’s global network of “black sites.” However, President Obama endorsed the detention of these men — 48 in total, reduced to 46 when two of them died — in an executive order two years ago, when he also promised periodic reviews of the men’s cases. Those reviews, however, have not taken place, providing another powerful reason for the men at Guantánamo to feel abandoned.

Thanks for your interest in this story. I will continue to cover it, in the hope that it will persuade President Obama to rouse himself from his inertia before more prisoners die. To demand action from President Obama, and from Secretary of State John Kerry, please see this article on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, of which I am a founder, and a member of the steering committee, with the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008.

Note: For further information, please also see this interview with my friend, the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, on RT.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Intimations of Mortality Revisited; or Why I Will Always Fight to Save the NHS

Two years ago — at noon on March 18, 2011 — I gave up smoking after chain-smoking for 29 years. It was one of the best things I ever did in my life, along with giving up drinking (nearly five years ago), and meeting my wife and having a child.

When I gave up smoking, I did so because I was admitted to hospital after two and a half months of severe pain in my right foot, which, in the last fortnight before my hospital admission, had become so excruciatingly painful that I literally couldn’t sleep. I wrote about it at the time, in an article entitled, “Intimations of Mortality” — hence the reference in the title above, as I revisit this crucial period of my life.

I had developed a blood disorder, which had manifested itself as a blood clot, cutting off the blood supply to my right foot — first to my big toe, and then to my middle toe. It took two months for me to be admitted to hospital, but, when that happened, doctors and consultants in St. Thomas’s Hospital saved my toes, and I was discharged after spending about a week and half being pumped full of drugs and gazing across the River Thames at the Houses of Parliament (as the photo above shows). Within three months, my toes had healed, and I contributed to keeping myself alive by giving up smoking, and, I think, by somehow “managing” the indignation I feel about the injustices of the world, an indignation that had led to me discovering, in my late 30s, that my calling was to be an independent journalist and activist — on civil liberties, human rights abuses, and social justice.

I’d like to say I’m “better,” but that wouldn’t be true. After a year eating biscuits I decided being fit was a good idea and began cycling and taking photographs of London on an almost daily basis. This has been a revelation to me, primarily as it has convinced me that we are meant to be outdoors — whatever the weather — and are not meant to be cooped up in buildings.

However, although I have been feeling fitter than I did since the natural high of youth wore off, sometime in my 30s, I am not “well.” I have a chronic blood disease, I am on blood thinners, and I will soon have to embark on further medication, which, it seems, will not be fun.

I’m sharing this with you, my friends, not just because March 18 is such a significant day for me, but also because I hope it provides a small grain of assistance to anyone trying to overcome addictions.

Primarily, however, I’m sharing it because I wish, very publicly, to defend the NHS as the single most important institution in the UK, and one that I will fight to save. I should add that my own experience is not the only reason that I will always fight for the NHS. In 1999, my son was born prematurely, and both he and his mother owe their lives to the NHS, and to doctors and surgeons and consultants and specialists and nurses in King’s College Hospital in Camberwell, so in a very real sense we are all here today because of the doctors and nurses of the NHS.

I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of an NHS that doesn’t exist. No one knew at first what was wrong with me, and GPs and specialists failed to work it out or to deal with it adequately until I ended up in St. Thomas’s. This was not their fault, as such. Illnesses and diseases rarely come with tags attached explaining what they are, and mistakes can be made that are not deliberate or the result of incompetence.

However, since I ended up in St. Thomas’s two years ago, the care I have received, the monitoring of my condition on a regular basis, and the fruits of the ongoing research into blood diseases, have all provided an excellent demonstration of the NHS as a world-class provider of healthcare.

Moreover, the NHS does all this as a taxpayer-funded insurance system for everyone, in which those trying to save lives do so, for the most part, because it is a service — one that, obviously, needs funding to make it work, but not a business.

Every time I visit the blood clinic at Lewisham Hospital to have my blood levels tested, or the haematology departments in St. Thomas’s and Guy’s, where my case is regularly reviewed by specialists, I am reminded of how the NHS provides this service, and I am enormously relieved that, because we all pay for it through our taxes, it is free at the point of entry and exit.

Here in the UK, the Tories want to destroy the NHS, as they want to destroy the taxpayer-funded state provision of almost all services (one exception being their own salaries and expenses). It is important that these plans are resisted. In the US, where almost twice as much of the country’s GDP is spent on health as in the UK, the world of private healthcare insurance is riddled with fraud, and tens of millions of the poorest and the weakest members of society — those unable to afford insurance — have their lives ruined by crippling debt if they get ill. As a result, the “care” that drives a universal system is constantly at odds with — and more often than not crushed by — the cold reality of healthcare as a business.

Here, the system works as insurance was designed to work — everyone puts in, except those exempt from taxes, and everyone benefits if they get ill. Whether you are unemployed or the leader of a political party, if you have a disabled child, for example, the NHS will be there for you.

The NHS currently faces the gravest threat in its entire 65-year existence — from the Tories, who are currently attempting to sneak through secondary legislation associated with their wretched Health and Social Care Act (passed last year) which will make it mandatory for the Clinical Commissioning Groups of GPs (who take over 80 percent of the NHS’s budget on April 1) to open up almost all NHS services to competition — in other words, to the encroachments of private companies, whose concern is with profits rather than health.

Although over 350,000 people signed a 38 Degrees petition resisting these changes, which prompted Liberal Democrat health minister Norman Lamb to state that the key regulations on competition in the NHS would be rewritten, the Tories cannot be trusted, and there will be is a lobby of Parliament on Wednesday March 26, beginning at 12 noon, to protest about the regulations. Please attend if you can, and also see the Facebook page here.

This is not the only threat to the NHS. The health service’s own medical directors are also engaged in a mission to destroy services, through cuts that will see the disappearance of dozens of hospitals, on the deluded basis that they are focusing on achieving the highest standards of clinical care at fewer sites.

These proposals are affecting Lewisham Hospital, and many other hospitals across London, and I am involved in the campaigns to save these hospitals from destruction, primarily on the basis that, although the senior NHS officials are correct to focus on making the best possible services available, and are to be congratulated on establishing a system whereby certain emergencies — heart attacks and strokes, for example — are best dealt with at specialist centres covering a number of hospitals, their reorganisation and rationalisation is going too far, resulting in the closure of A&E Departments serving hundreds of thousands of people and the knock-on effect on other widely-used services, including maternity and children’s care.

At Lewisham Hospital (which is being sacrificed illegally under the cover of legislation designed to deal with the financial problems of a neighbouring NHS trust), this will mean that there will be just one A&E for the 750,000 people in three boroughs (Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley), at a hospital located on a remote heath in Woolwich), as well as the resultant knock-on effect on other frontline services. In Lewisham, for example, a borough with a population of 270,000 (the size of Brighton, Newcastle or Hull), 90 percent of mothers (currently around 4,000 a year) will no longer be able to give birth in the borough, as only those who are regarded as a low risk (no first-time mothers, and no older mothers) can be provided maternity services without emergency back-up.

Not only is there no spare capacity in neighbouring hospitals for the tens of thousands of emergencies (out of the more than 100,000 adults and children who visit Lewisham’s A&E every year) — and the thousands of mothers — who will be turned away on an annual basis, but these plans also involve a fundamental dishonesty. If it can be established that more money is needed for the NHS, the people of Britain will, I am sure, pay more, but for that that conversation to take place, we need politicians of the calibre of Nye Bevan, the health secretary at the time of the founding of the NHS, who gave those of us defending the NHS our great rallying cry: “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

Note: For further information, please visit the website of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, and see my archive of articles. Please also note that there will be a London-wide “Defend London’s NHS” demonstration in central London on Saturday May 18, beginning at 12 noon in Jubilee Gardens in Waterloo (by the London Eye), followed by a march to the Department of Health and Parliament. See here for the flier on the Keep Our NHS Public website.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.