Andy Worthington's Blog, page 152

Andy Worthington Discusses the Urgent Need to Close Guantánamo with Peter B. Collins

As the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay approaches (on January 11, 2013), I wanted to make sure that I made available an interview I undertook recently with the respected progressive radio host Peter B. Collins, in San Francisco. Peter’s site is here, and our 50-minute interview is here, as an MP3.

Peter and I have spoken many times over the years, and it is always a pleasure to talk to him, as he is such a well-informed host, and his shows allow complex issues — like Guantánamo — to be discussed in depth.

Out latest conversation followed the reelection of Barack Obama, and gave us an opportunity to catch up on where we stand nearly four years on from the President’s failed promise to close Guantánamo within a year.

As Peter described it, “Journalist Andy Worthington updates us on Guantánamo, where 86 men cleared for release are still held … Worthington wrote The Guantánamo Files and continues to provide the best coverage of our island dungeon at his website.” As part of our discussion of the 86 cleared prisoners — out of 166 prisoners in total who are still held — we spoke specifically out the importance of the list providing the names of 55 of these cleared men, which was released by the government for the first time in September, and which I analysed in depth in my article, Who Are the 55 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners on the List Released by the Obama Administration?

We also spoke about “the September death of Adnan Latif, the Yemeni who had languished for 8 years since being cleared by Bush-era officials,” as Peter put it — a terrible indictment of US injustice and complacency that my colleague Jason Leopold has been pursuing relentlessly, and which I have most recently written about here and here.

As Peter put it, I also spoke about “the almost 100% denial rate for habeas corpus suits from Gitmo prisoners by the DC Court of Appeals in recent years” — a shameful story, also involving the Supreme Court, last June, which has never received the serious media attention it deserves — and we then followed up by discussing the surprising ruling by this same deeply Conservative court in favor of Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, whose 2008 conviction for providing material support for terrorism was overturned in October, on the basis that “material support” was “not a defined crime prior to 2006,” as Peter described it. I wrote about the Hamdan ruling in my article, Conservative Judges Demolish the False Legitimacy of Guantánamo’s Terror Trials.

Peter also explained how I provided “an update on the last British detainee still held, Shaker Aamer,” and also explained, “You can show your support to close Guantanamo here” — via the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and website that I established a year ago with the attorney Tom Wilner.

My thanks again to Peter, and I hope you have time to listen to the show.

Note: Peter’s show also included an interview with Sam Banning, who spoke about his new documentary, “Cruel and Unusual,” dealing with the unjust “three strikes” law in California.

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.

Memories of Summer: Photos of the Thames Festival on London’s South Bank

Memories of Summer: The Thames Festival on London’s South Bank, a set on Flickr.

Sunday September 9, 2012 was the final day of the weekend-long Thames Festival, established in 1997, and run by the Thames Festival Trust, which regularly attracts tens of thousands of visitors, and did so again this year, even though it was the last day of the Paralympic Games, and had been a summer so saturated with cultural events that it was possible to have thought beforehand that cultural saturation might well have set in.

Instead, the banks of the River Thames were packed, and nowhere more so than along the action-packed shoreline that stretches from Butlers Wharf in the east to Westminster Bridge in the west, via Tower Bridge, City Hall, Shakespeare’s Globe, Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, Gabriels Wharf, the South Bank Centre, the London Eye, and the cluster of largely unappealing corporate attractions in the former County Hall.

In the absence — this year — of the favourite attraction of myself and my family — the Feast on the Bridge, when Southwark Bridge is filled with long tables and excellent food outlets (and even some visiting farm animals) — we stayed mainly around the South Bank, which was the most popular area, although we promenaded at one point down to Bernie Spain Gardens, owned, managed and maintained by Coin Street Community Builders, a community action group that worked, successfully, to establish local, community-owned housing on a site sought by developers for offices in the 1970s and the early 1980s — something that is desperately needed again today, as rapacious developers pillage every spare piece of land in the whole of London for overpriced housing developments.

I hope you enjoy this set — a reminder of those heady days at the end of summer, when it is so lovely to be in Britain that it is sometimes possible to forget that it will come to an end, and that winter will strip the leaves off the trees and shorten the days with darkness.

It was also almost possible to forget that life in modern Britain is supposed to — according to those pushing the levers of power — revolve solely around money. Apart from the unfortunate presence of salespeople trying to flog the Olympic Village, the shrieking of big money was largely absent from the Thames Festival, as arts and culture held sway, and mostly small-scale operations sold people food and drink and gifts.

Thanks for taking my time machine back to September with me. For those keeping count, it’s the 68th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike. There will now be a short break, as I post a set of Christmas photos, before I return to post two more sets from September, of central London, and then return once more to the here and now, with more photo sets of winter.

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

Torture, Torture Everywhere

For those of us who have been arguing for years that senior officials and lawyers in the Bush administration must be held accountable for the torture program they introduced and used in their “war on terror,” last week was a very interesting week indeed, as developments took place in Strasbourg, in London and in Washington D.C., which all pointed towards the impossibility that the torturers can escape accountability forever.

That may be wishful thinking, given the concerted efforts by officials in the US and elsewhere to avoid having to answer for their crimes, and the ways in which, through legal arguments and backroom deals, they have suppressed all attempts to hold them accountable. However, despite this, it seems that maintaining absolute silence is impossible, and last week one breakthrough took place when, unanimously, a 17-judge panel of the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Khaled El-Masri, a German used car salesman of Lebanese origin, who is one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in the whole of the “war on terror.” See the summary here.

Describing the ruling, the Guardian described how the court stated that “CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on,” and “also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning [him],” also noting, “It is the first time the court has described CIA treatment meted out to terror suspects as torture.”

El-Masri was unfortunate enough to have the same name as a man who allegedly aided the 9/11 hijackers, and when, after a row with his wife, he arrived in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003 for a short break on his own, he was, instead, seized and held in a hotel room for 23 days by Macedonian agents, and then handed over to CIA operatives at Skopje airport.

He was then “beaten severely from all sides,” as the court described it, adding, “His clothes were sliced from his body with scissors or a knife. His underwear was forcibly removed. He was thrown to the floor, his hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back. He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus … a suppository was forcibly administered on that occasion.” He was then placed in a nappy, hooded, shackled and put on a plane.

Horrendously, El-Masri was flown by the CIA to the “Salt Pit,” a secret torture prison in Afghanistan, where he was held for five months until the CIA realized that he was a case of mistaken identity, and he was flown back to Europe. Dropped off on the border with Albania, he was abandoned and left to make his own way home, with his incredible-sounding story.

Since then, he has found every door to accountability shut, and has struggled with mental health issues as a result of his ordeal. The ruling by the ECHR will help to vindicate this poor man, and the 60,000 Euros ($80,000) the court also awarded him will presumably be of some use too.

His victory will not compel the US to accept any kind of responsibility, of course, but it joins the conviction of 22 CIA operatives and a senior US military official in Italy, for the kidnap and rendition to torture in Egypt of a cleric, Abu Omar, in February 2003, and it also provides hopes that other cases before the ECHR — against Poland, Romania and Lithuania, for their involvement in the Bush administration’s torture program — will lead to similar victories for those involved — in this case, the “high-value detainees” Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who are currently in Guantánamo.

While Khaled El-Masri was securing his victory in Strasbourg, another victim of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, Sami al-Saadi, a Libyan and a former opponent of the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, secured an important victory in the UK, when the British government agreed to pay him £2.23 million ($3.5 million) in an out-of-court settlement relating to the key role played by the UK, working with the US and Libya, in kidnapping Mr. al-Saadi and his family and rendering them to Col. Gaddafi, who then imprisoned and tortured him.

The British role in al-Saadi’s kidnapping and rendition to torture was confirmed in letters found in the office of Col. Gaddafi’s spy chief Moussa Koussa in Tripoli, during the fall of Gaddafi last year, and they cast the UK in a bleak light, not only in relation to Sami al-Saadi, but also in the case of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, another long-term Gaddafi opponent, who was also kidnapped (in Malaysia) and rendered to torture with British involvement. Both kidnappings took place in 2004, while Gaddafi was being courted to renounce terrorism, and grant the US and the UK access to his oil fields. Belhaj is still pursuing his claim against the British government through the courts, even though his friend al-Saadi accepted a settlement.

Al-Saadi explained, “My family suffered enough when they were kidnapped and flown to Gaddafi’s Libya. They will now have the chance to complete their education in the new, free Libya. I will be able to afford the medical care I need because of the injuries I suffered in prison.”

He added, “I started this process believing that a British trial would get to the truth in my case. But today, with the government trying to push through secret courts, I feel that to proceed is not best for my family. I went through a secret trial once before, in Gaddafi’s Libya. In many ways, it was as bad as the torture. It is not an experience I care to repeat. Even now, the British government has never given an answer to the simple question: ‘Were you involved in the kidnap of me, my wife and my children?’”

Again, the US is not directly implicated, but the reverberations from the settlement cannot be wished away by the US, and, it seems, there will be more to come in the case of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who said of al-Saadi, “When my friend Sami al-Saadi was freed from Abu Salim prison on 23 August 2011, he weighed seven stone. He was close to death. It is a miracle he survived his ordeal and is home with his family.”

The third significant development last week was the approval, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, of a 6,000-page report that took three years to complete, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the CIA’s torture program under the Bush administration. The report will now be sent to the CIA and the Obama administration, although it is unclear if it will ever be publicly released. Because it remains classified, lawmakers were not at liberty to discuss its contents as openly as they might have wished, although their criticism of the torture program was evident. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) stated, “The report uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight.” She also stated, “I strongly believe that the creation of long-term, clandestine ‘black sites’ and the use of so-called ‘enhanced-interrogation techniques’ were terrible mistakes. The majority of the Committee agrees.”

In addition, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) stated, “It is my hope that we can reach a consensus in this country that we will never again engage in these horrific abuses, and that the mere suggestion of doing so should be ruled out of our political discourse, regardless of which party holds power. It is therefore my hope that this Committee will take whatever steps necessary to finalize and declassify this report, so that all Americans can see the record for themselves, which I believe will finally close this painful chapter for our country.”

Unfortunately, while I also hope, first of all, that the report will be published, and, secondly, that it will not be excessively redacted, it is troubling to realize that everything relating to it will be calibrated by those in power to avoid the possibility that anyone will be held accountable for what took place in the darkest years of the Bush administration.

[image error]Sadly, torture remains either off-limits or glorified in the two other places where it counts — in the military commissions at Guantánamo, where the chief judge, Army Col. James Pohl, confirmed last week that those facing trials were prohibited from mentioning the torture to which they were subjected in the CIA’s “black sites,” and in movie theaters across the country, where Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” will soon be showing.

As Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald, Judge Pohl “approved the use of a time delay on public viewing of the Sept. 11 death-penalty trial as well as a censor in his court to make sure nobody divulges details of a now defunct CIA interrogation program, citing national security interests.” Rosenberg also explained that, in a 20-page protective order accompanying his ruling, in response to a challenge by the ACLU, he spelled out that “anything about their CIA custody is classified, including ‘their observations and experiences,’ meaning the accused can’t say what happened to them at the so-called ‘dark sites’ in open court.”

In contrast, film director Kathryn Bigelow faces no censorship for her deluded and dangerous account of the events that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. As Jane Mayer of the New Yorker explained last week, the film “seems to accept almost without question that the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden,” even though “this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts.”

Mayer also explained that the film “does not capture the complexity of the debate about America’s brutal detention program. It doesn’t include a single scene in which torture is questioned, even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue — again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the FBI, the military, the Justice Department, and the CIA itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime.”

As movies are so powerful, I fear that Bigelow will be playing a major cheerleading role for the advocates of torture, to which the best response, while repeatedly highlighting the case of Khaled El-Masri and the shame of rendering political opponents to Col. Gaddafi to secure his support and his oil, will be for President Obama and Congress to make sure that the Senate’s comprehensive torture report is released, and not hidden away, so that the torturers cannot continue to evade accountability for their crimes.

Without accountability, the toxic virus of torture in America’s body politic will continue to infect the whole country with its poison. It is time for the denial to end.

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.

Free Shaker Aamer: Last British Resident in Guantánamo Sues British Government

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. 

As we approach the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, those of us calling for the prison’s closure, as President Obama promised on his second day in office nearly four years ago, are still waiting for a sign that, in his second and final term, the President will revisit that promise and, first of all, address the disgraceful and unacceptable fact that, of the 166 prisoners still held, 86 were approved for transfer out of the prison by the Guantánamo Review Task Force that he established soon after taking office in 2009.

One of these men, and the one who, we believe, ought to be the first to be freed, is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who is one of the 86 cleared prisoners — and was one of 55 cleared prisoners named in an important document released by the Justice Department in September, which, for the first time ever, identified these men publicly.

Although the President faces opposition from Congress regarding the release of the majority of the cleared prisoners — because lawmakers have spent the last two years raising obstacles to the release of any prisoner to any country that they regard as dangerous — this cannot be said of the UK, where Shaker Aamer, born in Saudi Arabia, lived for many years before his capture in Afghanistan, and his transfer to Guantánamo, and where, crucially, his British wife and his four British children await his return.

To date, neither the US government, which has cleared him for release, nor the British government, which claims to have been asking for his return since 2007, has provided a realistic explanation of why he is not a free man. It was understandable — if unacceptable nonetheless — that the President refused to free Shaker Aamer during the run-up to the election, because Republicans would have seized on it to portray him as irresponsible on national security issues, but now that he has been reelected, there should be no obstacle.

One indication that the stumbling block may not just be the Obama administration, but may also be the British government, came last Friday when, in London, Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent 15 of the men still in Guantánamo, including Shaker Aamer, announced that their client was suing the British government for defamation. As the Guardian explained, he “blames the security and intelligence agencies for his continuing detention,” and “has accused MI5 and MI6 of making false and highly damaging claims about his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda.”

At a press conference, also attended by the comedian Frankie Doyle, who is supporting the campaign to free Mr. Aamer, his lawyers explained that they have written to William Hague, the foreign secretary, and Theresa May, the home secretary, “demanding an explanation for the false claims they say UK officials have made against him to the CIA, and an admission that his indefinite detention constitutes a war crime.” They also made reference to the fact that Mr. Aamer “has repeatedly implicated British officials in his mistreatment in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay,” and that these allegations are currently being investigated by the Metropolitan Police, who are planning to visit Guantánamo imminently to talk to Mr. Aamer.

As the Independent explained three weeks ago, “Mr. Aamer asserts that he was tortured, including having his head repeatedly bashed against a wall, by US investigators in the presence of British spies at Bagram, Afghanistan. He also says the British agents were aware of his torture in Guantánamo, which involved beatings and long periods in solitary confinement. This treatment continues, he says, despite at least three visits from British secret service personnel.”

The Independent also explained that, although his children “have no memories of their father,” they “speak to him on Skype every few months, with the help of the Red Cross.” His youngest son, Faris, who was born on February 14, 2002, the day his father was transferred from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, said that “when he spoke to his father for the first time, he thought ‘he was very funny.’”

The Independent also noted:

The children have written letters to President Obama in the hope that their voices would be heard after his re-election. “My dad is still in prison, and even though he has been cleared for release he’s been tortured,” Michael, 13, wrote. “I find it very difficult without my dad. I can feel how hard it is for my mum.” Mr. Aamer’s daughter, Johina, 15, added: “Why don’t you imagine being locked up for 11 years of your life and possibly more years to come. Try imagining being treated like a circus animal in a cage and being taken away from your home and everyone you love.”

At the press conference last Friday, Mr. Aamer’s lawyers claimed that American interrogators “were supplied with ‘knowingly false information’ by the UK security services, including the allegation that Mr. Aamer was paid directly by [Osama] Bin Laden and that he also recruited people to fight for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan,” as the Guardian described it. As his lawyers stated, “One of the most serious, knowingly false statements made by the UK security services is that Mr. Aamer is an al-Qaeda member who was part of al-Qaeda in London.”

The lawyers also described claims that Mr. Aamer was associated with mosques which served as an “attack planning and propaganda production base for al-Qaeda” as “emphatically false” in their letter to William Hague and Theresa May, adding, “Mr. Aamer emphatically denies that he is a member of al-Qaeda. He never has been.”

The BBC added that Mr. Aamer’s lawyers also stated, “The British Security Services will be able to produce not one shred of reliable evidence to the contrary.” Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s founder and director, said, “I’m utterly convinced that Shaker was not involved in extremism. But don’t take my word for it, lets have a trial — that’s the British way of doing things, and it’s the American way too. But if you presume people guilty we may as well lock everyone up.”

Note: To call for Shaker Aamer’s release, please sign the e-petition to the British government (UK citizens and residents only), and/or the international petition 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.

Top of the World: Photos of Nunhead Allotments, and the View from the Hill-Top Reservoir

Top of the World: Nunhead Allotments, and the View from the Hill-Top Reservoir, a set on Flickr.

The photos in this set — the 67th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — were taken on September 8, 2012, a lovely Sunny Saturday, and are the second of five sets from September, drawn from the huge archive I’ve been building up of my photographic journeys over the last five months (see the first set here). They also provide a contrast to the photos from November that I published previously, of autumn in south east London (see here, here, here, here and here), although I will soon return to more contemporary photos, as winter is now in full swing and Christmas is just around the corner.

On the day in question, I had set off on a bike ride, and had found myself drawn to the heights of Nunhead, one of the areas next to my home in Brockley, in south east London, where I had lived briefly in 1999, before the birth of my son. Completely unexpectedly, I stumbled on the allotments below Nunhead Reservoir, at the highest point in Nunhead, formerly known as Nunhead Hill, just as people were being let in, and, impulsively, I asked if I could come in and take some photos. For more information, see the Stuart Road Allotment Society’s website, and, for a history of allotments, see the National Allotment Society website, and the article, “A Brief History of Allotments in England.”

I was not only allowed in, as a lovely little social gathering was taking place, and given a drink, but I also became captivated by Nunhead Reservoir, built in 1855, which is the covered reservoir above the allotments, and found out that it can be accessed via Brockley Footpath, the footpath beside the allotments. This runs up to the hill-top beside the allotments and next to Nunhead Cemetery, another of south east London’s little-known treasures, which is one of seven suburban cemeteries built between 1839 and 1841, and it provides those who can locate it — those specifically drawn to the high places — with the most extraordinary views over London, as well as being a magnet for graffiti artists.

This was a fascinating journey — one of many that have occurred since I began my photographic project in May. I was surprised to make such great discoveries near my home, although it was not the first time I have been surprised by parts of London that are almost on my doorstep, to add to the pleasure of discovering completely unknown parts of London further afield.

The next photo set captures aspects of life on the South Bank during the Thames Festival, on the day after this set, and is followed by two sets in the West End, which I undertook after I had been interviewed on the BBC World Service, the day before the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when the prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan was in the news.

I hope to see you for those journeys, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy seeing some of the wonders of south east London.

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.

Wake Up to the Injustice of Britain’s Housing Crisis

Modern Britain is gripped by a cold-heartedness created by a sense of entitlement — not the entitlement to meagre benefits that is so shamefully touted by the Tory leaders of the coalition government as an excuse for hateful attacks on the welfare state, but the entitlement of those like David Cameron and George Osborne and those they represent, those who feel entitled to use clever accountants to avoid paying tax, both individually and in relation to the companies and corporations they support, and those who believe that it is acceptable to exploit others to live in the manner to which they believe they are entitled — which many people do through property.

These people, through their invented sense of entitlement, are presiding over the creation of the most hideously unequal society since before the time of the great Victorian reformers, who, in contrast, were inspired by a desire to help the poor rather than punish them, and were often inspired by the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. As a response to unfettered exploitation and hideous inequality, these reformers laid the foundations for the welfare state in the second half of the 19th century, foundations that were only fully realised through the establishment of the modern welfare state (including the creation of the NHS) by a Labour government after the Second World War.

However, in modern Britain, the notion of Christian charity is severely endangered by naked profiteers and those who, less obviously but no less damagingly, exploit those who cannot afford to buy their own homes to charge hideously expensive rents in a rental market that is unregulated by government, and is, moreover, one in which rampant greed has become commonplace.

Last week, one of the results of this collective greed was aired by the BBC in a Panorama special entitled, “Britain’s Hidden Housing Crisis,” which followed four groups of people over five months, as unexpected troubles derailed their lives, and they lost their homes and ended up homeless, joining the thousands of other people living on the streets, or, more typically, the millions living precariously in rented accommodation, where there are few obstacles preventing landlords from charging whatever they want, and, if they can get away with it, making those people live in squalor.

The BBC described the programme as follows:

Britain is in the grip of a housing crisis of a sort not seen before — where even the most unexpected people are finding themselves homeless. Every two and a half minutes someone in Britain is threatened with losing their home. This Panorama Special follows four stories over five months and reveals the devastating impact of being evicted from your own home and losing everything — from an investment banker now sleeping rough in a park in Croydon; to a businessman who lost his company in the recession; and a grandmother who gets cancer, has to stop working and then has her house repossessed.

So how did this happen, and what can be done about it? First of all, more people need to become aware of how desperate the housing situation is in the UK, and, if they are comfortable themselves, to imagine how horrendous it is to not have a roof over your head, or to live in overcrowded and/or unsanitary conditions. Secondly, people need to accept that London and the south east are gripped by a damaging form of greed that is causing widespread misery and suffering for the benefit of the banks, housing developers and individuals and companies exploiting others for unacceptable profits.

Slow signs that people are waking up to the scale of the crisis can be gleaned from the response to the Panorama programme, and by the fact that it is beginning to filter through to the right-wing media. Mary Riddell, a former Guardian columnist who now writes for the Daily Telegraph, last week wrote a column, “Britain’s monumental housing crisis is the scandal of our age,” in which she did a good job of providing an introduction to the crisis for the Telegraph‘s readers.

As she explained, “Homelessness has risen by more than a quarter in three years, with the number of families forced to live in B&Bs, often in conditions reminiscent of the Dickensian workhouse, up by 57 per cent in the past 12 months.” That latter statistic is particularly grim. She also pointed out that, according to Shelter, an estimated 75,000 children “will wake up on Christmas Day without a home.”

She also pointed out that, even beyond the sharpest end of the housing crisis — those who are homeless, or in unsuitable rented property — “[m]illions of young people are now realising that their hopes of buying their own homes will be unfulfilled, perhaps for ever.” The reasons are clearly delineated — stagnant wages, rocketing property costs and a mortgage moratorium,” which mean that “the average first-time buyer in London is now 37.” Riddell also explained that newly published census figures revealed that “house-building fell by four per cent between 2001 and 2011, while the numbers renting from private landlords rose from nine to 15 per cent.”

The central problem, as she proceeded to explain, is that there has not been enough building — for decades. In a new report, the Institute for Public Policy Research has noted that, under current projections, “demand for housing will outstrip supply by 750,000 homes by 2025. As Riddell notes, “Of the 88 per cent of 18- to 30-year-olds who told the institute that they hoped to own their own home within 10 years, the majority will see their hopes thwarted.”

Instead of addressing these issues, the government is only making matters worse. Ministers are both hiding the crisis and adding to it through cynical attacks on the unemployed, persuading my fellow citizens that the unemployed — and the disabled — are actually workshy scroungers, who should not be entitled to benefits, and are, in some unexplained alchemical way, responsible for the financial problems that have followed the global economic crash of 2008, which, of course, was actually caused by bankers and politicians. The fact that there are five times more unemployed people than there are jobs appears not to trouble either ministers, or my fellow citizens, who have taken readily to scapegoating the poor in a manner that would have been deeply satisfying to the Nazis.

Last week’s announcement by George Osborne — that he intends to limit an increase in benefits to just 1 percent a year for the next three years — adds to the problems shovelled on the poor in the last two and half years. In April, the cap on benefits, at £500 a week in total, will be introduced, and will cause huge damage, as numerous newly homeless families, unable to afford their rent, will be moved to ghettos where the rents will be cheaper, in large part because there is no work. Ignored in all of this, as ministers and my fellow citizens continue to rail against the spongers, is the fact that the housing benefit that makes up the majority of people’s benefits is not something that is pocketed by those in receipt of benefits, but is paid to the landlords who are not obliged to charge anything less than whatever the market will bear.

Noting this, Mary Riddell pointed out how the Labour MP Karen Buck has explained that “recent government forecasts predicted that £35 billion would be spent subsidising private rents between 2011 and 2015, meaning the taxpayer will pay £12 billion more on supporting low-income households renting in the private sector than in the preceding four-year period.” She added, “Whatever small savings come from welfare crackdowns, the only winners will be the private landlords now demanding extortionate rents from benefit claimants and from young people forced to shelve any idea of buying their own homes.”

Riddell also notes that the Labour Party has “promised, as part of its policy review, to consult on forcing landlords to give longer tenancies and ‘predictable’ rents,” although it remains to be seen if Labour will in fact tackle a crisis that is partly of their own making, and which involves the great profiteering scam that almost all of the wealthier members of society — including MPs — are tied into; namely, the huge profits to be made in Britain’s monstrously overpriced property market.

Rent caps — an obvious solution to the activities of the rental market’s unprincipled predators — would undermine the bubble that is feeding so many people who believe they are entitled to profit from property in a completely unregulated manner, although another problem, which Riddell notes, is “the dearth of affordable social housing,” which “Labour should have done far more to rectify when it was in office.”

There is indeed a huge and long-standing shortage of social housing, although the Tories are not actually interested, having made it clear that they despise anyone who isn’t a mortgage holder, and, as a result, having introduced a pernicious new rental regime for social housing in which children are not allowed to take over homes from their parents, and new social tenants are obliged to pay 80 percent of market rents. This is an absurd situation, in London and the south east in particular, as market rents are extortionate, and unaffordable for many workers, and 80 percent of those rents is also an unaffordable amount for low-paid workers — or even those on the median income, which, in the UK, is around £14,000 a year (the median being the half-way point in the incomes of all workers, rather then the average income, which is skewed by the incomes of the rich).

While politicians fail to seriously address the housing crisis, Mary Riddell notes that many of those forced into exorbitant rental situations, and unable to afford to buy a home, are not so indifferent. Some of the young people who spoke to the Institute for Public Policy Research, for example, spoke of “how they were deferring getting married or having children,” while others said they “had no sense of belonging or commitment to the area in which they lived.” She added, crucially, “These are not the vagrants of tomorrow but the bank managers, the teachers and the potential backbone of the communities that bind Britain together.”

She also noted, “Like the houses and flats that Generation Rent cannot and may never afford, that sense of belonging is beyond price. If it is to be restored, then rents must be brought down and investment shifted from welfare (and the pockets of unscrupulous landlords) into building the homes that Britain needs so desperately.”

Mary Riddell touched on some of the key themes of the housing crisis in an important — i.e. Tory — medium, although she failed to note that another pernicious Tory lie concerns those in receipt of benefits, who, in contrast to the government’s unsubstantiated claims, are not. for the most part, unemployed. As the New Statesman explained back in June, after David Cameron had floated a vile idea to cut housing benefit from the under-25s, in his speech he “perpetuated the biggest myth about housing benefit: that it is a benefit for the unemployed.”

The New Statesman added:

The truth is that just one in eight claimants is out of work (not a statistic that you’ll find reported in most papers). The majority of those who claim housing benefit, including the under-25s, do so to compensate for substandard wages and extortionate rents. A recent study by The Building and Social Housing Foundation showed that 93 per cent of new housing benefit claims made between 2010 and 2011 were made by households containing at least one employed adult.

Reiterating the crucial point that a bloated housing benefit bill is just a giant scam to transfer billions in taxpayers’ money to private landlords, the New Statesman also explained:

It is meaningless of Cameron to claim that the housing benefit budget is “too large” without considering why. The inflated budget, which will reach £23.2bn this year, is the result of a conscious choice by successive governments to subsidise private landlords rather than invest in affordable social housing. Yet rather than addressing the problem of stagnant wages and excessive rents, Cameron, in a bid to appease his querulous party, has chosen to squeeze the already squeezed.

For a final thought, for now, on the need for a massive new programme of social housing, John Perry, who was the director of policy at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) for 12 years until 2003, recently wrote an article for the Public Finance blog, in which he noted, “The construction of more council houses could help provide homes to rent while boosting job creation and the wider economy. George Osborne should lift the borrowing caps on local authorities to make this happen.” Refuting, crucially, David Cameron’s claim that “you can’t borrow your way out of a debt crisis,” Perry wrote that “borrowing to build houses makes perfect economic sense,” because austerity is not working. As he put it, “if interlinked economies like those of the EU all cut at once, the austerity is self-defeating and debt overhang gets worse, not better,” as “the National Institute for Economic and Social Research has pointed out.”

Pointing out that George Osborne needs to invest in housing, Perry noted that, although £10bn is in the pipeline as guarantees for housing associations, it is not known “how the guarantees will operate, and stimulating the building of houses for sale will only work if buyers can get mortgages,” and, in fact, what is needed is “direct investment in building new homes for rent.” As he proceeded to explain, “it so happens that local authorities have the capacity both to borrow and to build,” and “building council houses provides an almost perfect combination of economic benefits that could easily outweigh the costs,” because “it would use spare capacity in the construction industry and create jobs at a time when many point out that it is the decline in construction that is dragging down the economy,” and also because, “Many councils would link building contracts to training and apprenticeships, not only taking people off the dole but equipping them for future work. Gloucester City Homes calculates that apprenticeships are almost cost-neutral given the benefit savings if the apprentice was previously unemployed.”

Perry also noted that “every pound spent becomes £2.84 in the wider economy,” which is “just the sort of high-leverage impact required,” because “when spending money on building houses 92p of every pound stays in the UK.” He also pointed out that “houses when built and let generate rents and save benefit expenditure, because half of new social lettings go to people who were paying expensive private rents. If some of the remaining lettings rehouse people from costly temporary accommodation, there are further savings.”

He also noted that, “since they started building again two years ago, councils have shown they can do so at lower costs,” and that they also charge lower rents. In conclusion, he asked if anyone can “think of a good argument against doing it?” which is surely a very valid question. I have no doubt that George Osborne will do nothing substantial, and I also fear that the Labour Party will also not be interested, so perhaps the first appeal needs to be to those profiting from property, who need to ask themselves why their narrow self-interest should be unregulated, and why, in any case, they should think it appropriate to profit from their exploitation of the housing needs of others.

Note: For more discussions of the housing crisis, see the series of articles, under the heading, “The Politics of Housing,” on the website of the New Left Project.

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser: End of Week Appeal for Support for My Guantánamo Work

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Please support my work!

My thanks to the ten friends and supporters who have made donations to help to support my ongoing work as an independent journalist, investigator and commentator, working primarily to close the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, through humanizing the men held there, and exposing the enduring lies put forward by the Bush administration.

These lies are summed up in Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that the prisoners at Guantánamo are the “worst of the worst,” when the truth is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the men held had no involvement whatsoever with terrorism, and the cases against them are built up not of verifiable evidence, but of unreliable statements made by their fellow prisoners, most of whom have been exposed as unreliable witnesses by analysts within the US military and intelligence communities.

I’m also a concerned citizen of the UK, appalled at my government’s malevolent ideological assault on the poor, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled — as well as the attempt to destroy the NHS — and I write about these issues when possible, as well as being involved in a project I established in May this year, to photograph the whole of London by bike, a project that is also politically charged.

I have so far received over $300 in donations for the three months to come, and, ideally, I’d like to raise another $1000, although I understand that times are hard everywhere, as people have to cope with reduced living standards, unemployment and ideologically motivated austerity programs, part of the ongoing fallout from the global banking crash of 2008, whose architects — the bankers and the politicians who supported them — have evaded justice.

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

Thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work.

Andy Worthington

London

December 15, 2012

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 and David Remes Discuss Guantánamo on Revolution Truth

Last week, I took part in a panel discussion organized by Revolution Truth, along with David Remes, the attorney for a number of Guantánamo prisoners, which was presented by the activist Tangerine Bolen, with her co-host Pamela Sue Taylor.

The show, entitled, “GTMO, The Rule of Law and the NDAA,” lasted a little over an hour, and is available here as an MP3. A description of the show is here, and I’ve also posted it below as a YouTube video, which has just been made available today.

This was a fascinating show, and it was great to spend an hour on a show with Tangerine, who I got to know through her work at Revolution Truth, and her role as a plaintiff in the case brought by herself, Chris Hedges and others against the US government regarding the mandatory military custody provisions for alleged terror suspects that is contained in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This led to a memorable victory in a US courtroom earlier this year, which I wrote about in my article, Why Does the Government So Desperately Want Indefinite Detention for Terror Suspects?

In the show, David and I had the opportunity to explain in depth the story of Guantánamo past, present and future, and also to talk about the death of Adnan Latif, a Yemeni, and one of David’s clients, who died in Guantánamo three months ago, despite having been cleared for release repeatedly — by a military review board under the Bush administration, by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and by a US judge — although that latter decision was overturned by a disgraceful panel of appeals court judges, and, just three months before his death, when offered an opportunity to deal with his case (and that of six other Guantánamo prisoners), the Supreme Court refused to intervene.

Adnan Latif was failed by all three branches of the US government, and it can only be hoped that his death will lead to renewed demands for the prison’s closure, especially as my friend and colleague Jason Leopold continues to keep his story in the public eye, most recently, with David’s help (as he discussed during the show), in an article entitled, Latif Letter About Guantanamo Speaks From the Grave: “I Am Being Pushed Toward Death Every Moment.”

There is much more in the show — including discussion of the NDAA — and I hope you can find the time to listen to it, but as we approach the 11th anniversary of the prison’s opening, on January 11, 2013,  those calling for the closure of the prison — and for President Obama to fulfil his promise to close it — will be holding up Adnan as an example of what is so dreadfully wrong at Guantánamo, when cleared prisoners like him are dying, despite having been cleared for release.

86 other cleared prisoners are still held at Guantánamo, and it is imperative that the obstacles to their release are removed, before any of them, like Adnan Latif, die in Guantánamo without being freed. These obstacles are in Congress, where cynical lawmakers have set up obstacles designed to prevent the release of any prisoners, under any circumstances, and in President Obama’s administration, where a ban is in place on releasing any of the Yemenis who make up two-thirds of the cleared prisoners, because, three years ago, a Nigerian recruited in Yemen tired and failed to blow up a bomb in his underwear on a flight into the United States.

My thanks again to Tangerine Bolen and the team at Revolution Truth, and I hope to have an opportunity to talk on Revolution Truth again.

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.

Blue Skies and Golden Light: Photos of the River Thames in September

Blue Skies and Golden Light: The River Thames in September, a set on Flickr.

After my recent five-part series of photo sets from south east London — my home turf — in November, I promised to publish some photos from September, from the huge archive of photos I’ve been building up over the last five months, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, and also to publish photos from further afield in London.

In the first of five previously unpublished sets from September (and the 66th set overall in my London photo project) the photos here are from a journey I made by bike on September 6, a gloriously sunny day, when I took my son Tyler and his friend Louis to the South Bank and back, travelling there via Greenwich Foot Tunnel and the Isle of Dogs, and returning via Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, a great circular tour of the River Thames to the east of central London, which involves two of my very favourite journeys in the whole of London.

These routes are largely unpolluted by cars, and permanently close to the river, which, I realise more and more as time passes, is the city’s creator, however much generations of the rich and powerful have deluded themselves into thinking that it has something to do with them. Without water, we are nothing, however rich we are, and without the Thames — and the fresh water that feeds into its long tidal reach — London’s rich would be corpses.

The highlights of that September trip are all here — on the way there, a break on the shoreline of the River Thames on the Isle of Dogs, taking advantage of the low tide, and on the way back, the barges and boats of the community at Reeds Wharf, just to the east of Tower Bridge, and the towers of Canary Wharf, viewed from Rotherhithe, bathed in golden light by the setting sun.

In the next set, I’ll be posting photos from Nunhead, which, I realise, is in south east London, but the three sets after that will, I promise, be further from home — one on the South Bank, and two others in central London, and, in particular, on Regent Street and in Leicester Square.

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Please Support My Campaigning Work on Guantánamo

Please support my work!

It’s the third day of my quarterly fundraiser, in which I ask you, my friends and supporters, to help support my work as an independent journalist, researcher and activist — primarily on Guantánamo, and America’s embrace of torture and indefinite detention, but also on other issues, including, in the UK, ideologically driven austerity programmes targeting the most vulnerable members of society.

I’m sorry to report that, so far, I have only received $140 towards my target of $2500, and hope that you can at least help me to reach $1300 before the week is over — that works out at just $100 a week over the next three months.

If you appreciate the work that I do — and if you understand that most of it is unpaid — a donation of $25 or £15 would work out at two dollars a week or £1 a week; a small price, I hope, for maintaining this website, with its associated costs, and for allowing me to keep campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo, to work as an activist on other issues, to take part in events, and to undertake radio interviews, when I receive no funding for most of that work. I don’t have an NGO or a university backing me, and I rely on your support to make it possible.

If you can help at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world. If you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

Thank you for your time and for your interest in my work.

Andy Worthington

London

December 12, 2012

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.