Andy Worthington's Blog, page 15

In the Midst of the Coronavirus Lockdown, Environmental Lessons from Extinction Rebellion, One Year On

Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Tell the Truth’ boat in Oxford Circus on April 18, 2019, during a week-long occupation of sites in central London to raise awareness of the environmental catastrophe that is already underway, and the need for urgent change to combat it (Photo: Andy Worthington)..


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As we all continue to try to make sense of — and live with — the extraordinarily changed world in which we find ourselves, I’m reminded of what a different place we were in a year ago, and also how some of our insights from that time so desperately need to be remembered today.

One year ago, we were five days into Extinction Rebellion’s occupation of four sites in central London (Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch), which largely brought the traffic to a halt for a week, and enabled anyone paying attention to directly appreciate what a city not dominated by the choking fumes and noise of relentless traffic felt like, and what that, in turn, said about so many of capitalism’s priorities in a major capital city.

It was, to be blunt, something of revelation, as I explained in an article at the time, Extinction Rebellion’s Urgent Environmental Protest Breaks New Ground While Drawing on the Occupy, Anti-Globalisation and Road Protest Movements, in which I also related XR’s efforts to those of earlier protest movements, and noted how we had, it seemed, all become so accustomed to how loud and dirty London was, with its relentless traffic, the incessant din of its numerous building sites, and the lorries servicing those sites, which were the most unpleasant of all the vehicles incessantly filing our streets — other huge lorries, buses, taxis, white vans, and an inexplicable number of cars — that the sudden silence and clean air was astonishing.

As I explained in my article, when Extinction Rebellion’s occupation began, “I wasn’t sure that the ongoing intention of crashing the system through mass arrests, and waking people up to the need for change by disrupting their lives was going to work.” However, on return visits I saw something that “gave me hope that a genuine disruption to the system is possible.”

On April 18, to get to the Waterloo Bridge occupation, “I had cycled through a smog-shrouded London, making my way from my home in Lewisham, in south east London, over Southwark Bridge, through the City with its absurd and endlessly greedy building projects, and passing through Temple, where, with a few noble exceptions, lawyers have spent centuries protecting the wealthy, and no one has given a damn about the environment.”

I added, “All this changed as I reached Waterloo Bridge, normally hideously choked with heavy traffic, which was empty of all but cyclists and relieved pedestrians. As I approached the Waterloo end, there was a stage, various stalls providing food and information, people happily lounging around, and trees brought to the bridge by campaigners — and it wasn’t lost on anyone that, with no expenditure whatsoever, we now had a garden bridge without the insane amounts of money squandered on the ludicrous garden bridge vanity project that Boris Johnson had thrown his weight behind during his eight execrable years as London’s Mayor.”

Extinction Rebellion campaigners on Waterloo Bridge, having stopped traffic and re-claimed it as a “green bridge”, on April 17, 2019 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

As I also stated, “On Waterloo Bridge, everyone realised how pleasant London would be if there was, suddenly and permanently, signficantly less traffic. And it has been the same elsewhere in London as so many major roads have been shut down: most of Regent Street, much of Oxford Street, Marble Arch, Parliament Square.”

In conversations that I had on the people’s green bridge that Waterloo Bridge had suddenly become, I took to asking what all our hectic noisy pollution was actually in service of. Critics of the occupation made a big deal of discussing how it was obstructing buses taking people to work — not, apparently, noticing that all the other bridges were still open — but little else that was suddenly not on the roads appeared to be even remotely essential. Most significantly, it seemed to me, what had mainly shut down was unnecessary car use, on an insane scale, and an entire network of vehicles delivering — to give just one example — millions of corporate sandwiches, snacks and drinks, part of a network of petrol-guzzling recklessness that involves giant warehouses located up and down the country, the absurdity of which only became apparent when it was suddenly all switched off.

The coronavirus and the economic shutdown

Since the coronavirus lockdown began a month ago, what we glimpsed a year ago has now spread to almost the whole of our hectic, globe-trotting, and insanely environmentally destructive culture.

To start with, the horribly polluting cruise ship industry — whose monstrous ships plagued Greenwich every few weeks throughout the summer — has collapsed, and most of the airline industry is grounded — something that only the most extreme environmentalists wanted to see a year ago, as discussions took place about how often a year it would be acceptable to take a flight. Furthermore, the roads are almost empty, as most shops are now shut, and the upshot of all this is a huge drop in pollution. Clean air abounds, and bird song is ringing out everywhere.

Obviously, none of this is sustainable in the long run. Millions of people have suddenly been made unemployed, and, while the government has committed billions of pounds to supporting them, profound and irreparable damage will end up being done to the economy — to say nothing of people’s mental health, and their very lives if they are trapped in abusive relationships — if the lockdown continues for months.

However, while those who learn nothing from history, and don’t even want to, are salivating at the prospect of resurrecting the pre-coronavirus world in its entirety as soon as is possible, that would clearly be deranged, as the problems identified by Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and numerous other climate activists and experts are just as severe now as they were a year ago.

The culture that our leaders love, and that so many people have bought into, is an environmental disaster. Having tourism as the planet’s number one business is unsustainable, as are our patterns of consumption — a “fast fashion” clothes industry that is environmentally destroying vulnerable eco-systems around the world, a food industry that is also insanely environmentally destructive, and a building industry that is also massively responsible for catastrophic climate change. Check out a good analysis of major polluters here, and this Guardian article about how polluters are being bailed out (and another here).

How do we get to where we need to be?

So the big question, as countries begin contemplating how to ease the lockdown, weeks or months from now, is how we can somehow prevent the entire pre-virus world of mad over-consumption and deranged self-entitlement from picking up where it left off on our suicidal dash to environmental destruction.

Our politicians, sadly, are almost all likely to betray us, given that we tend to alternate between one major party of another, both of which are fatally wedded to the status quo, and to doing everything in their power to appease huge and powerful corporate interests.

In addition, the mainstream media are also almost entirely useless, as we can see from their coverage of the crisis, with very little space — if any — given to forensic analyses of what it means for the future of our reckless, suicidal culture.

However, I suspect that the virus itself might provide a brake on the return of “business as usual”, given that there is no magic wand that can be waved that will result in the creation of an instant and effective vaccine. Even if one is developed — and it may be a big if — its arrival is not imminent, leaving us with an ongoing situation in which “social distancing” of some sort is likely to have to remain in place for some time, wreaking havoc with airlines, cruise ships, the tourist industry, and all manner of sporting and entertainment events.

Shops can probably re-open, with “social distancing” in place, and offices too, but the notion that the whole of the pre-virus world can be magically revived looks extremely unlikely, and if that’s the case then opportunities not only exist to put forward cases for alternative way of operating, but necessity will dictate that those discussions have to take place.

When so many aspects of our economy rely on both a huge number of consumers, and, simultaneously, the massive exploitation of workers, change will have to come as demand will inevitably struggle to recover, with so many millions of people having lost their incomes for a period of many months.

With demand down, the furious exploitation of workers — in “fast fashion” around the world, in just-in-time food production, in hospitality and entertainment both at home and abroad, to name just a few sectors of the economy — will, surely, no longer be tenable, leading, I hope, to two particular outcomes: prices kept artificially low will have to rise, and rents kept artificially high will have to drop.

I’ll leave you to work out how both of those outcomes play out across the economy, but, in conclusion, to return to Extinction Rebellion and the environmental crisis that is already underway, don’t forget that this pause in human activity is already the most significant brake on catastrophic climate change that we’ve seen in our lifetimes, and don’t also forget that, in response to XR, Greta Thunberg, and the increasingly vocal and doom-laden warnings of scientists, governments and local governments scrambled to declare “climate emergencies” last year, to show how clued-up they were — although these promises then ended up looking monstrously hollow, as they were, essentially, followed by no action.

If we don’t come out of this with an even greater appetite for necessary changes to our idiotic behaviour, in order to safeguard our very future, and to have some chance of preventing an unthinkable and imminent environmental catastrophe, I might have to conclude that we deserve everything that is coming our way.

However, I hope that meltdown can be avoided, and that we take advantage of the pause that the coronavirus has so forcefully imposed on our hectic rush to self-gratifying self-destruction, not, lazily and self-righteously, to try to resume where we left off, but, for once, to actually learn some important lessons about who we are, why we are not as clever as we think we are, and why we urgently need to change direction before it really is too late.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The Coronavirus Lockdown, Hidden Suffering, and Delusions of a Rosy Future

London under the coronavirus lockdown, March 30, 2020 (Photo by Andy Worthington from his photo-journalism project The State of London).


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Nearly a month since the coronavirus lockdown began in the UK, it seems clear that the intentions behind shutting most retail outlets and workplaces, and encouraging everyone to stay at home as much as possible — to keep the death toll to manageable levels, preventing the NHS and the burial industry from being overwhelmed — are working, although no one should be under any illusions that Boris Johnson’s government has managed the crisis well. Nearly 13,000 people have died so far in hospitals in the UK, a figure that seriously underestimates the true death toll, because it cynically ignores those dying in care homes.

However, frontline NHS staff are also dying, and this is because they are still deprived of necessary personal protective equipment (PPE), which is an absolute and unmitigated disgrace, showing how far our current elected officials are from the wartime spirit of the plucky British that they are so intent on selling to the public to cover up their failings.

If they really were who they claim to be, they would have pulled out all the stops to get factories manufacturing PPE in as short a time as possible, but they’re not who they claim to be: they’re incompetent disciples of a neo-liberal project that is interested only in elected officials handing out contracts — and all profit-making ability — to private companies, and that is determined to destroy the state provision of services, something that the Tories have been gleefully doing, not least to the NHS, since they first returned to power almost ten long and dreadful years ago.

To hear Boris Johnson praising the NHS for looking after him so attentively — after he himself contracted the coronavirus as a result of his idiotic risk-taking and denial just a few short weeks ago — is enough to make all decent people feel sick, because the Tories are 100% responsible for the cuts to the NHS that have made its job so difficult since the virus started tearing through the population in February.

In addition, of course, while the shutdown of huge swathes of the economy — and the almost total prohibition on socialising — has led to the crisis being managed, Britain’s death toll is still miserably high, an outcome that can — and must — be attributed directly to those responsible: the government and their advisers, who, in the beginning, were fatally distracted by a callous “herd immunity” scenario, and who then waited for far too long before implementing a lockdown.

Here and now, however, as I try, on an ongoing basis, to make sense of this crisis that is unprecedented in our lifetimes — and that can only really be compared to the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide — the main focus of my concerns is not the government, but the economy; and, specifically, those who are suffering because of its almost total collapse, and, in looking to the future, the huge but almost unspoken necessity of rebuilding our societies in a more sustainable and equable manner than has been the case over most of my adult life, and, particularly, and most alarmingly, over the last decade.

Money in a time of no work

In response to the devastation to the economy caused by the sudden shutdown of all pubs, bars and restaurants, all entertainment venues, including live music venues, theatres and cinemas, all sports facilities and almost all retail outlets, except supermarkets and other food outlets, pharmacies and a few other protected sectors of the retail economy, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, almost immediately promised an unprecedented £330bn in bailout loans for business, following up with a promise that the government “would pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers” — up to £2,500 a month — “if companies kept them on their payroll, rather than lay them off as the economy crashes.”

That promise about furloughed staff was nearly a month ago (on March 20), but it has only just been confirmed today that furloughed workers will be paid by the end of the month. And as the BBC noted, “The scheme currently runs until 1 June. But there are fears firms could start to cut staff unless the government soon clarifies whether the scheme will be extended.”

As the BBC also noted, the CBI (the Confederation of British Industry) said that it was “worried” that companies “will be forced to start redundancy procedures this Saturday to comply with the minimum 45-day consultation period.” CBI director general Carolyn Fairbairn, said, “We are very concerned that businesses will be forced into a position potentially of having to make people permanently redundant.”

Missing from the chancellor’s original plans were Britain’s five million self-employed workers, and it wasn’t until March 26 that their needs were addressed, with a promise that they took would be eligible to have 80% of their profits covered by the government, up to a maximum of £2,500 a month for three months, with the Guardian adding that the chancellor said that the payments “would be backdated to March and cover those earning up to £50,000, or 95% of the self-employed.” However, payments will not be made until June, and it is unclear how many of the self-employed will survive until then.

Just yesterday, IPSE (the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed) published research establishing that “almost half (45%) of the self-employed fear they will not have enough money to cover basic costs like rent and bills during the Coronavirus crisis, despite the government support on offer”, and that, “Overall, two thirds (66%) also say they are worried they will burn through all their savings in the next three months.”

It is also unclear whether 95% of the self-employed will actually be eligible. Just two days ago, London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, wrote to the chancellor, and business secretary Alok Sharma, suggesting that “up to 290,000 Londoners, 12 per cent of the capital’s total workforce, are not eligible to receive anything from the scheme”, as City A.M. described it.

In addition to the above, there are also the large number of people — many in the retail and hospitality sectors — who were not employed with any kind of security whatsoever, and who suddenly found, when the lockdown started, that they were suddenly made unemployed, and have had to sign up for Universal Credit, with Sky News reporting yesterday that 1.4m people have signed on for Universal Credit since the lockdown began. Even under normal circumstances, it takes five weeks for claimants to receive their first payment, and it is therefore to be expected that there will now be longer delays — and all for a grand total of £342.72 a month for single people under 25, £409.89 a month for single people over 25, £488.59 a month for a couple under 25, and £594.04 a month for a couple over 25. For those with children, there is a two-child limit on payments, introduced in 2017, with each child being eligible for £235.83 a month (or £281.25 for the first child, if born before April 6, 2017).

Those on Universal Credit are at least eligible for support with housing costs, but elsewhere in the economy the newly-unemployed’s housing costs have not been addressed by the government, unless they have mortgages, in which case a mortgage holiday has been proposed.

Unfortunately, there is no equivalent for renters. Although the government recognised that there might be a deluge of cruel evictions if they didn’t take action, which they did by banning evictions for a three-month period, no pressure has been exerted on landlords to write off their rents for three months.

Instead, some are offering rent holidays, but these require paying back — along with the current rent — when the crisis is over, thereby not only hurling many renters into a financially intolerable position, but also failing to recognise that this still involves tenants paying rent to cover a period of unemployment that was not their fault.

Morally and ethically, landlords should take a hit, but as we’re seeing from the private rented sector, and also from the business rent sector, landlords’ sense of entitlement runs so deep that they are unwilling to accept that, as the entire economy suffers its worst damage since the Great Depression, they too might have to be inconvenienced. For landlords who own their properties outright, there is absolutely no argument for them insisting that their tenants should pay rent when they have no work, but even for those with buy-to-let mortgages, the only fair solution, it seems to me, is for the mortgage holidays for which landlords are eligible to be extended to their tenants, with the rent essentially written off the duration of the crisis as a no-payment period.

In the meantime, as Frances Ryan reported for the Guardian today, entitled, ‘Britain has a hidden coronavirus crisis – and it’s shaped by inequality’, “New research shows that a fifth of private renters had to choose between paying for food and bills and paying their landlords this month.” As she added, despite the government introducing a temporary ban on evictions, “a quarter surveyed have already lost their home. Unable to pay the rent, they had to voluntarily move in with friends or parents.”

The research, undertaken by Opinium last weekend, sought to assess the situation faced by the “one in five UK households – 4.5 million families – [who] live in private rented accommodation”, and the similar number who live in some form of social housing.

As the Guardian stated:

Despite the government’s measures, and guidance to landlords asking them to “be compassionate”, tenants who spoke to the Guardian said they had already faced threats of punitive action from their landlords. One self-employed renter, who preferred to remain unnamed, told the Guardian that when he approached his landlord to ask for a deferment of rent, he was served with an eviction notice in reply.

Others who have lost income are being forced into taking whatever work they can in order to continue to pay their rents, often in front line jobs in the gig economy, such as driving taxis or delivering takeaway food, potentially exposing themselves to infection with coronavirus.

“Many renters feel they have no choice but to break social distancing guidelines and go out to work, just so their landlords can continue to profit,” said Amina Gichinga of the London Renters Union. “How are people supposed to pay rent with no income and at least a month’s wait for any government assistance? How are people in low-paid jobs meant to clear hundreds or thousands of pounds of rent arrears in the future? During this global pandemic, people should be able to prioritise their safety and paying for food and other essentials. All rent payments need to be suspended and rent arrears need to be waived urgently to keep renters safe from eviction and from debt, and to prevent the further spread of the virus.”

An LRU petition on the 38 Degrees website calling for rents to be suspended has already secured over 100,000 signatures, but Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, isn’t interested, even though Opinium’s polling “found overwhelming support for a rent suspension, with three in four renters – and even a slight majority of landlords – in support.”

As many of you will have no doubt noticed, however, the problems faced by those at the sharp end of the shutdown get very little media coverage, as two groups of people still in full-time work — MPs and mainstream media journalists — persistently forget about them, even though there is clearly a huge amount of anxiety and suffering going on behind the scenes.

The future

And while the better-off — those in large homes, and often still on full pay while working from home — have the opportunity to wax lyrical about the delights of lockdown life, those at the sharper end really don’t have that kind of luxury, and their plight will need to be taken into account much more than it has been as the crisis continues, because, while the professional pundits start discussing how to ease the lockdown, we need to bear in mind that there is no magic wand that means that, after a few months of hardship, we can reopen the world and engage in “business as usual”, as it was in the dirty, hectic, selfish, environmentally disastrous days that existed until just a month ago.

As the Guardian reported in an under-read article just a few days ago, entitled, ‘Coronavirus distancing may need to continue until 2022, say experts’, a paper published in the journal Science has suggested that “[p]hysical distancing measures may need to be in place intermittently until 2022”, in what the Guardian described as “an analysis that suggests there could be resurgences of Covid-19 for years to come.”

The article “concludes that a one-time lockdown will not be sufficient to bring the pandemic under control and that secondary peaks could be larger than the current one without continued restrictions”, with one scenario predicting that a resurgence “could occur as far in the future as 2025 in the absence of a vaccine or effective treatment.”

Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard and co-author of the study, said, “Infections spread when there are two things: infected people and susceptible people. Unless there is some enormously larger amount of herd immunity than we’re aware of … the majority of the population is still susceptible. Predicting the end of the pandemic in the summer [of 2020] is not consistent with what we know about the spread of infections.”

In contrast to this scenario, I’ve been somewhat surprised, in the last few days, to hear from some people who are giddily awaiting the return of “business as usual” — the cruise ship fanatics eager to get back on board, despite cruise ships having been revealed as virus-incubating death traps — and those who, on an environmentally aware friend’s Facebook page, responded to being asked what they were looking forward to doing once the lockdown is over, started reeling off the names of all the foreign holiday destinations they intended to fly to.

Are we incapable of learning anything, and unable to see that this crisis must lead to a massive change in the way we operate — as I discussed in my last article, Health Not Wealth: The World-Changing Lessons of the Coronavirus? And are we unable to remember that many millions of other people — already at the bottom of society, economically — are going to come out of this even poorer and more disadvantaged than before, both at home and abroad, and that we must demand that — as well as adequately funding our health services and our frontline health workers, and all the other people previously dismissed as unimportant workers, who have now been revealed as much more essential than the rich and famous — we must also create a society that is more equal, more fair and much, much more conscious than before.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Health Not Wealth: The World-Changing Lessons of the Coronavirus

A composite image of a doctor and the City of London, photographed by Andy Worthington during the coronavirus lockdown, on April 2, 2020.


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday marked 100 days since the coronavirus (COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2) was first reported by the Chinese authorities, and, as now seems to be becoming clear, this highly infectious disease, which, in just three months, has reached almost every country on earth, and has so far killed nearly 100,000 people, is changing our lives — and our world — forever.

To put it simply, we have discovered that health is more important than wealth, and in a world dominated by the profit motive of capitalism, this is a profound lesson to learn, and one with consequences that will affect every aspect of our lives from now on.

Just a few weeks ago, we still raised up, and were obsessed by, the pin-ups of the celebrity world, one of capitalism’s many fronts for its almost complete domination of our lives, with its vacuous models, pop stars, footballers and film stars — all obscenely overpaid, and all dutifully obeying the requirement that, for fame and money, they had to allow themselves to be put on pedestals, to dazzle us into subservience.

The celebrities’ irrelevance has now been revealed, as the true heroes of the coronavirus world have emerged — those involved in the NHS, and in other health services around the world, risking their lives to try to save the lives of others, the drivers, the cleaners, the supermarket workers, postal delivery workers, those working in pharmacies, and all those hidden from view, still preparing and packaging the essential things of life under the virus — medicine and food — in nameless warehouses around the country.

As we reflect on these heroes, let’s also not overlook how many of them are immigrants, and, as we also think about how the fightback against the virus can only work through the cooperation of health researchers around the world, with no barriers raised whatsoever to the cooperation of experts, let’s also try to work out how we can get rid of divisive follies like Brexit, and far-right isolationist tendencies in other countries around the world, whose demonisation of immigrants and obsessions about nationalistic isolation, are, it must now be clear, actually suicidal.

Beyond food and medicine, everything else that makes up our high streets has shut down. Where once the “fast fashion” industry was dominant, enticing shoppers into a permanently giddy world of endless consumption, all the shops and department stores are now closed, as are all the outlets of the service industry that once dominated so much of our leisure time — the restaurants, the pubs and bars, the clubs, theatres, cinemas and music venues. Sport is cancelled, concerts too, and film and TV sets have shut down.

With the corporations that have dominated our lives so suddenly shorn of income, and therefore unable to promise ever greater yields to shareholders (the driving force of all human existence as the third decade of the 21st century started), governments eagerly stepped up to promise insanely eye-watering amounts of money to these organisations to keep them afloat, promises that deserve serious scrutiny on two fronts: firstly, whether, during a financial crisis that is unprecedented in all our lifetimes, they should be receiving any kind of bailout if, until just weeks ago, they were making healthy profits; and, secondly, whether their business is environmentally acceptable.

I have previously written about how the currently unfolding environmental catastrophe, brought to the fore over the last year and a half by Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, needs to be considered in every effort to revive the pre-virus economy, and I can’t stress enough how, without a proper environmental audit of everything we have been doing in recent decades, as well as a proper analysis of what we need to do to contain the virus’s spread, numerous industries must not be resuscitated.

The cruise ship industry is one, as the perfect vehicle for the global transmission of viruses, with its captive audiences of the old and rich. Similarly, much of the airline industry must also collapse, just as — unthinkable though it sounds — much of the global tourism industry, which, unsustainably, has become the no. 1 global business in recent years, must also come to an end.

Perhaps you think this sounds unduly pessimistic, but I assure you it’s not. To put it bluntly, the virus is not going away anytime soon, and the foreseeable future may have to be one of periodic lockdowns to try to manage it without its death toll overwhelming our health services. A vaccine, if one comes, is almost certainly some way away, and for now we need to reconcile ourselves to living in a world stalked by a killer whose appetite is fed exponentially by, what, in my last article, I referred to as our social promiscuity.

And while we’re thinking about the massive changes to society wrought by the virus, let’s also reflect on the much-needed collapse of the global construction industry — that bastion of global capital, which moved into land and property following the economic crash of 2008 that was caused by greedy bankers indulging in activities that, demonstrably, ought to have been illegal, but for which no one was imprisoned.

Since the crash, the financial sectors’ insatiable greed has moved into land speculation, the financing of massive “mixed-use” developments of offices, retail and residential properties — all eye-wateringly expensive, and involving huge foreign investment, and the enslavement of western workers in rent and mortgage traps — or, as in the UK, in largely residential developments that involve government funding, and corrupted housing associations. which once provided secure and genuinely affordable housing for rent — social housing — but are now, essentially, government-backed private developers with a sideline in insecure overpriced rental properties to keep the domestic population enslaved.

The list of sectors that will be massively impacted by the virus is enormous, of course, covering almost every aspect of money-making and human endeavour, and I’ll leave you to fill in some of the blanks yourselves — and to ask you to provide feedback if you’d like, as we all try to work out the contours of the post-virus world — but another area that concerns me immensely is the “fast fashion” industry, which is extraordinarily environmentally ruinous, as a recent report has just shown, and whose possible collapse also has terrible ramifications for “the 40 million garment workers in their supply chains around the world” — mainly in south east Asia —  who face destitution as factories close and orders dry up in the wake of the Covid-19 epidemic”, as the Guardian recently explained — and also see here.

In the West, too, jobs have suddenly been lost at an unprecedented rate, with millions made suddenly unemployed in the UK. The government’s corporate bailouts are supposed to cover 80% of many people’s wages, including some in the retail, hospitality and entertainment sectors that were so suddenly and savagely shut down, and provisions have also been made for the self-employed, but nearly a million people have had to sign up for Universal Credit, which guarantees less than £100 a week for those out of work, and as economists try to work out the impact of the government paying out £40bn a quarter to keep furloughed workers afloat, the impact on other parts of the economy need to be looked at closely.

Primarily, I have to say, this involves an area of massive growth in recent years — the buy-to-let sector, in which an untold a huge number of people supplement their own income, or have, as their prime income, what can only, objectively, be described as the one-on-one exploitation of others via private rents. I won’t include in this category those who are making almost no profit from their involvement in the private rental market, but in general people’s involvement in this particular aspect of the remorselessly greedy property bubble of the last 20 years, in which the cost of everything housing-related has been allowed to balloon out of control, is no longer viable at a time of economic collapse.

To be honest, I think it was already unsustainable, and involved many landlords having to silence their inner voices telling them that they were involved in an unholy business, but with the collapse of so much of the economy, and the unemployment of so many, through no fault of their own, it is unthinkable to me that this model of individual exploitation can be allowed to survive. Government ministers, to be fair, recognised this when they were first responding to the virus-related economic collapse, but sadly their promise to suspend rent-related evictions during the crisis has no teeth, and appears to be being ignored by numerous landlords whose sense of self-entitlement shows as little sign of being reformed as are the prevailing attitudes of the unrepentant sharks of the banking world

Running through this tale of retail collapse is another, more shadowy story — on in which certain online businesses are thriving. One area in which this is sadly true is the “fast fashion’ industry, whose biggest online companies — like Boohoo and I Saw It First, for example, with their insultingly cheap clothing, matching or even outdoing such notorious exploiters as Primark — were already exterminating retail shops and department stores before the virus came along. However, while I have not yet seen reports of how much business they are hoovering up with the high street stores all closed, the bottom line of the virus is that it is remorselessly devouring our belief in the stability of money. If we have savings, we’re surely more likely not to be spending like there’s no tomorrow — and, of course, millions of people only every had any money every payday, and are now struggling just to get by.

Other aspects of the online world involve giant predators like Amazon, which was already trying to branch out into the provision of everything even before the virus hit, and anyone paying attention will realise that the countryside in western countries is now dominated, to an insane degree, by truly gigantic warehouses in which exploited workers are hidden, and vast amounts of online orders are fulfilled. These are developments that are troubling in a number of ways; firstly, because we are provided with very little information about how workers are being treated, and whether social distancing measures are being properly observed; and, secondly, because we should ask whether it is appropriate that so much of the world’s business is conducted via online ordering, giant warehouses, and a ridiculous amount of environmentally ruinous transportation.

Related to this, when we look at the giant corporations that dominated the pre-virus world, are the communications and tech companies, which were making vast profits before the crisis began, and, in many fields — the creative industries, for example — were already destroying creative peoples’ livelihoods. Most musicians, for example, had to rely on gigs to make a living because the unregulated tech monsters were taking all the profits for themselves, but now, with gigs shut down too, they face a future of destitution.

It’s early to say it, but I genuinely think that, as we survey the possible futures, the tech companies and the communication companies might need to be nudged close to the front of an ever-growing list of sectors that can only really serve us, rather than fundamentally destroying us, by being nationalised, or, to put it another way, taken into public control.

In this new world, in which profit as the overarching driver of existence is longer tenable, we need competent unity governments, in which — and I cannot stress this enough — the needs of the population, globally, take precedence over the appetites of the profiteers, so that, for example, like looters in wartime, the business of financial speculators who are profiting from the disaster is made illegal. With capitalism unable to cope with so much of the fallout from the disaster, now is also the time for the entire world of excessive ‘remunerations’ to be brought to an end — of sickeningly overpaid CEOs, of the lazy greed of shareholders, and of the entertainment world’s frontline puppets. In this world, how much of the now-empty financial centres — the City and Canary Wharf here in London, Wall Street in New York, and the many other forests of priapic towers in financial centres around the world — can continue to exist?

Clearly, the frontline workers treated as dirt for so long must now be adequately compensated. We’re going to need lower incomes to be raised, and higher incomes to be cut, we’re going to need housing to be provided on a not-for-profit basis on a massive scale, and we’re going to need to either ethically re-employ huge numbers of unemployed people in new, greener areas of employment, or find some sort of universal basic income system that no longer punishes people for not having work in a bent system that is constantly striving, and has been for decades, to make more and more human beings redundant.

I hope you’re interested in shaping this future, because I can say with absolute certainty that, if enough of us don’t care — if too many of us remain blinded by the deference the mainstream media still want us to have for our useless leaders, their advisers and the powerful vested interests behind them — the future will be bleak. Currently, the sociopaths and psychopaths who largely rule us have worked out that an unfettered death toll is too high a price for “business as usual”, but don’t be fooled into thinking that they actually have our best interests at heart. They are, almost without exception, wedded to greed not only as an driver of economic activity, but also — incredibly — as a virtue.

The virus, meanwhile, is showing us a world in which we are all equal, an unthinkable conclusion for those who, secretly or otherwise, think that they and the profit-obsessed and ego-obsessed people they represent are actually more important. As the virus shows us, no one is actually more important than anyone else.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

A Coronavirus Lament by Guantánamo Prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul

Guantánamo prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul, known to the US authorities as Haroon al-Afghani, who has been held at the prison without charge or trial since 2007.


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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the 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.

Last week, on my own website, I published an article looking at the threat posed to the prisoners at Guantánamo by the coronavirus, following up on the alarming news that a US sailor had been diagnosed with the virus, and was in isolation. My article also included a cross-post of a related article written for Just Security by Scott Roehm, the Washington Director of the Center for Victims of Torture.

Roehm pointed out that a number of the prisoners have serious underlying health problems, including Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, Saifullah Paracha, and Sharqawi Al-Hajj, who tried to commit suicide last year, both of whom we have written about (see here and here).

Roehm also called for a number of appropriate responses from the Trump administration, beginning with letting the prisoners and their lawyers know what policies are in place to deal with the virus, and also including a call for Congress to allow prisoners to be transferred to the US mainland if they need urgent medical care.

Following up on the news about the sailor being infected, Guantánamo prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul sent a message to the world via one of his lawyers, which was published by Pajhwok Afghan News.

Asadullah Haroon Gul, the pre-penultimate prisoner to arrive at Guantánamo, in June 2007, is more generally known as Haroon Gul, and was initially identified by the US simply as Haroon al-Afghani (Haroon the Afghan, revealing upfront how little they knew about him).

His Guantánamo prisoner number — ISN 3148 — is a number from Bagram, not Guantánamo, showing how little the authorities thought about his significance, because, to be assigned a Guantánamo prisoner number means having an administrative review, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), to confirm that the prisoner in question is an “enemy combatant,” so that they can be put forward for a military commission trial.

Having a CSRT also would have meant that some information would have ended up being made publicly available about Gul, from his own statements, but instead he remained shrouded in mystery, with the only publicly available information about him coming from the Pentagon, who made some nebulous claims about him being involved with Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which had, at one point, been aligned with Al-Qaeda.

Gul was held for nine years without any kind of representation whatsoever until he finally secured an attorney, Shelby Sullivan Bennis of Reprieve, who described him as a “bright-eyed, chatty young man,” after meeting him to try and help him prepare for his Periodic Review Board, a parole-type system set up under President Obama, which has, unfortunately, repeatedly refused to recommend his release, even though Sullivan Bennis told the board that, “Having completed a two-year university program in economics and mastered five different languages, Haroon is more able than most to begin a productive and peaceful life upon release. He wants nothing more than to return to his wife and daughter, whom he feels immensely guilty for having left to fend for themselves.”

That was in 2016, and for another profile of Gul, providing additional information suggesting that he wasn’t even affiliated with HIG, see my article from 2018, entitled, Trapped in Guantánamo: Haroon Gul, a Case of Mistaken Identity Silenced By Donald Trump.

More recently, the continued absurdity of holding Gul was made clear when a former Guantánamo prisoner with HIG associations, Hamidullah, was repatriated from the United Arab Emirates, where he had been sent with other Afghans in 2016, because Hekmatyar had reached a peace agreement with the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani. Two other men sent to the UAE, but not aligned with HIG, were also repatriated, and it seems obvious that Gul should also have been freed.

In his message from Guantánamo, Gul expressed his desire to be reunited with his wife and daughters, who are in a refugee camp, and also wrote about his fears for his fellow prisoners, specifically mentioning Saifullah Paracha, and also noting, “I have refused three doctor visits in the last week, as at least I can refuse that if they will give me no assurance that the doctors are free of infection.” He added, “I do not fear having it myself, but I don’t want to be the one who brings it into the block. I do not want to be the one who brings Saifullah a death sentence just because I want a medical visit for myself.”

Rather than posting more from Gul’s letter from Guantánamo, I’ll leave you to read the whole of it yourself. I hope you have time to do so, and will share it if you find it useful.

A Lonely Corona-life in Guantánamo Bay

By Asadullah Haroon Gul, Pajhwok Afghan News, March 31, 2020

It is lonely facing the Coronavirus here in Guantánamo Bay. I don’t mean that in any self-pitying sense, but I am desperate to be in the refugee camp with my family. People in Europe have everything while Afghanistan cannot protect people as they are fighting for their daily life. They have enough problems, without something else like this. The doctor here told me that Coronavirus will take millions of lives. So many of those lives will be in countries like Afghanistan with such limited health care, people will not bring food to your house, the government is not going to assure you that you will get thousands of dollars a month.

This is a very real enemy, and many countries have not taken it seriously enough. As for America, the guard force here (thousands of men and women) need to be helping in other places, rather than wasting their time here.

This is now a global issue – Corona has just made its way to Guantánamo Bay, with the first soldier testing positive. We know it was probably late in the day when the soldier was identified, and nobody tells us whether he was part of the guard force who had already been into the cell blocks. There is some fear here as we cannot get away from guards. Saifullah Paracha, from Pakistan, is in his seventies and he has had two heart attacks already, so we worry particularly for him. Prisons are notorious for being places where viruses multiply much faster than in the outside world. I was joking with the guards, telling them, “I am not going to shake your hand any more!” Of course, they never do shake my hand – just roughly manhandle me into shackles and handcuffs.

I have refused three doctor visits in the last week, as at least I can refuse that if they will give me no assurance that the doctors are free of infection. I have no idea if they have it, and I do not fear having it myself, but I don’t want to be the one who brings it into the block. I do not want to be the one who brings Saifullah a death sentence just because I want a medical visit for myself. I will take the risk I know – not having medical treatment – rather than take a risk that I do not know and cannot control.

I do not think it is going to go away very fast. I watch the news and as I write this there are more than half a million people who have it. If the US does not want to release me because they think they still have the right to hold me in prison, despite all these years when they have never thought to charge me with a crime or give me a trial, they should think about my family. I know I am innocent of any crime, but my family are all innocent in the eyes of the world. All I want is to be with my family to help them.

My wife had surgery recently and she is still in recuperation. She suffers from Vitamin D deficiency, which is another vulnerability to the virus. I don’t know if she gets supplements, I wish I could get them to her. I do not want her to go to hospital too much as that is where she will catch it. People have little knowledge and understanding where she lives, and they will be spreading it all around.

My daughter Mariam is still going to school – if I was there I would teach her at home. Schools are like other institutions – she cannot stay far away from the other students, so she is going to catch anything that is in the school. If Mariam gets sick the police will take her by force and they will put her in hospital for two or three weeks. She is a child and nobody would be allowed to see her.

My parents are over 60 years old and very weak because they have had disease for too much of their lives. My mother had a heart attack when I was detained. My father is diabetic. They have all the risk factors. I worry all the time for them.

It is very hard to sit here in my solitary cell, unable to do anything about it. I wish I could be put on trial – tomorrow – even if it was with no notice and no chance to prepare. I think I would be acquitted, but at least there would be certainty. If I was convicted of something – however false – at least then I would be someone who was falsely convicted. But if I am just to rot here, unable to do anything to help, and if one of my family dies, I have no idea what my response would be. I think the coronavirus is as much a mental disease as a physical one. People panic, worrying about someone they love dying.

I listened to a doctor from Kabul talking on Voice of America saying that people are afraid of the virus, but they are more afraid of the breakdown of society. I read that in Britain people panic-bought toilet paper; that may be foolish, but it’s not dangerous. In America they went out and bought more guns. People will kill each other. Yesterday the Afghan government was asking for cooperation with the Taliban – I hope that the people will become more united as there is a common enemy to all humanity. The virus does not recognize borders, it targets everyone. But I have no assurance that my family will be okay.

In the end, if I am to help my family, President Trump surely needs to hear from President Ghani – how can you ask Afghanistan to release thousands of prisoners, if you will not release one? I do not think the public in America would have any problem with me being released from here to be with my family. The people will have compassion even if the government does not.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The Coronavirus and Guantánamo’s Extraordinarily Vulnerable Prison Population

A collage of Guantánamo and the coronavirus.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Ever since the coronavirus began its alarming global spread, those who work with, and on behalf of prisoners have been aware of the threat that it poses to those who are incarcerated. This applies, as commentators have noted, whilst urging urgent action, to the many million of prisoners worldwide who are imprisoned after being tried and convicted of crimes, as well as, in some countries, political prisoners.

In the UK, lawyers urged the government, to no avail, to release Julian Assange, who is held in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London, fighting efforts by the British government to extradite him to the US to face entirely inappropriate espionage charges relating to his work with WikiLeaks, and in the US, as well as highlighting the dangers faced by the country’s three million domestic prisoners — the largest prison population per capita in the world — some activists have also been highlighting the dangers the virus poses to the 40 men still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, all held for between 12 and 18 years, and almost all held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The plight of the Guantánamo prisoners was particularly highlighted eight days ago, on March 24, when the US Navy announced in a press release that a sailor stationed at the base had “tested positive for COVID-19” and was “currently undergoing evaluation and treatment.” The Navy’s press release added that the Department of Defense had “notified public health authorities of the positive test” and had “taken prudent precautions” to ensure that the service member was “receiving the appropriate care.” It was also noted that the sailor was “currently isolated at their home and restricted in movement in accordance with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Guidelines,” and that efforts were underway to trace recent contacts made by the sailor.

The press release also noted that “Naval Station Guantánamo Bay has developed an aggressive mitigation strategy to minimize spread of COVID-19 and protect the health of our force,” but, as I explained in a Facebook post following the news, “No mention was made about protecting the health of the 40 prisoners in their care, which is unsurprising, but callous.”

I added, “What should happen right now is that prisoners who are not facing trials, and are unlikely ever to face trials should be released, but unfortunately that’s unlikely to appeal to a government headed by Donald Trump, who doesn’t care, and cannot be made to care.”

Unfortunately, I think it remains true that Trump will have no interest whatsoever in releasing any of the men still held, but I’m glad to note that, yesterday, Scott Roehm, the Washington Director of the Center for Victims of Torture, wrote an article for Just Security calling for some other practical responses that should be undertaken by the government; namely, disclosing to all prisoners and their lawyers “any protocols, plans, or guidance” for “preventing COVID-19 from reaching the detention facility,” and for dealing with it if it does, providing lawyers with medical records (subject to the prisoners’ consent), urging Congress to allow prisoners to be transferred to the US mainland |for emergency medical care,” avoiding isolation for prisoners where possible, and appointing a a Chief Medical Officer as required in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.”

It is very much to be hoped that the government pays attention, and that the media pick up on the importance of attempting to guarantee the safety of the Guantánamo prisoners during the coronavirus crisis, especially because, as Scott Roehm also explains, a number of prisoners have serious underlying health issues, making them particularly vulnerable to the virus — Saifullah Paracha, the prison’s oldest prisoner, whose case I have looked at closely in the 14 years since I dedicated my life to covering Guantánamo and getting the prison closed down, and who I wrote about most recently in my article last week, entitled, Uzair Paracha, Victim of Tortured Terrorism Lies, is Freed from US Jail; Why Is His Father Still at Guantánamo?; Nashwan al-Tamir (aka Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi), a “high-value detainee,” put forward for a trial, who has severe spinal problems that have not been adequately addressed by four operations at Guantánamo in the last six months, and Sharqawi Al-Hajj, who I have also written about extensively, a long-term hunger striker who made a suicide attempt last year, and whose health is still very much at risk.

Just yesterday, in fact, as Scott Roehm’s article was published, a letter from him and other experts was sent to defense secretary Mark Esper, noting that “Mr. Al Hajj’s health has again significantly deteriorated,” and urging Esper “to take appropriate steps to mitigate the situation before it becomes catastrophic.”

As Scott Roehm also explained in his article, another unfortunate effect of the coronavirus has been that “access to counsel” has been “severely restricted due to the virus,” with personal visits from lawyers “essentially impossible,” cutting off the only independent lifeline for the prisoners, and also cutting off the few visits allowed by independent medical experts. In addition, “the legal mail courier service to and from Guantánamo was recently suspended,” but as Roehm explains, the answer to all these problems, at this difficult time, is for the authorities to open up the use of video-conferencing.

I was shocked to realize that the men still held are currently completely cut off from the outside world because of the virus, which, to my mind, makes it absolutely essential that pressure is exerted on the Trump administration to respond to Scott Roehm’s demands. I’ve cross-posted his article below, and if you agree that urgent action is required, please feel free to contact your Senators and Representatives, if you live in the US, and to write to the mainstream media to urge them to cover this story.

Guantánamo’s COVID-19 Precautions Must Safeguard Detainees’ Rights

By Scott Roehm, Just Security, March 31, 2020

My colleague Daphne Eviatar wrote an excellent piece last week about the human rights implications of a “war” against COVID-19, in which she rightly observed that “[t]he half a billion dollars spent per year to run an offshore prison for 40 men denied fair charges or trials would surely be better put to use providing truly ‘essential services’ in a time of national crisis.” Of course, Daphne was referring to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.

But what happens when COVID-19 arrives at Guantánamo? Sadly, that’s already happened: The first case of COVID-19 was reported on March 24. A member of the U.S. Navy stationed at the base tested positive. And while the sailor is apparently not involved in detention operations, the virus’ local presence, coupled with certain measures that the Defense Department is undertaking to prevent a larger outbreak, endanger both the detainees and the already limited rights they have been afforded.

The 40 prisoners who remain at Guantánamo are aging and their health is increasingly deteriorating, making them particularly vulnerable to the virus. 

For example, Saifullah Paracha is 72 years old, has had two heart attacks, and currently suffers from “diabetes, coronary artery disease, diverticulosis, gout, psoriasis and arthritis.” 

Nashwan al-Tamir has had four spinal surgeries in the last 18 months, has still not fully recovered, and continues to suffer. 

Sharqawi Al Hajj — whom independent medical experts have previously described as at risk of “total bodily collapse” due to a combination of the effects of his hunger strikes and CIA torture — attempted suicide late last year and his health has again significantly deteriorated (to the point that my organization and Physicians for Human Rights wrote today to Defense Secretary Esper seeking emergency intervention). The list goes on.

There is also the physical and psychological debilitation associated with nearly two decades of indefinite detention that cuts across the detainee population, as well as the reality that many of the remaining detainees are torture survivors suffering resulting physical and/or psychological damage.

Were COVID-19 to strike this population the consequences could be catastrophic, especially given Guantánamo’s well documented lack of medical capabilities — including insufficient equipment and expertise — to address atypical health needs.

But even if the virus does not reach the detainees, some of the precautions that Guantánamo is taking — absent efforts to mitigate aspects of their impact — could at once undermine detainees’ rights and jeopardize their health.

A prime example is access to counsel, which is now severely restricted due to the virus. In-person visits are essentially impossible; even if counsel were able to find a way to fly to Guantánamo, they would be required to self-quarantine for two weeks upon arrival, then for another two weeks upon return to the mainland. Attorneys cannot represent their clients if the effective price of a single client visit is four weeks of lost or reduced ability to provide them with legal services, not to mention the risks to their own health. 

Moreover, the legal mail courier service to and from Guantánamo was recently suspended, and while temporary measures have been put in place, there will be an impact on both the privilege and frequency of legal mail to detainees. Finally, remote access is extremely limited (especially for the “high value” detainees) — not because it’s technically infeasible, but because the Defense Department has prohibited more widespread use.

Counsel access restrictions can also have negative consequences for detainees’ health, exacerbating pre-existing conditions that Guantánamo has proven over time either unable or unwilling to adequately address, and all but eliminating access to independent medical experts.

Mr. Al Haj, mentioned above, is a case in point. In August of last year, he cut his wrists with a piece of broken glass during a telephone call with counsel. He threatened additional self-harm shortly thereafter. At the time, two independent psychologists with whom Mr. Al Hajj’s counsel consulted characterized him as “actively” suicidal. 

According to Mr. Al Hajj and his counsel, while his care would eventually improve, Guantánamo staff’s initial response was dangerously inadequate; Mr. Al Hajj alleges that he was moved to “isolating conditions” in a “freezing cold” cell, and refused a warm blanket and warm clothes, both against the recommendations of his doctors at Guantánamo.

Mr. Al Hajj is apparently again in crisis now, but this time with minimal ability to communicate with the outside world. As a torture survivor, and especially given his mental health history, Mr. Al Hajj needs trusted human connections. He cannot form those connections with Guantánamo staff — a phenomenon that is common among detainees — both because the United States is responsible for his torture, and because U.S. medical personnel were complicit in torture, including at Guantánamo. This increased level of isolation may well accelerate his decline.

Current restrictions will also put an end to periodic visits by independent medical experts, for the minority of detainees who continue to be seen periodically. As I explained here previously, detainees have not been able to retain independent medical experts except through litigation, and so those experts’ access is dependent upon counsel’s access.

None of this is to say that the Defense Department shouldn’t take reasonable and appropriate steps, consistent with public health experts’ recommendations, to protect everyone at Guantánamo from exposure to COVID-19. But they don’t need to further infringe upon detainees’ rights in the name of health and safety. For starters, the Defense Department should, immediately:

Disclose to all detainees and their counsel (both habeas counsel and military commissions defense counsel) any protocols, plans, or guidance — including timely updates if/when those evolve — for preventing COVID-19 from reaching the detention facility, for identifying and testing potentially infected detainees, and for providing the range of care that could be necessary for any detainee who tests positive;Dramatically expand remote access to counsel and to independent medical experts — via videoconference in particular — for all detainees;Subject to detainees’ consent, immediately provide their counsel and any other appropriate party they authorize (especially independent medical experts) with full, unredacted and unprotected copies of their medical records, including as near to real-time updates as is practicable;Seek authority from Congress to transfer detainees to the United States for emergency medical care;Avoid the use of isolation to the maximum extent possible consistent with the standard of medical care that President Donald Trump signed into law as part of the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (FY2020 NDAA),* and with public health experts’ recommendations for addressing COVID-19; andAppoint a Chief Medical Officer as required by section 1046 of the FY2020 NDAA.

Some of these may seem like drastic measures to those who are well-versed in Guantánamo’s history, but they aren’t. They’re reasonable and sensible steps toward safeguarding detainees’ rights, their health, and the health of everyone at Guantánamo in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

*Per section 1046 of the FY2020 NDAA, all detainees must receive “evaluation and treatment that is accepted by medical experts and reflected in peer-reviewed medical literature as the appropriate medical approach for a condition, symptoms, illness, or disease and that is widely used by healthcare professionals.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Imagining a Post-Coronavirus World: Ending Ravenous Capitalism and Our Consumer-Driven Promiscuity

A tug leading Royal Caribbean’s insanely-misnamed ‘Harmony of the Seas’ into Southampton Harbour. Cruise ships are environmentally ruinous, helped spread the coronavirus, and needs to be high on the list of enterprises that mustn’t be bailed out after the coronavirus crisis ends, if we are to secure a better world (Photo: Andrew Matthews/PA/AP).


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

It’s too early to begin creating a post-coronavirus world when we’re still in the throes of the crisis, but we can beginning thinking about it, and planning for it; otherwise, the dark forces that led us to this point — helped by many of our least helpful habits — will only return with a vengeance once the worst of the crisis is over.

When we think about the post-coronavirus world, there are, I presume, two camps: those who want everything to go back to how it was before, and those who don’t. The latter camp, for now, contains many more people than it has within living memory — those who recognize that running the world solely for the unfettered profits of the few has been a disaster.

This group includes many environmentalists — those who, in the last year and a half, helped to amplify the messages of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion to try to alert everyone else to an uncomfortable but vitally necessary truth: that we are facing an unprecedented man-made environmental crisis, which threatens humanity’s very existence.

In response to the actions and messages of Thunberg and XR, the public began to recognize, often by sizeable majorities, that climate change was the most important topic today, but although, in response, a large number of our political representatives — at government level, and at local government level — appeared to get on board, enthusiastically declaring “climate emergencies,” when it came to taking action they were revealed to be doing what Greta Thunberg had correctly identified them as doing since before she was even born: uttering fine words but doing nothing.

With the arrival of the coronavirus, some of the main targets of the environmentalists have found themselves coming unstuck: the cruise ship industry, for example, now looks to be, if you’ll excuse the pun, dead in the water, and the airline industry is also grinding to a halt. I think that most environmentally aware people would agree that the cruise ship industry must not be revived — as well as being massively polluting, it is also a health risk — but few people would support the collapse of the airline industry.

From the point of view of our governments, however, both industries seem to be in line for eye-wateringly huge bailouts, to keep them in business, and if we are to prevent this happening, then we need to make sure that we know what we want and why, because, of course, our government’s proposed bailouts are not aimed just at the cruise ship and airline industry, but also at many other companies at the forefront of the largely unfettered turbo-charged global capitalist economy that has just been massively shut down to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The opportunities right now are unprecedented, because, of course, it is not just the cruise ship industry and the airlines that have shut down. In developments that were absolutely unimaginable just months ago, or even weeks ago in the case of the UK, businesses have shut down in huge numbers, the streets are almost empty, and most people are staying at home, as requested, to prevent the spread of the virus, which, it seems, is more easily spread than any virus since the Spanish flu of 100 years ago, which killed 50 million people worldwide.

Outside of those who are still going to work — those in the health services, in food production and distribution and sales, and in a variety of other jobs regarded as essential — people are either working from home, and still being paid if they are fortunate, while others are waiting to see if they will be paid via government bailouts.

In the UK, employees are supposed to be guaranteed 80% of their pre-virus wages via a £330bn bailout announced by the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, but the details are still sketchy, and it remains to be seen if employers behave with a conscience, or if their capitalist impulses prevail, and they take money for themselves and for their shareholders, while attempting to sacrifice as many workers as possible.

Similarly, on the frontline of our atomised world, the millions of self-employed people — those who genuinely work for themselves, as well as the many employees moved into precarious zero-hours contracts by cynical employers, with the full support of governments — were only finally included in plans put forward by the Chancellor a few days ago, and will not receive any money until June.

How people are supposed to survive this sudden loss of income for any amount of time is yet to be revealed, as are other pressing concerns for those who are not amongst the privileged minority of British people with paid off, or mostly paid off, mortgages, with savings, and with sort sort of ongoing income stream.

Politicians have made encouraging noises about preventing any evictions of people in rented properties until the crisis is over, but those, again, seem to be empty words, as we live in a rentier economy, in which those who leech off others via exorbitant private rents in an unfettered property market that makes up a huge, and hugely disproportionate part of our economy, feel absolutely entitled to do so, and will not necessarily give up their undeserved sense of entitlement without a struggle.

As well as raising these questions and others — primarily, I think, how people with children in small, crowded, homes are supposed to survive — the shutdown must prompt, in all of us, questions about the very basis of our lives economically. With the service sector largely shut down, and with so many people without incomes, how can the rentier model of exploitation be allowed to survive? What needs to come out of this crisis, surely, is, for the first time since the 1970s, a widespread recognition that we need as many properties as possible to be available on a not-for-profit basis; a massive social homebuilding programme, in other words.

Instead of this, however, what we got, as everyone else was being encouraged to stay home, was Boris Johnson insisting that construction workers should be allowed to carry on working.

Why construction? Well, because the construction industry has been the driver of the economy since the criminal activities of investment bankers led to the global economic crash of 2008. In response, with the entire sector not actually held accountable, the financial sector moved into property, buying up land, continuing to build huge office blocks, but, more particularly, building vast amounts of generally unaffordable housing, designed to make huge profits for themselves by enticing investors who may or may not have also been able to make a tidy profit, while completely screwing the ordinary hard-working people required to pay an ever-increasing proportion of their income to service the lazy, parasitical rentier economy.

With our economies in freefall because of the virus, and, presumably, with governments unable to properly resurrect the notion of “business as usual” because of their bailouts, which dwarf the response to the 2008 crash, I can’t see how the entire rentier economy can survive, and it clearly needs to collapse if we are to learn the lessons of the coronavirus, and create a less hectic, less selfish and less greedy society.

This is not only morally important, but at some level it surely involves the only conceivable response to the lessons that we need to fully take on board from this crisis.

To put it bluntly, our behaviour over the last few decades has been insanely promiscuous. The significant minority of the global population who are not poor have, in fact, been living like updated medieval kings, able to fly anywhere, to drive anywhere, to buy whatever we want whenever we want, and not, we thought, ever having to count the cost of any of it.

That model has now surely collapsed. The coronavirus has shown us that we cannot do what we want whenever we want, and treat the world as both a whore and a dustbin.

The cruise industry must surely collapse, not only because cruise ships are horribly polluting, as environmentalists have long been pointing out, but because of the health risks involved. Only old people, in general, can afford to take cruises, but as the ships travel the world, and are oh so readily able to pick up and fatally incubate viruses, they can only come to be seen as death traps.

Similarly, our self-declared “right” to fly where we want whenever we want must also be curtailed, for the environmental reasons that have pricked our consciences of late, but that have generally failed to modify our behaviour. If you somehow don’t know the unfortunate truth, aeroplanes, like cruise ships, emit unwarranted amounts of pollution, but are also, of course, the main vehicles for the transmission of the coronavirus, which, in no time at all, has spread to almost every country on earth.

It will be hugely challenging for many of us — and not least our politicians, and the business leaders who are driven only by profit and power — to take on board that we have overreached, that our appetites have made us suicidally infected, but that we have to make massive changes to our behaviour, whether we want to or not.

“Business as usual” — environmentally, and now in terms of the coronavirus — is, it has now been revealed, quite literally a death sentence.

Choice has spoiled us, so perhaps a lack of choice will make enough of us understand that a better world, in which we travel less, crave less, live more locally, and are more genuinely connected with each other than we have been for many years, is infinitely preferable to what we’ve been aggressively encouraged to pursue instead.

The crisis is, of course, revealing that what we want, overwhelmingly, is for our NHS to be a service rather than a business, an insurance policy for all paid for through general taxation, rather than the hacked-up private monstrosity that the Tories want, and hopefully we can also realise, in sufficient numbers to change the world, that we want the common good to supersede personal greed not just in terms of our health, but also in as many other walks of life as possible.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Uzair Paracha, Victim of Tortured Terrorism Lies, is Freed from US Jail; Why Is His Father Still at Guantánamo?

Uzair Paracha, left, photographed at the time of his arrest in 2003, and his father Saifullah, still held at Guantánamo, in a photo taken a few years ago by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.


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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the 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.

For anyone who has been paying attention not only to the long and horribly unjust Guantánamo saga, but also to the stories of others held in other circumstances as part of the “tangled web” of the “war on terror,” the recent announcement that Uzair Paracha, a Pakistani national, has been released from a US jail and repatriated after 17 years in prison, with a judge throwing his conviction out of court, is extremely good news.

If there is any justice, Uzair Paracha’s release ought to secure the release from Guantánamo of his father, Saifullah, although, when it comes to Guantánamo, of course, it has rarely been the case that anything involving that prison has ever had any meaningful connection to justice.

I first came across Saifullah Paracha’s story in 2006, while researching my book The Guantánamo Files, and I came across his son’s story in 2007, which prompted me to write about a possible miscarriage of justice in my article, Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man.

Saifullah Paracha, as I explained in my introduction to a cross-post of “Forever prisoners: were a father and son wrongly ensnared by America’s war on terror?”, a Guardian article by Saba Imtiaz in December 2018, was “a successful businessman in Pakistan, with business interests across the world, including in the US where he lived in the 1980s,” and is “alleged by the US to have been involved in plotting with al-Qaeda, but although he accepts that he met Osama bin Laden on two occasions, he has always denied any involvement with terrorism.”

Uzair Paracha, meanwhile, “moved to the United States in Feb. 2003, settled in Brooklyn and was arrested just a month later” for involvement with terrorism, as the New York Times reported last week, paraphrasing the judge’s ruling in his case. As I explained last year, he “was convicted of providing material aid and financial support to al-Qaida terrorists in November 2005, and received a 30-year sentence in July 2006.”

That sentence was, surprisingly, thrown out in July 2018 by Judge Sidney H. Stein, who had been the judge in his original trial, and had handed down his 30-year sentence. Judge Stein ordered a new trial after concluding that allowing the existing conviction to stand would be a “manifest injustice.”

Judge Stein correctly asserted that the critical question had “always been whether Paracha acted with knowledge that he was helping Al Qaeda.” The government claimed, during his trial in 2005, that, as Benjamin Weiser described it for the New York Times, Uzair Paracha and his father “had met in Pakistan with two Qaeda operatives — Majid Khan and Ammar al-Baluchi — and that Uzair had agreed to help Mr. Khan fraudulently obtain immigration documents so he could carry out a plot to bomb gas stations in the United States.”

Weiser added that Uzair Paracha “testified at trial that he had taken ‘some small steps’ to help Mr. Khan,” but, as court papers showed, “he claimed he never knew the men were Qaeda members,” and stated that, had he known, “I would not have helped them out.”

Weiser added that, although Judge Stein had noted that Uzair Paracha “had given varying, and at times incriminating, statements to the authorities about his knowledge of the men’s Qaeda ties,” at his trial, Paracha had a convincing explanation, testifying, as Judge Stein put it, that “key portions of his statements were false and stemmed from ‘a combination of fear, intimidation and exhaustion.’”

Crucially, Judge Stein also asserted that, in the years since Uzair Paracha’s conviction, “new evidence had come to light: statements not only by Mr. Khan and Mr. al-Baluchi, but by the self-described architect of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.”

All three men have been held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay since September 2006, after several years in CIA “black site” torture prisons, and, as Judge Stein also noted, their statements, which were “made before military tribunals or in interviews with federal agents,” in the Times’ words, “directly contradict the government’s case” that Uzair Paracha “knowingly aided Al-Qaeda.”

As Ben Weiser proceeded to explain, “Mr. Khan, for example, told the authorities that he had never disclosed his Qaeda ties to Mr. Paracha, whom he described as innocent; and Mr. Mohammed ‘openly confessed his responsibility for dozens of heinous crimes and terrorist plots,’” but, as Judge Stein acknowledged, never mentioned Mr. Paracha or his father — who had been seized in August 2003 on a business trip to Thailand, and had been sent to Guantánamo, after a year in “black sites,” in September 2004.

“Given this new evidence,” Weiser added, Judge Stein noted that Uzair Paracha “could ‘credibly ask the jury’ to infer his innocence and ‘lack of involvement in the operations discussed,’” and, as noted above, damningly concluded that allowing the existing conviction to stand would be a “manifest injustice.”

Uzair Paracha is freed

Instead of having a retrial, the US government released Uzair Paracha, who is now 40 years old, and he flew back to Pakistan on Friday March 13, and was reunited with his family, a free man after all charges against him were dropped, according to a government court filing submitted on Monday March 16, and a statement made by his lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York (CUNY).

As Ben Weiser explained, “Mr. Paracha’s release followed months of secret negotiations between the government and his lawyers,” and left the government flailing around for a plausible explanation as to why they did not proceed with a retrial. As Weiser put it, “The government had indicated in court papers that it did not believe the new evidence exonerated Mr. Paracha,” and, “[a]s recently as late 2018, prosecutors described Mr. Paracha as ‘an avowed Al-Qaeda supporter’ whose release would pose a ‘serious danger to the public.’”

This was idiotic, but typical. However, as Weiser also explained, by the time of the last filing, on March 16, prosecutors ended up claiming that “they decided not to retry Mr. Paracha because they could not complete a required review of 14,000 classified documents before Mr. Paracha’s trial date ‘without diverting substantial resources from other important national-security and law-enforcement functions.’”

Weiser added that this document review “was necessary to determine whether any of the documents were relevant to the case and might have to be turned over to the defense in advance of March 23, the date of Mr. Paracha’s retrial, which the judge said he would not postpone.” However, “[e]ven with prosecutors and FBI agents sifting for months through the materials, which were generated by American intelligence and military agencies in the years since the first trial, the government told the judge in November that only 6,300 documents had been reviewed,” conveniently allowing them not to proceed with a retrial, which, we can only conclude, would have gone disastrously for them.

In order to secure his release, Uzair Paracha had to agree to “give up his status as a permanent US resident,” but, as Ramzi Kassem explained, “Uzair’s slate is clean and he returns home to Pakistan a free and innocent man.”

In a statement, Uzair himself said, “My prayers have been answered,” although he added that “it’s hard for me to imagine life outside of prison, so I feel anxious but hopeful.”

Providing further explanation of their supposed motivation for freeing Paracha rather than giving him a retrial, the government  also “made it clear that beyond the burden of the classified-document review, it also had considered Mr. Paracha’s long stay in prison and his agreement to renounce his residency status and leave the country,” as Ben Weiser described it, noting that the prosecutors stated, “The government believes that dismissing the indictment under the circumstances presented is the best available option to protect the public and preserve national-security equities.”

Ramzi Kassem further explained that, “early on in discussions prosecutors offered to let Mr. Paracha return to Pakistan immediately if he pleaded guilty to a terrorism-related charge,” but he “refused to take the deal.” In Kassem’s words, “Mr. Paracha was adamant that he wanted to go to trial to clear his name.” Another of his lawyers, Joshua L. Dratel, told the Times that “he believed Mr. Paracha would have been acquitted in a retrial.”

Kassem also explained that the government “made additional offers — that Mr. Paracha plead to a lesser count, for example — but he rejected them,” and, instead, last fall the government “agreed to a defense proposal that became the framework for the final deal.”

When will Saifullah Paracha be released from Guantánamo?

Unfortunately, while Uzair Paracha is now a free man, there is no guarantee that his father will also be released, because, although the profound doubts about the reliability of those who, under duress, accused him of being knowingly invoked with Al-Qaeda are just as applicable to the case against Saifullah Paracha, the horrible truth about Guantánamo is that suspicions are regarded as far more compelling than evidence.

Perhaps those of us who care about quaint notions like the veracity of evidence as a basis for imprisonment can find a way to highlight the injustice of Saifullah Paracha’s ongoing imprisonment, as, unfortunately, the only body charged with reviewing his indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, the parole-type Periodic Review Board, established under President Obama, has repeatedly refused to recommend his release, even though there is no evidence against him, and, in addition, he is Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, and suffers from an array of complex and life-threatening medical issues.

If you’d like to find out more about the high esteem in which Saifullah Paracha is held, by both prison staff and his fellow prisoners, please read Saifullah Paracha: The Kind Father, Brother, and Friend for All at Guantánamo, an article by former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi that was written for Close Guantánamo, and cross-posted here, in 2018.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Coronavirus: How Did 8,900 Deaths Worldwide Lead to the Complete Shutdown of the Global Economy?

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I don’t mean to sound wilfully contrarian, but, as the UK enters a phase of coronavirus lockdown so surreal that it feels as though we’re all, almost overnight, living in an apocalyptic sci-fi movie, I have found myself struggling to cope with the imminent collapse of the entire global economy because of a virus that, to date, has killed less than 8,900 people worldwide.

Don’t misunderstand me. I recognise that the coronavirus is infectious, and that in China, where it began, and in Italy, where it subsequently took a sudden hold, the local health services were overwhelmed with the scale of its spread. As a result, I understand why the notion of a total lockdown in response has seemed so necessary. And in the UK, responding to the initial response of the government of Boris Johnson, which was to let the virus spread freely, and to let us, the livestock, develop “herd immunity” or die, I wholeheartedly joined in the cries of outrage of those opposing such an invitation to rates of infection and death that would, it seemed clear from the examples of China and Italy, overwhelm our own health service.

And so, in response, as the notion that people should self-isolate — perhaps for a two-week period, perhaps for a month, or two at the most — took hold, I also remained supportive, but now, suddenly, as the reality of a lockdown becomes apparent, with the prospect of total economic collapse, and the unchecked rise of unprecedented authoritarian impulses on the part of governments, and with isolation now being portrayed as something that may need to be implemented for a much longer period, I suddenly find myself in revolt.

Before delineating the contours of my revolt, let me first state that I wish to protect the most vulnerable people in society: those who are old, and/or with pre-existing health conditions, and those on the front line, in the health service, who are dealing with the virus’s victims. The latter are clearly not being protected adequately by the British government, while, for the former, the notion of self-isolation seems to make sense, but only if the government commits resources to widespread testing for the virus, so that those interacting with the elderly and the vulnerable — as will need to happen if any plan involving isolation is to work — can do so safely.

Outside of the elderly and the vulnerable, however, I am struggling to see how the complete shutdown of the economy is a proportionate response to the virus. Obviously, the cruise ship industry was going to suffer — and will be missed by no one who is environmentally responsible, if it were to shut down forever — as were the airlines, firstly as people chose not to travel, and then as governments have increasingly shut borders. And again, from an environmental point of view, the end of “peak” air travel can only be welcomed.

It also seemed to me, and to many other people, that large sporting and entertainment events might not be particularly sensible, and that the 9 to 5 commuter rail network would need to be shut down, involving an enforced hiatus for all kinds of industries that would be, to put it mildly, challenging for the existing economc order.

But the contagion of fear has now spread so virulently that almost every situation in which human beings gather is being shut down, either by government edict, government advice, or by people themselves. Pubs, clubs, bars, restaurants, cinemas, theatres and music venues are all shutting down, with the prospect of the widespread collapse of countless businesses, and the sudden impoverishment of millions of workers, while bailout plans, funnily enough, all seem designed to favour corporate interests, rather than the needs of the people.

The only area of life where people are going to be allowed to retain any freedom of movement, it seems, is in shopping for food, even though crowds at supermarkets represent just the kind of problems with transmission that are leading to the closure of every other business that involves humans being sociable. In addition — although it is rather incidental to the main issues — supermarkets have also been where modern, atomised, selfish humanity has to date been seen at its casual worst, in the disgraceful panic-buying of essential items to the exclusion of the needs of others.

Most alarmingly to my mind, however, are the proposals for population control that are being undertaken by our leaders. In France, for example, where, not uncoincidentally, President Macron was, until the coronavirus opportunity arrived, struggling to cope with a kind of low-level civil war via the “gilet jaunes” movement, he is now intent on implementing a total curfew on the French people, to be enforced by the police.

In Britain, we should no doubt expect the same over the coming days and weeks, as the government — pretty inevitably, it seems to me — will move towards curtailing free movement, and will start to revel in the possibility of controlling any and all dissent through the mobilisation of the police, and, perhaps, the military.

Personally, I don’t see how order can be maintained if millions of people, no longer with any income, are meant to isolate themselves in their homes on an open-ended basis, as the entire capitalist system collapses, but perhaps I’m missing something.

Am I, though?

Last year, as awareness of the already unfolding global environmental catastrophe spread, though the work of Greta Thunberg and the actions of Extinction Rebellion, anyone looking responsibly to the future wondered how we were going to halt unfettered capitalism to save the planet from the worst effects of catastrophic climate change. In response, however, the global capitalist system showed no willingness to genuinely contemplate how to effect revolutionary change.

Now, however, on the basis of a virus, some of those necessary changes are being implemented, but accompanied by dangerous panic and an even more dangerous authoritarianism on the part of our governments, which I don’t find healthy, and which I — and, I am sure, many, many other people — am determined to resist. Let us, by all means, protect the old and the vulnerable, but let us not accept that, almost overnight, our economies must grind to a sudden halt that will destroy the livelihoods of an untold number of people, while our horribly compromised leaders use the virus not only, as usual, to protect, corporate interests, but also to implement unprecedented social control.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Judge Orders Chelsea Manning’s Release From Jail for Not Cooperating With WikiLeaks Grand Jury, But Won’t Waive $256,000 Fines

Chelsea Manning, after her release from prison in 2017, and before her re-imprisonment in 2019, for refusing to cooperate with a Grand Jury investigation into Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Good news from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where, on Thursday (March 12), District Judge Anthony J. Trenga ordered the immediate release from jail of whistleblower Chelsea Manning (formerly Pfc. Bradley Manning), who has been imprisoned since last March for refusing to cooperate with a Grand Jury investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

While serving as an Army intelligence analyst in 2009, Manning was responsible for the largest leak of military and diplomatic documents in US history, and received a 35-year sentence — described by Charlie Savage in the New York Times as “the longest sentence by far in an American leak case” — in August 2013.

After her conviction, as Savage also explained, “she changed her name to Chelsea and announced that she wanted to undergo gender transition, but was housed in a male military prison and twice tried to commit suicide in 2016.” After these bleak experiences, it came as an extremely pleasant surprise when, just before leaving office in January 2017, President Obama commuted most of her sentence, as I explained in an article at the time, entitled, Obama Commutes Chelsea Manning’s 35-Year Sentence; Whistleblower Who Leaked Hugely Important Guantánamo Files Will Be Freed in May 2017, Not 2045.

Unfortunately, after seven years in prison, Chelsea Manning’s freedom was short-lived. Last March, as Charlie Savage put it, “prosecutors investigating Mr. Assange subpoenaed her to testify before a grand jury about their interactions.” As Savage also explained, “Although prosecutors granted immunity for her testimony, Ms. Manning had vowed not to cooperate in the investigation, saying she had ethical objections, and she was placed in civil detention for contempt of court.”

Shortly after, that first Grand Jury expired, but, as Savage explained, “Prosecutors then obtained a new subpoena, and she was locked up again for defying it in May.” As he added, ominously, “The moves raise the possibility that prosecutors could start over a third time.”

In a brief opinion, Judge Trenga stated, “The court finds that Ms. Manning’s appearance before the grand jury is no longer needed, in light of which her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose.” As Savage described it, the judge’s ruling involved him “dismiss[ing] the grand jury that Ms. Manning was refusing to testify before after finding that its business had concluded,” even though Manning’s supporters “believed that the grand jury was not set to terminate on March 12.”

For Manning the timing is obviously helpful, as, just the day before, she had attempted to commit suicide, and had ended up hospitalized, but Judge Trenga refused to tackle another aspect of her imprisonment over the last year that has been profoundly unjust: the decision to charge Manning $1,000 for each day that she refused to testify, By the time of the ruling, this had reached $256,000, but the judge ruled that “enforcement of the accrued, conditional fines would not be punitive but rather necessary to the coercive purpose of the court’s civil contempt order.”

In a hard-hitting article for the Intercept, Natasha Lennard condemned the ruling for failing to recognize the fact that “the coercive purpose of Manning’s detention had long been shown to be absent,” because “Manning has proven herself incoercible beyond any doubt.” Lennard cited Manning’s attempted suicide as “the most absolute evidence that she could not be coerced: She would sooner die.”

As she also explained, the framing and timing of the decision were ”galling,” because, the day after the ruling, “Manning was scheduled to appear at a court hearing on a motion to end her continued imprisonment, predicated on her unshakeable resistance proving coercion to be impossible, and her incarceration therefore illegal. She endured months of extreme suffering, driving her to near death, but never wavered on her principled refusal to speak.”

As Lennard added, “Again and again, Manning and her legal team showed that her imprisonment was nothing but punitive, and thus unjustifiable under the legal statutes governing federal grand juries. Yet for nearly a year, Manning has been caged and fined $1,000 per day. Ever since she was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, which is investigating WikiLeaks, Manning has also insisted that there was never any justifiable purpose to asking her to testify. As her support committee noted in a statement last May, ‘Chelsea gave voluminous testimony during her court martial. She has stood by the truth of her prior statements, and there is no legitimate purpose to having her rehash them before a hostile grand jury.’”

Fortunately, in a sign of the esteem with which Manning is held by her many supporters, the $256,000 has been raised in donations in just two days, and a separate follow-up fundraiser, set up to fund her living expenses, has also reached its target — $30,000 — in a matter of hours.

The Guantánamo files

I’m delighted that so many people are supportive of Chelsea Manning, and I can only hope that they are all fully aware of her service to the cause of transparency, and of exposing secrets that the US government would rather keep hidden. As I explained when her sentence was commuted, in January 2017, with particular reference to the release of one set of files she leaked — the classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners — on which I worked as a media partner:

Any intelligent analysis of the files … reveals the extent to which they lay bare the cruelty and incompetence of the authorities at Guantánamo, providing the names of the many unreliable witnesses, who, as a result of torture or other forms of abuse, or being bribed with better living conditions, or simply through exhaustion after seemingly endless — and pointless — interrogations, told their interrogators what they wanted to hear. And the interrogators, of course, wanted whatever information would make the prisoners appear significant, when, in truth, they had been rounded up in a largely random manner, or had been bought for bounty payments from the Americans’ Afghan or Pakistani allies, and very few — a maximum of 3% of the 779 men held, I estimate — genuinely had any kind of meaningful connection with al-Qaeda, the leadership of the Taliban, or any related groups. Most were either foot soldiers or civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, dressed up as “terrorists” to justify a dragnet, from September 2001 to November 2003 (when the transfers to Guantánamo largely ended) that is primarily remarkable because of its stunning incompetence.

I began a detailed study of the Guantánamo files leaked by Manning after their release in 2011, but exhaustion, and a lack of funding, prevented me from analyzing more than the 422 files I covered in detail in 34 articles totaling over half a million words, which are available here, although I do believe that my work on the files constitutes important research. One day I hope to complete the project, but even if I don’t, the files Manning released will provide historians with an unparalleled opportunity to understand the extent to which the so-called intelligence at Guantánamo is a house of cards built on torture and lies, and we should all be grateful to her for leaking them in the first place — just as there are reasons to be grateful for all the other documents she leaked.

After Thursday’s ruling, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, one of Manning’s lawyers, stated, “It is my devout hope that she is released to us shortly, and that she is finally given a meaningful opportunity to rest and heal that she so richly deserves.”

The entwined fate of Julian Assange

That is certainly to be hoped for, but we must also all spare a thought for the publisher of the information she leaked, Julian Assange, with whom her fate seems forever entwined. Last April, while Assange was still living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he had first sought asylum in 2012, the Justice Department unsealed criminal charges against him. As Charlie Savage noted, “Prosecutors initially charged him with a narrow hacking conspiracy offense, accusing him of agreeing to try to help Ms. Manning crack a password that would have let her log onto a military computer system under a different user account, covering her tracks.”

This seemed to be nothing more than a cynical effort to portray Assange as a cic-conspirator rather than what he and WikiLeaks are and were — publisher of leaked information, just as the Washington Post was, in 1971, with whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, relating to the Vietnam War. Since then, however, prosecutors “significantly expanded the case against Mr. Assange by bringing charges against him under the Espionage Act for soliciting, receiving and publishing classified information.”

Charlie Savage noted that these charges “rais[ed] novel First Amendment issues,” which, sadly, is something of an understatement, as a successful prosecution of Assange would have a genuinely chilling effect on the freedom of the press, and of freedom of speech in general — and, it’s worth noting, was a course of action that, precisely for those reasons, was abandoned by President Obama after he had initially sought to pursue Assange.

Savage also noted, at the close of his article, that “Mr. Assange has been fighting extradition in a London court,” which, again, is a rather curt reference to the proposed extradition of Assange from the UK to the US, which the British government, to its great shame, is supporting unquestioningly, even though the same principles of what is at stake — the chilling suppression of press freedom and freedom of speech in general — applies as much to the UK as the US, and ought to preclude any notion that his extradition is acceptable.

I have been writing about this since last year, in a number of articles and in various media appearances — see, for example, my articles, Defend Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: Press Freedom Depends On It (from last April), Stop the Extradition: If Julian Assange Is Guilty of Espionage, So Too Are the New York Times, the Guardian and Numerous Other Media Outlets (from last May), As a Frail and Confused Julian Assange Appears in Court, It’s Time For the UK to Stop His Proposed Extradition to the US (in October), and, last month, A Call for the Mainstream Media to Defend Press Freedom and to Oppose the Proposed Extradition of Julian Assange to the US.

I have also submitted a witness statement in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, with specific reference to the Guantánamo files, which will, I believe, be discussed in May when the hearing regarding Assange’s proposed extradition resumes, following a disturbing week of hearings last month, in which Assange was held in a glass box, and there were allegations of clear judicial bias, and confusions regarding the terms of the US-UK extradition treaty.

For further information, I recommend the accounts of former ambassador and human rights activist Craig Murray, who attended the hearing (see here, here, here, here and here), and also of Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof, who was also attending the hearings, travelling from the US to do so (see here, here, here and here). Gosztola’s second article looks at, as he describes it, how “Chelsea Manning’s Grand Jury resistance [is] a major hurdle for prosecutors,” who are seeking to revise history to try, erroneously, to make Manning into some kind of accomplice of Assange.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

US Judge Orders Independent Psychiatric Assessment of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner Mohammed Al-Qahtani

Tortured Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani, and US District Judge Rosemary Collyer, who has ordered the US government to allow independent psychiatrists to visit him at Guantánamo, to assess whether his long-standing mental health problems are so severe that he should be sent back to Saudi Arabia.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In a breakthrough legal ruling, a US judge has ordered the government to allow a psychiatric assessment of a Guantánamo prisoner, involving not only US doctors, who have been allowed into the prison before, to make assessments of certain prisoners’ mental and  physical health, but also, for the first time, foreign doctors, the intention being, as Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times explained, “to determine whether he should be released from the prison” and “sent home for psychiatric care.”

The prisoner in question, Mohammed al-Qahtani, is well-known to seasoned Guantánamo watchers, as he is one of only two prisoners at Guantánamo to have been subjected to torture programs specifically approved for them (the other one being Mohamedou Ould Slahi). Al-Qahtani was regarded as the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, and was subjected to what Carol Rosenberg described, accurately, as “two months of continuous, brutal interrogation”, by US soldiers, at the end of 2002 and the start of 2003. The torture took place in a wooden hut at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray, after that facility — the prison’s first camp — had closed, and TIME magazine published the harrowing log of those torture sessions in 2006, which are available here.

What was not publicly known until long after al-Qahtani’s torture was that, as Carol Rosenberg put it, he “had a history of profound mental illness and psychiatric hospitalization in Saudi Arabia before he left in 2000 or 2001,” although this has been consistently ignored by the US authorities.

When al-Qahtani finally secured the support of someone in the US government, it was Susan Crawford, the convening authority for the military commission trial system at Guantánamo. Crawford’s job was to choose whether or not to press charges, and in al-Qahtani’s case, after he was put forward for a trial along with five men accused of involvement with the 9/11 attacks, she refused to press charges, admitting to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, just before George W. Bush left office, that she did so because al-Qahtani had been tortured.

“We tortured Qahtani,” Crawford told Woodward, adding, “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.” As she also explained, “[T]hat’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

This was the only admission, by a senior Bush administration official, that a prisoner had been subjected to torture, but although it removed al-Qahtani from the broken military commission trial system, his severe mental health problems continued to be ignored by the authorities, and when he was made eligible for the Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type review process under Barack Obama, panels of military and intelligence officials continued to ignore his mental health problems and to approve his ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial because, the panel members claimed, “By consensus, continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The ruling in al-Qahtani’s case came last Friday, March 6, almost two years after it was first submitted, when I wrote about it in an article entitled, Lawyers for Guantánamo Torture Victim Mohammed Al-Qahtani Urge Court to Enable Mental Health Assessment and Possible Repatriation to Saudi Arabia. As Carol Rosenberg described it, “Mr. Qahtani’s lawyers petitioned the court to order the Pentagon to treat him like a prisoner of war with Geneva Convention protections, as defined by a US Army regulation, to evaluate whether he was too ill to be held at Guantánamo,” while “Department of Justice lawyers opposed the request, saying that Guantánamo detainees were not covered by the Army regulation.”

As Rosenberg also explained, District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer’s 25-page opinion was “a departure from the court’s usual deference to the military” on medical issues  at Guantánamo, giving “foreign doctors a decisive say in determining, for the first time, whether to release a detainee” from the prison.

As Rosenberg proceeded to explain, “Judge Collyer wrote that she was granting a request” by al-Qahtani’s lawyers “to compel the United States to apply an Army regulation designed to protect prisoners of war and to create ‘a mixed medical commission’ made up of a medical officer from the U.S. Army and two doctors from a neutral country chosen by the International Committee of the Red Cross and approved by the United States and Saudi Arabia.”

As Rosenberg also stated, “In ordering the evaluation, Judge Collyer relied on a report from Dr. Emily A. Keram, an American psychiatrist who treats US veterans and who examined Mr. Qahtani at Guantánamo and some of his medical records in Saudi Arabia.” Her report noted that al-Qahtani “spent four or five days in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, after an ‘acute psychotic break’ and a suicide attempt in May 2000,” and she also noted that he “suffered a head injury in a car accident when he was a child and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia.” As Rosenberg pt t, “One symptom included hallucinations; he spoke to nonexistent people before he left Saudi Arabia and after his arrival at Guantánamo.”

As Rosenberg also explained, “Central to Judge Collyer’s order was the contention by Mr. Qahtani’s lawyers that Guantánamo was not equipped to handle his psychiatric illnesses, and that he was entitled to repatriation to culturally appropriate mental health care under the prisoner-of-war provisions in the Army regulations.“ These provisions,” she noted, “give the board members access to both Mr. Qahtani and his clinical records,” adding, “Recommendations are made by a majority vote, and if repatriation is warranted, it must be done within three months of the decision.”

Judge Collyer also noted that “she agreed with the Justice Department that the use of the mixed medical commission was entering ‘uncharted territory’ and [was] ‘likely burdensome.’”

It is not known, at present, whether the US government will appeal Judge Collyer’s ruling. Rosenberg also noted that the government could send al-Qahtani “to Saudi Arabia for care in lieu of allowing the first-ever mixed medical commission to evaluate him.” Whatever the outcome, Ramzi Kassem, one of al-Qahtani’s lawyers, said that the need for his repatriation was “a matter of life and death,” adding, “We hope he can return to Saudi Arabia, where he will be given the psychiatric care and treatment he needs.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.