Andy Worthington's Blog, page 149

Photos of Brighton: The Sea and the Storm

Brighton: The Sea and the Storm, a set on Flickr.

This photo set is the second of three sets taken in Brighton during my visit from January 29-30, 2013 to take part in “Freedom from Torture,” an event about Guantánamo organised by the University of Sussex Amnesty International Society, featuring myself, my friend Omar Deghayes, a former Guantánamo prisoner, and Elspeth Van Veeren, a researcher and writer about Guantánamo in the university’s International Relations Department.

It was a great event, as I explained in my previous article, in which I posted the first photo set, and I was also delighted to have time to socialise — with Omar, and with my friend Jackie Chase and her family, who put me up for the night. As I explained in the previous article, Jackie runs Under the Bridge Studios, beside Brighton station, which also houses Radio Free Brighton, a community radio station stuffed full of politics and music, which has just been recognised as being in the Top 30 online stations worldwide.

On January 30, just before my return to London, Omar and I recorded a show that is available here, which I’ll be publicising separately in the very near future, but before that I had the opportunity to cycle from the studios down to the seafront near Brighton’s surviving pier, and then along the seafront to Black Rock and the marina, just over a mile away. This is a lovely trip, from the hustle and bustle of Brighton, along Madeira Drive, a generally quiet road below the massive sea wall that supports Marine Drive and its grand hotels and houses, to the marina, built in the 1970s at Black Rock.

When I set out, it was a lovely sunny day, but within the space of 20 minutes huge storm clouds had rolled in, a rainbow had suddenly emerged, and a torrential storm   had engulfed the marina, with waves crashing powerfully on the great breakwater that protects the houses and shops of the marina from the fury of the elements. Though soaked by the storm, I managed to capture some powerful photos of it, before it passed as suddenly as it had arrived, and I cycled back to Brighton, amazed at the elemental journey I had just been through.

I hope to post the final set soon — primarily featuring shops and streets in the wonderfully picturesque North Laine area of Brighton — but for now I hope you enjoy this journey through the elements where the land meets the sea in Brighton.

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.

Tories Endorse NHS Proposals to Disembowel Lewisham Hospital

In the end, then, the massive grassroots struggle to save Lewisham Hospital from government-backed destruction on the advice of the NHS’s own senior officials — which led to two massive demos, in November, and last weekend (see here and here) — proved not to be an end in itself, but just the beginning of a larger battle.

Yesterday, Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, broadly approved the proposals to close Lewisham Hospital’s A&E Department, replacing it with an “urgent care centre,” unable to deal with emergencies, and have other frontline services, including its maternity services, severely downgraded. The proposals were put forward just three months ago by Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed last summer by the former health secretary Andrew Lansley to deal with the bankrupt South London Healthcare Trust, and his recommendations regarding Lewisham came as a shock and surprise to the 250,000 residents of the borough.

Their — our — surprise was understandable. After all, Kershaw had been appointed to make recommendations regarding the fate of the South London Healthcare Trust, based in Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley, and not Lewisham, which is an independent trust. In addition, the SLHT was crippled by PFI debt — which, incidentally, is so monstrously disproportionate that it should have been declared illegal — whereas Lewisham was solvent, but this apparently made no difference to the would-be butchers of NHS services.

Kershaw recommended that the South London Healthcare Trust “be dissolved, with each of its hospitals taken over by neighbouring NHS and Foundation Trusts.” Specifically, he recommended that Queen Mary’s in Sidcup “be transferred to Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust and developed into a ‘hub’ for the provision of health and social care in Bexley,” as Jeremy Hunt described it in his decision. He also recommended that the Princess Royal in Bromley be taken over by King’s, and proposed the merger between Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Lewisham Hospital that ignited righteous indignation in the borough of Lewisham, whose 250,000 residents are now supposed to join the 500,000 in Greenwich and Bexley who already rely on the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich (part of the bankrupt trust) to provide their A&E services.

As the South London Press reported on January 15, after Matthew Kershaw’s final report was issued, Dr. John O’Donohue, a consultant physician at Lewisham Hospital, said, “These plans are a travesty. They are unsafe, rushed and unjust. But most of all they will disadvantage the people of Lewisham, who will have to travel further to already overcrowded A&E and maternity units, which, ironically, have themselves been diverting ambulances and pregnant women to Lewisham in recent days due to lack of capacity.”

At the time, a spokesman for Lewisham Healthcare NHS Trust conceded that the trust supported merging with Queen Elizabeth, but added, “However, we do not agree with the TSA’s prescriptive approach to service change, which would result in local emergency services being closed and maternity services being downgraded. As a successful organisation, we would like to determine the future of services ourselves and we would include proper engagement with the public.”

In reaching his decision on Matthew Kershaw’s recommendations, Jeremy Hunt acknowledged that “the public campaign surrounding services at Lewisham Hospital has highlighted just how important it is to the local community,” adding, “I respect and recognise the sense of unfairness that people feel because their hospital has been caught up in the financial problems of its neighbour.”

The Lewisham A&E non-closure scam

However, contrary to the impression given by various news outlets yesterday — “London A&E unit spared the axe,” was the Evening Standard‘s tagline on its cover — Lewisham’s A&E has not been saved. In dealing with the proposals for Lewisham, Jeremy Hunt consulted with Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the medical director of the NHS, and, on A&E, as he explained in his decision:

Sir Bruce was concerned that the recommendation for a non-admitting Urgent Care Centre at Lewisham may not lead, in all cases, to improved patient care. While those with serious injury or illness would be better served by a concentration of specialist A&E services, this would not be the case for those patients requiring short, relatively uncomplicated treatments or a temporary period of supervision. To better serve these patients, who would often be frail and elderly and arrive by non-blue light ambulances, Sir Bruce recommends that Lewisham hospital should retain a smaller A&E service with 24/7 senior emergency medical cover.

A “smaller A&E service” might sound like a victory, but in reality it is no such thing. In Matthew Kershaw’s initial proposals, it was envisaged that 70 percent of the 120,000 people admitted to Lewisham’s A&E every year would still be seen in the urgent care centre, but that the other 30 percent — the cases requiring acute care — would be taken elsewhere. That figure has now been adjusted to allow for the care of 5 percent of those patients — 6,000 a year — who require “short, relatively uncomplicated treatments or a temporary period of supervision,” but that is no victory at all.

As the Save Lewisham Hospital website explained, “Mr. Hunt’s words seemed to have offered a partial reprieve of the A&E, he says to the benefit of the frail and elderly — which instead of an urgent care downgrade is to be reduced to a 25-bed facility. But look beneath the surface and very little has changed from the Kershaw recommendations.” The campaign quoted Lewisham A&E consultant Dr. Chidi Ejimofo, who said, “An A&E of the type described is little more than an Urgent Care Unit – patients will still have to be transported to other hospitals because we will no longer have acute provision here.”

In addition, the Londonist website, which explained how “the plan for Lewisham is now a bizarre fudge that we think might actually be a worse idea,” stated that the amended A&E plans “will cause confusion among residents and ambulance services about the best place to go, and even more patients being blue-lit around London. It’s being billed as a ‘smaller A&E’ but in reality is still the original Urgent Care Centre with some inpatient beds and a misleading name.”

Furthermore, the plans for Lewisham will impact negatively on surrounding hospitals, as five MPs — Harriet Harman, Kate Hoey, Simon Hughes, Tessa Jowell and Chuka Umunna — explained in a letter to Hunt on January 15 regarding the added stress that will be faced by King’s College Hospital, in Camberwell, in which they also disputed the claim that just 30 percent of A&E cases would be referred elsewhere, pointing out, instead, that it would actually be 54 percent:

It is now acknowledged that most of the patients who would otherwise have used Lewisham A&E will come to King’s. This will have a major impact on the service provided in King’s A&E. It simply will not be possible to maintain the high standard of service which King’s seeks to provide in A&E, and in particular in paediatric A&E.

We estimate the following, based on NHS figures: 54 per cent of patients — or 65,000 people — who would otherwise have gone to Lewisham will come to King’s A&E — that is an increase of almost 45 per cent for King’s A&E. As it is, there is a small but concerning increase in waiting times at King’s A&E. If Lewisham A&E closes it is inconceivable that King’s would be able to maintain what is a much improved service for our constituents.

Of those 65,000 extra A&E patients approximately 12,200 will be likely to be admitted to King’s as emergencies — that is an almost 45 per cent increase in emergency admissions at King’s. That will place a further pressure on inpatient beds at a time when King’s management have raised with us their concerns about capacity at King’s. They say they are already looking to take on extra capacity at Princess Royal in Bromley to deal with outpatients and non-emergency admissions. To accommodate the additional emergency admissions even more non-emergency admissions will have to be moved out of King’s to Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley. For our constituents — many of whom do not own a car — the journey from Camberwell to Princess Royal in Bromley would mean a journey of at least a bus and a train lasting more than an hour and costing £5.50.

Lewisham’s 4,000 abandoned mothers

On maternity, Jeremy Hunt’s approval of Matthew Kershaw’s proposals for a stand-alone midwife-led birth centre are also a disaster. At present, around 4,400 women a year give birth in Lewisham Hospital, but with the loss of emergency support just 10 percent of future Lewisham mothers will be able to give birth to their children in the London Borough of Lewisham.

In addition, mothers’ lives will be at risk, as will those of other A&E cases who can no longer be treated in Lewisham. As Dr. Louise Irvine, the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, explained, “As a GP I can state unequivocally that these proposals are going to cost lives.” The campaign’s website added, “Mothers whose labour runs into difficulty will be forced to endure a blue light ambulance trip to an unfamiliar hospital in the manner of decades past. We already know that we have mothers who are members of our campaign whose lives and whose babies would have been lost in these circumstances.”

The campaign also explained, “Crucially, Sir Bruce Keogh’s estimates of travel times immediately throws this into doubt — another 1-3 minutes extra travel to Woolwich can only be achieved in a private jet or an emergency helicopter! Our campaign’s real time travel film [see below] shows that this is closer to 2 hours (one way) than 2 minutes by public transport.”

In their letter to Hunt on January 15, the five MPs mentioned above also wrote, “We estimate that if Lewisham maternity services close then there will be 3,235 more births at King’s to add to the existing 6,000 births, an increase of 54 per cent of births at King’s. There is simply not the capacity at King’s for a 54 per cent increase in births. It would not be fair on the mothers, the babies or the staff. There are already mothers who want to give birth at King’s who have to go elsewhere — some are referred to Lewisham.”

Lewisham’s paediatric services also face the axe

On another topic of huge importance to the people of Lewisham — Lewisham Hospital’s excellent paediatric record (the treatment of children) — Jeremy Hunt also consulted Sir Bruce Keogh, and described his advice as follows:

On the issue of paediatric care, Sir Bruce recognised the high quality paediatric services at Lewisham and that any replacement would have to offer even better clinical outcomes and patient experience. His opinion is that this is possible but dependent on very clear protocols for primary ambulance conveyance, a walk-in paediatric urgent care service at Lewisham and rapid transfer protocols for any sick children who would be better treated elsewhere. He is clear that this will require careful pathway planning and need to be a key focus of implementation.

On the surface, this perhaps sounds reassuring, but as Dr. Tony O’Sullivan, Lead Paediatrician at Lewisham Hospital, explained, “Mr. Hunt stressed that this will involve careful handling and careful planning. This is politician’s cover for introducing these measures without any consultation with local paediatricians or the College of Paediatrics. He repeatedly said that these measures would improve standards. The destruction of our exemplar childrens’ service is the not the way to do that and we will be addressing this at the earliest opportunity.”

A legal challenge?

As we wait for these questions to be answered, it strikes me as significant that the legality of Matthew Kershaw’s recommendations was not mentioned by Jeremy Hunt, despite it being obvious that it involved a certain deviousness to decide that his remit for the SLHT extended to the whole of the NHS in south east London, and, specifically, to the destruction of NHS services in Lewisham. I have written previously about my disappointment with the senior NHS officials advising Kershaw, and their understanding that they were trying sneak through a major reorganisation of services using the deliberately short timeframe for dealing with bankrupt trusts as cover, and I am not reassured by the manner in which Jeremy Hunt tried to brush the issue aside.

In his decision, he wrote that, “as a consequence” of Kershaw’s six proposals for breaking up the SLHT, the Special Administrator “also recommended that services be reconfigured beyond the confines of South London NHS Trust, across all of South East London.” Quite where the authority for this decision came from is not explained, and I fervently hope that the Mayor of Lewisham, Sir Steve Bullock, will now launch a formal legal challenge, as he has threatened to do since the proposals were first announced at the end of October.

In a statement yesterday, Bullock said, “The Secretary of State is riding roughshod over the people of Lewisham. These plans have been roundly rejected by local people, by the staff who work in the hospital and by local GPs. The Secretary of State has pressed ahead regardless by downgrading maternity services and emergency services at Lewisham Hospital. But let me be clear, this is not the end of the matter. I do not believe that the TSA had the statutory power to make recommendations about Lewisham Hospital and the Secretary of State therefore has no power to implement them. I will be talking to our lawyers and we will also of course need to talk to our colleagues at Lewisham Hospital in order to fully understand the implications of Mr Hunt’s statement.”

Why none of this needs to happen

In conclusion, for now, I am left with a handful of figures that simply don’t add up. Matthew Kershaw has already conceded that it will “cost £195m by 2015-16 in transition and capital costs, but admit[ted] that the move would take until then to start generating a £19.5m annual payback,” which prompted Dr. John Miell, a consultant endocrinologist at Lewisham, to state, in exasperation, “it’s fiscal nonsense and financial madness to do this. How can you tell the taxpayer that it’s sensible to spend £195m to get £19.5m savings a year? It’s completely unfair and ridiculous to penalise a successful, high-performing, viable NHS trust to bail out a PFI-burdened and debt-laden neighbour.”

Furthermore, in Jeremy Hunt’s decision it is made clear that, to compensate for the downgrading of maternity services, “£36m of additional investment has been earmarked to ensure there is sufficient capacity at the other sites,” and, on A&E, “an additional £37m of investment will further expand services” at the hospitals that will deal with the “more serious conditions” that Lewisham will be unable to tackle — namely, King’s, Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich, the Princess Royal in Bromley and St. Thomas’s.”

When we are dealing with a minimum of 30,000 accident and emergency cases, and 4,000 mothers, surely it makes sense to spend that £73 million on Lewisham Hospital, rather than proceeding with the hugely expensive closure of Lewisham’s services, and all the damaging disruption — and the occasional risk of fatalities — that it will bring?

This makes more sense, doesn’t it? Or am I missing something, like the fact that everyone involved has decided to ignore any argument, however sensible, that detracts from the policy that they have all agreed on — that, out of the five hospitals in south east London, only four can continue to be supported as fully-functioning hospitals with A&E departments and full maternity services, and Lewisham was chosen for the axe long ago?

As we have shown over the last three months, we will not take these proposals lying down, and we will not begin to do so now. As Dr. John O’Donogue, a Consultant Physician at Lewisham Hospital, has explained, “This is a travesty — a dangerous injustice. Taking a high performing hospital out of the heart and soul of our community is nothing short of vandalism.”

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: Brighton at Night, in the Rain – and a Guantánamo event at the University of Sussex

Brighton at Night, in the Rain, a set on Flickr.

On January 29, 2013, I travelled to Brighton, one of my favourite places in England, for “Freedom from Torture,” an event about Guantánamo organised by the University of Sussex Amnesty International Society, featuring myself, my friend Omar Deghayes, a former Guantánamo prisoner, and Elspeth Van Veeren, a researcher and writer about Guantánamo in the university’s International Relations Department.

The event was filmed, and I’ll publicise it here as soon as it has been edited and is made available, but I can confirm that it was a powerful evening, very well attended, in which the 120 students and other members of the public who turned up were left in no doubt about the shameful history of Guantánamo, and the even more shameful truth that it is still open because of the failures of all three branches of the US government to deal appropriately with the wretched legacy of the Bush administration — primarily through cowardice and/or laziness on the part of President Obama, and opportunistic fearmongering and obstruction on the part of Congress and the D.C. Circuit Court (the court of appeals dealing with the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions), as well as indifference in the Supreme Court. For more on these issues, see my recent article, “Eleven Years of Guantánamo: End This Scandal Now!” and also see the videos of my speech outside the White House on January 11, and a panel discussion at the New America Foundation on the same day.

It was my first visit to Brighton for a while, and it was great not only to spend some time with Omar, and to meet some wonderful students in pursuit of truth and justice, but also to spend time with Jackie Chase and her family. Formerly a major player in the Save Omar campaign, which then, after Omar’s release in December 2007, moved on to become a campaign to free the last British residents in Guantánamo, Binyam Mohamed (freed in February 2009) and Shaker Aamer (who, disgracefully, is still held — please see and sign the petition here!), Jackie regularly used to get me down to Brighton to talk about Guantánamo, beginning around five years ago, and we instantly became friends on our first meeting.

Still thoroughly engaged in political campaigning, Jackie runs Under the Bridge Studios, beside Brighton station, which also houses Radio Free Brighton, a community radio station stuffed full of politics and music, which has just been recognised as being in the Top 30 online stations worldwide. Omar and I recorded a show on January 30, which is available here (and which I’ll be publicising separately in the very near future), but although strategising took up part of my time with Jackie, I was also nearly swept away by the permanent buzz at the studio as children were trooped in for music classes, endless successions of hirsute young men — and some young women — in a huge variety of bands rocked out in the rehearsal studios, and, throughout, Radio Fee Brighton continued broadcasting and having new shows recorded.

After the event at the University of Sussex, Omar drove me back to the studios, and I then went for a meal with Jackie and family, before staying the night with them, and, in the morning, cycling down the seafront for a brief and exhilarating tour of the British weather (from sun to storm and back, and with a rainbow thrown in for good measure) prior to my show with Omar. I’ll be posting the photos from my journey along the seafront very soon, but for now I hope you enjoy these glimpses of Brighton, and the University of Sussex, in the rain, on the day of the Amnesty International event that provided me with such a great opportunity to visit Brighton once more.

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.

From Guantánamo, An Innocent Man Pleads for Release

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we have long despaired that the power of black propaganda is such that the Bush administration’s claim that Guantánamo held “the worst of the worst” has had a disturbing and enduring power. The reality, as those who have studied Guantánamo know, is that this is an empty claim, not backed up by evidence.

In fact, few of the 779 men held at Guantánamo throughout its 11-year history are genuinely alleged to have had any connection to al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, or any other examples of international terrorism. Sold for bounty payments, or rounded up through woefully inept intelligence, the men and boys flown to Guantánamo were generally so insignificant — either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or mere foot soldiers in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that predated the 9/11 attacks and had nothing to do with terrorism — that reasons had to be created to justify holding them, even though, for the most part, the authorities did not see it that way. Convinced that their prisoners were holding out on them, they tortured, abused or bribed them into making false statements — about themselves, and about their fellow prisoners — that could be used to justify holding them.

Even so, 604 of the prisoners have been released — although another nine only left the prison by dying. Of the 166 men still held, 86 have been cleared for release by an interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama when he first took office four years ago, but are still held because of Congressional opposition and the refusal of President Obama to hold to his promise to close the prison within a year, which he made when he first took office in 2009.

In particular, two-thirds of the 86 men cleared for release are Yemenis, and they continue to be held because, three years ago, it turned out that a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried and failed to bomb a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had been recruited in Yemen. When this information came to light, President Obama announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, which still stands, even though it only came about as a response to hysteria from his critics following the failed bomb plot.

It is, to be blunt, time for this dark farce of “guilt by nationality” to come to an end. There is no comfort to be gained from considering the contradictions in the Yemenis’ situation — that, on the one hand, they are men cleared for release by the US government, but, on the other, they are condemned to indefinite dentition by that same government, simply because of their nationality.

In an attempt to break through the obstacle preventing the Yemenis’ release, a program of education is required — not only about a sense of fairness and justice, but also about humanising these men whose detention will otherwise be for the rest of their lives, so that their only way out of Guantánamo is in a coffin, like Adnan Latif, a Yemeni who died in September, despite having been cleared for release on several occasions, dating back to 2006.

In a first article aimed at humanizing the Yemenis still held at Guantánamo, Omar Farah, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who I met with during my recent visit to the US to call for the closure of Guantánamo, has written a profile of one of his clients, a Yemeni named Mohammed al-Hamiri, who was a close friend of Adnan Latif, and is one of the 55 cleared prisoners named in a list made publicly available by the Justice Department last September. This powerful account was first published in a reader diary at FireDogLake, and we’re delighted to be publishing it below.

- Andy Worthington, Close Guantánamo

Freedom or Death at Guantánamo

By Omar Farah, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights

Adnan Latif and Mohammed al-Hamiri arrived at Guantánamo through strikingly similar twists of fate. Adnan Latif is the most recent of nine men — four since President Obama took office — to die in US custody at Guantánamo.

Mohammed al-Hamiri is a Yemeni prisoner I have represented and visited since 2008 who remains trapped at Guantánamo, housed at the prison’s medical clinic, fighting to stave off despair. Like all Guantánamo prisoners, he grapples daily with the haunting thought that he many never leave the island prison alive.

January 11 marked 11 years since the first of these men arrived at Guantánamo, and this week marks four years since the president’s signing an executive order mandating the closure of Guantanamo within the year. As we observe these anniversaries, I question what, if anything, the Obama administration learned from Adnan’s senseless death. For better or for worse, the answer will say a lot about what lies ahead for Mohammed.

Both Adnan and Mohammed suffered severe injuries as boys that left them with cranial fractures. There is a noticeable scar under Mohammed’s hairline, and he suffers from chronic headaches caused by the reconstructive metal plates in his skull. Mohammed’s first round of treatment at the Saudi-German Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia is well documented. The necessary follow-up treatment was financially prohibitive, so, like Adnan, Mohammed traveled to Pakistan in search of cheap medical care.

Following the US invasion of Afghanistan, Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan by local police. In that respect, his story and Adnan’s are typical. Since the prison first opened, the government has cynically perpetuated the myth that Guantánamo prisoners were “captured on the battlefield.” Nothing could be further from the truth: the troubling reality is that in the months after September 11, the US military ran a slipshod bounty system that offered handsome compensation to Afghan and Pakistani locals for turning over anyone who seemed out of place. That is how Adnan ended up at Guantánamo, and the circumstances surrounding Mohammed’s arrest point to the same explanation.

Hooded and shackled, Mohammed was then rendered to Guantánamo in 2002.  He was just 19 or 20 years old. Since then, he has endured more than a decade of arbitrary, indefinite detention, with no end in sight. He has never been charged with a crime. He never will be. In 2009, he, like Adnan, was approved for release by unanimous consent of an Inter-Agency Task Force that President Obama convened. The Task Force included representatives from every military, law enforcement, and national security agency with a stake in detainee affairs. But within months, the President instituted a moratorium on transfers to Yemen, effectively rescinding Mohammed’s clearance in favor of a policy of crude collective punishment — one that bases the detention of Guantánamo’s Yemeni prisoners on citizenship alone.

The results are at once shameful and predictable: it has been 30 months since a Yemeni has been repatriated or resettled. Of the 166 prisoners who remain at Guantánamo, roughly 90 are from Yemen. Fifty-six Yemenis are already cleared for transfer — 57 before Adnan died.

Death is rapidly becoming the only way out of Guantánamo. That is the inevitable by-product of the administration’s inaction. It is a chilling fact that is not lost on Mohammed, who was housed in a cell near Adnan, his dear friend and countryman. It was there, in the harsh, isolative conditions of Camp V, that Mohammed came face-to-face with the grim toll indefinite detention takes on the men at Guantánamo. That is where his path and Adnan’s parted. It is no wonder that Mohammed is — in his words — at a “breaking point.”

But Mohammed’s continued torment is unnecessary: President Obama has the power to free him with the stroke of a pen. He should do so immediately, or history will not judge him kindly. The cost of delay has never been so high or potentially irrevocable. The president now confronts a grave moral question: had he foreseen Adnan’s death, would he have done anything differently? For Mohammed’s sake, and for the others languishing at Guantánamo, I hope the answer is yes.

Note: For more of Andy Worthington’s photos from the day of action in Washington D.C. on January 11, 2013, the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, see 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.

Save Lewisham Hospital: More Photos of the Massive Protest on January 26, 2013

Save Lewisham Hospital: More Photos of the Massive Protest on January 26, 2013, a set on Flickr.

So now we wait.

On Saturday, as this second set of my photos shows — following on from the first set here — around 25,000 people marched through Lewisham, in south east London, to a rally in Mountsfield Park in Catford, to deliver a powerful rebuke to senior NHS officials, and to the government.

In the first set, I focused on the initial gathering in the centre of Lewisham, and in this second set I photographed the march through the streets, past shoppers and car drivers earnestly honking their horns in support, past Lewisham Hospital, and on to Mountsfield Park in Catford, where there were speakers including Louise Irvine, a Deptford GP and the chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, and Heidi Alexander MP, who introduced a successful petition to save Lewisham Hospital, which now has over 30,000 signatures.

There was also music, a number of food stalls and a giant petition, and it felt, just for a few hours, as though a velvet revolution was beginning. It is certainly true that only huge numbers — like the numbers seen on Saturday — can genuinely alarm those in power, but it remains to be seen, of course, if such numbers can be mobilised again, not just for Lewisham, but across London, and throughout England as a whole, as the long years of this wretched coalition government — arrogant and cruel, to an extent that is almost beyond belief, and without a genuine mandate — continue to grind away at the very structure of civil society, hurling more and more of the most vulnerable members of society into genuinely alarming poverty, while continuing to destroy Britain economically, and doing nothing for anyone except the rich and the super-rich — the bankers, corporations and individuals who got us into financial difficulties in the first place, and who continue to avoid paying taxes on a colossal scale.

On Saturday, the rebuke that was aimed at senior NHS officials by the crowd of 25,000 came about because, in a team clustered around a Special Administrator, Matthew Kershaw, officials including the medical directors of NHS London (Dr. Andy Mitchell) NHS South East London (Dr. Jane Fryer) and King’s (Dr. Mike Marriman) have used legislation designed to deal with bankrupt NHS trusts as cover for a major reorganisation of NHS services throughout south east London, with Lewisham singled out for particular damage.

Despite not being in debt, and despite not being part of the failed trust in question, the South London Healthcare Trust (based in Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley), Lewisham is to be punished by having its A&E Department closed (even though it has only just been refurbished at a cost of £12 million), other frontline services downgraded or closed, and 60 percent of its buildings sold. Under these proposals, one A&E Department — at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, part of the indebted SLHT — will be the only A&E for the 750,000 people in three boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley, where the A&E Department was also closed down.

The protestors in Lewisham on Saturday were directing their message at the government, as well as the NHS officials responsible for the proposals to disembowel Lewisham Hospital, because Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, will decide this week, or perhaps early next week, whether to accept the Special Administrator’s proposals, or whether to spare Lewisham.

Please write to Jeremy Hunt now , if you haven’t already, to urge him to save Lewisham Hospital.

The health secretary has been told repeatedly that the Special Administrator has exceeded his remit by deciding to include Lewisham in his deliberations regarding the SLHT, and those of us who have been working on the campaign believe that he does not want to face a legal challenge that, logic dictates, he would lose. In addition, although the legislation allowing a bankrupt trust to be carved up also obliges changes to take place within a very short timeframe — a consultation period of just five weeks, for example, as happened with these proposals –  a proper reorganisation of NHS services throughout south east London, including the destruction of vital hospital services, would not be allowed to be rushed through in such a short period of time. The NHS officials want to push through their changes under the cover of this legislation, as Dr. Jane Fryer stated publicly at a consultation in Lewisham in December, but it seems clear to me, and to others involved in the campaign, that they are not legally entitled to do so.

Additionally, what the proposals also disguise is the fact that all of these problems have arisen specifically because of the ruinous PFI deals that have crippled the South London Healthcare Trust, and that should be written off. Matthew Kershaw has partly accepted this, and has proposed that the government should swallow some of the debt — no doubt only to make the SLHT more attractive to investors — but anyone who looks at the nature of the deal — a £2.5 billion repayment for two hospital that cost £210 million to build — will realise that those profiting from the deal — Barclays, Innisfree and Taylor Woodrow — are, essentially, thieves, prepared to damage the health services on which hundreds of thousands of people depend, to ensure their own disturbingly disproportionate profits.

For those wishing to focus their ire solely on the government, because of its evident hostility towards the NHS, as made clear in its stealth privatisation bill, passed last year, it is important to remember that, although the government is not to be trusted, the people of Lewisham have genuinely been sold out by the NHS officials supposedly responsible for their care. Although these officials bleat on about needing to concentrate care in fewer locations to ensure excellent standards, they are conducting their deliberations not on a basis of clinical need, but on the basis of money — the programme of £20 billion savings introduced under Labour, and the cuts that appear to be the Tories’ sole reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Lewisham has a population the same as Brighton, Hull and Newcastle, and the notion that it can have its A&E Department shut, and other services severely downgraded or shut down without having a damaging effect on the people of Lewisham, and on neighbouring NHS trusts, is ridiculous. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, which already struggles to serves the A&E demands of two boroughs, is too far from Lewisham, and too poorly served by public transport, to safely ensure that those most in need of a distant A&E Department — the poor and elderly, for example — would get there without someone, at some point dying en route, and the knock-on effect of crippling Lewisham would also impose a huge strain on other neighbouring hospitals, in particular King’s, in Camberwell, which is also struggling — very literally — to cope at present, without having to try to deal with thousands more visitors from Lewisham.

Similarly, spare capacity elsewhere simply does not exist for the 4,400 or so women who currently give birth in Lewisham, and who, if the plans go ahead, will not be able to give birth in Lewisham unless it can be guaranteed that  there will be no complications with their births, once Lewisham Hospital has been gutted of the ability to deal with any front line emergency situations.

As I mentioned at the start of this article, we are now waiting — for Jeremy Hunt to save Lewisham Hospital. If he doesn’t, the struggle will continue, but even if he does, dozens of other hospitals in London, and elsewhere in the country, are under threat and need our support. As Nye Bevan, the health minister when the NHS was introduced in 1948, stated, in a rallying cry that remains just as powerful today as it was when the NHS began, “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.

Save Lewisham Hospital: Photos of the Huge March on January 26, 2013

Save Lewisham Hospital: The Huge March on January 26, 2013, a set on Flickr.

On January 26, 2013, in Lewisham, in south east London, I took these photos of an extraordinary demonstration, in which an estimated 25,000 people marched from the centre of Lewisham, past Lewisham Hospital and up George Lane to Mountsfield Park in Catford to save Lewisham Hospital from having its A&E Department closed, and other services severely downgraded, including its maternity services.

It was one of the most exhilarating protests I have ever taken part in, a worthy successor to the one in the driving rain on November 24, when around 15,000 people showed up, providing the first thrilling indication that, in attacking the NHS in Lewisham, the government and the wrecking crew in the NHS’s management had sparked a movement of resistance that was spreading like wildfire throughout the borough and beyond. Yesterday, it felt like a continuation of that initial impulse — that something had been sparked which was finally waking people up to the understanding that, although politicians and bureaucrats wield often considerable power, and generally show disdain for us, in the end we are many and they are few.

The plans for Lewisham were put forward at the end of October by a government-appointed NHS Special Administrator, Matthew Kershaw, and his team of advisors within the NHS, as part of his solution to the financial problems of a neighbouring NHS Trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, which is burdened with payments for PFI deals that are so exorbitant they should be illegal.

Disturbingly, the proposals were put forward by Kershaw even though Lewisham NHS Trust is not in debt. He proposes that Lewisham should be downgraded to become an acute care centre, but the loss of A&E and all the frontline acute services that go with it mean that, if the plans were to go ahead, it would soon be hollowed out, and incapable of providing the full range of services necessary for the people of Lewisham, a borough with a population of 250,000, the same as Brighton, Hull or Newcastle.

Under the plans, Lewisham would be forced to merge with Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich (part of the SLHT), which is difficult to get to, and dangerously so at rush hour, and there would be just one A&E Department, at the QEH, for the 750,000 people in three boroughs — Greenwich, Lewisham and Bexley. To add insult to injury, Kershaw also proposes selling off 60 percent of Lewisham Hospital’s buildings, and making most of the rest into a centre for elective surgery for the whole of south east London; in other words, a private hospital for those with money.

The proposal to disembowel Lewisham sends a clear message that the NHS and the government are punishing success and rewarding failure, and are doing so to protect the corporate sharks profiting from their PFI deals in the South London Healthcare Trust, where an investment of £210 million for building two hospitals was set up to eventually provide a repayment of £2.5 billion, at the end of which the SLHT would still not even own its own buildings.

For those wanting to know more, the companies whose profits come before the healthcare of hundreds of thousands of people are Barclays, Taylor Woodrow and Innisfree (which you may never have heard of, but which is, alarmingly, “the largest investor in NHS hospitals and healthcare after the NHS,” which “has commitments of £539 million to 19 UK hospital projects costing £4.9 billion.” These “comprise 28 hospitals representing around 13,000 beds.” Innisfree is also involved in PFI projects involving education and defense. For further information, see the recently established Save London NHS website.

In his proposals for the SLHT, Matthew Kershaw recommended that the trust should be broken up, which he is entitled to do, but as I have argued, and continue to argue, the legislation established for dealing with bankrupts trusts like the SLHT does not authorise a wholesale reorganisation of other trusts as well, and I wish to reiterate, just days before health secretary Jeremy Hunt makes his decision about the proposals, that everything planned for Lewisham appears to be illegal.

I hope the minister is paying close attention to the 25,000 people who marched on Saturday, a number so big that it felt to me that it was the start of some new political movement. That remains to be seen, of course, as it is notoriously difficult to mobilise significant numbers of people for sustained actions, but the timing and the issues — the future of the NHS, beyond Lewisham’s borders, and across London, and England as a whole — are certainly appropriate to spark mass mobilisation, of a kind that has largely been elusive since the wretched Tories seized power in May 2010 and began their vile mission to destroy the state.

A second set of photos will be along soon, but for now, please enjoy these glimpses of the day that the people of the London Borough of Lewisham resoundingly told Jeremy Hunt, David Cameron and the rest of the Tories masquerading as competent ministers, as well as Matthew Kershaw and the NHS management backing him, that their plans stink, that Lewisham needs to keep its A&E and maternity services, and that the cuts and privatisation aimed at the NHS, across London, and across England as a whole, need rethinking in terms of the needs of the people, and not the malevolent ideology of politically motivated austerity programmes.

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.

A Hollow Inauguration

On January 11, the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, I was in Washington D.C., with various human rights groups, lawyers, mainly religious anti-torture groups, and other concerned individuals, calling on President Obama to fulfill the promise he made to close the prison when he took office in 2009.

It was my third Guantánamo anniversary in the nation’s capital, but unlike in previous years, we were not allowed to protest in front of the White House, as preparations were being made for President Obama’s Inauguration, and, instead, we spoke in the middle of President’s Park South, with the White House in the distance.

It was only after the official event ended that activists with Witness Against Torture, in orange jumpsuits and hoods, dared to make their way to the fence at the back of the White House, to tie 166 orange ribbons to the railings — one for each of the men still held in Guantánamo — and to stage a peaceful sit-in. The activists only narrowly avoided arrest, which would have been particularly ironic, given that they were only reminding President Obama of his failed promise.

Four years ago, lest we forget, the closure of Guantánamo took pride of place in President Obama’s concerns at his Inauguration. Now, four years on, there was not a word about Guantánamo at his second Inauguration on Monday, and those who are not seduced by fine-sounding rhetoric were left to reflect on how, four years ago, candidate Obama’s fine words turned to ash almost as soon as he had issued his executive order promising to close Guantánamo within a year.

Instead, in May 2009, President Obama scuppered a plan, initiated by his senior lawyer Greg Craig, to bring a handful of innocent and wrongly detained prisoners to the U.S. who could not be safely repatriated (the Uighurs, oppressed Muslims from Xinjiang province), and, in January 2010, imposed a ban on releasing any cleared Yemeni prisoners, after it was revealed that the failed underwear bomb plot of Christmas 2009 was hatched in Yemen, even though the deeply insulting rationale for the ban is that Yemenis, although cleared for release, can instead be imprisoned for life on the basis of “guilt by nationality.”

The failure to close Guantánamo also involved Congress, where lawmakers passed legislation imposing severe restrictions on the administration’s ability to release prisoners, and the courts — and specifically the D.C. Circuit Court and the Supreme Court. Judges in the Circuit Court rewrote the rules on detention, gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the prisoners by demanding that anything produced by the government as evidence, however wildly implausible, should be regarded as accurate, and the Supreme Court refused to get involved, turning down appeals in 2011 and again last year, including one from a Yemeni, Adnan Latif, whose successful habeas corpus petition had been overturned by the D.C. Circuit.

Latif died at Guantánamo in September, under dubious circumstances, and despite having been cleared for release under President Bush, and again under President Obama. The blame for his death therefore lies with President Obama, with Congress, with the D.C. Circuit Court and with the Supreme Court, and yet, to listen to the rhetoric on the Inauguration, in which the prison was not mentioned, you would think that Guantánamo no longer exists, or that, if it does, it is a lawful and humane environment keeping US citizens safe from terrorists — the very same lie that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld used when it opened eleven years ago.

In his second and final term, President Obama knows that his legacy will be decided by what he accomplishes — or fails to accomplish — in the next four years, and he must also know that the history books will not condone his failure to close Guantánamo, however much he claims that it was politically inconvenient to fulfill his promise.

To salvage something of his reputation, as well as to bring, belatedly, something resembling justice to the men still held at Guantánamo — and, in particular, the 86 men cleared for release by his own interagency Task Force, of whom two-thirds are Yemenis — President Obama needs to stand up to Congress, and to point out that it is unfair to keep holding cleared Yemenis forever because of one foiled terrorist plot three years ago, just as it is unjust to keep holding men judged as eligible for release by a 60-strong panel of careful government officials and lawyers from all the relevant departments, as well as the intelligence agencies.

The President is fond of saying, as he did when, bizarrely, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.” He is also fond of saying that the ongoing existence of Guantánamo is counter-productive for America’s interests. In January 2010, for example, he stated, “We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.” He now needs to put his money where his mouth is, and not cement his existing reputation as someone whose actions suggest that, behind the fine words, he is shallow, cowardly and lazy.

I will be working with lawyers, activists and academics to try and exert constructive pressure on the administration to move forward on closing Guantánamo over the next four years, although I have no illusions that it will be anything but an uphill struggle. This, after all, is a President who had the nerve, on Monday, to claim that “a decade of war is now ending,” when that is so patently untrue that it is something of a marvel that he dared to utter the words at all.

As Salon.com explained, “Mere hours earlier, a US drone dropped missiles over Yemen, killing two [alleged] al-Qaeda militants as part of an intensified airstrike campaign which began last month.” The article added, “It has been well-established in reports (like those from the Washington Post‘s Greg Miller) that the Obama administration has set up a national security apparatus ensuring, contra the president’s words Monday, a perpetual war.”

But then again, Obama’s is a modern political success story — one based on spin rather than substance. On Guantánamo, as on other topics of concern when it comes to national security, including the use of drones — the President needs to be told that spin will not secure a meaningful legacy when what is being spun is illegal, unjust, or both.

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.

Omar Deghayes and Andy Worthington Discuss Guantánamo at Sussex University, January 29, 2013

[image error]On Tuesday January 29, 2013, I will be in Brighton — and, specifically, the University of Sussex, in Falmer — for an event organised by the Sussex University Amnesty International Society entitled, “Freedom from Torture: Guantánamo Bay Panel Event with former detainee and leading world expert.” The event, which is free, begins at 6pm, and finishes at 8pm, and is taking place in Arts A1 (no. 22 on the map ).

This is the first event I’ve taken part in since my trip to the US, from January 7 to 16, to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 11th anniversary of its opening, and I’m delighted to be bringing news of my visit to the enthusiastic students of Sussex University, in the company of my friend, the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who I last shared a platform with at a peace conference in Sheffield in October, and also with Elspeth Van Veeren, a researcher and writer on Guantánamo Bay from Sussex University’s International Relations Department.

The Facebook page for the event is here, and I’m looking forward not only to a great event in the evening, but also to catching up with my friend Jackie Chase in the afternoon, and recording an interview for Radio Free Brighton, the community radio station based in Under the Bridge Studios, below the station. I’m also looking forward to staying the night, hanging out with Jackie and hopefully getting to cycle around Brighton a bit before returning on Wednesday afternoon.

There is much to discuss, of course, even though the news is not rosy, as 166 men languish at Guantánamo, largely forgotten by the media and the public, even though 86 have been cleared for release, and the others were either officially designated for indefinite detention by Barack Obama, which is a disgrace, or were recommended for trials that may never happen.

However, we must take comfort — and inspiration for renewed campaigning — from the fast that it is now Barack Obama’s second and final term as President, and he must therefore be conscious that he failed to close Guantánamo as he promised four years ago, and now faces being remembered as the President who failed to deliver on his promise, and left 166 men to rot in a prison that remains an abomination, however much living conditions may have improved for the majority of those still held. They still have no right to see their families, even if their relatives could get out to Guantánamo, and they still have no idea about when, if ever they will be released, which, lest we forget, is a form of mental torture peculiar to the “war on terror” — both at Guantánamo and at Bagram (renamed Parwan) in Afghanistan.

I will be talking about these topics, and more — including the plight of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison — on Tuesday, and I look forward to seeing you if you’re anywhere in the general Sussex area and fancy a lively discussion on the gulag inherited by President Obama, which, despite his promise of “hope and change,” he has shown so little will to close.

Note: Please sign the e-petition to the British government calling for the return of Shaker Aamer, which needs 100,000 signatures by April, and currently has over 22,000 signatures (and 5,000 more still to be submitted via paper petitions). 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.

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.

No More Drones and Close Guantánamo: Protest Photos at CIA Headquarters

No More Drones and Close Guantánamo: Protest at CIA Headquarters, a set on Flickr.

On January 12, 2013, during my ten-day visit to the US to campaign for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo on the 11th anniversary of its opening, I joined around a hundred protestors, from groups including Witness Against Torture, Code Pink, Episcopal Peace Fellowship DC, Northern Virginians for Peace & Justice, Pax Christi and World Can’t Wait to protest against the Obama administration’s use of drones in its ongoing “war on terror,” and also to protest about the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, the day after the 11th anniversary of the prison’s opening.

The protest took place outside one of the entrances to the headquarters of the CIA, in McLean, Virginia, and I was delighted to be asked to address the crowd, drawing connections between Obama’s use of drones and Bush’s use of torture, “extraordinary rendition” and the indefinite detention to which the prisoners at Guantánamo are still subjected. Before and after, I was reunited with various friends in the activist community, and also met others for the first time, as I wandered around with my camera, capturing the photos in this set.

It was a pleasure, as ever, to be in the company of such wonderful people, and afterwards I felt honoured to join the activists of Witness Against Torture, who had been fasting for a week, as, after marching from the entrance to CIA HQ, they broke their fast at a nearby Quaker church, belonging to Langley Hill Friends.

For further information about Guantánamo, and the ongoing need to close it, see my article, “Eleven Years of Guantánamo: End This Scandal Now!” Also see my photos of the protest in Washington D.C., here and here, and also see the videos of my speech outside the White House and the panel discussion I took part in at the New America Foundation with the attorney Tom Wilner (my colleague in the “Close Guantánamo” campaign), and Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, who resigned in 2007 in protest at the Bush administration’s use 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.

London in the Snow: Photos of Brockley and New Cross

London in the Snow: Brockley and New Cross, a set on Flickr.

On January 20, 2013, as London became enveloped in snow — the second snowfall in two days, and this time much heavier than the first — I visited Hilly Fields, the hill-top park on Brockley, in south east london, where I have lived for the last 13 years, to take my son Tyler sledging, and to capture some photos of Londoners at play, which I published here.

I then walked with Tyler down to Brockley station, where we parted ways. He went round to a friend’s, and, after a quick coffee and a muffin at the Broca coffee shop, I cycled north, through Brockley, and on to New Cross and Deptford, as the snow grew heavier and heavier, and the cars and pedestrians began to disappear.

It was quite a wild experience, as the snow was driving into my face the whole time, and I had very little time to take photos before my camera was covered in wet snow, an ordeal which, I’m glad to say, it managed to survive — as, of course, did I.

This photo set — the 74th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — covers the first part of that journey from Brockley to New Cross, and in the sets to follow I’ll cover the last part of the journey — down Deptford High Street, past the splendour of St. Paul’s Deptford (a Baroque masterpiece) and down to Deptford Creek, the tidal stretch of the River Ravensbourne, near where it meets the River Thames on the border with Greenwich.

I hope you enjoy this journey with me. You were probably either in sunnier, or at least less snowy climes, or, if you were in London, staying warm somewhere out of the driving snow on Sunday. Certainly, I could count the numbers of pedestrians and drivers I saw throughout most of this journey — except in Deptford High Street, which is only ever quiet at night — and this suggests to me that most people, except those with extremely durable toddlers and toboggans, and teenagers like my son and his friends, who spent all afternoon in Telegraph Hill Park, may appreciate the driving snow from a distance, as photographed by bike, while the snow was busy transforming the streets of London with a magical, albeit temporary blanket.

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.