Andy Worthington's Blog, page 147

URGENT: Save the NHS Now! Legislation Enforcing Privatisation Will Be Passed in a Month Unless We Act

UPDATE 7.30pm, Feb. 25: The campaigning group 38 Degrees has now launched its own official petition calling for a debate on the provisions for implementing enforced competition in almost all NHS services, which the Tories had been hoping would pass in a month’s time without even being noticed. There appear to be no depths to which these butchers of the state will not sink. Please sign this and share it as widely as you can. It already has nearly 20,000 signatures, and the target is 60,000 by the end of today. Note: This petition is in addition to the one launched by Charles West, mentioned below.

Where is the outrage in the mainstream media?

For the past week I have been receiving messages via email or on Facebook from concerned friends and/or organisations warning me that the government is sneakily pushing through new legislation which will force all Clinical Commissioning Groups — the GP-led practices, which, from April, will be responsible for 80 percent of the NHS budget — to go through a marketplace for all new NHS service contracts.

As the campaigning group 38 Degrees explains in an urgent new petition, regulations relating to section 75 of the wretched Health and Social Care Act (Andrew Lansley’s NHS privatisation bill, which was passed last year) “require virtually all health provision to be carried out in competitive markets, regardless of the wishes of either local people, GPs or local Clinical Commissioning Groups. They contradict assurances that were given by health ministers during the passage of the Act that it did not mean the privatisation of the NHS, and that local people would have the final say in who provided their NHS.”

The silence in most of the mainstream media regarding these plans — in the BBC, for example — has been deafening, although today, the Daily Mirror has become involved, with an article entitled, “Tories’ hidden privatisation plan revealed,” and on Friday, in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee’s contribution was an informative article entitled, “The Lib Dems must not stand for any more lies over the NHS,” in which she noted how NHS dissent over the Health and Social Care Act was only quelled through public assurances from ministers that there would be no enforced privatisation of services, which “seemed convincingly cast-iron.”

Now, however, the quiet release of the regulations for the Health and Social Care Act “shows how far the act does the reverse of what ministers promised. Commercialisation and competition is written into its key section 75, opening up virtually all the NHS to public tender in a market supervised by Monitor,” the Independent Regulator for NHS Foundation Trusts, established in 2004. Toynbee adds, “Secondary legislation is rarely challenged — but this is a final chance for parliament to strike out the obligation of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to advertise almost every service to any bidder under EU competition law.”

She also notes:

From the start the plan was misrepresented to the public “as putting GPs in the driving seat”, free to commission best services for their patients. The health department was at it again this week, announcing more commissioning groups approved: “All 8,000 GP practices in England will be members of a CCG, putting the majority of the NHS budget in the control of frontline clinicians for the first time.”

Clare Gerada, head of the Royal College of GPs, calls that “disingenuous”, since all GPs are legally forced to join, yet only a minority of CCGs are led by GPs. Most are not involved, she says, with “barely time to do their day job”. She is shocked by the section 75 requirement for every service to be tendered out and advertised on a national NHS website. However satisfied GPs may be with local NHS services, if anything is not put out for tender Monitor can step in to enforce it. As the bill went through parliament, Monitor’s role was amended from “promoting competition” to “preventing anti-competitive behaviour” — a change in grammar, not in law, repeated in regulations. That’s what the act is for.

With the NHS so severely threatened, and on such a short timescale (the regulations will be approved by March 31, unless there is opposition in Parliament), it is hugely important that those of us who care about the NHS act now.

So please, take action NOW and do the following three things:

1. Sign and share the 38 Degrees petition, “call[ing] on both Houses of Parliament to ensure the NHS Competition regulations (SI 257) made under the Health & Social Care Act 2012, are subject to a full debate, and vote, on the floor of both Houses of Parliament, and that they are defeated or withdrawn.”

2. Ask your MP to take action. Send them the following message, or, of course, write your own letter, or amend it as you see fit:

I feel very strongly that the latest attack on our NHS under section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act urgently needs to be stopped.

We need to preserve our NHS free at the point of need for future generations.

Could you please organise with other MPs to sign an Early Day Motion to address this at the earliest opportunity?

3. Cut and paste and email the following letter to the Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee by this Thursday, February 28:

Secondary legislation under Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012

I notice that the Lords’ Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee will be discussing the regulations laid by the Government under Section 75 of the new NHS Act 1 at their meeting on 5 March.

I write to request that the Committee send these regulations for reconsideration. The reason is that there is a significant disjunction between the public statements of ministers and the content of the regulations.

Ministers said:

Andrew Lansley MP: “There is absolutely nothing in the Bill that promotes or permits the transfer of NHS activities to the private sector.” (13/3/12, Hansard)

Andrew Lansley MP: “I know many of you have read that you will be forced to fragment services, or put them out to tender. This is absolutely not the case. It is a fundamental principle of the Bill that you as commissioners, not the Secretary of State and not regulators – should decide when and how competition should be used to serve your patients interests.” (12/2/12, letter to Clinical Commissioning Groups)

Simon Burns MP, Minister of State for Health Services: “It will be for commissioners to decide which services to tender …to avoid any doubt — it is not the Government’s intention under clause 67 [now section 75] that regulations would impose compulsory competitive tendering requirements on commissioners, or for Monitor to have powers to impose such requirements.” (12/7/11, Hansard)

Lord Howe: “Clinicians will be free to commission services in the way they consider best. We intend to make it clear that commissioners will have a full range of options and that they will be under no legal obligation to create new market.” (6/3/12, Hansard)

Nick Clegg: “That’s why I have been absolutely clear: there will be no privatisation of the NHS. The NHS has always benefited from a mix of providers, from the private sector, charities and social enterprises, and that should continue … It’s not the same as turning this treasured public service into a competition-driven, dog-eat-dog market where the NHS is flogged off to the highest bidder.” (26/5/11)

The regulations

The regulations break these promises by creating requirements for virtually all commissioning done by the National Commissioning Board (NCB) and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to be carried out through competitive markets regardless of the will of local people. They contain legal powers for Monitor to enforce the privatisation spontaneously or at the request of private companies which lost bids.

They would also make it impossible to fulfil some of the key thrust of the Francis report recommendations.

According to David Lock QC, the regulations as a whole have the effect of closing down the current option of an in-house commissioning process, even if local people wish it. This option has been taken in a number of cases, including since the passage of the Act. Ministers have confirmed that at the present time such arrangements are legal and would not give rise to challenge under EU Procurement law.

Regulation 5: Awarding a contract without competition can, effectively, only be done in an “emergency”, a much narrower restriction than suggested in the parliamentary debate.

Regulation 10: This makes whatever Monitor judges to be an “unnecessary” restriction of competition illegal. It thus effectively closes down the current option of one state body (i.e. the NHS Commissioning Board or a Clinical Commissioning Group) merely making a new arrangement (not contract) with another — i.e. an NHS Trust.

Regulation 12: This forces commissioners to use the market to meet waiting time considerations, in contravention of assurances offered to CCGs during the passage of the Act when they were told they would have discretion and could also consider quality issues.  This regulation also ignores the summary of the Department of Health’s own consultation which highlighted that waiting time considerations should not be used to override quality considerations.

Part 3, Regulations 13-17, covering Monitor’s powers: The sweeping (and time unlimited) statutory powers given to Monitor enable it to decide when the CCG has breached regulations (Regulation 14), to end any arrangements the CCG has come to and to impose their own (Regulation 15) – including the criteria governing selection of suppliers, and more fundamentally, the decision about whether to use competitive methods like tendering and AQP (Any Qualified Provider) at all. Under these regulations Monitor will have sweeping statutory power to enforce (as yet unseen) guidance, whereas the current guidance is not legally binding.

In summary, therefore, there is a contradiction between the intention of the Act as expressed by ministers and the consequences of the regulations.

The regulations need to be reconsidered and rewritten.

Note: The photo at the top of this article is from Flickr, from my set of photos of a rally to save Lewisham Hospital on February 15, 2013. For further information on the plans outlined above, please see this Open Democracy article, and this briefing by Keep Our NHS Public.

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.

Adventures in History: Photos of the Mile End Road

Adventures in History: The Mile End Road, a set on Flickr.

This is the 79th photo set in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began last May. I currently have around 8,000 photos to publish, to add to the 1,500 or so I have already published, so it would be fair to say that it’s a project that is slightly out of control, in which it has proven far easier to get out and about taking photos, than it is to upload them.

Part of this is because I insist on spending time researching the places I photograph, so that my record of London is not just photographic, but a text-based historical record as well. However, it is also because, from the beginning of the project, I have been responding to the long years I spent indoors, writing on a daily basis about Guantánamo, followed by my illness two years ago, with an insatiable desire to be outdoors, on a bike, as much as possible.

I am still engaged in trying to secure the closure of Guantánamo, of course, and also in resisting the malevolent austerity programme of the Tory-led government here in the UK (particularly, at present, as it affects the NHS), but I have discovered, over the last nine months, that nothing is better for my well-being than to spend many hours a day outdoors, cycling, whether bathed in sunlight or lashed by the rain, as I seek out the forgotten and neglected corners of London.

This set — the first of three that I will be publishing over the next week or so — both 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 took the Overground from my home in Brockley, in south east London, to Whitechapel (on the last day before non-folding bikes were banned for the duration of the Olympics and the Paralympics, even though the trains  were generally empty), and then cycled east along Mile End Road (the A11), until it becomes Bow Road and crosses the A12 on the way to the Olympic Park. 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.

I’m rather amazed to discover that this whole trip only took six hours, as it felt rather more epic than that, and I managed to cover so much ground. This first set covers the first part of the journey, from Whitechapel station, past various historical landmarks on the way to Queen Mary, University of London and the Regent’s Canal. At that point, the E1 postcode gives way to E3, and Mile End turns into Bow, and then becomes E15, and Stratford, at the junction with the A12. This section is covered in the second photo set, and the third and final set largely picks up where the Olympic set left off (with the exception of a few photos taken in Leyton), where Hackney Wick turns into Old Ford, and then traces my journey south.

I was mainly inspired to undertake this journey because I wanted to make a journey around the perimeter of the Olymic Park before the madness of the Games began, the day after — and because, when the Games began, I was off to the WOMAD world music festival for five days — but it was also because, just three days before, I  had spent a wonderful day exploring Commercial Road, which runs to the south of Mile End Road (see here, here and here), and had been absolutely captivated by the East End, and its working class history, its more recent immigration, its decay, and – in certain pockets – its gentrification, as bankers and speculators continue to make London a global centre for property investment, and a playground for young professional couples in well-paid jobs, all the while squeezing everyone else so that, increasingly, working people won’t actually be able to afford to live in London.

This sorry tale of bloated greed, artificially sustained despite the global economic crash of 2008 that was caused by these same bankers and speculators, remains a cancer eating away at the every soul of London, although I’m pleased to report that it didn’t dominate my journey from Whitechapel to Stratford and back home via the Isle of Dogs on July 25 last year, when the joy of summer was at its most generous, and, to be honest, I was more preoccupied by the eye-wateringly extravagant indulgence of the Olympics than by any other socio-economic considerations.

I hope you enjoy the photos, and I’ll be back soon with the journey from Mile End to Stratford.

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.

America’s Disappeared

[image error]Injustices do not become any less unjust the longer they are not addressed, and when it comes to the “war on terror” launched by President Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, those injustices continue to fester, and to poison America’s soul.

One of those injustices is Guantánamo, where 166 men are still imprisoned, even though 86 of them were cleared for release by a task force established by the President four years ago, and another is Bagram in Afghanistan (renamed and rebranded the Parwan Detention Facility), where the Geneva Conventions were torn up by George W. Bush, and have not been reinstated, and where foreign prisoners seized elsewhere and rendered to US custody in Afghanistan remain imprisoned. Some of these men have been held for as long as the men in Guantánamo, but without being allowed the rights to be visited by civilian lawyers, which the men in Cuba were twice granted by the Supreme Court  — in 2004 and 2008 — even if those rights have now been taken away by judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., demonstrating a susceptibility to the general hysteria regarding the “war on terror,” rather than a desire to bring justice to the men in Guantánamo.

Another profound injustice — involving the kidnapping of prisoners anywhere in the world, and their rendition to “black sites” run by the CIA, or to torture dungeons in other countries — also remains unaddressed.

Some of “America’s Disappeared” eventually turned up at Guantánamo, and those foreign prisoners held at Bagram also fit into this category. What happened to others, however, is as unknown now as it was six years ago, when six NGOs — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reprieve — issued a report, “Off the Record: US Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror,’” identifying 39 prisoners whose whereabouts were unknown (PDF).

At the time — June 2007 — there was some interest in the story, as George W. Bush had run into a credibility problem in his second term, but interest had already waned by 2010, President Obama’s second year in office, when a follow-up report, the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” was published by the United Nations (PDF).

I was the lead author of the sections dealing with US disappearances in the “war on terror,” which was prepared for the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the Working Groups on arbitrary detention, and enforced or involuntary disappearances.

In the report, I noted that, “Based on figures disclosed in one of the Office of Legal Counsel’s notorious ‘torture memos’ (PDF), written in May 2005 by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury” and made available by President Obama as part of a court case in April 2009, “the CIA had, by May 2005, ‘taken custody of 94 prisoners [redacted] and ha[d] employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these detainees.’”

These 94 men were part of the “high-value detainee” program, and were held in secret prisons run by the CIA in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania and Morocco, although most also passed through the network of secret prisons in Afghanistan en route.

However, an unspecified number of other prisoners were also rendered to other countries for torture, including Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The only estimate of numbers came in September 2007, when then-CIA director Michael Hayden told Charlie Rose that the number was “Mid-range, two figures since September 11, 2001,” without elaborating. As Rose stated in response, “Two figures. So 50, 60. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Have been renditioned to somewhere.”

Two weeks ago, the latest update in this sordid and neglected story arrived via the Open Society Justice Initiative, which issued a new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.” As the press release explained, the report “identifies for the first time a total of 136 named victims and describes the complicity of 54 foreign governments in these operations.” The governments, “ranging from Iceland and Australia to Morocco and Thailand,” are revealed to have “enabled secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations in various ways, including by hosting CIA prisons, by assisting in the capture and transport of detainees, and by permitting the use of domestic airspace for secret flights.”

As the press release also noted, “the report underscores the US government’s failure to confront the legacy of abuses committed in the name of counterterrorism.” It was not lost on the Open Society Justice Initiative that the report was being published while the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence sits on a 6,000-page report that took three years to complete, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the CIA’s torture program under the Bush administration, while Kathryn Bigelow’s movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” continues to pump out the irresponsible false message that torture played a key role in identifying the location of Osama bin Laden, and on the eve of the confirmation of John Brennan as the director of the CIA, even though, under George W. Bush, he had explicitly supported torture and renditions.

Amrit Singh, the author of the report and a senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, said, “The time has come for the US and its partner governments to own up to the truth and secure accountability for the abuses committed around the world as part of these CIA programs. The taint of torture and other abuses associated with these programs will continue to cling to the US and its collaborators as long as they hide behind a veil of secrecy and refuse to hold their officials accountable.”

This is true, of course, but it remains to be seen if anything can awaken the American media, or the public, to sufficient outrage that any action will be taken to hold anyone accountable. Singh notes that the best hopes for accountability still lie elsewhere — in Europe, where, in December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held that the Macedonian government had violated the rights of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, during an operation with the CIA that led to El-Masri, a case of mistaken identity, being kidnapped and rendered to a “black site” in Afghanistan, where his treatment “amounted to torture.”

In addition, in 2009, an Italian court convicted in absentia 23 Americans — almost all CIA officials and operatives — for the brazen daylight kidnapping in Milan, in February 2003, of a cleric, Abu Omar, who was subsequently rendered to torture in Egypt, and, just last week, an Italian appellate court sentenced the country’s former intelligence chief, Niccolò Pollari, to ten years in prison “for complicity” in that kidnapping.

As the Open Society Justice Initiative notes, “Other legal challenges to secret detention and extraordinary rendition are pending before the European Court of Human Rights against Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Italy; against Djibouti before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights; and against domestic authorities or officials in Egypt, Hong Kong, Italy, and the UK.”

These remain the best hope that one day someone at the highest levels of the US government will be held accountable for their crimes. In the meantime, the senior Bush officials — up to and including the former President — walk free, and President Obama has his own “kill list” and drone program, which, one day, will be seen to have been as monstrous and illegal as Bush’s program of rendition and torture.

Furthermore, as the Open Society Justice Initiative also notes, “The Obama administration has not definitively repudiated extraordinary rendition. In 2009, President Obama issued an executive order disavowing torture and closing secret CIA detention sites, but the order was reportedly crafted to allow short-term, transitory detention prior to transferring detainees to countries for interrogation or trial. Current policies and practices with respect to extraordinary rendition remain secret.”

As with so much else in the “war on terror,” secrecy is never a good sign. It is too much to hope that President Obama will willingly address the legacy of “America’s Disappeared,” inherited from his predecessor, but one day someone must be held accountable for this global program of torture.

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.

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

Andy Worthington and Omar Deghayes Discuss Aafia Siddiqui in East London, Saturday February 23, 2013

[image error]The power of Islamophobia, it seems, is such that when a tabloid newspaper — the Daily Star — published an article with the headline “Mosque terror doc fundraiser,” claiming that “Britain’s biggest mosque is under investigation after it scheduled a fundraising event for a convicted would-be killer,” it led to the event being moved.

The mosque in question was the East London Mosque, in Whitechapel, and the alleged investigation was by the Charity Commission. The Star reported that the Charity Commission “said it had started a probe into the mosque,” and had “not yet launched a full investigation,” but was “looking into the issue.” That sounds very vague, but it was enough to get the mosque jumpy, and the event has, as a result, been moved to another venue in Whitechapel.

As for the “fundraising event for a convicted would-be killer,” another way of putting it would be that the Justice for Aafia Coalition (also see here) is putting on a fundraising event for a US-educated Pakistani neuroscientist who disappeared for nearly five and a half years, from March 2003 to July 2008, when, they contend, she was kidnapped and she and two of her three children were held in secret prisons run by or for the CIA and the US government. The third child, a baby at the time of her disappearance, may, it appears, have been shot and killed at the time of Dr. Siddiqui’s kidnapping.

The “conviction” trumpeted by the Star is another claim that needs qualifying. Dr. Siddiqui was indeed given an 86-year sentence in a New York courtroom in September 2010, for allegedly trying to shoot some US soldiers in Afghanistan, but as Yvonne Ridley explained in a recent article for Ceasefire magazine, “The fact they shot her at close range and nearly killed her is often overlooked. To their eternal shame, the US soldiers serving in Afghanistan claimed in court under oath that the diminutive, fragile academic leapt at them from behind a prison cell curtain, snatching one of their guns to shoot and kill them. It was a fabricated story that any defence lawyer worth his or her salt would have ripped apart at the seams.”

Ridley also stated, “The scenario painted in court was incredulous and more importantly, the evidence non existent — no gunshot residue on her hands or clothes, no bullets from the discharged gun, no fingerprints belonging to Dr. Aafia on the gun. Other vital evidence removed by US military from the scene went missing before the trial … After being patched up in a medical wing in Bagram, she was then ‘renditioned’ to America to stand trial for an alleged crime committed in Afghanistan. Flouting the Vienna and Geneva Conventions, she wasn’t given consular access until the day she made her first court appearance.”

When the sentence was first delivered, I wrote an article entitled, “Barbaric: 86-Year Sentence for Aafia Siddiqui,” and I have made several appearances at events since (see here, here, here and here), as Aafia Siddiqui’s story has always struck me as one of the murkiest in the whole page, torture-soaked “war on terror’ that the Bush administration embarked on with such sadistic relish in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. At Saturday’s event, I will be talking to my friend, the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, about being imprisoned without rights, in vile conditions, separated from family, and we will reflect, as wlll the audience, on those lost years, when, it seems, Aafia Siddiqui and two of her children — who were just infants at the time — were subjected to the extra-legal horrors of America’s “war on terror.”

I’m looking forward to the event — and to seeing Omar and taking part in a discussion with him — and I don’t feel the need to apologise to the Daily Star for taking part in it.

The details are below:

Saturday 23rd February, 1.15pm-4.15pm: Her Pain, Our Shame: Have We Abandoned Aafia Siddiqui?

A Fundraising Conference at the Water Lily, 69-89 Mile End Road, London E1 4TT, featuring Ilyas Townsend, Imam Shakeel Begg, Adnan Rashid, and, at 3.25, Omar Deghayes in conversation with Andy Worthington.

For further information, please email the Justice for Aafia Coalition.

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 Destruction of the NHS in North West London

Yesterday’s news was expected, but it still hit hard. Following proposals put forward last June, the Joint Committee of North West London Primary Care Trusts proposed the closure of four of the nine A&E Departments at hospitals in north west London, and on Tuesday, despite vigorous campaigns throughout the area against the proposals, the committee confirmed that, as the Evening Standard put it, “Hammersmith and Central Middlesex hospitals will lose their A&Es permanently while Charing Cross and Ealing will be left with a downgraded urgent care centres which will not accept emergency patients.”

This really is an alarming development, as it will leave three of the eight boroughs in north west London — containing about three-quarters of a million people — without a major hospital, out of the 1.9 million people in the whole of north west London. In addition, removing hospitals’ ability to deal with emergencies essentially sounds the death knell for those hospitals, as a huge range of hospital services relies upon emergency admissions and the ability to deal with emergencies. In Lewisham, for example, where similar cuts have been approved, at least 90 percent of the mothers in the entire borough (4,400 a year) will no longer be able to give birth in the borough.

Following the announcement about the north west London hospitals, Andy Slaughter, the MP for Hammersmith and the secretary of Save Our Hospitals Hammersmith and Fulham, said, “This is the biggest hospital closure programme in the history of the NHS. It will put lives at risk across West London and will give a second class health service to 2 million people.” He also stated, “There will be no A&E in the London boroughs of Hammersmith, Ealing or Brent, which together have a population the size of Leeds.”

In addition, of course, as Andy Slaughter indicated, services will be dangerously overstretched at the remaining hospitals. As the Standard noted, “The pressure on already over-stretched hospitals in the area is set to increase. Chelsea and Westminster is the only A&E in the area which is not already exceeding waiting time targets.”

Anne Drinkell, a matron and NHS campaigner, told the Standard, “It’s worrying that people with serious conditions no won’t necessarily be treated in a timely fashion. The pressure on other already much-pressed hospitals, such as St Mary’s in Paddington and Chelsea and Westminster, will increase greatly.”

Providing further details of the cuts, the Standard also explained, “Ealing will lose its obstetrics and maternity units and Charing Cross its hyper-acute stroke unit, while both hospitals will lose emergency surgery and intensive care units. Central Middlesex will lose intensive care while its A&E, which has already closed, will not be reinstated. Hammersmith will become a specialist hospital, without an A&E, while intensive care will become a specialist unit. All four hospitals will retain an urgent care centre — also known as polyclinics or walk-in care centres — to treat patients with less serious, non-life threatening injuries. They will be manned by GPs and nurses.”

Londonist provided more information. Mocking Hammersmith and Fulham Council for lying last week, when it claimed that Charing Cross had been “saved,” the website noted, “The buildings will be knocked down and the vast majority of the land sold off to developers; a replacement UCC [urgent care centre] run by GPs will take its place and 60 of the current 500 inpatient beds retained. It will become a specialist hospital without the facilities to perform emergency surgery or handle patients needing intensive care. What’s more, funding for some revised services at Ealing and Charing Cross has yet to be identified.”

While campaigners pledged to continue fighting to save their hospitals, and the announcement added to the urgency of creating a campaign across the whole of London, as identified by the “Defend London’s NHS” campaign that was launched last week, one of the key themes to emerge from these proposals — as at every other area affected (Lewisham, where I have been involved in a massive local campaign, the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and the hospitals of south west London) — is, firstly, that money is at the heart of the proposals, and secondly that the senior NHS managers responsible for the proposals are, whether deliberately or not, hiding this behind lies and spin about the need for savage cuts to improve services.

As the Standard explained, “In one of London’s biggest NHS land sales, trust bosses plan to dispose of most of the 30-acre Charing Cross hospital site.” They want to slash all 500 beds, leaving as just an acre — less than a football pitch — of land for buildings to treat patients. It will mean as little as four per cent of the current site will be used as a hospital, according to page 595 of the proposal.”

The Standard added, According to documents, the trust’s current estimate for the land sale would be up to £136 million but it is anticipated the true profit will be considerably more. Some of the money be reinvested to build new facilities on the smaller part of the site with the addition of 60 beds.”

The Standard noted “similar sell-off plans by the Whittington Hospital, where the trust wants to dispose of half of its buildings, including nurses accommodation, and cap the number of births to save £4.8million,” but failed to mention Lewisham, where the proposals to disembowel the hospital in a similar manner to the proposals for north west London include selling off 60 percent of the hospital’s buildings.

On the lies and spin, Londonist noted that “the remaining A&Es will be expanded,” — although, as with Lewisham, it is by no means certain that any extra money promised to achieve this will actually materialise — and also questioned “whether they’ll be able to cope with the extra demand.” The website also touched on the NHS officials’ false claims about urgent care centres, explaining that the rationale for their creation — as opposed to retaining A&E Departments — is that they “can treat about 70% of illnesses that patients go to A&E with,” although, crucially, “that assumes people will assess themselves and make a decision about how ill they [or]their family member really is.”

This is hugely important, as is the allied claim by the NHS officials proposing the cuts — that community-based care will reduce the demand on hospitals, even though it has been clearly established that the proposals are nothing more than an aspiration, without any grounding in reality.

As the BBC noted when the proposals for north west London were first announced last June, “Four out of nine accident and emergency wards will close under NHS reorganisation plans. The NHS says better care can be given by fewer, more specialised centres.” This is another of the empty mantras of the NHS management, which ignores the damage that will be caused by increased waiting times, increased travel times, and the added stress on staff at the hospitals that are supposed to take hundreds of thousands of extra patients a year, and is contradicted by the very next line in the BBC article: “Health bosses say there would be a £332m gap to plug by 2014/15 if no changes are made.”

In other words, it’s all about the money, whatever senior NHS officials tell themselves. If you care about the NHS, please be aware that the health service’s own senior officials — backed by the government — are currently engaged in plans in London which will lead to the loss of between 20 and 60 percent of A&Es, maternity departments, intensive care and other acute services, and the irreversible selling off of much of the hospitals’ land.

This should alarm everyone, and not just those in the currently affected areas. If you care, please get involved. Help is currently needed to fully establish the “Defend London’s NHS” campaign, so if you’re interested, and have particular expertise in establishing and running websites, dealing with social media via Facebook and Twitter, coming up with ways to attract media attention, or mobilising and organising supporters, then please get in touch with me.

Note: If you want to be involved in the campaign to save the hospitals in north west London, please see the Save Our Hospitals Hammersmith and Fulham website here, and get in touch here. Also see the Save Our Hospitals Ealing campaign, and get in touch here. Also see the response to the announcement on February 19 by Ealing Council, which, unlike Hammersmith and Fulham Council, has always opposed the plans. The council is backing local campaigners’ plans to refer the proposals to Jeremy Hunt, although, as the example of Lewisham has demonstrated, it is unwise to expect too much of the health secretary.

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.

Defend London’s NHS: MPs, Doctors and Activists Describe An Unprecedented Threat to the NHS

Defend London’s NHS: A Week of Action, a set on Flickr.

Last week, from February 9 to 16, campaigners across London — in Lewisham, in Hammersmith, in Ealing, in Archway and in Kingston — who are fighting to save essential frontline services from the government (which is committed to the destruction of the NHS), and from senior NHS management (who have forgotten what the NHS is for), came together as ”Defend London’s NHS,” an unprecedented coalition of MPs, unions, campaigners, patients, doctors and other health workers.

In the inaugural week of action, there were events on Saturday February 9 outside Ealing Hospital and Central Middlesex Hospital (between Brent and Ealing), which are two of the four A&E Departments (out of nine in total) that face the axe in north west London, along with the two hospitals in Hammersmith — Charing Cross and Hammersmith itself, and there were also protests and events throughout the week, culminating in a rally in Lewisham on Friday (see my photos here), and rallies in Hammersmith and Kingston on Saturday.

The Parliamentary launch of “Defend London’s NHS”

However, the week of action’s central event took place on Monday February 11, when “Defend London’s NHS” was launched in the House of Commons. At this event, the speakers, who included the doctors Louise Irvine, the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, and Onkar Sahota, the chair of the Ealing Save Our Hospitals campaign, and two MPs, Andy Slaughter and Heidi Alexander, were united in their recognition that the NHS currently faces an unparalleled threat, greater than at any other time in its 65-year history.

Different themes are at play in the various parts of London affected by the proposed cuts, but what was clear from the meeting was the fact that, across the board, senior management in the NHS — the medical directors, primarily — have bought into proposals to inflict savage cuts on the NHS, while claiming that they are committed only to improving clinical standards.

In contrast, those of us fighting to save services recognise that lives will be endangered and people will die as a result of the proposed cuts, and also that, whether deliberately or not, those defending the cuts from within the NHS are spinning a web of lies and deceit — including false figures about the numbers of patients who will have to travel much further than previously to A&E Departments, the knock-on effect of this on the ability of hospitals without emergency admissions to provide anything approaching a comprehensive service of clinical care, and the knock-on effect of this on neighbouring hospitals, who simply do not have any spare capacity. In addition, every cut is defended with a hollow mantra about providing community-based care, rather than needing hospitals and hospital beds, which, though worthy as an ideal, is not grounded even remotely in reality, and can only, at present, be regarded as an aspiration.

At the meeting last Monday, a powerful panel of speakers laid out the pressing case for a London-wide campaign, building up to a national campaign.

I unfortunately missed the speech by Dr. John Lister, an authoritative campaigner for the NHS, but I urge you to check out his excellent Health Emergency website, and I only caught the end of the speech by Dr. Sahota. The Morning Star, however reported that Dr. Lister said that creating a national campaign for the NHS “has been problematic historically,” adding, “It’s difficult because what matters most to the general public is the hospital down the road from them, their local hospital. This means it has always been hard to co-ordinate campaigners in the north to join up with events that only affect those in the south. Even in London where the boundaries are more blurred, it has proved to be a challenge that hasn’t been achieved for many years, so this is an encouraging development. I’m sure a national NHS campaign can be done.”

Dr. Louise Irvine of Save Lewisham Hospital

Fortunately, I was in time for all the other speakers, beginning with Dr. Louise Irvine, the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, of which I have been a part for the last four months, since Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed last summer (by former health secretary Andrew Lansley) to deal with the financial problems of the neighbouring South London Healthcare Trust (in Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley) proposed that rationalising services across south east London — and disembowelling Lewisham as part of that process, cutting A&E, downgrading a range of other services, and selling off 60 percent of the site — was the best way forward.

We believe the plans to close Lewisham’s A&E Department and other acute services, which will mean journeys to neighbouring boroughs for tens of thousands of emergency cases a year (up to 1,500 every week), and will mean that only 10 percent of Lewisham’s mothers (currently 4,400 a year) will be able to give birth in the borough in which they live, are wrong, reckless and illegal. We believe that Kershaw did not have a mandate to include Lewisham in the solutions to the problems of the SLHT, under the “unsustainable providers” legislation that was used for his appointment, and we will continue to fight against health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s approval of the plans on January 31, through the campaign that has galvanised the people of Lewisham — with 15,000 marching in November, and 25,000 the weekend before Hunt made his announcement (see my photos here, here and here).

Louise Irvine made all these points and more, telling the crowd of journalists and activists that Lewisham was a test case for the “unsustainable provider regime.” With 60 trusts nationally in financial trouble, she painted a bleak picture of a situation in which, if the axe falls on Lewisham as planned, financially viable hospitals will also find themselves being sacrificed for their neighbours — often, as with the South London Healthcare Trust, when a large part of those financial problems only came about because of ruinously expensive PFI deals — in the SLHT’s case, two hospitals for £210 million, which will eventually cost £2.5 billion.  As Louise Irvine so memorably described it, “neighbours will be cannibalised to pay the beast.”

She also spoke about the terrible impact of the plans on maternity services in Lewisham, noting that, although she had every respect for a midwife-led service, that alone, without the ability to deal with emergencies provided by an obstetric-led service, is unacceptable. As she noted, it rules out almost all first births, and the many births these days involving women in their late 30s and 40s. She also noted that, although Jeremy Hunt stated that just 10 percent of Lewisham babies would be born in lewisham as a result, “we think it will diminish further.”

Shirley Franklin of Defend the Whittington Hospital Coalition

Next up was Shirley Franklin of Defend the Whittington Hospital Coalition. The Whittington, in Archway, was under threat three years ago, but that threat was seen off by campaigners, Now, however, as the campaign explains, “The Board of the Whittington Hospital has agreed to sell off £17million of buildings, leading to ward closures, massive reduction of maternity provision, loss of wards for the elderly, total loss of staff accommodation. They also plan huge cuts of up to 570 hospital staff.”

The day after the Parliamentary meeting, DWHC held a meeting with four MPs — Jeremy Corbyn, David Lammy, Frank Dobson and Emily Thornberry — and the author and journalist Owen Jones, attended by 600 protestors. the hospital’s chairman, Joe Liddane, was also present, and he stated that the board “has no intention of changing tack or slowing down, despite the pleas,” as the Islington Gazette described it. Instead, he “promised more meetings to explain the move” and stated, “They are complex ideas but we think when people understand why we are doing it, they will be more amenable.” Crucially, the Islington Gazette noted that hospital bosses “are championing ‘care in the community’ because beds will be lost through the plans” — a theme that emerges everywhere in the proposed cuts, as senior officials argue for the significance of a community-based care system that doesn’t even exist.

Shirley Franklin, who chaired the proceedings, ended the meeting by saying to Joe Liddane, “You stuck your two fingers up at us. We are your Whittington community and you gave us absolutely zilch information and zilch respect and that’s why we’re angry. Don’t give us, ‘we don’t need hospital beds.’ It’s disgusting, it’s insulting and we’re not stupid.” Those were powerful words, similar to the message she delivered on Monday in the House of Commons, when she said that board members had been saying that it was “old-fashioned to be treated in hospital.” As she asked, incredulously, “How dare they?”

Andy Slaughter, MP for Hammersmith

Next up was Andy Slaughter, the Labour MP for Hammersmith, and the secretary of Save Our Hospitals Hammersmith and Fulham, who spoke about the plans to close four of the nine A&E Departments in north west London. As with Lewisham, he noted that all acute, ICU (intensive care) and specialist departments would be closed at the hospitals affected, leaving them as shadows of their former selves, eventually to be closed or privatised.

As ITV News noted on Saturday, “The NHS’s North West London trust has recommended that four of its A&E units will be closed and Charing Cross Hospital will no longer remain a ‘major hospital.’” ITV News also noted that “the key decisions expected to be pushed through by the NHS” on February 19 were that “Charing Cross will be a ‘local hospital’ with no A&E, surgery, Intensive Care or Stroke Unit,” that “the majority of the Charing Cross site will be sold off at a profit for development,” and that “Hammersmith, Central Middlesex and Ealing Hospitals will lose their A&Es.”

This was no surprise to the campaigners, although it remains a bitter blow — one made all the more unpalatable by the fact that, as Andy Slaughter told the crowd on Monday, although the Ealing campaign had the full backing of the council, in Hammersmith and Fulham the council did not help at all — and in fact actively opposed the “Save Our Hospitals” campaign. Alarmingly, the Tory spin machine is so brazen in Hammersmith that last week the council had the nerve to claim that it had “saved” Charing Cross A&E from closure, echoing what happened in Lewisham when, at the last minute, feeble concessions were promised that enabled the spinners to claim that A&E had been saved, when that is not the case at all.

As Andy Slaughter explained last Monday, “This is a particularly cynical move from the council. To get everyone’s hopes up by saying that their A&E has been saved and then including what they’re really doing in the small print.”

Andy Slaughter also explained that the cuts currently taking place are “the biggest threat there has ever been to the NHS in London and across the country,” which he described as “creating a second-tier service” for the majority of people.

Heidi Alexander, MP for Lewisham East

He was followed by Heidi Alexander, the MP for Lewisham East, who has been working diligently on the Lewisham campaign. She stated that “hospitals in London as we know them will disappear,” and described the role of the Matthew Kershaw, regarding the South London Healthcare Trust and Lewisham, as “deceitful and opaque,” as well as one that cost £5.2 million, at a time when money is supposed to be being saved. Pointing out the injustice of “services axed to pay for financial problems elsewhere,” she stated that “the NHS should be for patients and not accountants,” a key theme in my dealings with the NHS, which, over the last 13 years, has saved my life and that of my wife and son, and has always done so on the basis that it provides a service that needs money to run it, not as a business first and foremost.

In conclusion, Heidi Alexander exclaimed, “Jeremy Hunt says that his proudest moment was saving the A&E Department at the Royal Free in Surrey. My proudest political achievement will be to expose what this government is doing to the NHS in London.”

The pernicious role of the NHS medical directors

Afterwards, there was a lively Q&A session, to which my contribution was to point out that, as campaigners, we need to focus not only on the government’s role, but also on that of the senior NHS officials who are destroying the health service they claim to love, while providing false evidence about the cuts being in the interest of improving clinical standards — that plus all the nonsense about a community-based care system that doesn’t exist.

It struck me in particular, at a meeting in Lewisham with the Special Administrator and his team on December 3, that the great betrayers of the NHS are the medical directors, three of whom were at that meeting. One was Dr. Jane Fryer, the medical director of NHS South East London, who closely advised Matthew Kershaw, and who admitted — and must be held accountable for the admission — that the proposals for the SLHT provided an excuse for a long-cherished reorganisation of hospitals across south east London, in which Lewisham was always a target. The others, who spouted nonsense about presiding over widespread cuts to improve clinical standards, were Dr. Mike Marriman, the medical director of King’s, and Dr. Andy Mitchell, the medical director of NHS London. When Jeremy Hunt approved the plans for Lewisham on January 31, he drew on advice given to him by Sir Bruce Keogh, the medical director of the whole of the NHS.

I asked the panel what they thought about the role of the medical directors, and how we might be able to target them in campaigns to urge them not to betray the NHS — or be held accountable for deaths that would otherwise have been  avoidable, when journey times and waiting times increase massively, as they undoubtedly will if all the planned cuts take place.

Onkar Sahota picked up on the medical directors’ fantasies about community-based care as a justification for cutting departments, wards and beds, stating that they were “painting a picture of aspiration, not reality.” Louise Irvine went further, noting that they were appointees, who were “naive” and “being used politically, just as GPs were used to sell the Health and Social Care Act.” She also recognised, as I was suggesting, that some of these people might be vulnerable to criticism, especially if they recognise that failures — deaths and chronic overcrowding, for example — will be laid at their door, and indicated that it was time to say to the medical directors, “Either you are doctors whose job is to hand out sound medical advice, or you are stooges of the government.”

Andy Slaughter added that the medical directors — who have also, of course, played a key role in the plans for north west London — “should be ashamed,” and Heidi Alexander highlighted “the need for a high-level debate within the medical profession.” In conclusion, Onkar Sahota pointed out another group of people within the NHS who might find themselves taking the blame for political failures in the not too distant future — namely, the GPs, who, as Clinical Commissioning Groups, are going to be responsible for most of the NHS’s budget. He noted that “cuts are being forced through already on behalf of CCGs, before they even exist,” which is surely an intolerable position for any GP to find themselves in.

The photos at the top of this article come from the press launch of “Defend London’s NHS” in the House of Commons last Monday, and the rally in Hammersmith on Saturday, which I attended, along with Louise irvine and the Strawberry Thieves Choir from Lewisham. It was quite a long journey to show solidarity, but it is of inestimable importance that we make the campaign to save the NHS London-wide and then national.

Help the campaign!

If you have time to volunteer, to join a small team to play a part in this campaign, particularly if you have any particular expertise in establishing and running websites, dealing with social media via Facebook and Twitter, coming up with ways to attract media attention, and mobilising and organising supporters, then please get in touch with me. This is my country, and my NHS, and I will not stand by and watch it gutted by yet more pigs hungry for the trough of privatisation.

Note: For the threats to A&E, maternity and children’s services at two out of five hospitals in south west London — St. Helier (Sutton), Kingston, Croydon, St. George’s (Tooting) and Epsom — please see the Kingston Save Our Hospitals website. Several hundred people turned up for their rally on Saturday, and, as they note, “recommendations about which hospitals will lose their key A&E, maternity and children’s services are due to be made on Thursday 25th February.” A video from Saturday is here, and photos are 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.

In the Belly of the Beast: Photos of a Walk through Lower Manhattan

In the Belly of the Beast: A Walk through Lower Manhattan, a set on Flickr.

Regular readers will recall that, last month, I visited the US to campaign for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the 11th anniversary of its opening, taking part in events in Washington D.C. and McLean, Virginia from January 10 to 12, and in New York on January 13, which I made available in photo sets here, here and here. An archive of various articles relating to my visit — and videos of my appearances — can be found here.

However, as I explained in an article two weeks ago, An Englishman in New York: Photos of a Walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I actually arrived in New York on the evening of January 7, and didn’t leave until the evening of January 16, so I had plenty of time to wander around the city — and specifically Manhattan and Brooklyn, the former because, of course, it draws the visitor like an irresistible magnet, and because I had appointments there with various friends and colleagues: with Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait, with various friends and associates at the Center for Constitutional Rights, with the dancer and activist Nancy Vining Van Ness, and with the journalist and researcher Anand Gopal, as well as my rendezvous for a panel discussion at Revolution Books on January 13 with the Guantánamo attorney Ramzi Kassem, who represents Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, after which a big group of World Can’t Wait supporters went out for dinner before I ended up down an alley in Chinatown being filmed for a forthcoming documentary.

As for Brooklyn, I was staying in the Cobble Hill area with my friend, the secretive blogger known as The Talking Dog, and his family. The ‘Dog has been my friend since September 2007, when we first met over the phone, as he interviewed me for his excellent ongoing series of interviews with people involved with the Guantánamo story, just after the publication of my book The Guantánamo Files, and I first visited him and stayed with him in March 2008, during my first ever visit to America.

This set of photos is the second of eleven sets from New York (plus two from Washington D.C.), and was taken on January 8, my first full day in the city, when it was unseasonably warm, the sun shone magnificently, and my host escorted me on a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan. While he then went to work, I wandered through the financial district and down to Battery Park — somewhere I have always wanted to visit — before walking back up through Lower Manhattan, and then back across the Brooklyn Bridge as dusk fell.

There are five sets from this adventure — plus a sixth from the same day, as, after returning home to Brooklyn, I set out once more through the dark night to capture a few glimpses of the million lights of the Manhattan skyline from the former docks, which was quite an experience, as the docks, in contrast, were lightly cordoned off and in complete darkness!

I’ll be posting these other sets in the weeks to follow, but for now I hope you enjoy the second part of my journey of discovery in New York — through Lower Manhattan, crossing Wall Street and passing the New York Stock Exchange, and on down Broad Street to the southern tip of Manhattan where the skyscrapers end abruptly, and the docks and ferries take over. So come and walk with me through Manhattan — next up is my long-anticipated visit to Battery Park, which, I’m delighted to say, was not a disappointment.

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: Save Lewisham Hospital Rally, February 15, 2013

Save Lewisham Hospital Rally, February 15, 2013, a set on Flickr.

In Lewisham, in south east London, Save Lewisham Hospital campaigners, trade union representatives and concerned residents of the London Borough of Lewisham attended a rally at the war memorial opposite Lewisham Hospital, on Lewisham High Street, at 1pm on Thursday February 15, to tell the government and senior NHS management that they — we — will continue to campaign to save Lewisham Hospital from the plans to severely downgrade its services and to sell off 60 percent of its buildings, which were approved two weeks ago by the health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

The proposals were put forward in October by Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator charged with finding solutions to the financial problems of a neighbouring NHS trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, which was placed in administration in the summer. Under those plans, Lewisham’s A&E Department will close, replaced by an Urgent Care Unit, which cannot deal with emergencies, and this will have a severe impact on the hospital’s ability to survive. There will no longer be an intensive care unit, other acute services will be shut, and, according to Hunt, just 10 percent of the 4,400 Lewisham mothers who give birth in Lewisham every year will be able to do so in future, as any birth that carries a risk of complications will have to take place elsewhere.

As the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign has successfully pointed out over the last four months, it is unjust for Lewisham — a financially viable hospital — to be sacrificed to address the financial problems of a neighbouring trust, which is seriously in debt, in part because of monstrous PFI repayments. However, it is also unacceptable for tens of thousands of emergencies to have to be dealt with elsewhere, when there is no spare capacity, just as it is unacceptable that 4,000 mothers will also have to travel elsewhere, to hospitals that have no room for them.

Speaking at the event — and introducing the speakers — was Dr. Louise irvine, the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, who has provided inspirational leadership since Kershaw’s proposals were announced at the end of October. She dismissed Hunt’s supposed concession two weeks ago — that some aspects of A&E would continue at Lewisham — as a lie that it took two minutes to see through (even though some parts of the mainstream media took it at face value), and urged everyone to continue to use Lewisham Hospital, and to celebrate it, so that it can continue to thrive in the face of adversity. She also pointed out that there will be another big event soon, “Born in Lewisham,” to follow up on the massive protests in November last year and on January 26, when 25,000 people marched in support of the hospital. See my photos here, here and here.

The East London Lines blog described Dr. Irvine’s points as follows: “Going forward, there are four aspects to our campaign to change this decision: supporting hospital staff with our new slogan ‘use it don’t lose it’, a public campaign against the government, as this is something that can change with an election, rallies and stalls to keep the issue at the forefront of people’s minds, and finally, we are applying for judicial review.”

As was also mentioned at the rally — by Lewisham’s Mayor, Sir Steve Bullock — Lewisham Council is preparing to launch a judicial appeal into the legality of the proposals approved by Jeremy Hunt, which, it seems to me, and to many others involved in the campaign, is a thoroughly legitimate complaint. Dr. Jane Fryer, the medical director of NHS South East London, admitted at a meeting I attended in Lewisham in December that the plans for Lewisham were part of the NHS management’s plans to butcher Lewisham Hospital as part of a reorganisation of hospitals in south east London, but that, of course, is not the mandate under which Matthew Kershaw and his advisers — including Dr. Fryer, Dr. Mike Marriman, the medical director of King’s, and Dr. Andy Mitchell, the medical director for the whole of the NHS in London  — were operating, which, very specifically, was the “unsustainable providers” legislation that was supposed to deal solely with the problems of the South London Healthcare Trust.

The Lewisham event on February 15 was part of the launch week of “Defend London’s NHS,” an umbrella organisation dedicated to saving NHS services  — and hospitals — across the whole of London. I wrote about that campaign here and here, and will soon be publishing my report about the launch in the House of Commons on Monday, which threw down a gauntlet to the government, to senior NHS management who have forgotten what the NHS is for, and to the people of London — and more widely, in Britain as a whole — who also need to recall the words of Nye Bevan, the health minister at the time of the founding of the NHS in 1948: “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

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 of the Protest Calling for Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo, and a New Challenge to the UK Government

Stand Up for Shaker Aamer: The Protest at Parliament Calling for His Return to the UK from Guantánamo, a set on Flickr.

Today, February 14,  2013, is the 11th anniversary of the day that Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who has a British wife and four British children, arrived at the Bush administration’s experimental “war on terror” prison from Afghanistan, where he had travelled with his family to engage in humanitarian aid. After the 9/11 attacks, however, having managed to get his family to safety, he was captured and sold to US forces by bounty hunters. Ironically, Shaker’s arrival at Guantánamo on February 14, 2002 was also the day that his youngest son was born.

To mark this dreadful anniversary, six years — six whole years! — since Shaker was first told that he would be going home to his family, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign organised a protest outside Parliament yesterday, attended by activists and campaigners — myself  included — and also by MPs: Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion), Sadiq Khan (Labour, Tooting), John O’Donnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington) and Shaker’s constituency MP, Jane Ellison (Conservative, Battersea).

We were all there to ask why it is that Shaker is still held, when he was not only cleared for release in 2007, under the Bush administration, but was also cleared for release again in 2009, under the Obama administration, a fact that was only made public in September, when the Justice Department publicly released a list containing the names of 55 cleared prisoners, of which he was one.

I missed Caroline’s visit yesterday, but I spoke to all the other MPs, and was pleased that afterwards there was some activity in Parliament. Sadiq Khan noted on his website that he received “assurances from  the government that they will continue to use their best efforts to secure the release” of Shaker Aamer. In a letter to Mr. Khan, Alistair Burt MP, the Foreign Office Minister for counter terrorism, explained that William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, “has made multiple representations to his US counterparts and also raised the case numerous times with the outgoing US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton as well as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.” Mr. Burt also assured Mr. Khan that the British government “believes that indefinite detention without trial is wrong and that they will continue to call for the closure of Guantanamo Bay.”

Furthermore, it has just been announced today that Caroline Lucas  has “tabled amendments to the government’s proposed Justice and Security Bill aiming to increase the accountability of the security services,” with specific reference to Shaker. In December, his lawyers at Reprieve, with the help of the comedian Frankie Boyle, sued the British government for defamation, with the Guardian explaining that Shaker “blames the security and intelligence agencies for his continuing detention,” and “has accused MI5 and MI6 of making false and highly damaging claims about his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda.” Caroline Lucas’ amendment follows up on this. As Reprieve stated today, “The UK government has repeatedly claimed that they want Shaker returned to the UK. Yet Shaker has told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that UK agencies are still telling lies about him — lies which prevent him from being released. The defamation consists of untrue allegations and includes a picture of Shaker wearing normal Arabic clothes in London as proof of him being an extremist.”

Caroline Lucas’ amendment to the government’s proposed Justice and Security Bill “says that where a claim has been made to the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) about actions of the secret services, which are false and which harm the individual being defamed, then the ISC will immediately investigate the claim and will also ensure that the misinformation is corrected,” as Repreive described it.

The exact wording is: “Where a plausible claim has been made by or on behalf of an individual to the ISC that the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service or the Government Communications Headquarters has disseminated any information to any recipient concerning any person that appears to be – a) materially false; and b) harmful to the person defamed, the ISC shall fully and expeditiously investigate the claim, and where the claim appears to be well founded, shall ensure that the misinformation is expeditiously corrected.”

After tabling the amendment, Caroline Lucas said, “The defamation of Shaker Aamer is evidence of the immense power of the security services to say whatever they want about an accused man, to devastating effect. Shaker has been cleared for release by the US government — twice — and yet remains in Guantanamo Bay where he has been for eleven years, completely unable to defend himself. The failure of the British government to challenge this illegal incarceration is shameful and damaging — instead of pandering to the will of the US, it should be holding the security services properly to account and redoubling efforts to bring Shaker home.”

Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith, said, “I saw Shaker in Guantánamo just last week, and while what he said remains classified, he remains a testament to human resilience, as his spirits remain high while his body crumbles around him. Surely after he has spent 11 years in that terrible prison without charges or trial, cleared for release for six years, he should be allowed home to London to meet his youngest child Faris for the first time.”

It is to be hoped that these interventions put pressure on the British government to fulfil its duty to Shaker, as it is to be hoped that yesterday’s event will prompt further activity within Parliament to secure Shaker’s release.

In general, however, the bleak truth about Guantánamo, and about Shaker’s case, is that his status as a clear prisoner who is still held (along with 85 others) should have triggered a deluge of shame and outrage — in the US, in the UK and any other countries where people claim to respect the rule of law — but Guantánamo is now an almost forgotten footnote in the crimes and misdemeanours of the previous administration, whose sordid history is, in any case, being busily rewritten by Hollywood filmmakers. The fact that Obama promised to close Guantánamo but then failed to do so, the fact that he has lacked courage and principles on crucial occasions, when needed, the fact that Congress is full of opportunists who have made it their cynical mission to pass legislation preventing any more prisoners from being released from Guantánamo — none of this apparently counts.

To future historians, this indifference, it seems to me, will not be regarded favourably. Guantánamo remains an abomination, a place where indefinite detention without charge or trial — an anathema to civilized peoples — has come to pass, and the regime has not been thoroughly dismantled because it is politically inconvenient do so.

Without outrage — from the people, from the media, from celebrities — indefinite detention at Guantánamo has been normalized. If no one cares that the US is holding people — probably for the rest of their lives — despite having said that it doesn’t want to continue holding them, then why should President Obama care? There are, at Guantánamo, Yemenis cleared for release who are not being released because all Yemenis are, it transpires, regarded as a security threat, rather making a mockery of the whole process of approving them for release. There are others who can’t be safely repatriated, who wait — in vain, it seems — for other countries to take them, or for America to take responsibility for its own mistakes.

And then there is Shaker, whose return has been requested by the British government, to match the Americans’ stated desire not to hold him anymore, but Shaker — well, Shaker too is still held. The British, despite the revelations publicised by Reprieve, continue to say that the US won’t release him, though they keep asking. Obama says very little. Shaker’s fate falls into the cracks between these two powers’ negotiations, or lack of negotiations. Those who know his case well fear that both sides are fudging, happy for him to be held because, as the most articulate and passionate defender of the prisoners’ rights, he knows too much and, if released, will talk, embarrassing both governments, or exposing their crimes, and because, these days, no prisoners need to be released because few people in the outside world care enough.

Shaker Aamer must be released — and must be released today. There is no excuse for it not to happen. I will keep saying this, and writing this, until perhaps someone somewhere with an eye on their legacy and not just on their poll ratings, remembers that indefinite detention without charge or trial is disgraceful and unacceptable, and that it needs to be brought to an end.

Until that time, what is being done to Shaker Aamer, and to the other cleared prisoners, is being done in our name.

To take action for Shaker Aamer, please sign the e-petition to the British government calling for his return, which needs 100,000 signatures by April to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate, and currently has over 25,000 signatures. This is for UK citizens and residents only, although anyone anywhere in the world, including UK citizens and residents, can sign the international petition to both the US and UK government on the Care 2 Petition Site. Also, please check out this show on Radio Free Brighton, in which the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes and I discuss Shaker’s case, and the ongoing scandal of Guantánamo in general.

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 Relentless Importance of Closing Guantánamo

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.

Two weeks ago, there was a flurry of activity in the mainstream media when it was announced that the State Department had reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy for closing the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, and would not be replacing him. As Charlie Savage explained for the New York Times, “Mr. Fried’s office is being closed, and his former responsibilities will be ‘assumed’ by the office of the department’s legal adviser,” according to an internal personnel announcement.

The Times article continued: “The announcement that no senior official in President Obama’s second term will succeed Mr. Fried in working primarily on diplomatic issues pertaining to repatriating or resettling detainees appeared to signal that the administration does not currently see the closing of the prison as a realistic priority, despite repeated statements that it still intends to do so.”

The article also noted that Fried, a career diplomat, had “traveled the world negotiating the repatriation of some 31 low-level detainees and persuading third-party countries to resettle about 40 who were cleared for release but could not be sent home because of fears of abuse,” adding, that “the outward flow of detainees slowed almost to a halt as Congress imposed restrictions on further transfers, leaving Mr. Fried with less to do.”

Although the media largely spun the story to stress Charlie Savage’s suggestion that “the administration does not currently see the closing of the prison as a realistic priority,” it was actually more significant that Mr. Fried’s work had largely come to an end following the release of nearly 70 prisoners in 2009 and 2010.

However, the downturn in his work was not primarily because of Congress. The good will of countries around the world to take prisoners who could not be safely repatriated had largely dried up by the summer of 2010 — a situation that was not aided, it should be noted, by America’s own refusal, at every branch of the government, to bring any of these men to live in the US — and the President himself contributed to the deadlock. He quashed a plan by Greg Craig, the White House Counsel, to bring a handful of wrongly detained Uighurs (Muslims from China who could not be safely repatriated) to live in the US, when Republican critics caught wind of it, and he also imposed a ban on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, following a hysterical backlash after a failed plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for the US on Christmas Day 2009.

This was particularly outrageous, because the President’s own interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, consisting of around 60 career officials and lawyers from the main government departments and the intelligence agencies, had concluded that 86 of the 166 men still held should be released, and two-thirds of these men are Yemenis.

By refusing to stand up for these men, President Obama consigned them to rot in Guantánamo, a situation that was only compounded when Congress imposed onerous restrictions on releasing prisoners to any other countries that lawmakers regarded as dangerous. That, it turns out, appears to include almost every country on earth.

Of the 86 cleared men, 56 are Yemenis, whose fate rests with President Obama, leaving 30 others who no longer have even the nominal representation of Mr. Fried — the last five Tunisians, five Algerians (see here, here and here), four Syrians, four Afghans, a Saudi, the last Palestinian, the last Tajik, the last three Uighurs, one prisoner from Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, and Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.

As Guantánamo settles into its twelfth year of operations, President Obama needs to show that he can do more than just talk about the ongoing need to close the prison, a position that was expressed to the New York Times by Ian Moss, a spokesman for Daniel Fried’s office, who said that the closure of the office “did not mean that the administration had given up on closing the prison,” as the Times put it. Mr. Moss said, “We remain committed to closing Guantánamo, and doing so in a responsible fashion. The administration continues to express its opposition to Congressional restrictions that impede our ability to implement transfers.”

To add meaning to these words, we issue the following requests to President Obama:

1: to lift the ban on releasing any of the 56 cleared Yemenis from Guantánamo, which he issued in January 2010.

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

3: to 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.

Please help us by writing to President Obama, and to Secretary of State John Kerry:

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

or email the President.

Secretary of State John Kerry

US Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, DC 20520

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.