Andy Worthington's Blog, page 150

Save Lewisham Hospital: We March Again This Saturday, January 26 – Let’s Make It Massive!

Please come to the demonstration to save Lewisham Hospital this Saturday (January 26), and please also send health secretary Jeremy Hunt a quick email, via 38 Degrees, to ask him to save the hospital.

This Saturday, January 26, a huge protest is taking place in the London Borough of Lewisham, in south east London, in a last show of outrage before Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, makes a decision about whether or not to close Lewisham Hospital’s A&E Department — leaving just one A&E, out in Woolwich, for the 750,000 people in Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley — as advised by Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed by Hunt’s predecessor, Andrew Lansley, to deal with the debts of a neighbouring NHS Trust.

Those concerned by this devastating assault on NHS services for the 250,000 people of Lewisham are requested to meet at Loampit Vale roundabout at 12 noon, for a march past the hospital to Mountsfield Park, where there will be a rally, music and a giant petition! Please, please come along if you can!

We know, from the huge turnout for the march to save Lewisham Hospital on November 24 (see my photos here), that the people of Lewisham can show the government what resistance is, when they are provoked, as they have been by these wretched proposals. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people turned out in the driving rain to oppose the plans to shut the hospital’s A&E Department, to cut other services, including intensive care and maternity services, and to sell off 60 percent of its buildings, leaving just the A&E Department at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich to serve the needs of everyone in Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley.

Ever since, at the end of October, Matthew Kershaw issued his proposals for dealing with the debts of the South London Healthcare Trust (largely accrued as a result of disastrous PFI deals), by taking it out on Lewisham instead, the campaign to save Lewisham Hospital has drawn massive support from local people for two particular reasons.

The first is that people recognise, as I have stated repeatedly, that Lewisham, with a population of 250,000, the same as Brighton, Hull or Newcastle, needs its own fully-functioning hospital, as does every population centre of a similar size.

The second reason is that the people of Lewisham recognise that punishing their own hospital, which is not in debt, for the financial problems of a neighbouring NHS Trust, is fundamentally unfair. 125,000 patients a year use Lewisham’s A&E Department, over 30,000 children use children’s A&E, and over 4,000 women give birth there every year. It is a brazen lie for Kershaw and his team to suggest that all of these people can be dealt with elsewhere, or in-house in a severely downgraded hospital unable to deal with emergencies and with all the acute services that A&E supports.

These are the issues that brought people out onto the streets in such huge numbers in November, and I hope there will be a similarly huge turnout this Saturday. Since the march in November, the consultation period has come to an end, and Matthew Kershaw and his team have made their recommendations to Jeremy Hunt, who is due to make his announcement about the proposals next week, on February 1.

Underscoring the widespread disgust at the targeting of Lewisham for problems that have nothing to do with the management and operation of its own NHS trust, campaigners have been seeking not just to challenge the Special Administrator on an operational basis, pointing out how the huge impact on the people of Lewisham — including the risk of death for some vulnerable people unable to reach an A&E Department in a matter of minutes — is a disgrace, but also to challenge the very legality of the proposals, something that I have taken a keen interest in since the proposals were first announced just three months ago.

From the beginning, it has been unacceptable that the fate of an entire hospital, and the 250,000 people it serves, should be subject to the deliberately short timeframe enshrined in the legislation for dealing with bankrupt trusts under which Kershaw and his team are operating. No doubt it suited them, as the intended butchers of Lewisham Hospital, to have on the statute book a derisory six-week period of consultation, followed by a final report and a final decision within two months (in other words, just over three months in total), but from the start it has not convinced the people of Lewisham.

Moreover, it may also be illegal, and while I have been away in the US for most of the last two weeks, and have been unable to follow every development closely, including the release of Kershaw’s final report (and the revelation that 90 percent of the 8,000 people who responded to the consultation were opposed to the plans for Lewisham, rising to 96 percent amongst Lewisham residents) it is clear, from an article on the East London Linesblog last week, that the legal avenue, as I fervently hoped, is being pushed by the local MPs, following up on the letter that was written to Jeremy Hunt by Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, in December. In that letter, Andy Burnham wrote, “Lewisham Hospital is outside the purview of the TSA terms of reference and I am clear that the powers associated with the Failure Regime policy were not intended to be used to encompass service changes in other hospitals and allow back-door reconfigurations of services without proper public consultation.”

As was noted on January 15, “Fourteen south London MPs met with Jeremy Hunt yesterday to challenge whether the NHS Trust Special Administrator actually has the power to make recommendations that would see the closure of Lewisham Hospital’s A&E department.” One was Heidi Alexander, the Labour MP for Lewisham East, who started a popular petition to save Lewisham Hospital, and who, as the blog described it, “met with the secretary of state for health last night to summarise the legal and financial objections” to Kershaw’s recommendations.

Jim Dowd, the Labour MP for Lewisham West and Penge, told East London Lines that Hunt said he would “re-examine the legal case” surrounding Kershaw’s proposals. On Twitter, Heidi Alexander wrote that that Hunt “reiterated that he is seeking fresh legal advice.”

Heidi Alexander and Jim Dowd, along with Dame Joan Ruddock, the Labour MP for Lewisham Deptford, submitted a report to Hunt, entitled, “The Case Against Recommendation 5: Service Reconfiguration (Closure of the A&E and Maternity Services at Lewisham Hospital,” in which they specifically stated, “We question whether the Trust Special Administrator has the power, in law, to make recommendations which affect Lewisham Healthcare NHS Trust, and whether the secretary of state, in response to these recommendations, has the power to take a decision which results in the loss of A&E and maternity services at Lewisham Hospital — a solvent, successful hospital which is not part of the Trust to which the TSA was appointed.”

The answer is surely no, but it remains unclear if Hunt will accept it. Jim Dowd told East London Lines that Matthew Kershaw and his close advisor, Hannah Farrar, who was impressive only in her coldness at the sham consultation I attended in Lewisham on December 4 (photos here), were “shamelessly brazen” following the meeting.

“Mr Hunt was predictably non-committal at this stage, simply maintaining that he would look carefully at the plans and re-examine the legal case surrounding the TSA’s meddling with a hospital outside his remit,” Dowd said, adding, “Matthew Kershaw and Ms. Hannah Farrar from the NHS board were shamelessly brazen in their refusal to listen to any alternative suggestions and their dismissive arrogance showed exactly why they were chosen to ensure the destruction of Lewisham Hospital.”

Dowd also echoed widespread complaints in Lewisham about the shortness of the consolation period, describing it as “a farce.” He added, “No wonder that the BBC Question Time panel in New Cross last week were uniformly aghast by the sheer lunacy of closing a solvent, high performing service to bail out its bankrupt neighbour.”

More particularly, all three MPs “also argued that the service reconfiguration proposed by the TSA fails all four tests set by the Government,” as ELL put it. These are: “support from GP Commissioners, strengthened public and patient involvement, clarity on the clinical evidence base, and consistency with current and prospective patient choice.” The MPs report concluded that the proposals to shut the A&E Department and reduce maternity services are “dangerous and ill-conceived.”

The report also described the consultation period as a “back-door approach to service re-configuration,” and urged Hunt to accept that, “if every recommendation, except for recommendation five, was implemented,” as ELL put it, then, as the MPs describe it, “significant savings can be made without closing emergency and maternity services in Lewisham.”

This important financial point was echoed by Dr. John Miell, a consultant endocrinologist at Lewisham, who spoke to the Observer for an article on January 13, which began by stating, “Angry doctors have condemned plans to axe their hospital’s A&E and maternity units as “financial madness” because the closures will cost the NHS large sums of money over many years.”

As the Observer proceeded to explain, “Senior medics at Lewisham, furious at it being ‘penalised’ for another trust’s failings, point out that SLHT’s expected deficit of £75m over the next three years could be cut to just £1.1m by implementing all of administrator Matthew Kershaw’s radical blueprint apart from his insistence that their hospital lose its emergency and childbirth departments.”

In his final report, Kershaw’s dodgy maths was shown up when he stated, as the Observer put it, that “closing the Lewisham units as part of implementing all six of his recommendations would cost £195m by 2015-16 in transition and capital costs, but admit[ted] that the move would take until then to start generating a £19.5m annual payback.”

As Dr. Miell explained, “It’s fiscal nonsense and financial madness to do this. How can you tell the taxpayer that it’s sensible to spend £195m to get £19.5m savings a year?” He added, “It’s completely unfair and ridiculous to penalise a successful, high-performing, viable NHS trust to bail out a PFI-burdened and debt-laden neighbour.”

Dr. Miell also said, “Staff feel 100% antagonism towards the plans, which are clinically unsafe, financially non-viable and totally unjust,” and informed the Observer that staff are currently writing protest letters to Hunt, who, as the Observer put it, “rates defeating a bid to shut the A&E unit at the Royal Surrey County hospital in his own constituency in 2006 as his proudest political achievement,” adding, “He has acknowledged Lewisham campaigners’ grievances and given them some hope by telling MPs that “[hospital] reorganisations are not always the panacea they are made out to be.”

That comment needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, obviously, as Jeremy Hunt may well want to downplay public opposition to the plans prior to his decision — not to mention the fact that he is a minister with the same government that spent a year pushing through a wretched bill to force privatisation on the NHS, which remains a huge and ongoing threat to the health service as a whole.

However, after my experience of the one sham consultation I attended in Lewisham on December 4, it was clear to me that one of the greatest threats to the NHS is its own officials — not just Kershaw and Farrah, but also Dr. Jane Fryer, Kershaw’s chief medical advisor, and Dr. Mike Marriman, the medical director of King’s, and Dr. Andy Mitchell, the medical director for the whole of the NHS in London, who also took part.

While professing to be interested only in providing the best services possible, these officials have accepted, without argument, the huge cuts imposed on the NHS, without pointing out that, to the people of Britain, the NHS is an institution more beloved than any other, which they would support with further taxation if it could be established that it was necessary to maintain services. Instead, we have a government devoted to the destruction of the NHS, and it seems, senior NHS officials happy to go along with it.

The biggest insult of the night, I thought — and one that needs to be pointed out to Jeremy Hunt if it hasn’t been already — was when Dr. Jane Fryer brushed aside complaints about the Special Administrator’s lack of a mandate for his planned destruction of Lewisham Hospital by stating that the carve-up of the SLHT had provided a timely opportunity for the reorganisation of NHS services across south east London, which would have happened anyway, but just a little later. That may seem like necessary opportunism to Dr. Fryer, but to me it stinks of a disregard for the Special Administrator’s remit, of the kind that the MPs have been challenging. Six weeks is not long enough to reorganise NHS services for millions of people, even if the legislation endorsed it, which, it seems increasingly clear, it does not.

I do hope Mr. Hunt is listening. Otherwise, the people of Lewisham will, I am sure, be letting him know that the fight has only just begun. When it comes to the NHS, there is, I believe, only so much that people will put up with from the Tories — and from NHS officials who have completely lost touch with the purpose of the health service — before they seriously begin to fight back to protect essential services.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo’s Horrendous 11th Anniversary with Peter B. Collins and Scott Horton

Listen to my interviews here with Peter B. Collins (at 55 minutes in) and here with Scott Horton.

It’s four days since I came back from a ten-day trip to the US to join other campaigners, on the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, in calling for President Obama to revisit the promise to close Guantánamo that he made when he took office exactly four years ago, and this time to fulfill his promise, and not cave in to criticism, failing the prisoners as thoroughly as they have also been failed by the other branches of the US government.

As well as being failed by the President, the 166 men still in Guantánamo have been failed by Congress, where opportunistic lawmakers, bent on selling a message of fear to the US public, have imposed onerous restrictions on the President’s ability to release prisoners, and the courts, where pro-Guantánamo ideologues in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., who have gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners, and have discovered that they are able to dictate detainee policy to the Supreme Court, which has refused to consider a single appeal from the prisoners.

As a result, on the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, those of us protesting the prison’s ongoing existence — and the inertia and indifference towards it that is more marked than ever before — found ourselves bound together closely by our concern for those still held, and for the system of indefinite detention without charge or trial that Guantánamo has become. We also discovered new levels of righteous indignation — see, for example, my speech outside the White House here (on the anniversary), and, earlier that day, the panel discussion I was part of, with the attorney Tom Wilner and Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, at the New America Foundation. Also check out my photos here and here.

I’m pleased to report that, as a result of several productive meetings during my visit, new initiatives aimed at securing the closure of Guantánamo will be forthcoming during 2013, to keep alive an issue that was shamefully ignored or downplayed in most of the mainstream media last week. Fortunately, the videos mentioned above continue to do the work the media missed, as does the dedication of a handful of principled independent radio hosts — in particular, Peter B. Collins in San Francisco  and Scott Horton in Texas. Peter B. and Scott are both old friends and colleagues in the war on cruelty, illegality and indifference that is a constant undertaking for those who care about the bitter legacy of Guantánamo, inherited by President Obama from George W. Bush, but now fully owned — in all its undimmed injustice — by the Democratic President who promised to close it but then failed to do so, and has now, with the help of Congress and the courts, enshrined a form of indefinite detention at Guantánamo that is unforgivable.

My half-hour interview with Peter B. Collins is here, and begins at 55:23, after Peter’s interview with Nick Turse, the author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. The interview came at the end of a busy evening, in which I spoke to a gathering of Witness Against Torture activists, fasting for a week in solidarity with the Guantánamo prisoners, in the church where they were all staying — and where, I should note, the collective spirit of reflection, on the prisoners, and on the significance of the anniversary, was noticeable, and very powerful. I spoke along with Maj. Todd Pierce, a recently retired military defense attorney for prisoners at Guantánamo facing trials by military commission, who delivered a fascinating history lesson about the origins of the commissions, and troubling analogies with the Nazis, and afterwards, prior to speaking to Peter, I took a conference call with supporters of World Can’t Wait, one of the organizations supporting my visit, along with Witness Against Torture and “Close Guantánamo.”

This is how Peter described our interview, which was a pleasure as ever, although it was the first time I had been interviewed while sitting in the foyer of a church:

[Andy] Worthington returns to update the status of our illegal offshore penal colony in Cuba, and tells how the administration, the Congress and the courts have all lined up to continue to hold 166 prisoners there, even though 86 have been cleared for release. Obama said he would close the camp, and did release a number of prisoners in 2009 [and 2010]; but he buckled to opposition, and Congress has placed severe restrictions on the president’s ability to release any inmates from the camp, while the courts have been blocking all habeas corpus actions. This leaves the 86 entombed with no indication of if and when they might be released, with dozens more, who may never be charged or released, just left in a legal limbo.

That seems to be to be a fair summing-up of the issues, as Guantánamo begins its 12th year of operations.

After my return to New York, on the afternoon of January 12, following a protest against drones, torture and the ongoing existence of Guantánamo outside the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which I’ll be writing about soon — and also posting photos — I was delighted to speak to Scott Horton, formerly of Antiwar Radio, with whom I have been speaking regularly for over five years, on January 15, the day before my return to the UK. I spoke to Scott from the office of World Can’t Wait, in midtown Manhattan, after a short stroll along 7th Avenue, and prior to a walk in Central Park with Debra Sweet, the director of World Can’t Wait, and Nancy Vining Van Ness, a passionate opponent of the existence of Guantánamo and the director of American Creative Dance.

I’ll be posting photos taken on these walks soon, but in the meantime my half-hour interview with Scott Horton is here, which, I believe, very effectively captured the outrage that is the appropriate response of everyone who has not lost touch with their humanity to the realization that Guantánamo may never close, and cleared men will continue to die there, like Adnan Latif, who died in September, unless concerted action is taken by those who care.

This is how Scott described the show:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses the campaign to pressure President Obama to finally close Guantánamo and “End 11 Years of Injustice;” how national security is endangered by leaving Guantánamo open; and the dozens of innocent men (cleared by a government task force for release) imprisoned indefinitely because of Obama’s political cowardice.

Note: The photo at the top of this article is by Palina Prasasouk, an activist with Witness Against Torture. See more photos here, on Palina’s Flickr account — and see Witness Against Torture on Flickr here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Photos of London: Hilly Fields in the Snow

Hilly Fields in the Snow, a set on Flickr.

On Friday, when the snow began falling on London — something that is not even necessarily an annual occurrence in the UK — I took a tour by bike around Brockley, my home in south east London, and also visited Ladywell, Lewisham and Greenwich, taking photos as the first snow fell.

I posted the first set of photos yesterday, and was planning to post the second set, featuring Greenwich, today, but then it began snowing again, more heavily than before, and I spent this afternoon on another photographic trip — first of all, taking my son sledging in Hilly Fields, the hill-top park in Brockley that is one of my favourite places to visit, and then cycling through Brockley and on, via New Cross, to Deptford, capturing one of my favourite urban environments in the snow.

This set, the 73rd in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, features the first part of today’s journey — the sledging in Hilly Fields, which is always packed out when the snow falls. I hope to post the other sets soon, although I also have other sets to post from my recent visit to the US, and, in particular, of New York, which is as visually mesmerising as London, and which, between appointments dealing with the ongoing disgrace that is the prison at Guantánamo, I had the opportunity to get to know better than ever before.

In the meantime, as the snow still falls, and as I prepare to go out on my bike once more to take some night photos, I hope you enjoy these glimpses of winter parklife in London. Hilly Fields is rarely as busy as it is when the snow falls, and it’s also wonderful to see children and their parents out in force, enjoying pastimes that nature provides, and which have been enjoyed for hundreds of years, as a refreshing alternative to the corporate toys that take up most of our free time — my camera and my computer included, of course!

Admittedly, it is possible to splash out on top-end sledges and toboggans, but, as one teenager demonstrated, if you don’t have a sledge, you can also use an estate agent’s sign — which to my mind, is a distinct improvement on its intended use!

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Photos: First Snow in London

First Snow in London, a set on Flickr.

This photo set, the 72nd in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, rather sprang upon me yesterday (January 18), when, while still sleep-deprived and rather jet-lagged after returning from my ten-day visit to the US to campaign for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on the 11th anniversary of its opening, I had to make a visit to my local hospital in Lewisham, in south east London — whose A&E Department, and other frontline services, are currently under threat of closure — and was thrilled, in an inner-child way, to discover that it was snowing.

After taking a few photos en route, I reemerged after an hour or so to find that the snow was still steadily falling, and so, after pushing my bike back up the hill to Brockley — to mend a puncture I had received during the short journey to the hospital — I set out to capture some photos of my wider neighbourhood in the snow, taking a well-worn route down the hill to Lewisham, along the River Ravensbourne to Greenwich, and then down to the River Thames and back, a two-hour journey, at the end of which I was half-frozen.

The photos I took yesterday are divided into two sets. I’ll be posting the second, focusing on Greenwich, as soon as I can, but first up is a set featuring the photos I took in Ladywell, Brockley and Lewisham in the morning and the early afternoon, as the snow fell, transforming the familiar into a wonderland, or, if you’re inspired by the sensitivity of the 19th century American Poet Emily Dickinson, into a landscape heavy with the weight of mortality.

It was wonderful to be out on my bike again, after ten days in America, when I walked as much as possible to compensate for being separated from my wheels. I’ll be posting photos of my walks in New York and Washington D.C. soon — as well as another set of protest photos, from an anti-drones protest outside CIA headquarters, to accompany the Guantánamo protest photos I’ve already posted — but for now, here’s a welcome back to London in a way that only winter can provide.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Photos: Protestors Call for the Closure of Guantánamo outside the White House

Protestors Call for the Closure of Guantánamo outside the White House , a set on Flickr.

These photos, following on from the previous set, capture some of the key images and the principled, decent and tireless campaigners for justice involved in the protest in Washington D.C. on January 11, 2013 to mark the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to call on President Obama to fulfil the promise he made to close the prison when he took office in January 2009, or be remembered as a failure, who succumbed to political expediency and settled for a path of cowardice rather than confronting his political opponents, both in the Republican Party and in his own party, and doing what needed to be done.

This, of course, involved the still-pressing need to restore some semblance of justice in the wake of the horrors inflicted on the law, on America’s reputation, and on hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the so-called “war on terror,” but instead of addressing the issues, President Obama has expanded the US government’s drone program of extrajudicial assassinations, and has failed those in Guantánamo — especially the 86 men (out of 166 still held in total), who were cleared for release by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established after taking office in 2009. The Task Force spent a year reviewing the prisoners’ cases before reaching its sober and considered conclusions, and, in addition, some of these men were actually cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, some as long ago as 2004.

However, they remain held either because they are Yemenis, regarded as an unprecedented terrorist threat  — despite being cleared– since the foiled underwear bomb plot on a US-bound plane three years ago, or because they are from countries where they face the risk of torture if repatriated, or simply because Congress has passed legislation designed to prevent any prisoner being released to any country that lawmakers regard as a threat.

As I explained in my speech outside the White House, where I took many of these photos (and where Jeremy Varon of Witness Against Torture took the photos of me), continuing to hold men who were cleared for release makes the US worse than a dictatorship that throws people in a dungeon and then throws away the key.

As well as featuring elements of the rally and the speakers outside the White House, this set also includes the unannounced last part of the protest, in which members of Witness Against Torture, the mainly Catholic (but also Quaker) group of campaigners who fasted for six days from January 7 to 12, while protesting every day, and reflecting intensely on the plight of the prisoners, advanced to the fence around the White House, and tied 166 ribbons to it — one for each of the men still held — while softly and beautifully singing a song of sympathy and solidarity with our “Muslim brothers,” which was profoundly moving.

More photos from my US trip will follow soon. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these glimpses into the spirit of righteous indignation — and empathy with the prisoners — which powers the protests against the US government’s embrace of torture, indefinite detention, endless war and extrajudicial assassinations that has dominated US policy for the last 11 years. I believe we will prevail, but I’m also aware that the struggle is, for the most part, not for those without phenomenal endurance.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: Close Guantánamo – Andy Worthington, Tom Wilner and Col. Morris Davis Lay into President Obama at the New America Foundation

[image error]On Friday, the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, myself and the attorney Tom Wilner, the steering committee of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, held our annual reunion at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. with Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, who resigned in 2007, the day after he was placed in a chain of command under William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s senior lawyer and one of the Bush administration officials most involved in developing the administration’s notorious torture program.

For three years now, we have gathered on the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo to call on President Obama to fulfill the promise to close the prison that he made on taking office in January 2009.

This year our call was more passionate, intense, and driven by righteous indignation than ever before.

I’m very pleased to report that the event, “America’s indefinitely detained,” was broadcast by C-SPAN, so that it could reach as wide an audience as possible (and will remain available on C-SPAN’s website), and also that it was made available on YouTube, via the New America Foundation’s YouTube page. I have posted it below, and I do hope that, if you have an hour and half to spare, you will be able to watch the event.

The three us provided a detailed explanation of the particular horrors of Guantánamo today: the outrageous and completely unjustifiable detention of 86 prisoners (out of 166 in total), who were cleared for release by an interagency Task Force created by President Obama in 2009, and the outrageous and completely unjustifiable detention of 46 others, who were designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial in an executive order issued by President Obama two years ago. And hovering above these specific categories of failure, of course, is the failure of the President to fulfill his promise to close the prison in its entirety.

Although there have been significant obstacles raised by Congress, and the courts have also contributed to the problems, the ultimate responsibility for these failures lies with President Obama. To prevent him being regarded as a President defined by cowardice and laziness, who failed to fulfill his promise to shut down this monstrous prison because it was politically inconvenient, he needs to take the fight back to Congress, and to make the case that indefinitely holding men cleared for release is an affront to all notions of justice, and must be brought to an end. The clock is now ticking on his legacy, and if he fails to act the history books will show no sympathy for his lack of leadership on this issue.

This means overturning the ban on releasing any cleared Yemenis, which he himself put in place after the failed underwear bomb plot in 2009, and resuming the search for new homes — including in the US, if necessary — for other cleared prisoners who cannot be safely repatriated. Two-thirds of those cleared are Yemenis, so lifting the ban needs urgent attention, especially as one cleared Yemeni, Adnan Latif, died at Guantánamo last September.

Crucially, there must be no further excuses that it is acceptable to hold people, possibly forever, for being Yemeni, as though all Yemenis constitute a serious security threat, when Obama’s own Task Force of sober and serious government officials — including representatives of the intelligence agencies — concluded in 2009 that they do not constitute a serious security threat.

So twisted is the current situation that the word Kafkaesque fails even to do justice to it. Fair trials for the 30 or so prisoners designated for trials need to proceed, and a thorough and objective review of the cases of the 46 men officially designated for indefinite detention also needs to take place, for which we at “Close Guantánamo” — Tom and I — are both willing and able to meet with government officials to discuss the fundamental problems with the supposed evidence.

Immediately, however, something positive needs to happen, and that must be the release of cleared prisoners, some of whom — beginning with Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison — can be freed immediately.

Note: After this event, the speakers traveled to the Supreme Court for a rally and march to the White House. See here for my photos, and see here for the video of my 4-minute speech outside the White House.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: Andy Worthington Tells President Obama Why His Failure to Close Guantánamo Is Akin to Dictatorship

“Andy Worthington rips President Obama for failing to close Guantánamo” is the heading that the Baltimore-based filmmaker Bill Hughes gave to his video of my speech outside the White House in Washington D.C. on Friday January 11, on the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo. The video is available on YouTube, and I’ve posted it below.

Bill filmed me as I addressed the passionate group of protestors — many in orange jumpsuits — who had gathered on President’s Park South (aka the Ellipse), just south of the White House, at the end of a march from the Supreme Court, when, inspired by the vigorous and almost palpable spirit of indignation that was the driver of the protests, I called on President Obama to fulfill the promise to close Guantánamo that he made when he took office four years ago, and was justifiably critical of the failure fog all three branches of the US government to deal with the poisonous legacy of Guantánamo with justice and fairness, instead demonstrating — in the administration, in Congress, and in the courts — a disgraceful combination of cowardice, indifference, and cynical obstruction and fearmongering.

I explained, with some passion, why the failure to fulfil the promise to close Guantánamo is disastrous, both in the present and in the future, because, now that he has won his second and final term in office, President Obama can no longer bury anything that it was inconvenient to discuss on the campaign trail, and, most significantly, his legacy is now being written. If he does nothing, he will be remembered as the President who promised to close Guantánamo, an internationally reviled stain on justice, simply because it was politically inconvenient.

It also needs stating that what makes this even worse is the fact that, of the 166 prisoners still held at Guantánamo, 46 are being held indefinitely without charge or trial, regarded as “too dangerous to release” even though the administration concedes that it does not have the evidence to put them on trial. This is a disgraceful endorsement of indefinite detention — holding people in a legal, moral and ethical black hole, in other words.

It is compounded by the fact that 86 others were cleared for release at least three years by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, a collection of around 60 sober and responsible government officials and representatives of the intelligence agencies, who spent a year assessing all the prisoners’ cases. In addition, some of these cleared prisoners were first cleared for release under President Bush as long ago as 2004, and in other cases in 2006 and 2007. Imagine being held for three, five, six, eight since you were told you were going home, and then comprehend the state of mind of Adnan Latif, a Yemeni cleared in 2006 and again under Obama, who died in Guantánamo last September.

Continuing to hold men who were cleared for release makes the US worse than a dictatorship that throws people in a dungeon and then throws away the key. America has thrown people in a dungeon called Guantánamo and thrown away the key because of the obstacles raised to releasing cleared prisoners by all three branches of the US government — President Obama and his administration, Congress, and the courts (and specifically the D.C. Circuit Court and the Supreme Court) — but they have made this even worse by pretending that there is a review process in operation by which prisoners are cleared for release. Doing so and not releasing them is, I argue, even more cruel than the actions of dictators, and pointing this out was the conclusion of my speech outside the White House on Friday.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Close Guantánamo: Photos of Protestors outside the Supreme Court on the 11th Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison

Close Guantánamo: Protestors outside the Supreme Court on the 11th Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison, a set on Flickr.

These photos are from the protest in Washington D.C. on January 11, 2013 to mark the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an annual event that becomes more shameful for the United States with every passing year, and which has also come to test the endurance of those opposed to the prison’s existence.

Four years after President Obama came to office promising to close Guantánamo within a year, the blunt and unforgivable truth is that the prison is still open, and that all three branches of the US government — the administration, Congress and the courts — have failed the 166 men still held, and particularly the 86 men who were cleared for release by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama in 2009, which spent a year reviewing the prisoners’ cases before reaching its sober and considered conclusions. In addition, some of these men were actually cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, some as long ago as 2004.

These 86 men are still held either because they are Yemenis, regarded as an unprecedented terrorist threat  — despite being cleared– since the foiled underwear bomb plot on a US-bound plane three years ago, or because they are from countries where they face the risk of torture if repatriated, or simply because Congress has passed legislation designed to prevent any prisoner being released to any country that lawmakers regard as a threat — which is pretty much everywhere in the Muslim world, according to numerous Republicans, and some Democrats too. President Obama has also failed the men in a depressingly thorough manner, endorsing the ban on releasing any Yemenis, and refusing to push for innocent prisoners seized by mistake to be resettled in the US if they cannot be safely repatriated.

The courts have also intervened to try to prevent the release of prisoners, but however much the blame is spread across the various branches of government, the unforgivable truth is that the US continues to hold 86 men cleared for release indefinitely — and probably until their deaths, unless steps are taken, by the administration, to locate and implement an evidently unfashionable form of political courage in their otherwise shallow and corrupt world of spin and expediency.

At the protest, attended by hundreds of opponents of the continued existence of Guantánamo, including supporters of 26 groups, ranging from Amnesty International and the Center for Constitutional Rights to the activists Witness Against Torture and World Can’t Wait, and my own pressure group, “Close Guantánamo,” the indignation was palpable, and the call for President Obama to end his inertia and find a solution was particularly pointed, given that it is the start of his second term, and his legacy is now being written, as well as by anger that, in September, one cleared prisoner, a mentally ill Yemeni named Adnan Latif, who was cleared in 2006 and 2009, died, crushed by his long and unacceptable detention so many years after he was told he would be going home.

More photos will follow soon, of the rally and speeches outside the White House, where I also spoke, but in the meantime I hope these photos capture something of the powerful sense of indignation that dominated the day, and that will continue to dominate our actions this year, and every year until Guantánamo is closed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Eleven Years of Guantánamo: End This Scandal Now!

Eleven years ago, on January 11, 2002, the Bush administration proudly presented to the world one of its major responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — a prison on the grounds of the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, designed to hold hundreds of men and boys seized in the “war on terror” that was declared in the wake of the attacks, where the prisoners were to be neither criminals not soldiers, but “enemy combatants” without any rights whatsoever.

The base was chosen because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts, and when the prisoners were deliberately excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, in a directive issued by President Bush on February 7, 2002, it became a genuinely evil experiment, devoted to torture and other forms of coercion, indefinite detention without charge or trial, and the extraction of false statements from the prisoners that were then dressed up as evidence to justify holding them.

This was in spite of the fact that, for the most part, the prisoners knew nothing about Al-Qaeda or international terrorism, and were sold to US forces for bounty payments by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, or seized as a result of inept US intelligence. Many of the prisoners were living in Pakistan or visiting Pakistan, or were visiting Afghanistan as missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, refugees or economic migrants.

Others were soldiers, recruited by clerics in their homelands to help the Pashtun Taliban fight an inter-Muslim civil war against Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, comprising the country’s other ethnic components — the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara who make up over half the population. These men may have been sold a lie about the Taliban establishing a “pure Islamic state” in Afghanistan, but few of them had even met Osama bin Laden, and only a few dozen of the 779 could genuinely be alleged to have had any involvement with terrorism or to have traveled to Afghanistan to engage in any kind of conflict with the United States prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Eleven years on, the prison’s continued existence demonstrates the profound failure of the US establishment to deal with the crimes committed in the name of counter-terrorism by the Bush administration. Although torture has largely been replaced by assassination as government policy — in the drone attacks that are such a hallmark of the Obama administration — the cancer of indefinite detention continues, at Guantánamo, to eat away at America’s belief in justice and fairness.

166 men are still held, of the 779 held in total since the prison opened, and, shockingly, 86 of these men were cleared for release — or otherwise told that the US government did not want to continue holding them without charge or trial for the rest of their lives — at least three years ago, after an interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama, issued a report after a year spent reviewing all the prisoners’ cases. In around half the cases, these men had previously been cleared for release, between 2004 and 2007, by military review boards established by the Bush administration.

In two-thirds of the cases, these prisoners are still held because they are Yemenis, and President Obama imposed a ban on the release of any cleared Yemenis from Guantánamo after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a US-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009. The rest are largely held because of onerous restrictions imposed by Congress, where lawmakers have passed legislation designed to prevent any prisoners from being released, for the most part as a cynical political maneuver.

On the 11th anniversary, I call on President Obama to fulfil the promise to close Guantánamo that he made when he took office in January 2009. The Yemenis, held on the basis of “guilt by nationality,” must be freed, and negotiations need to take place between the administration and Congress regarding the passages in the National Defense Authorization Act that prevent the release of prisoners, requiring the secretary of defense to make promises about the men’s future conduct that are impossible to make; namely, that they will not, under any circumstances, be able to pose a threat to the US or its interests.

Last Wednesday, when President Obama signed the latest National Defense Authorization Act, a $633 billion monster that will fund America’s bloated military-industrial complex for another year, he included a signing statement in which he criticized Congress, noting, “I continue to believe that operating the facility weakens our national security by wasting resources, damaging our relationships with key allies, and strengthening our enemies.”

Although President Obama had threatened to veto the bill, as he had threatened last year, he failed to do so in the end, stating, from his vacation in Honolulu, that he signed the bill into law because of “the need to renew critical defense authorities,” for which “funding was too great to ignore.” He did, however, give notice to Congress that he was not necessarily prepared to accept the restrictions if they violated what he regards as the acceptable reach of Presidential power.

Specifically, he stated, “My administration will interpret these provisions as consistent with existing and future determinations by the agencies of the executive responsible for detainee transfers. In the event that these statutory restrictions operate in a manner that violates constitutional separation of powers principles, my administration will implement them in a manner that avoids the constitutional conflict.”

In other correspondence in the run-up to the signing, defense secretary Leon Panetta wrote to House Armed Services Committee Chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon on December 11 to argue for “relief from the restrictions” by “highlighting the financial costs” of Guantánamo, where 1,700 troops and civilians work, and where, as the Miami Herald explained, “the Pentagon imports everything from food to fuel for electricity to entertainment for both captives and captors.” It costs around $800,000 a year to hold prisoners at Guantánamo — meaning that it costs nearly $70 million a year to hold the cleared prisoners alone — whereas the cost of one year’s federal confinement in a maximum security prison is just less than $35,000 a year; in other words, less than five percent of the cost per prisoner at Guantánamo.

Panetta also noted, “These sections would preclude moving even convicted war criminals serving life sentences to secure facilities in the United States that would also be economically efficient,” a reference that, at present, applies only to one prisoner, Ali al-Bahlul, convicted of producing videos for Al-Qaeda in a trial by military commission in 2008 at which he was given a life sentence after refusing to mount a defense.

Primarily, however, as the Miami Herald explained, President Obama took exception to a passage that “forbids the use of federal funds to transfer Guantánamo detainees to US soil for any reason, including a federal criminal trial,” and another which “maintains restrictions on executive branch authority to transfer detainees to a foreign country.” As the article noted, these restrictions “have all but frozen transfers from the base. Only those detainees who die in custody or who get court release orders can leave without a Defense Department waiver and certification to Congress.”

With the legitimacy of the military commissions under threat after a conservative judge in the D.C. Circuit Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, quashed the 2008 conviction of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, for providing material support to terrorism, because, as he correctly noted, it was not a crime at the time of the supposed offense, the administration may be looking for a way to revive federal court trials for Guantánamo prisoners.

Although terror suspects in general are prosecuted in federal court, where material support is a recognized offense, only one Guantánamo prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian peripherally involved in the 1998 African Embassy bombings, made it to the mainland for a federal court trial before the Congressional shutters came down. The administration’s intention to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men in federal court in New York, which was announced in November 2009, was abandoned in a humiliating climbdown by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, when significant opposition was mounted, and they caved in to the criticism.

Perhaps hinting that officials wanted to look once more at federal court trials, President Obama stated that the proposal for federal court trials “substitutes the Congress’s blanket political determination for careful and fact-based determinations, made by counterterrorism and law enforcement professionals, of when and where to prosecute Guantánamo detainees.” Reiterating his concerns that his power as the President was being unduly impeded, he added, “Removing that tool from the executive branch undermines our national security. Moreover, this provision would, under certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles.”

While the tug-of-war between Congress and the executive branch continues, there can be no justice for the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo — neither the 86 men cleared but still held, nor the 30 or so scheduled to face trials. For the sake of justice, a solution needs to be found that can lead to the release of the cleared prisoners, and fair trials, sooner rather than later, for the other men. In addition, a solution needs to be found for 46 others, who were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial by Obama’s Task Force, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, but that insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. This is deeply shocking, but also typical of the problems, as it infers a state of danger where none can be proved.

Everyone involved in this profoundly shameful story, in the executive branch and Congress, needs to stop treating Guantánamo as though it is some sort of challenging law enforcement matter. It is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, its rationale built on arrogance and vengeance, and sustained through torture and lies. Those who allegedly constitute a threat should be tried, and everyone else should be released, unless the US government can find the courage to declare that some of them are prisoners of war, as defined by the Geneva Conventions, who can legitimately be held unmolested until the end of hostilities.

However, that would involve the administration and lawmakers having to accept legal challenges regarding the duration of the “war on terror,” which, it seems, they do not want, preferring to continue to shirk their responsibilities for defining what kind of war America is allegedly involved in, and maintaining an ill-defined global war indefinitely.

The men at Guantánamo are victims of this bogus war, as are the 50 or so non-Afghan prisoners at Bagram, in Afghanistan, whose release was prevented by Congress for the first time in this year’s NDAA, even though some of them have been held for over ten years without even the limited rights of the Guantánamo prisoners.

That the lives of these prisoners should be sacrificed for endless war through a policy of indefinite dentition ought to be a source of undying shame for all Americans. It is time, once more, to demand the closure of Guantánamo, but this time not to give up if elected officials try to silence us with indifference.

Note: For more photos of the protests against the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, in Washington D.C. on January 11, 2013, see my Flickr account.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

A Message from Omar Deghayes on the 11th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo

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

On the 11th anniversary of the opening of the lawless prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where 166 prisoners seized in the “war on terror” remain imprisoned, I am in Washington D.C., having traveled from my home in London to take part in events designed to raise awareness of the burning need for the injustices of Guantánamo to be brought to an end, for the 86 cleared prisoners still held to be released, and for the others to be tried or released — or, if the political courage exists, to be redefined as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, so that we can finally begin to ask how long this ill-defined and open-ended “global war” can actually last.

Only those paying close attention seem to know that, of the 86 cleared men still held, all were cleared for release under President Obama in 2009, through the sober and careful deliberations of an interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and around half were also cleared for release by President Bush between 2004 and 2007, and yet they remain held because of political inertia, or cynical fearmongering, in all three branches of the US government — the administration, Congress and the courts.

As those of us who care, and who can find the time to travel, protest outside the Supreme Court, the Capitol and the White House in Washington D.C. — or take part in other events in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami and London — I wanted to make available to you a message from my friend Omar Deghayes, who was held in US custody, mostly at Guantánamo. from May 2002 until December 2007, when he was released, to be reunited with his family in the UK. Omar has marked the end of his fifth year of freedom by writing an appeal for justice to President Obama. He sent it to me accompanied by a note in which he said, “Hope you have a good, safe and successful journey to the States. Wanted to be with you in spirit there with all those who care. Please thank them on my behalf and wanted to share these thoughts with them.”

Omar’s message is below:

A message from former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes on the 11th anniversary of the prison’s opening

On 11th January 2013, we relive and remember the pain and suffering still being endured by many detainees kept far, behind bars and walls, alone, voiceless and stripped of every right, and so are their loved ones, a never extinguished flame in the heart.

Three years after he repeatedly promised to bring this shame to an end, President Obama failed to fulfil his promise, and there it remains a black blemish on the American morality.

I was lucky and grateful to be reunited with my family and back to the warmth of my home, to be touched, at last, by the soft cool wind of freedom, but my joy is incomplete and will remain so, until the rest of the unlawfully held detainees share my experience of freedom at last.

Before another one dies, and loses his rights even after his death, before another one loses his eye sight forever as myself, please bring this grave violation of the most basic human rights to an end, please free these detainees and unite them, intact, with their families, before the rest of their youth perishes behind concrete walls.

Most of these remaining detainees have been cleared for release years ago, never been condemned of committing any crime, yet no laws on earth seem to have the power to save them out of this evil and immoral place.

I strongly urge President Obama to take the right step, and leave behind a legacy that lives up to the terms of his Nobel peace prize.

Omar Deghayes

Former Prisoner at Guantánamo Bay

Legal Director GJC (Guantánamo Justice Centre)

Board member of Cageprisoners

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.