Andy Worthington's Blog, page 154

Photos: Greenwich Early and Late

Greenwich Early and Late, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, this, the 63rd set I’ve posted, contains photos taken in Greenwich, in south east London, in the early morning and after dark, on two recent trips — the first after an epic journey from Limehouse Basin up the Limehouse Cut and the Lea Navigation to the Olympic Park at Stratford and beyond (which I hope to post soon), and the second in the early morning of the following day, after a good friend helped me liberate my bike from where I had left it overnight, when my key snapped off in the lock.

Celebrated in and of its own right, as a maritime centre and a former royal residence — as well as a venue for this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games — Greenwich is the most significant tourist destination in suburban south east London, with its many attractions — the Cutty Sark, the Royal Park, the Observatory and the Royal Naval College, for example, as well as other attractions like St. Alfege Church and Greenwich Market, a covered market for artists, craftspeople, food vendors and antique sellers, which plays a major role in ensuring that Greenwich is not plagued by a surfeit of the same bland corporate chain stores that have taken over almost ever major population centre in the country. That status, however, is in doubt as the owners are determined to “regenerate” the market, which will only allow corporate raiders to take over and destroy Greenwich’s character.

These photos capture some of these attractions — St. Alfege Church and the market — and they also focus on some of the other shops, pubs and restaurants that give Greenwich its character, as well as visits to the shoreline of the River Thames, a place that I am drawn to repeatedly, and Deptford Creek, the tidal part of the River Ravensbourne, which feeds into the Thames on the border of Greenwich and Deptford. On the creek there are still traces of the maritime industries that once played such major role in Britain’s wealth and economic health, before greed took over and far too much was outsourced and moved to vast container ports. Like the River Thames, Deptford Creek is also a place that I visit repeatedly.

I hope you enjoy these photos, the third in a series of five photo sets dealing with my part of London — south east London — in autumn, following on from a set in Hilly Fields in Brockley at sunset, and another set in Lewisham, Greenwich and Deptford at night. The next set features St. Alfege Park, a park and graveyard next to St. Alfege Church, which I photographed on the same morning that I rescued my bike in Greenwich, and there will be one more set before I broaden my scope once more, and post another five sets of photos that I took in September, in other parts of 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.

The Long Pursuit of Accountability for the Bush Administration’s Torture Program

In June 2004, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a notorious memo from August 2002 was leaked. It was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and it claimed to redefine torture and to authorize its use on prisoners seized in the “war on terror.” I had no idea at the time that its influence would prove to be so long-lasting.

Ten years and four months since it was first issued, this memo — one of two issued on the same day, which will forever be known as the “torture memos” — is still protecting the senior Bush administration officials who commissioned it (as well as Yoo, and his boss, Jay S. Bybee, who signed it).

Those officials include George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and their senior lawyers, Alberto Gonzales and David Addington. None of these men should be immune from prosecution, because torture is illegal under US domestic law, and is prohibited under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, which the US, under Ronald Reagan, signed in 1988 and ratified in 1994. As Article 2.2 states, unequivocally, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

However, the architects of the torture program didn’t care, and still don’t, because for them the disgraceful memos written by John Yoo were designed to be a “golden shield,” a guarantee that, whatever they did, they were covered, because they had legal advice telling them that torture was not torture.

Although President Obama came into office promising to ban the use of torture, and released the second Yoo and Bybee “torture memo” and three later “torture memos” from 2005, as part of a court case in April 2009, that was the end of his administration’s flirtation with accountability. In court, every avenue that lawyers have tried to open up has been aggressively shut down by the government, citing the “state secrets doctrine,” another “golden shield” for torturers, which prohibits the discussion of anything the government doesn’t want discussed, for spurious reasons of national security.

The only other opportunity to stop the rot was three years ago, when an internal DoJ ethics investigation concluded, after several years of diligent work, that Yoo and Bybee were guilty of “professional misconduct” when they wrote and signed the memos. That could have led to them being disbarred, which would have been inconvenient for a law professor at UC Berkeley (Yoo) and a judge in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (Bybee), and might well have set off ripples that would have led to Bush and Cheney and their lawyers.

However, at the last minute a longtime DoJ fixer, David Margolis, was allowed to override the report’s conclusions, claiming that both men were only guilty of “poor judgment,” which, he alleged, was understandable in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and which carried no sanctions whatsoever.

Thwarted in the US, those seeking accountability have had to seek it elsewhere — in Spain; in Poland, where one of the CIA’s “black sites” was located; and in Italy, where 23 Americans — 22 CIA agents and an Air Force Colonel — were convicted in November 2009 of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric, Abu Omar, and rendering him to Egypt, where he was tortured, in a ruling that was upheld on appeal in September this year.

The US has refused to extradite any of the men and women convicted in Italy, but the ruling is a reminder that not everyone around the world believes in Yoo and Bybee’s “golden shield.”

Moreover, although senior Bush administration officials — George W. Bush himself, and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — have so far evaded accountability, their ability to travel the world freely has been hampered by their actions. In February 2011, for example, George W. Bush called off a visit to Switzerland when he was notified that lawyers — at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights — had prepared a massive torture indictment that was to be presented to the Swiss government the moment that he landed in the country.

The former President was told that foreign countries might take their responsibilities under the UN Convention Against Torture more seriously than America has, and arrest him, on the basis that his home country had failed to act on the clear evidence that he had authorized torture, which he had actually boasted about in his memoir, Decision Points, published in November 2010.

Most recently, lawyers seeking accountability have tried pursuing George W. Bush in Canada. Last September, prior to a visit by the former President, CCR and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) submitted a 69-page draft indictment to Attorney General Robert Nicholson, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, setting forth the case against him for torture.

When that was turned down, the lawyers launched a private prosecution in Provincial Court in Surrey, British Columbia on behalf of four Guantánamo prisoners — Hassan bin Attash, Sami el-Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz (all released, with the exception of bin Attash) — on the day of George W. Bush’s arrival in Canada.

That avenue also led nowhere, as the Attorney General of British Columbia swiftly intervened to shut down the prosecution. Undeterred, however, CCR and CCIJ last week tried a new approach on behalf of these four men who, as Katherine Gallagher of CCR explained in the Guardian, “are all survivors of the systematic torture program the Bush administration authorized and carried out in locations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo, and numerous prisons and CIA ‘black sites’ around the world.”

“Between them,” she added, “they have been beaten, hung from walls or ceilings, deprived of sleep, food and water, and subjected to freezing temperatures and other forms of torture and abuse while held in US custody.”

The new approach, taken by the lawyers, was to file a complaint with the UN Committee Against Torture, in which the four men “are asking one question: how can the man responsible for ordering these heinous crimes openly enter a country that has pledged to prosecute all torturers regardless of their position and not face legal action?”

As Gallagher explained, “Canada should have investigated these crimes. The responsibility to do so is embedded in its domestic criminal code that explicitly authorizes the government to prosecute torture occurring outside Canadian borders. There is no reason it cannot apply to former heads of state, and indeed, the convention has been found to apply to such figures including Hissène Habré [the former President of Chad] and Augusto Pinochet.”

This is true, and it will be interesting to see how the UN Committee Against Torture responds. Probably the “golden shield” will not need to be invoked once more by the US, as the Canadian government evidently has no wish to annoy its neighbour, and has its own appalling track record when it comes to preserving human rights in the “war on terror,” as the cases of Omar Khadr in Guantánamo, and Mahar Arar and others who were tortured in Syria, demonstrate. However, the submission is to be commended for reminding people that great crimes — committed by the most senior US officials and their lawyers — still remain unpunished, and that this is a situation that ought to be considered a major disgrace rather than something to be brushed aside.

Note: For the story of Nigel Ayers’ “war criminal” posters (featuring Tony Blair as well as George W. Bush), see Nigel’s website 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.

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

A Photo of Shaker Aamer After Eleven Years in Guantánamo

Please sign the e-petition to the British government , calling for Shaker Aamer’s release, and the international petition on the Care 2 Petition Site , addressed to both the British and the American governments.

The family of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, have just released this photo of him, smiling and waving, and looking, for all the world, like a free man, even though he has just started his twelfth year in US custody. My headline is slightly misleading, as February 14, 2013 will mark the 11th anniversary of Shaker’s arrival at Guantánamo, if he is not released beforehand, but he was first sold into US custody on November 23, 2001, so it was a convenient shorthand for his eleven years in US custody. Please click on the photo to enlarge it.

This photo is the first to be made available since April 2011, when a photo of him was included in his classified military file, which was released by WikiLeaks. Hundreds of photos of the Guantánamo prisoners were included in the WikiLeaks files, and many of them featured prisoners who had never been seen before, or had only been seen in photos taken before their capture, which were often taken many years before their capture.

Dehumanising prisoners was part of the Bush administration’s program for those seized in the “war on terror,” an essential part of a regime in which those held were supposed to have no rights whatsoever, and could be subjected to abuse — and even torture — with impunity. This is something that Shaker Aamer knows all about, not just because he was privy to numerous stories from his fellow prisoners, as the most articulate and passionate defender of their rights in Guantánamo, and also as a fluent English speaker who could liaise with the authorities on their behalf, but also because of the abuse he received in US custody in Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo, and the abuse he subsequently endured in Guantánamo. This was most recently reported by Shaker himself, in the notes from a meeting with one of his lawyers that he specifically asked to be made available to me.

It took until 2009 for the first photos of any of the prisoners to emerge from Guantánamo, as part of a policy that involved representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross taking photos that were then sent to family members. One of these photos, for example, was of Fayiz al-Kandari, one of the two Kuwaitis who are still held, although very few of the photos were made public.

I am delighted to see this photo, as I believe that Shaker’s evident humanity and kindness is something that those of us campaigning for his release will be able to use, as we push both the British and the American governments to secure his freedom, at least five years since he was first told that the US authorities no longer wanted to hold him, and that the Britsh government was actively seeking his return, and two months since, for the first time, his name was included in , that was made publicly available by the US Justice Department.

Bring Shaker Aamer home now! His wife and his four children, here in London, have the right to be reunited with him, and have the right not to have their husband and their father detained indefinitely as a scapegoat — a victim of Obama’s paralysis and indifference when confronted by the bigots, cynics and fearmongers who populate Congress and America’s right-wing media.

On Facebook, publicising this photo of Shaker, Mahfuja Bint Ammu, one of the tireless campaigners for Shaker’s release, and for the closure of Guantánamo, wrote, “Shaker Aamer’s wife said, ‘Shaker sends his Salam to everyone, and may Allah reward you all, Aameen.’ She has given permission to share and circulate, so please do so.”

Mahfuja also included the following dedication by Shaker to his family, which is very moving:

To my wife and kids:

You are the breath of my lungs

You are the beat of my heart

You are the light of my eyes

You are the reason I am alive

God witness, no lies.

So please, share this photo, share this story, and sign the petition and get others to sign it. Securing Shaker’s release is hugely important in and of itself, but it will also pave the way for the release of other prisoners, from other countries, who have also been cleared for many long years, but are still held because of President Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo, and the black propaganda of those who want to keep it open.

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.

When Night Falls: Photos of Lewisham, Greenwich and Deptford

When Night Falls: Lewisham, Greenwich and Deptford, a set on Flickr.

This photo set — the 62nd in my ongoing project to photograph London by bike — follows on from the previous set, in which, just a few weeks ago, I recorded a particularly warm and vivid sunset from Hilly Fields, the hill-top park near my home in Brockley, in south east London. After the sun had finally dipped below the horizon for good, I made my way down the hill for a quick circuit of the other areas close to me that are a source of enduring fascination for me — Lewisham, the centre of the borough, and Greenwich and Deptford, both of which meet the River Thames at their northern edge.

With the sky darkening, this was a fascinating journey — through some of Lewisham’s back streets and industrial sites that took on an eerie beauty at night, and then down to Greenwich, where I took photos of some of that famous borough’s celebrated pubs and other sights — including St. Alfege’s Church and the Cuttty Sark by the river — before moving on to Deptford along the path beside the Thames, and a return journey via Deptford High Street, the least corporate high street in London, which was still buzzing with independent life despite the late hour.

Some of the photos I took on this journey didn’t work out, as I didn’t have a tripod with me, and there wasn’t sufficient light, but I remain impressed by what i can capture with failing light, but without any outside assistance, and I hope you enjoy coming along on this mostly liminal journey with me.

Posting these photos has also made me realise quite how many photos I have still to publish of Lewisham, Deptford and Greenwich in the daytime, taken at various times from August onwards, which I will try to post in the not too distant future. Next up, however, are more local photos taken this month, to reflect the changing of the seasons. After that, I’l post some photos from September, of other parts of London, but I should get back to posting more from south east London before Christmas!

Thanks, as ever, for your interest!

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: Autumn Sunset in Hilly Fields, Brockley

Autumn Sunset in Hilly Fields, Brockley, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, my most recent photo sets — with the exception of the set featuring images from Saturday’s massive demonstration in Lewisham to resist plans to close the hospital’s A&E Department — captured a journey I made through south east London, and then along Commercial Road in the East End and back home via Canary Wharf, on a blazing hot day in July. That was exhilarating, and a lovely reminder of the joys that summer can bring, but here and now, as the days get shorter, and the leaves continue to fall, heralding the full-blown arrival of winter, I thought it would make sense to post some more recent photos.

This set — the 61st London set — and the four to follow capture some of the delights of autumn, in and around my home in Brockley, in south east London, and also including Deptford and Greenwich. This first set, however, returns to my local park, Hilly Fields, on a hill commanding wonderful views of Blythe Hill, looking over to the wooded expanse of Forest Hill, where the last vestiges remain of the Great North Wood that once covered most of south London. There are also glimpses to be had of Canary Wharf and the O2, as well as views over Blackheath to Shooters Hill, down to Lewisham and all the way out to Kent.

I posted a set of photos taken on Hilly Fields three weeks ago, taken on a damp autumn day full of rich earthy colours, and this set captures a return visit two weeks ago, late on a Saturday afternoon, when the conditions were perfect for a rich, golden, autumnal sunset, and all the intense, burnished shades and long shadows that come with it.

For myself, and other inhabitants of Brockley — and, I believe, for many others who visit this part of London — Hilly Fields is a very special place, and a reminder of the important work undertaken by philanthropists in the second half of the 19th century. What is now the beautiful Hilly Fields park used to be fields, which were only saved from developers by activists and reformers including Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust.

This is never lost on me, as I contrast the progressive impulses of that time with the new barbarism prevalent in the present, when, 33 years after Margaret Thatcher embarked on a mission to roll back the social advances — and the march towards equality — of the previous hundred years, her successors, seeped in a selfishness that even she couldn’t have imagined, are pushing to remake Britain as a wretched place for everyone except the very rich, in which all the reforming zeal of the last 150 years is swept away.

Those of you who follow my work know that these are themes I will be revisiting very soon, but for now I hope you enjoy Hilly Fields, on a mild evening in November, radiant with an autumnal sun.

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

Save Lewisham Hospital A&E: Photos of the Massive Protest on November 24, 2012

Save Lewisham Hospital A&E: The Massive Protest on November 24, 2012, a set on Flickr.

The rain fell, but nothing could deter the people of Lewisham — and supporters from elsewhere –  from marching in numbers not seen in living memory to protest about the disgraceful plans, announced less than a month ago, to close Lewisham’s A&E Department, to downgrade maternity services, and to cut other acute frontline services, sending emergency cases and mothers with complications to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, which will then be responsible for the A&E of the 750,000 inhabitants of three boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley.

Faced with a derisory “consultation period,” ending on December 13, and an intended fait accompli, the people of Lewisham have been saying no in serious numbers — nearly 20,000 people have now signed a petition initiated by Heidi Alexander MP, and at least 10,000 people turned out yesterday, on a day that was so miserable and wet that only the hardcore showed up, the committed and the dedicated, and there were at least 10,000 of us! 10,000 people believing in the need to preserve Lewisham Hospital as a fully functioning hospital for the 250,000 people who use it and rely on it.

The numbers are disputed. The BBC, lamely, opted for just 2,000, which was absurd, but those who were there on the day were estimating between 8,000 and 12,000, and the traffic controllers put the figure at 15,000. That is unheard of, these days, and it is a sign that the people of Lewisham have seen through the lies being peddled by Matthew Kershaw, the NHS special administrator, appointed by the former health secretary Andrew Lansley, who has proposed disembowelling Lewisham as a fully functioning hospital.

Mr. Kershaw has done this despite his mandate to deal with the problems in a neighbouring NHS trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, responsible for Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, and two other hospitals in Bexley and Bromley, which Lewisham has nothing to do with. That trust, burdened by such monstrously distorted PFI deals that they ought to be illegal (£250 million for two hospitals that will be £2.5 billion when repaid, a 1000% mark-up), was nevertheless placed in administration in summer, and the plans for Lewisham have come about as Kershaw’s response to the SLHT’s problems.

Such is the deliberately short timeframe of Kershaw’s “consultation,” however, that no one is supposed to have time to prove that his proposals are outside his remit. Nowhere can campaigners find reference to the special administrator’s right to include other, solvent NHS trusts in the problems of the trust to which he was assigned, but the plan is for us all to shut up, to meekly offer our hospital to the executioner, and to let Jeremy Hunt approve Kershaw’s proposals in February next year.

The people of Lewisham get it, though. Whatever the problems of the South London Healthcare Trust, the people of Lewisham understand that they are being made to pay, and that this is unfair. They also know, in their thousands, what it means to have a full range of hospital services within reach, and can imagine the difficulties — quite possibly life-threatening, in the most serious cases — of having to get to Woolwich in an emergency, when — if — Lewisham’s ability to deal with emergencies will, literally, have been shut down.

They know that this is all about money, and that the money could be found if there was the political will, and they also know, it seems clear, that they will have to fight to stop the government and their lackeys inside the NHS from killing off the provision of NHS services in London borough by borough, starting with Lewisham and north west London, where there is also a huge campaign of resistance to plans to close four out of nine A&Es. In all, 26 A&Es across England and Wales are currently under threat of closure.

Yesterday was an inspiration, and I hope everyone in Lewisham, and others in London and around who can make it, will come to a free public meeting in the Catford Broadway Theatre this Wednesday, November 28, at 7pm, to continue the campaign and work out how to carry on showing the government that the people of Lewisham will not surrender their hospital to those who would destroy it.

If you want to pursue this, and the bigger picture of the NHS across London, and across the country, then think about what we can do — what you can do — to help set up and promote a London-wide demonstration in support of the NHS, and in support of fully functioning NHS services in every London borough, in the New Year. Otherwise, the Tories, with their miserable austerity programmes, driven by a politically motivated desire to destroy the state provision of services, will continue to  work to fatally undermine the NHS, while wealthy, tax-avoiding corporations sharpen their knives and salivate at the prospect of the profits to be made from privatised healthcare.

Please note that, although mass direct action is, I believe, the key to defeating the proposals, it is important that as amy people as possible fill in the consultation form made available by the special administrator, Matthew Kershaw, before the closing date on December 13.

An important guide to cutting through the deliberate attempts to put people off has been provided by the campaigning group, Save Lewisham A&E. Please also follow Save Lewisham A&E on Twitter and on Facebook — and see the Twitter hashtag #thankslewisham, where people are telling their moving stories of how staff at the hospital helped them into the world, or saved their lives.

Those in need of further advice in dealing with the prospoals are also recommended to read the article, “Learn to speak ‘Special Administrator,’” which explains what Kershaw’s jargon really means.

And finally, there are still opportunities to meet Matthew Kershaw in person, and to tell him why his proposals are wrong and will endanger lives and severely impoverish the provision of health services in Lewisham. See here for details.

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.

On Guantánamo, the New York Times Abdicates Responsibility

[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. 

This week, in its “Room for Debate” series, the New York Times invited six people to debate the question, “Time to End Military Tribunals?” and also to comment on whether, in his second term, President Obama should “finally close Guantánamo.”

On the one, hand, of course, there were some powerful arguments made for President Obama to drop the military commissions — especially after the recent ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court, quashing one of the only convictions in the system’s troubled history, that of Salim Hamdan — and finally fulfill his failed promise to close Guantánamo, and it was important to have these arguments made in the pages of the Times.

In “A Failed Experiment,” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch stated bluntly, “The Guantánamo experiment has failed,” and added, “Those implicated in serious crimes should be prosecuted, but in time-tested judicial systems. If the president is serious about closing Guantánamo, he needs to work with Congress to lift the restrictions on transferring detainees. If Congress refuses, Obama should use his veto”– included in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which Tom Wilner wrote about here.

Laura K. Donohue, a law professor at Georgetown University and the acting director of the Center on National Security and the Law, followed up on this in “We the People Should Judge,” arguing that a crucial difference between the commissions and federal courts is that the latter allow the American people to be involved as jurors, and also provide a vital check on what the Founding Fathers recognized as “the dangers of placing all legislative, executive and judicial power in the same hands.”

In “Shut Down the Whole Thing,” Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, stated, “Guantánamo was an international symbol of lawlessness and abuse in 2008 when the newly elected President Obama promised to close it, and remains so today.” He called the commissions “an ad hoc second-class system of justice, where defendants have no right to know their accusers or even see the evidence against them and where hearsay is admissible,”  and noted that President Obama “would do well to shut the whole misbegotten project down.”

However, he also recognized that federal courts “are not immune to the politics of the day,” and the problems with a system in which “[m]ost federal terrorism prosecutions involve the vague and slippery charge of material support,” in which, for Muslims, the conviction rate is, shockingly, almost 100 percent. This situation, then, would need addressing urgently if the commissions were to be shut down.

Unfortunately, in its desire for objectivity and a balanced debate — which, to be blunt, is unwise when dealing with the legacy of an administration that went out of its way to show disdain for domestic and international laws and treaties — the Times also called on three columnists to provide opposing views: Glenn M. Sulmasy, a law professor at the US Coast Guard Academy, Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and, disturbingly, Marc Thiessen, a former speech writer for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, and an unreformed advocate of the lawlessness of the Bush years.

Sulmasy argued for the need to create a new trial system in his article, “A Hybrid Court  for a Hybrid Warrior,” and Posner, in “Foreign Terrorists Are Different,” called for the President to keep the commissions, although he recognized problems, noting, “Indefinite detention is increasingly difficult to sustain morally and politically, and this seems to have led the Obama administration to prefer drone strikes to captures, a questionable policy from an operational perspective, as it deprives the United States of intelligence, to say nothing of the moral issues.” He hoped that “some better system can be devised, where detainees are given stronger rights, foreign observers play a role, the standards for detention are strengthened or the period of detention is limited.”

Both of these men can at least justify their positions, whereas Thiessen, while complaining about drone strikes in his article, “No Intelligence Without Detention,” only did so to complain that the Obama administration “has prioritized killing senior terrorist leaders over taking them alive for questioning.” Thiessen claimed, “We need to question live terrorists who can tell us their plots and plans. And that means we need somewhere to take them.” On this occasion, he stopped short of explaining that he also believes that torture should then be used on these captives, but he has not always been so reticent.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we believe that it is important to present both sides of the story, but we also believe that the fabled “objectivity” of the liberal media has served to obscure some fundamental truths that can be swept away or ignored through presenting a supposedly “balanced” viewpoint.

The truth is that Guantánamo has been a prison mired in black propaganda from the beginning, and that those defending it need no encouragement for their unprincipled position.

The truth is that 86 of the 166 men still held at Guantánamo were cleared for release in 2009 by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force — and that many of these men were also cleared for release under President Bush.

The truth is that they are still held because of failures on the part of the administration, and obstruction by Congress and the courts, and that these obstacles need to be removed so that these men can be freed, and this needs to happen as soon as possible.

Then we can look at the other 80 men, and decide which kind of trials would be best for those the Task Force recommended to be put on trial (currently around 30 of those still held), and also decide how many of those men cannot now be put on trial because of the D.C. Circuit Court’s recent ruling, overturning Salim Hamdan’s conviction for providing material support to terrorism.

When the 86 cleared prisoners are freed, we can also ask why it is considered acceptable that the rest of the remaining 80 men — 46 in total — are being detained indefinitely without charge or trial on the basis that the supposed evidence against them cannot be used in a court. That means that it is not evidence, but some unreliable ragbag of information obtained through torture and coercion, and involving multiple layers of hearsay.

First though, the 86 men cleared for release need to be released.

To create the pressure to achieve that, people need to be told why Guantánamo remains an experiment that should never have been started, and one that needs bringing to an end immediately, and they also need to be told that, on indefinite detention, as on torture, there is no “Room for Debate.”

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.

Shops, Ships and Union Jacks: Photos of a Surreal Tour Around Canary Wharf

Shops, Ships and Union Jacks: A Surreal Tour Around Canary Wharf, a set on Flickr.

This photo set — the 60th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — is the last in a series of five sets recording a journey I made one sunny day in July, from my home in south London, through New Cross and Bermondsey by bike, across Tower Bridge, and up through Shadwell to Commercial Road, which I followed — with many fruitful deviations — along its whole length, to the junction where West India Road bears off towards Canary Wharf, and Commercial Road becomes East India Road.

As my camera battery had run out, but I couldn’t bear not having a working camera, I decided to find one in Canary Wharf, which was more difficult than I expected, as the shop I needed was some distance from where I parked my bike, through a series of shopping malls whose scale surprised me, as they now constitute another city entirely.

When I did finally locate a new battery, I retraced my steps, taking the photos in this set, of shops and shopping and advertising and patriotism, and then of the ships and boats gathering in the former docks for the Olympic Games, and finally of some locals, from Cubitt Town — which was here long before the towers of Canary Wharf were dreamed up — paddling in the River Thames or hanging out on the only stretch of shoreline in the Isle of Dogs that can be considered a beach.

This was my second specific visit to Canary Wharf since I began my project to photograph the whole of London by bike in May (see then first set here). I have returned several times since, for specific photo shoots that will eventually be published, and I have passed it even more often, on my route to east London or even central London, via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. In addition, I have photographed its priapic towers even more often, as they are visible almost everywhere in London.

Visually, Canary Wharf’s towers appeal to me — or, at least, some of them, including the iconic, pyramid-topped One Canada Square — but close up I have always found Canary Wharf to be a cold and soulless place, like Wall Street redesigned by robots. Moreover, the amounts of money needed to build these kinds of buildings, and to rent them, is, frankly, obscene,  and especially so after the global financial crash of 2008 for which bankers — and their politician lackeys — were solely responsible.

What is even more discomforting is the realisation that, in many ways, the story of Canary Wharf is the story of modern Britain, mirroring our decline as a global power in trade and manufacturing, and the replacement of that world with the naked greed and creative accounting of the banking sector, first under Margaret Thatcher and the “enterprise zone” she established throughout London’s former docklands — a physical echo of the financial deregulation she initiated in the City, unwisely allowing banks off the leash, to come up with ever more elaborate schemes to make money in what ought to have been an unacceptable manner, and to find ever more ingenious ways to hide it away, which ought to be illegal.

Around a million people work in the financial sector in the UK, and around a third of these jobs are in London — in Canary Wharf and the City of London. Obviously, the majority of those working in London’s financial sector are not directly responsible for the global economic crash of 2008, but the sector as a whole remains toxic, exercising a baleful influence on the rest of society.

Since 2008, nothing really makes sense anymore, and Canary Wharf is the perfect manifestation of the incomprehensible here and now. With the exception of a handful of sacrificial victims, the banks that lied and cheated and crashed the global economy got bailed out, and are still working their vampire voodoo in Canary Wharf, while the ordinary people got hit with politically motivated austerity programmes. Unpunished, the dark side of the banking world has continued its criminal exploitation of everyone and everything for maximum profit, so that the rich have continued to get richer, while the poor are getting crushed.

I will return to this theme again — and echoes of it, I hope, run through much of my photographic work in London, where the unacceptable chasm between the rich and the poor continues to grow and to become more evident, actively promoted by malevolent and malignant Tory politicians whose desire is the complete destruction of the state, and the state provision of all services — health, education, you name it — so that everything can again be privately owned, as Canary Wharf itself is, and as the world was before serious social reform began in the late 19th century.

The state provision of services, paid for by the taxpayer, is not a trifle to be brushed aside so easily, and an ideological battle is already taking place, even if far too many people have not yet woken up to it. As a result, it will continue to permeate my work, but for now, please enjoy this surreal trip to one of those disturbing places in London where everything is new, and designed, and even the parks are not real, and where only money speaks, stifling all the other things that actually make life worthwhile.

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.

Guantánamo: Andy Worthington Discusses Shaker Aamer at Hull University Amnesty Society, November 27, 2012

[image error]make a donation.

Save Lewisham Hospital from Tory Destruction: Huge Rally on Saturday, Public Meeting Next Wednesday

[image error]make a donation.