Andy Worthington's Blog, page 146

Quarterly Fundraiser: Please Help Me Raise $2500 For My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year again, when I ask you, if you can, to help to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo and the 166 men still held there, with a donation. Although I do receive some income from the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I founded last year with the attorney Tom Wilner, and from the Future of Freedom Foundation, for whom I write a regular column, much of the work that I do is unpaid, and I cannot survive as an independent researcher, writer, photographer and activist without your support.

All contributions are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

Since my last appeal, in December, when 17 friends and supporters donated nearly $900 to support my work, I have traveled to the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo — in January, to mark the 11th anniversary of the opening of the prison, just before Barack Obama’s second inauguration as President. Although my flights to and from the UK were paid for, I was not paid for the ten days I spent in the US campaigning and having meetings to discuss strategies for President Obama’s second term, so any help you can provide will be very gratefully received.

The struggle to close Guantánamo is more uphill than ever, because of obstacles imposed by Congress, and the President’s own inertia when it comes to making the case that his thwarted plans to close the prison must be fulfilled. I remain in discussions with various parties, formulating plans to publicize the plight of the remaining 166 prisoners — whether they are the 86 men cleared but still held, the 46 designated for indefinite detention who have not had the reviews of their cases that President Obama promised them two years ago, or the others, mostly designated for trials, but largely held in a similar limbo to all the other men, because the military commissions at Guantánamo have been so thoroughly discredited. As we have been hearing lately, and as I discussed in my most recent article, “A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo,” the situation is now so intolerable that a prison-wide hunger strike has broken out, largely unreported in the mainstream media, by men who, understandably, are now convinced that death is the only way to leave Guantánamo.

As well as continuing to be the most significant independent voice calling for the closure of Guantánamo, and continuing to use the wealth of information that I have built up over the last seven years of working on the story of the prison and the men held there, I have also been involved in unpaid work resisting the cynically imposed “age of austerity” implemented in my home country, the UK, by the wretched Tory-led government that has been using the ongoing fallout from the global financial crash of 2008 to try to destroy the British state.

As part of this, I have been involved in the struggle to save the NHS, and, in particular, to save Lewisham Hospital from proposals to fatally downgrade its services to pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust, and to resist severe cuts to services across London. I have been working both as a journalist and a photographer on these issues, and if you like what I’ve been doing, then donations to support tis work will also be gratefully received.

Also welcome is any support you can provide for my project to photograph London by bike, to document the city at this difficult time on its history — with the rich still showing off their mostly ill-gotten wealth, while everyone else is squeezed, and the poor and the weak are, in particular, mercilessly assaulted by the malignant millionaires in charge of the Tory-led coalition government. I have already published around 2,000 photos as part of this project, but I have at least 8,000 more   that I am steadily publishing, while continuing to record London’s forgotten places, its brash demonstrations of wealth, and the still-growing gulf between the rich and the poor.

I do hope that you can support me in my quarterly appeal. Rest assured that I am grateful for your interest, whether or not you are able to help me out financially, but I continue to hope that the work I do is a useful example of independent online journalism that is partly funded by those who read it.

Thanks for your support, as ever,

Andy Worthington

London, March 11, 2013

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,”.

A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

When is a hunger strike not a hunger strike? Apparently, when the government says it doesn’t exist.

At Guantánamo, reports first began to emerge on February 23 about a camp-wide hunger strike, of a scale not seen since before Barack Obama became President. On the “Free Fayiz and Fawzi” page on Facebook, run by lawyers for Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah, the last two Kuwaitis in the prison, the following message appeared: “Information is beginning to come out about a hunger strike, the size of which has not been seen since 2008. Preliminary word is that it’s due to unprecedented searches and a new guard force.”

Fayiz al-Kandari’s team of military lawyers arrived at the prison on February 25, and the day after announced, “Fayiz has lost more than twenty pounds and lacks the ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time due to a camp wide hunger strike. Apparently there is a dispute over searches and the confiscations. We believe there is a desperation setting amongst the prisoners whereby GTMO is forgotten and its condemned men will never get an opportunity to prove their innocence or be free.”

On February 27, the team reported, “Today, we had a communication with the Kuwait legal team concerning Fayiz and Fawzi’s physical condition in GTMO. It is difficult meeting with a man who has not eaten in almost three weeks, but we are scheduled for an all-day session tomorrow which we are sure Fayiz will not be able to complete due his failing physical condition. Additionally, we learned that our other client Abdul Ghani, [an Afghan] who has been cleared for release since 2010, is also on a hunger strike. Eleven years without an opportunity to defend themselves.”

On February 28, the lawyers confirmed that Fayiz al-Kandari’s weight loss over the previous three and a half weeks had reached 26 pounds (12 kg), and on March 5, after meeting their client, they reported that he had said that the hunger strike “certainly hurts physically,” but he felt “very sorry for his parents whose psychological pain is ten times greater than his physical discomfort.”

While that last comment showed great concern for others, no one aware of the situation at Guantánamo would begrudge the men still held from dwelling on their own position, and concluding that a hunger strike is the only way to try and draw attention to their plight. Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, al-Kandari’s military lawyer, told FireDogLake, “there is a growing feeling here that death is the road out of GTMO.”

Death has indeed been the way out for three of the last seven prisoners to leave the prison — two who died in 2011, and one, Adnan Latif, a Yemeni, who died last September, despite having repeatedly been cleared for release from the prison.

Despair is entirely appropriate at Guantánamo for the 166 men still held, because, although 86 of them were cleared for release at least three years ago by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama (and some were cleared for release under President Bush, between 2004 and 2007), they are still held because of Congressional obstruction, and because of President Obama’s refusal to make the case that holding men cleared for release is a disgrace.

Of the 80 others, 46 were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, and the rest were recommended for trials. Two years ago, President Obama issued an executive order formalizing the indefinite detention of those 46 men, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. This was also disgraceful, as it attempted to create the illusion that a collection of unverifiable statements produced through the use of torture, other forms of coercion, or bribery could be regarded as something approximating evidence, when that is clearly not the case.

In an effort to placate critics, the President promised periodic reviews of these men’s cases in his executive order, although two years later no reviews have taken place at all, and a review board has not even been established. These men can, therefore, reasonably be expected to regard themselves as having been abandoned by the President at least as thoroughly as the 86 men cleared for release who are still held. In addition, the majority of the rest of the prisoners — those recommended for trials — are also effectively being detained forever without any kind of review process, because, in recent months, the deeply conservative court of appeals in Washington D.C. has ruled that two of the key charges in the military commission trial system first established under President Bush to charge Guantánamo prisoners were not regarded as war crimes when the trial system was established, and has thrown out the convictions against two men tried in 2008.

On March 4, lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and others representing prisoners at Guantánamo, sent a letter to Rear Adm. John W. Smith, Jr., the Commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo, adding further information about the hunger strike. They stated that, “through reports by several detainees to their counsel,” they understood that “conditions in the camps have worsened to the point that all but a few men have now gone on a hunger strike in protest,” and explained that they had been informed that “since approximately February 6, 2013, camp authorities have been confiscating detainees’ personal items, including blankets, sheets, towels, mats, razors, toothbrushes, books, family photos, religious CDs, and letters, including legal mail; and restricting their exercise, seemingly without provocation or cause.”

They added, “Moreover, we understand that Arabic interpreters employed by the prison have been searching the men’s Qur’ans in ways that constitute desecration according to their religious beliefs, and that guards have been disrespectful during prayer times. These actions, and the fact that they have affected so many men, indicate a significant departure from the way in which the rules have been formulated and implemented over the past few years.”

The lawyers also explained that, as the men’s health has deteriorated, they had received reports of their clients “coughing up blood, being hospitalized, losing consciousness, becoming weak and fatigued, and being moved to Camp V [a maximum-security block] for observation,” as well as reports of the men “feeling increased stress, fear, and despair.”

Requesting that the Commander “take immediate measures to bring an end this potentially life-threatening situation in the camps by addressing the reasons that give rise to it,” the lawyers also noted, “The practices occurring today threaten to turn back the clock to the worst moments of Guantánamo’s history, and return the prison to conditions that caused great suffering to our clients and were condemned by the public at large. If prior experience serves as any guide, the current practices risk dire consequences and will only invite outside scrutiny.”

In response, as I mentioned at the start of this article, the prison authorities claimed that there is no widespread hunger strike. As Carol Rosenberg reported for the Miami Herald, Navy Capt. Robert Durand, the prison’s public affairs officer, said that only “six of the 166 captives at the base had missed enough consecutive meals to be classified as hunger strikers,” and that five of them “were being fed through tubes.”

David Remes, who represents a number of Yemeni prisoners, disputed the authorities’ claims. He said that, on Monday, he met with a Yemeni client, Hussein Almerfedi, who “hadn’t eaten in 22 or 23 or 24 days” to protest the Qur’an searches, but “had not deteriorated sufficiently to be force fed.”

The mainstream media has begun pick up on the story, but it remains to be seen if, in the current political climate, the situation at Guantánamo will be “condemned by the public at large,” as the lawyers stated with reference to the response to Guantánamo in George W. Bush’s second term. Experience shows us that, sadly, people no longer care sufficiently, and that President Obama shares that indifference. I hope that I am wrong, and that indignation once more becomes fashionable with reference to Guantánamo. Certainly the men who are still held deserve to have their complaints noticed, and if a hunger strike is the way to do it, then so be it.

After all, these are men whose situation ought to alarm and appal all Americans. Under President Obama, who promised to close the prison, they are, instead, held indefinitely despite being cleared for release, or they have officially been designated for indefinite detention and are then denied the reviews they were promised, or they were recommended for trials that even the most conservative judges in Washington D.C. regard as inadequate.

None of that is fair or just, and after eleven years, and with no end in sight, it is time for concrete steps to be taken to close Guantánamo once and for all.

Note: See Lewis Peake’s website, and also see this article featuring the five pictures Lewis drew based on descriptions of pictures drawn in Guantánamo in 2008 by Sami al-Haj, prior to his release, which were described to him by Sami’s lawyers at Reprieve.

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.

Night Lights: Photos of a Journey from Camberwell to New Cross at Night

Night Lights: Camberwell to New Cross at Night, a set on Flickr.

This photo set is the 83rd in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began last May, and after my recent publication of a series of photo sets from last July, featuring a journey through the East End to Stratford and the Olympic Park, on the eve of the Olympic Games, I thought it was time to return to the present — and also to publish some photos taken at night. For the previous photos, see here, here, here and here — and here for my journey around the perimeter of the Olympic Park.

As a result, I’m posting here a set of 15 photos I took at night a few days ago, during a journey from Camberwell to my home in Brockley, in south east London, after collecting my son from an art class organised by Southwark’s schools and the South London Gallery, and then escorting him to Denmark Hill station, to catch a train home. A month ago, in a set entitled, “Mostly Camberwell, At Night,” I published photos from a variation on this journey — from Brockley to Camberwell and back — although on that occasion I travelled back home through East Dulwich, and it was raining. On Tuesday, when it was dry, I cycled through Peckham instead, taking in a few council estates on the way — in Camberwell, Peckham and New Cross.

As my project continues, with over 8,000 photos still unpublished, to add to those already available, journeys between Brockley and Camberwell, via Peckham and New Cross, have become very familiar, part of what I can best describe as a mental map I am creating — of south east London in particular — in which, street by street, I am documenting the fabric of the city at this crucial time in its history.

Right now — as a close examination of London reveals, of the type that can readily be undertaken by bike — the greed of the financial elites still stalks the streets, artificially maintaining a housing bubble in which they, the speculators, continue to enrich themselves, while a relatively small number of those who are wealthy enough (professional couples, those with rich parents, and foreign investors) keep the bubble inflated, and, meanwhile, everyone else gets more and more squeezed, and, from April, when the Tories’ savage benefit reforms kick in, many of those in social housing — workers and the unemployed — will find that they can no longer even afford to live in London (also see here).

As I cycle around, I see social housing everywhere. Much of it, obviously, was sold when Margaret Thatcher cynically initiated council house sales, but much of it still houses those who rent, and who have their part to play in an intricately connected city — one that the Tories, in their arrogance, are pretending is a city that needs only the rich to survive.

I hope you enjoy these photos. I’ll be back soon with some more photos taken as winter turns to spring, but in the meantime I’m delighted to have you along for the journey.

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.

Government Climbdown Over Plans for Enforced NHS Privatisation

Life under the Tories is so miserable, and the assaults on the very fabric of British life so unrelenting, that it’s rare for a ray of sunlight to shine through.

Yesterday, however, NHS campaigners secured victory in a campaign to prevent the stealthy passage of legislation designed to enforce competition on almost all aspects of the NHS business, largely as a result of pressure exerted by members of the public. Just two weeks ago, campaigners began setting off alarm bells across the internet — by email, on websites, and via social media — about regulations relating to section 75 of the wretched Health and Social Care Act, which the government hoped would pass stealthily, without debate, and which, in the words of the campaigning group 38 Degrees, “would force local doctors to open up almost all NHS services to private companies,” breaking cast-iron promises made by the government when the bill was passed, without which it would have been derailed.

The quote from 38 Degrees comes from the petition that was launched last Monday, February 25, which currently has nearly 250,000 signatures, and which secured nearly 120,000 signatures in the first 24 hours.

As the Guardian reported yesterday, however, “Ministers have been forced into a humiliating climbdown on plans for more private sector involvement in the NHS just four weeks before they were due to come into effect.”

In an announcement that Labour described as a “humiliating U-turn” for the government, which, as the Guardian put it, “has for nearly three years insisted that the Health and Social Care Act passed last year does not create privatisation by stealth,” Liberal Democrat health minister Norman Lamb stated that the key regulations on competition in the NHS would be rewritten.

The Guardian described the decision as following on from “intense lobbying over two weeks since the controversial regulations were introduced under section 75 of the act,” noting that critics “had accused Jeremy Hunt’s health department of attempting to introduce ‘privatisation by the back door’ despite previous assurances — mainly to rebellious Lib Dem coalition partners — that the act would not prefigure a wholesale privatisation of the NHS.”

In the House of Commons, Norman Lamb responded to questioning from Labour about the regulations regarding enforced competition by stating that the government “did not accept critics’ claims of wholesale privatisation,” but “offered to rewrite key parts of the regulations” to, in his words, “remove any doubt.”

Those sections, it is clear, include key clauses dealing with the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), the  groups of GPs who will be responsible for 80 percent of the NHS’s budget from April, and who, as the Guardian put it, “will decide when and how competition should be sought.” There will be “clearer rules about the exceptional circumstances when only one organisation can tender for a service without competition for the contract; assurances that CCGs do not have to tender all services, and cannot be forced to by the regulator, Monitor; and an insistence that competition must not be at the expense of ‘integration and co-operation.’”

Lamb also noted that, “In all cases, the regulations would be based on standards adopted by the previous Labour government, when the now shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, was in charge of the health department,” as the Guardian described it. He added, “The regulations must be fully in line with the assurances given to this House during the passage of the Health and Social Care Act.”

In response, Andy Burnham accurately pointed out that the government’s policy on competition in the NHS was “in utter chaos” just four weeks before the CCGs are supposed to begin their work, adding, “It beggars belief that almost three years after the white paper and the upheaval inflicted on the NHS there’s still no clarity on policy today.” He also stated that the government had been found out while “trying to sneak through privatisations through the backdoor.”

I would encourage everyone to remain vigilant, as this is a government that does not like to be derailed from its vile obsession with destroying the very fabric of life in Britain, but it does appear that we have made a difference.

Let us not forget, however, that the NHS is not safe from its own management, determined to save money by axing services, and — again — from the government, when it comes to cuts, the closures of A&E Departments and other key frontline services, and even the closure of entire hospitals. In Lewisham, where I live, the battle to save Lewisham Hospital from being sacrificed to pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust continues (see my article, “Save Lewisham Hospital: Legal Challenge Goes Ahead, Plus New Actions Confirmed“), and across London other battles are still being fought, as I reported most recently in my article, ‘Defend London’s NHS: MPs, Doctors and Activists Describe An Unprecedented Threat to the NHS.”

Please get involved if you can — after you’ve taken a moment to thank yourselves for the success described above, if you were one of the nearly 250,000 people who signed the 38 Degrees petition or were otherwise involved in — for once — stopping the government from inflicting huge damage on the institutions, like the NHS, that define civil society.

Note: The photo above is from my set of photos of a rally to save Lewisham Hospital on February 15. Also see here, here, here and here.

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.

Photos of Poplar Dock, Canary Wharf and Greenwich on the Eve of the Olympics

Poplar Dock, Canary Wharf and Greenwich on the Eve of the Olympics, a set on Flickr.

This photo set is the 82nd in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began last May, and is the last of five sets taken on July 25 last year, a wonderful sunny day two days before the Olympic Games began, when I cycled east from Whitechapel along the A11 — Mile End Road, which becomes Bow Road and crosses the A12 on the way to the Olympic Park along Stratford High Street. I then cycled around the perimeter of the Olympic Park, up to Leyton on the eastern side, then along the A12 at the north, and then back south via Hackney Wick and Old Ford on the east, then through Bow, Bromley-by-Bow, Poplar and the Isle of Dogs, stopping in on Greenwich before returning home to Brockley.

The first two sets recording this journey were “Adventures in History: The Mile End Road,” and “From Mile End to Bow and Stratford on a Summer’s Day,” canned the third set — “The Olympics Minus One Day: Photos from the Frontline in Stratford” (and see here too) — was published last July, to capture some of the Olympic fervour at the time — even though I was extremely cynical about the outrageous and unaudited cost of the Olympics and the hideous patriotism milked by the government to deflect attention from its own evil heart, and even though I almost always prefer the fruits of cooperation to the chest-thumping Darwinism of competitive sport.

The fourth set was entitled “East End Odyssey: Photos of a Journey from Leyton to Poplar,” and recorded part of my return journey, ending up at Poplar Public Baths, a wonderful Art Deco building that has shamefully been derelict since 1988, but which was opened up briefly for an art exhibition during the Olympic period.

This final set follows on, featuring the delights of Poplar Dock Marina (a former dock turned into a marina, as the name indicates), and Canary Wharf viewed from Blackwell Basin, as well as a series of photos from Greenwich, while the final preparations were being made for its use as the Olympics’ equestrian centre.

I hope you enjoy this journey from Poplar to Greenwich, on such a wonderful summer’s day. In the next sets, I’ll return to the present, as winter is finally promising to give way to spring, although I do have around 8,000 photos to publish from July onwards, so I’ll be back soon with other sets from summer, autumn and winter.

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, Digg, 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 Lewisham Hospital: Legal Challenge Goes Ahead, Plus New Actions Confirmed

Please support the “Born in Lewisham Hospital” event on Saturday March 16 , and, if you can, contribute to Lewisham Council’s Legal Challenge Fund to pay for the Judicial Review that has just been launched, to prove that the plans to close Lewisham Hospital’s A&E Department and severely downgrade other services is illegal!

The struggle to save Lewisham Hospital from destruction continues, with undiminished energy, I’m glad to report. I have been a resident of Lewisham, in south east London, for the last 15 years, and I am proud of the creativity, commitment and clear-sighted indignation of my fellow residents campaigning against the wretched proposals to disembowel the hospital, conceived of, proposed and endorsed by both senior NHS officials and the government.

To recap briefly (although my archive of articles is here, and I also recommend the Save Lewisham Hospital website and Facebook page), at the end of October Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed by the former health secretary Andrew Lansley to deal with the financial problems of a neighbouring NHS trust (the South London Healthcare Trust, covering the boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley) proposed that King’s (in Camberwell) should take over one of the SLHT’s hospitals, while another, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, on a remote, blasted heath in Woolwich, should merge with Lewisham.

Kershaw was the first administrator appointed under specific “unsustainable providers” legislation, of which there are many critics (myself included), who see that trusts may end up in debt for all kinds of reasons, including, as in the case of the SLHT) monstrous PFI deals that ought to have been illegal. However, there was at least a certain logic at work with regard to the proposals for King’s to take over one hospital, and for Lewisham to merge with Queen Elizabeth.

This was not all, though. Kershaw also recommended that Lewisham Hospital should have its services severely downgraded — proposing that the hospital should have its A&E Department axed (despite recently being refurbished at a cost of £12m), and have 60 percent of its buildings sold. Campaigners immediately picked up on the injustice of punishing Lewisham, run by an independent trust and not in financial difficulties, for the SLHT’s problems, and also picked up on the alarming fact that, if the proposals were to go ahead, there would only be one A&E Department, at Queen Elizabeth, for the 750,000 people in three boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich, and Bexley, whose A&E Department has already been closed.

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East End Odyssey: Photos of a Journey from Leyton to Poplar

East End Odyssey: A Journey from Leyton to Poplar, a set on Flickr.

This photo set is the 81st in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began last May, and is the third of four sets which either precede or follow on from a set I published last July, entitled, “The Olympics Minus One Day: Photos from the Frontline in Stratford” (and see here too), in which I cycled east from Whitechapel along the A11 — Mile End Road, which becomes Bow Road and crosses the A12 on the way to the Olympic Park along Stratford High Street. In the Olympics set I published in July, I then cycled up to Leyton, along the A12 at the north of the Olympic Park, and then back south via Hackney Wick, Old Ford, Poplar and the Isle of Dogs, stopping in on Greenwich before returning home to Brockley.

The previous two sets, “Adventures in History: The Mile End Road,” and “From Mile End to Bow and Stratford on a Summer’s Day,” covered the first part of this journey, right up to my first glimpse of the Olympic Park from the Bow Flyover. This set largely picks up where the Olympics set left off, although it includes a few photos not specifically related to the Olympics, which I took in Leyton and Hackney Wick and Old Ford, while making my way around the perimeter of the Olympic Park.

I then recorded my journey back, across Bow Road, and down through Bromley-by-Bow to Poplar, where I stopped at the magnificent Art Deco ruins of Poplar Public Baths, unduly neglected for the last 25 years, which — as part of the Cultural Olympiad –  were the temporary home of an art exhibition, allowing visitors like me to marvel at the baths’ architecture, and to lament their current sad state.

The areas covered in this set — Leyton, Hackney Wick, Old Ford, Bow and Bromley-by-Bow — are all places I hope to revisit in the not too distant future. Poplar, which also features in the last set — from Poplar Dock to Greenwich via Canary Wharf –  is somewhere I have visited on a few occasions since, and I hope to publish those photos sometime soon, although, at present, they are part of an archive of over 8,000 unpublished photos that I have taken in the last seven months, and as a result it is difficult for me to sate with any certainty when I will find the time to publish them, especially as I keep embarking on more new adventures, whether it is raining or sunny, warm or freezing cold.

For now, however, I hope you enjoy this set. Every time I post photos of east London, it makes me want to visit again — which I think expresses how lively and fascinating it is to me, a fine companion, across the river, to the equally fascinating south east of London, which is my home.

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, Digg, 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.

The Forgotten Prisoners of 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.

At “Close Guantánamo,” we recently launched our appeal to President Obama for his second term in office, asking him to do three things in particular to honor his promise to close Guantánamo, made when he took office four years ago, which, of course, he failed to fulfill.

Those three requests — relating to the 86 prisoners, out of 166 in total, who have been cleared for release but are still held — were as follows:

1: Lift the ban on releasing any of the 56 cleared Yemenis from Guantánamo, imposed in January 2010.

2: Appoint a new person to deal specifically with closing Guantánamo, to find new homes for the cleared prisoners in need of assistance.

3: Take the fight to Congress to stop treating the cleared prisoners as pawns in a cynical game of political maneuvering, and to clear the way for all 86 cleared prisoners to be repatriated or safely rehoused in other countries.

These remain hugely important demands, essential if America is to recover any of its credibility as a nation founded on the rule of law, which it lost in the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration.

In addition, however, we are profoundly concerned about the circumstances in which 46 other prisoners are held. In 2010, when the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, appointed by President Obama in 2009, delivered its final report, the officials and lawyers involved recommended that 48 of the prisoners at the time should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though the officials conceded that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial. Two of those men have since died, bringing the total to 46.

Not only did President Obama accept the recommendations, but in March 2011, he issued an executive order authorizing the indefinite detention of these men. The President tried to make it clear that this policy of indefinite detention applied solely to these 48 men, but it set a dangerous precedent, formalizing indefinite detention — however supposedly limited in its scope — as official Obama administration policy.

It also provided a solid basis for the legislation, initiated by lawmakers in 2011 — and again in 2012 — in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), authorizing the mandatory military custody, without charge or trial, of anyone regarded as being a terror suspect connected to Al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. Without the dangerous and unjust precedent established at Guantánamo, as I have repeatedly pointed out, there would have been no basis for the outrageous proposals for indefinite detention made by lawmakers last year and the year before.

Moreover, the very notion that there are people who are too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial, profoundly undermines the entire basis of detention in countries that call themselves civilized, in which the writ of habeas corpus (first introduced in England in 1215), guarantees that no one may be arbitrarily imprisoned — that everyone, in other words, has the right to have the case against them heard in a court of law.

The only exception to the above is to hold people seized in wartime as prisoners of war, who can be held until the end of hostilities, but this is an option that was done away with by the Bush administration, and has not been reinstated by President Obama.

Back in March 2011, when President Obama issued his executive order authorizing the indefinite detention of 48 of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners, he attempted to placate critics by promising that there would be periodic reviews of the men’s cases to establish whether or not it was appropriate for them still to be held. This was an insult, in that “periodic reviews” had been a hallmark of the Bush administration — a process that the Supreme Court found “inadequate,” which involved the use of classified evidence, and prohibited the prisoners from having lawyers.

Under President Bush, however, the review process at least led to the release of numerous prisoners, whereas it recently became apparent that the reviews promised by President Obama have not even materialized.

In December, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Julian E. Barnes and Evan Perez, entitled, “Obama Pressed Over Gitmo Reviews,” which began by noting, “The Obama administration has failed to re-evaluate the threat posed by dozens of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, putting it at increasing odds with political allies who are angry with the president’s lack of action on the US terrorism-detention system.”

The mention of “political allies,” it turned out, was a reference to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which, as the WSJ put it, “has authority under the Geneva Conventions to monitor the treatment of war prisoners to prevent mistreatment and torture,” and which “has raised the issue of the missing reviews with senior US officials at recent meetings in the US and in Geneva. It also has acknowledged its concerns publicly, a rare rebuke from an agency that usually works under strict neutrality and in confidence.”

As the Wall Street Journal described it, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the director of operations for the ICRC, visited Washington in mid-December to meet with Pentagon officials “and raised the issue of the reviews, according to people briefed on the visit.” The WSJ also noted that the ICRC had pressed the issue at recent meetings in Geneva with Daniel Fried, the special envoy for the closure of Guantánamo, who was recently relieved of his post, and transferred elsewhere, a situation that we wrote about two weeks ago, and that led to our call for the President to “appoint a new person to deal specifically with closing Guantánamo, to find new homes for the cleared prisoners in need of assistance.”

The ICRC “declined to comment on its confidential communications with Pentagon and other officials, but it acknowledged it has raised the issue of the reviews since the beginning of the Obama administration,” as the WSJ put it. Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the ICRC in Washington, confirmed that the ICRC “continues to raise this important issue as part of its confidential dialogue with US authorities, including the Department of Defense.”

US officials told the Wall Street Journal that the periodic reviews “would likely begin early next year.” Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “We are on track to fulfilling the presidential executive order, and we anticipate initiating these hearings soon.”

Outrageously, an unnamed senior official added, “The detainees likely to be held long-term without trial pose a significant risk, and the threat they pose isn’t likely to have diminished since the initial review by the administration, meaning the delay in beginning the reviews hasn’t been consequential.”

That is particularly disgraceful, because it indicates an acceptance, within the administration, of information that is fundamentally unreliable.

On December 31, we urged the administration to consult with us regarding the 46 men officially subjected to indefinite detention, pointing out that they “are currently held indefinitely without charge or trial, on the basis that they are allegedly too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial,” and adding, “We can confirm that what this means is that the so-called evidence is no such thing, and instead consists primarily of unreliable statements, mainly made by other prisoners in the ‘war on terror,’ not only at Guantánamo, but also in the CIA’s ‘black sites.’”

We added, “We are ready to meet with government officials to discuss the fundamentally unreliable basis of the so-called evidence against the majority of the prisoners at Guantánamo, and are making plans to publicize our findings as the year progresses.”

That remains the case, and we hope for some positive feedback.

Below, we publish in its entirety an editorial from the Washington Post addressing this issue, which, we believe, needs urgent action, and an open mind on the part of those responsible for making crucial decisions about the men — unlike the unnamed official cited above, who, like many others, is too readily swayed by information that is deeply and tragically tainted by the torture, coercion and abuse that was so central to the “war on terror”:

Mr. Obama’s inertia on Guantánamo

Washington Post editorial, December 22, 2012

The Obama administration has been wrongly constrained by Congress from winding down the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But the rebuke it recently received from the International Committee of the Red Cross was entirely its own fault. Despite promising to set up a new system of reviews for foreign detainees still held at the facility, the administration had yet to hold a single proceeding. That means there is less due process at Guantánamo now than there was during the last years of the George W. Bush administration.

The previous administration, vilified for using Guantánamo to hold terrorism suspects captured abroad, eventually began holding annual reviews to determine if detainees still posed a threat. After conducting its own review of the prisoners, President Obama, who took office vowing to close Guantánamo within a year, signed an executive order in March 2011 establishing a new Periodic Review Board to review cases. There is a genuine need for such reviews: Of the 166 prisoners still at Guantánamo, somewhere between 40 and 60 will probably never be tried by a military commission. While some may never be judged as non-threatening, others are closer calls who deserve a thorough and impartial review.

Why has the board not begun work 21 months after Mr. Obama’s executive order? The main reason appears to be slow-rolling by the Pentagon bureaucracy. With some reason, officials have feared touching Guantánamo issues: Witness how Congress manhandled Eric H. Holder Jr.’s Justice Department after it proposed staging civilian trials for some detainees in New York — or the departure from office of White House counsel Greg Craig after he pushed for quick action to move prisoners out of Guantánamo.

Pentagon officials now say that the review board will start work early next year. But that still leaves President Obama with a considerable Guantánamo hangover for his second term. Though it is necessary to hold some of the prisoners, 86 remain in the prison despite having been cleared for transfer to their home countries. Last week congressional conferees approved language in the annual defense authorization act that will continue a ban on moving prisoners to the United States during 2013 and maintain onerous restrictions on transfers to other nations.

If Mr. Obama is serious about closing Guantánamo, he will veto the bill, as the administration has threatened that he will do [Note: This did not happen]. But as we have previously said, closing Guantánamo would be a largely symbolic act; more important is providing justice, or at least due process, to the prisoners who remain. The administration could begin certifying some of them for transfer even under the strictures established by Congress; it could negotiate with governments such as Tunisia and Saudi Arabia about creating conditions for the return of other detainees. The biggest single problem is a group of 56 Yemenis cleared for return, but even in that difficult case the administration could begin working with Yemen on creating an appropriate detention facility.

Resolving Guantánamo’s problems is a matter of political will. So far Mr. Obama has failed to muster it.

Note: For more of my photos from my US trip in January, see here, here and here.

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, Digg, 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.

Photos: From Mile End to Bow and Stratford on a Summer’s Day

From Mile End to Bow and Stratford on a Summer’s Day, a set on Flickr.

This photo set, the 80th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began last May, is the second of three that precedes and follows on from a set I published last July, entitled, “The Olympics Minus One Day: Photos from the Frontline in Stratford” (and see here too), in which I cycled east from Whitechapel along the A11 — Mile End Road, which becomes Bow Road and crosses the A12 on the way to the Olympic Park along Stratford High Street. In the Olympics set I published in July, I then cycled up to Leyton, along the A12 at the north of the Olympic Park, and then back south via Hackney Wick, Old Ford, Poplar and the Isle of Dogs, stopping in on Greenwich before returning home to Brockley.

Following the previous set, “Adventures in History: The Mile End Road,” in which I passed various historical landmarks on the way to Queen Mary, University of London and the Regent’s Canal, this set begins at the “green bridge” that crossed Mile End Road, and then traces my journey along Bow Road, past the derelict St. Clement’s Hospital, and other landmarks, to Bow Church, marooned on a traffic island, and the Bow Flyover, which vaults over the A12, where bikes were exempt from the Olympic traffic ban, and I had great views, from a highway that is never normally empty in the daytime, of the Olympic Park, the Lea Navigation (the River Lea), the A12 and the northern reaches of Bow and Stratford.

The final set, to follow — which largely takes up after my journey around the perimeter of the Olympic Park — features a few photos from Leyton, and then from my journey back south via Hackney Wick and Old Ford, across Bow Road, and down through Poplar to the Isle of Dogs, after which I stopped in Greenwich briefly before returning home to Brockley.

After that, I’ll get back to publishing some contemporary photos, as the winter continues to bite, and the brief bloom of warmth two weeks ago has given way to biting cold weather for the last seven days.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the second part of my visit to east London on a glorious summer day last July.

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, Digg, 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.

Radio: Guantánamo, Black Sites and Torture – Andy Worthington Talks to Scott Horton

On Friday, following the publication of my article “America’s Disappeared” on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, I was interviewed by Scott Horton, with whom I have been talking since August 2007, when he first picked up on my Guantánamo work, and then followed up via an article about Jose Padilla, the US citizen imprisoned as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland, and tortured until he lost his mind.

Our latest half-hour show is here, and see Scott’s website here — and please help to support him financially, if you like what he does.

Scott and I have mostly discussed Guantánamo in the last five and a half years, although we have also dealt with related issues — the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan, for example — and on Friday the initial topic of our discussion was torture, the CIA’s “black sites” and the lack of accountability for the Bush administration’s torture program  — all of which was dealt with in my article. This followed the publication, by the Open Society Justice Initiative, of “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition,” the first major report identifying the prisoners subjected to torture and disappearance since a UN report on disappearances in 2010, on which I was the lead author of the sections on disappearances in the “war on terror.”

I’m disappointed, of course, that the report was largely ignored in the mainstream media, but it is unsurprising, as the crimes of the “war on terror” — and its victims –  are largely ignored these days. This is because, for some unfathomable reason, people have accepted that President Obama has managed to shroud them in a cloak of amnesia, so that they are no longer regarded as significant.

This, of course, is horribly true when it comes to Guantánamo, and the 166 men still held — and especially the 86 men cleared for release at least three years ago, and in some cases as long ago as 2004 — who are still held because it has proven to be politically inconvenient to release them.

I was, I hope, particularly indignant about the indifference regarding Guantánamo in the US political establishment and the mainstream media, and my hope that it will somehow prove possible to persuade President Obama and his advisors that continuing to ignore Guantánamo — and the President’s failed promise to close it — will not look good as part of his legacy.

When President Obama’s legacy is written — and the first drafts are already being prepared — it will be noted that he failed to close this legal, moral and ethical abomination not because, on reflection, he rather liked having a prison where people could be indefinitely imprisoned without charge or trial, but simply because it was politically inconvenient to fight for what is right and just, in the face of outrageous fearmongering and cynical political maneuvering.

My thanks again to Scott, and I hope you have a spare half-hour to listen to the show.

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, Digg, 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.