Andy Worthington's Blog, page 155

Development and Decay: Photos of Commercial Road in Stepney and Limehouse

Development and Decay: Commercial Road in Stepney and Limehouse, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, this is the 59th photo set I have posted, and the last of three photo sets recording a journey I made along Commercial Road, in the East End, one hot and sunny day in July (see here and here). It was something of a revelation to me, as, although I know parts of the East End, I was largely unfamiliar with this area, and cycling the whole of the road from Aldgate to the junction near Canary Wharf, as well as making diversions into the back streets, helped bring to life this vibrant and historically fascinating part of town that I have since revisited on several occasions.

This whole part of the city — rather frayed around the edges, and with an uneasy mix of wealth and poverty, featuring the white working class and Asian immigrants on the one hand, and bankers on the other — is primarily subject to drastic changes because of its proximity to the City and Canary Wharf, and is, in a very real sense, up against the full force of international money, with developers intent on exploiting any land they can get their hands on to build new housing aimed at foreign investors — a bubble of exploitation, with investors charged too much for properties that they, in turn, sell or rent for too much to London residents.

This, of course, is a familiar story across the whole of London, but the nearer you get to the epicentres of the international banking mafia (the City and Canary Wharf), the more problematical it becomes for local people, and for anyone who isn’t earning well in excess of the average UK income — around £26,000 a year. Those on the median income — around £14,000 a year — or amongst the 50 percent of the working population who earn less than £14,000 a year are even more disadvantaged, and may well find themselves priced out of London altogether, unless this artificially inflated bubble is somehow brought to an end.

I hope you enjoy this, the penultimate set of photos from that particular sunny day in summer, with the derelict buildings I encountered, the new housing developments, the ailing Victorian heritage (especially the Limehouse Library), and the glimpses of the wonderful Limehouse Cut, the canal that is regularly on my mind since I first visited it in summer.

Ironically, as my journey came to an end, the battery in my camera ran out, and the only place I could think of to buy a new one, so that I could carry on taking photographs without having to go home and recharge the existing battery, was Canary Wharf. Photos of that surreal shopping expedition will be along soon, but for now, come with me on a journey along the western end of Commercial Road — in Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse.

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 Banality of Evil: How the US Killed an Innocent Man at Guantánamo

Now that the all-consuming, and insanely expensive Presidential election is over for another four years, President Obama’s in-tray still contains Guantánamo, where, of the 166 men still held, 86 were cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force. Consisting of officials from the relevant government departments and the intelligence agencies, the Task Force analyzed the cases of all the remaining prisoners in 2009, and recommended them for trial, continued detention, or release.

These men have now been held for at least three years since the Task Force reached its conclusions, and many were previously cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration — in many cases in 2006 or 2007, and in 2004 in others.

Although the public’s interest in the long-term injustices of George W. Bush’s horrendous experimental prison has dwindled, some people still remember that the President promised to close the prison within a year, when he first came to office in January 2009, but failed to do so. That is a failure that those concerned with justice will not let him forget, not least because it perpetuates the notion, introduced by the Bush administration, that certain people — those labelled as “terrorists” — can be subjected to indefinite detention.

However, as profoundly disappointing as this is, it is, I believe, overshadowed by the ongoing detention — with no end in sight — of men approved to leave by the government’s own officials, for at least three years, and in some cases for eight years.

Congress has provided President Obama with some cover, imposing onerous restrictions on releasing prisoners, and the D.C. Circuit Court has also played a part, gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the remaining prisoners by commanding lower court judges to presume that the government’s supposed evidence is accurate. This is a position that is absurd to anyone who has examined the mixture of tortured confessions and hearsay that masquerades as evidence, as revealed in particular in the files relating to the prisoners that were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011.

However, as the President of the United States, Barack Obama cannot truly claim that his promise to close Guantánamo was too difficult to achieve, and should be forgotten. Leadership is required, of a kind lamentably lacking when, in May 2009, he refused to support efforts to give new homes in the US to cleared prisoners who could not be safely repatriated (the Uighurs, oppressed Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), and when, in January 2010, he imposed a moratorium on releasing any cleared Yemeni prisoners, after hysteria greeted the news that the failed plane bomber on Christmas Day 2009, a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

Two-thirds of the men cleared for release but still held are Yemenis, and, in one particular case, the administration’s refusal to release any of these men led to a situation in which one of these Yemenis, a man named Adnan Latif, died at Guantánamo, despite being repeatedly cleared for release.

That was on September 8, and I told his story in an article at the time, entitled, “Obama, the Courts and Congress Are All Responsible for the Latest Death at Guantánamo,” in which I ran through the distressing story of a mentally troubled man, who had always stated that he had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001 to seek treatment for a head wound sustained as a result of a car crash in Yemen many years before. As a result of his mental health issues, he had tried to commit suicide in Guantánamo on numerous occasions.

As well as being cleared for release under Presidents Bush and Obama, Adnan Latif had also had his habeas corpus petition granted, until the D.C. Circuit Court intervened. The final injustice came in June, just three months before his death, when his appeal to the Supreme Court was turned down.

At the time, no explanation had been given by the US military, or by the Obama administration, for the death of Adnan Latif, although it was clear, as one of his lawyers, David Remes, explained, that “it was Guantánamo that killed him.”

In recent weeks, however, it has become apparent that, not content with holding a cleared prisoner until he died, the US government continues to treat him with scorn, even after his death.

As Jason Leopold explained last month in a detailed report for Truthout, which began with a vivid reminder that Adnan Latif was a father, and that his death hit his 14-year old son particularly hard, his family was told by Yemen’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Yemen Embassy in Washington, D.C. had been told that his remains “would be sent home within two weeks after his death.” However, a Yemeni official, speaking anonymously, said that the Yemen government “refused to accept Adnan’s body until they receive a full accounting of the cause of his death.” The official added that Yemen’s President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi “was briefed about Adnan’s death and decided against accepting the remains.”

“We have asked for a copy of the autopsy report and it has not been provided to us,” the official said.

That was on October 18, and, in response to questions from Truthout, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said only that the US was “collaborating closely with the Republic of Yemen government on this case,” adding, “We respect their wishes that we maintain the remains until a time when they are prepared to receive them. Mr. Latif’s remains are being handled with the utmost care and respect by medical professionals and are being maintained in an appropriate facility designed to best facilitate preservation.”

He also explained, “His remains are no longer at JTF-Guantánamo Bay,” adding that they were “currently being held in a secure undisclosed facility.” Truthout established that this was Ramstein Air Base in Germany, but as Adnan Latif’s father Farhan explained, without the body the family “cannot mourn his death.” He said, “We will not mourn our son under Islamic law until we receive his body. As you can imagine, this is a nightmare for us.”

The latest news still provides no satisfactory resolution, two months after Adnan Latif’s death. As Jason Leopold explained in another article, the Yemen Embassy in Washington, D.C. received a copy of Adnan Latif’s autopsy report on November 10, although a Yemeni official told Leopold that he didn’t know “whether Latif’s remains would be accepted by the Yemeni government based on the autopsy report alone” — or whether they would want to see the results of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service report, which might take a year at least.

In another update, on November 14, Leopold explained that the Department of Defense “now intends to publicly disclose the cause of [Adnan Latif's] death,” although Lt. Col. Breasseale stated, “We do not have an announced timeline but anticipate a COD (cause of death) announcement to be forthcoming.”

In the meantime, Adnan Latif’s body remains in Germany, and, with no official explanation forthcoming, rumors will continue to swirl. This is a deeply unsatisfactory way for Adnan Latif to be treated after his death, but it also continues to shine a spotlight on all the other cleared prisoners. They must be wondering if they too will die at Guantánamo, with the notifications of their proposed release providing a bitter reminder that America, while pretending to have established fair and just review processes for releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, is actually crueller than regimes that simply lock prisoners up and throw away the key, without pretending to offer them any hope.

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. Do check it out! It has been relaunched after a major redesign, and is looking very good indeed!

Ex-Children’s Minister Sarah Teather Condemns Government’s Benefit Cap as Cruel and Immoral

Hurrah for Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat MP for Brent Central, and the minister for children and families in the Tory-led coalition government until September, when she was sacked.

I was sorry to see Sarah under the yoke of this hideous government, because she clearly had more humanity than all the other ministers, and, although she undoubtedly was trying to do her best for those in need, it was also clear to me that she would be unable to do anything much that was worthwhile in a government so dedicated to making the poorest people in society suffer as much as possible. I knew of her humanity, and of her dedication as a constituency MP, because she had very actively campaigned for one of her constituents, Jamil El-Banna, a prisoner in Guantánamo who was released five years ago, and I had met her during that time.

On Sunday, Sarah Teather broke her silence in fine style, telling the Observer, in no uncertain terms, that the government’s welfare reforms are unacceptable, and that, in particular, the one-size-fits-all benefit cap, being introduced in April, is cruel and immoral.

For the interview, Teather was visited in Brent by Toby Helm, the Observer‘s political editor, who noted her dedication, writing that the 38-year old and her team “offer advice sessions to constituents not once, as is normal, but five days a week,” because of her dedication to her job and her constituents, and because of the extent of the problems her constituents face. Brent Central is “one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in the country,” as Helm explained. “More than 200 languages are spoken in its schools. There are high levels of deprivation. Unemployment is high and the percentage of people on benefits and in rented accommodation is among the largest in the country.” Teather calls it “a classic deprived, multicultural, inner city constituency.”

Immediately the interview began, Teather also told Helm about “the issue that disquieted her most during her time in government — the £500-a-week cap on welfare that ministers will place on families from April next year.” He added, “When she was in government Teather kept fairly quiet about the issue — though she refused to vote for it in parliament. Now, free of collective responsibility, she feels it is her duty to speak out.”

Although she acknowledged that “an incentive in the benefits system to encourage people to work is a good thing,” the problem, bluntly, is that what has been brought in instead by the government is, as she describes it, “a system which is so punitive … that it effectively takes people entirely outside society, so they have no chance of participating.” That, she added, “crosses a moral line for me.”

No one knows quite how many thousands of people will be affected by the changes, which cap the total receipt of welfare payments at £500 a week, even though unscrupulous and unregulated landlords, in London in particular, are taking much of this money — or all of it — in rent. The answer should be genuinely affordable housing, and a vast new programme of not-for-profit social housing, but instead there will be social cleansing, of a type never seen in London before. A minimum estimate of the chaos that will be caused, as families have to uproot themselves, take their children out of schools and move elsewhere, is that 40,000 families will have to move, and that the majority of those affected will be in London (also see my articles here and here).

As Helm noted, “The local council estimates that more than 2,000 people in Brent will end up losing at least £50 a week when the cap comes in. At the top end, 84 families will lose about £1,000 a week. Many will be driven out of the area, including thousands of children.”

Teather accurately accused “parts of government and the press” of “a deliberate campaign to ‘demonise’ those on benefits and of failing to understand that those in need of state help are just as human as they are,” as the Observer put it.

Specifically, she said:

Whenever there is any hint of opposition they wheel out a caricature of a family, usually a very large family, probably black, most likely recent immigrants, without much English, lots of children, apparently chaotic, living in a desirable neighbourhood that middle-class people would like to occupy. That is the caricature and of course it is a partial spinning of the truth and it allows the demonisation to take place.

I would really urge particularly Conservative colleagues but people in all parties to be careful. I don’t think we can afford to preside over a society where there is a gradual eroding of sympathy for people at the bottom end of the income spectrum and a rapid erosion of sympathy for people on benefits.

I think deliberately to stoke up envy and division between people in order to gain popularity at the expense of children’s lives is immoral. It has no good intent. There are all sorts of things you have to do when times are tight that have negative consequences but you do them for good purposes. To do something for negative purposes that also has negative consequences — that is immoral.

She added that “the benefits cap was never intended to save money,” as Helm describes it, because, when she was a minister, “she saw work showing that the policy would not save any money because emergency accommodation would have to be found for people who would inevitably be thrown out of current homes.”

“The policy was essentially conceived as a political device,” she told Helm, adding, “It is simply not in the same league as other policies that are challenging in their consequences but done for a good purpose. I don’t think it was even remotely conceived as a financial cost-cutting device. I think it was conceived as a political device to demonstrate whose side you are on.”

Summarising her stance, Helm wrote that the core of her argument is that “the entire policy will not only be cruel and socially disruptive but also self-defeating because families and — most tragically — many thousands of children will be driven out of their homes and schools and forced to live in areas where rents are lower but where there will be less chance of adults finding jobs.”

When the cap is introduced, in April next year, there will, she said, be a “reverse Jarrow March,” as “many thousands of people leave London.” She added, “My fear is that a lot of people will effectively just disappear from the area in which they were living. I think some very horrible things are going to happen.” Speaking of the children, she also said, “Obviously not all of those children will be made homeless and it is difficult to tell how many will be, but a substantial number will be required to move and that will have a destructive effect on their education. It will remove them from their friends. It will have a destructive impact on the support networks that their families have.”

Tellingly, as Helm puts it, she also recogniss that many of those visiting her surgery “have little idea that the benefit cap will hit them so soon.” As she put it, “I see people who come to see me about something else and I realise that they have three children, that they are not working and I think ‘there is no way you are not going to be affected by this cap.’” She added that middle-class people “would only notice the effect when their children lose their friends,” as the Observer described it. In her words, “When the child in the nice middle-class family comes home and says ‘my friend has just disappeared,’ I think then it might hit home and they might realise a set of children have disappeared from the class — kids who last week came to Johnny’s birthday party. Then it will start to be real. We are in a vacuum phase where I am frankly terrified about what is going to happen.”

In conclusion, Toby Helm noted that, at times, Sarah Teather was “close to tears.” The day she failed to vote for the government was “extremely difficult,” she said, but it “was a moral judgment she felt she had to make.” As she described it, “Driving a sledgehammer through a fault line that already exists between the working poor and the non-working poor — setting up that hostility — is the thing that I find most difficult morally.”

It takes someone properly attuned to what is happening to even notice that these fault lines exist between the working and non-working poor, and are being exploited by this horribly unprincipled government, which wants to portray anyone not working as a scrounger — which is outrageous during this seemingly endless recession — and which, moreover, wants no one to recognise that much of the benefit system has been masking the true poverty of those paid far too little for their work to actually afford to live in modern rip-off Britain (and especially London and the south east), where middlemen and shareholders are everywhere, leeching off everyone, but disproportionately off the poor.

The sad truth, moreover, is that people are being played off against each other, when we should all be united, and should be demanding that private landlords be reined in, and that a new age of social housing needs to begin — one that will create work in construction, but that is designed not to make profits for anyone. These are ideas that, 33 years on from Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979, have been almost entirely eradicated, as people have been encouraged to think only of themselves, and not of others — or, in other words, of the “society” that Thatcher so malevolently boasted about destroying.

We need a return to a way of thinking that doesn’t commodify everything for the benefit of the idle entitled rich, a way of thinking that recognises that, when the median income in the UK is £14,000 a year, as it is, at least half the working population is struggling, and most people cannot afford to pay the kinds of disproportionate rents charged by unprincipled landlords in London and the south east.

Without these changes we are, I believe, genuinely doomed as a society; so numb and so selfish that the forced exodus of poorer people to other towns and cities where there is no work, creating ghettoes of hopelessness, doesn’t even register, as people look out only for themselves, and continue to regard the rich as entitled to whatever they have managed to grab, by whatever means, and the poor as deficient — as workshy scroungers. The most horrendous manifestation of this tendency to date has been in the demonisation of the disabled, but in April next year its impact on the working poor and the unemployed will begin to have the devastating effect on families and on children that Sarah Teather has so courageously spoken about.

She needs our support, especially as her words will have spread ripples of panic throughout the Lib Dem leadership. Despite praising Nick Clegg and calling on her colleagues to fight hard to stop George Osborne from imminently cutting a further £10 billion off the welfare budget in his autumn statement (on December 5), her words will have reminded many members of the public that it is only with the Liberal Democrats’ support that the dreadful Tory butchers leading this government are laying waste to the British state more thoroughly than at any other time in history.

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

Photos of Shadwell: School, Street Art, Studios and Railway Bridges

Shadwell: School, Street Art, Studios and Railway Bridges, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I’m currently posting five sets of photos of a journey I made on a hot, sunny day in July, when I travelled from my home in Brockley, south east London, through New Cross and Bermondsey to the River Thames, and then across Tower Bridge and up to Commercial Road, one of the great arteries of east London, built to service London’s docks two hundred years ago.

Located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Commercial Road, which runs for two miles, passes through four areas within Tower Hamlets — Whitechapel, Shadwell, Limehouse and Stepney — where poverty is still prevalent, despite the encroaching gentrification, and these contrasts are reflected in the architecture — some old and decaying, some old and restored, and some with the gleaming new arrogance of London’s currently unfettered developers.

The last set I posted consisted of photos taken on and around the western end of Commercial Road, populated by small businesses, mostly in the garment trade, and in this set I allowed myself to be diverted down some of the side streets further east, between Commercial Road and Cable Street, in Shadwell, where, as the title of this set indicates, I stumbled upon an architecturally stimulating school, some street art in a group of abandoned railway arches, the vast ramshackle Victorian warehouse complex housing Cable Street Studios, and a number of lovely Victorian railway bridges.

This was my first visit to this part of London in any depth, and I found it fascinating. I have since returned on several occasions, and am beginning to understand how Commercial Road fits within east London generally, and how east London has a deep history of poverty and immigration that pockets of gentrification cannot erase, however much the current government is intent on forcing poor people out of London completely, to create more playgrounds for foreign investors, and more soulless modern developments for aspiring individuals and couples working in the City or Canary Wharf.

My heart, as regular readers will understand, is in the back streets, or on quirky parts of the main roads, where the buildings hold stories, and where there are hidden corners and shadows that the napalm of gentrification has not been able to wipe out. I am fascinated by the fabric  of the city — and am frequently drawn to the creations of contemporary architects, which often demonstrate innovation in form and material — but far too much of it is cold and clinical, and also socially divisive, or even socially destructive, and I will continue to seek out and photograph places that have depth and soul.

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

Andy Worthington Discusses the Need to Close Guantánamo on the Michael Slate Show

Yesterday, I was delighted to talk to Michael Slate on his long-standing progressive show, on KPFK in Los Angeles, about Guantánamo past, present and future. The show is here, as an MP3, and our interview lasts for around 20 minutes.

If you have the time, I hope you can listen to the show. Michael and I have spoken before (see here, here and here) and he is always very well-informed. On this occasion, our discussion was timed to coincide with the aftermath of the Presidential election, and the focus on President Obama to fulfil his promise to close Guantánamo within a year, which he made in January 2009, and then, of course, failed to achieve.

Michael asked me about the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I established in January this year with the attorney Tom Wilner, and I explained our mission, and how the main focus is on educating people about the fact that 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners in Guantánamo have been cleared for release but are still held, and how securing the release of these men is the most urgent demand for campaigners.

I also explained how two-thirds of these men are Yemenis, and how the Yemenis have been subjected to “guilt by nationality” ever since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed underwear bomber, was seized on Christmas Day 2009, and it was discovered that he had been recruited in Yemen. The moratorium that President Obama announced in January 2010, refusing to release any cleared Yemenis until further notice, needs to be withdrawn as soon as possible, so that these men can resume their lives.

Michael also asked me about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose plight is one that I have repeatedly highlighted, and whose ongoing detention remains a particular insult. Shaker has been cleared for release for many years, and may well be the only prisoner from a country that right-wing lawmakers, who have imposed onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, cannot argue is a haven for terrorists, and yet he remains held.

I was also able to stress how Guantánamo — and its closure — remains of huge importance: firstly because it is a prison where indefinite, arbitrary detention was put in place by President Bush, and hasn’t been stopped by Barack Obama, even though only dictatorships hold people indefinitely without charge or trial; and secondly, because the existence of Guantánamo is the reason why last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with its notorious sections requiring the mandatory military custody of terror suspects, possibly to include Americans,  was able to be initiated.

No Guantánamo, no NDAA — and as I also explained, the existence of indefinite detention should trouble Americans deeply because it provides a template for tyranny, which, in America, has been used for the last eleven years.

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and thanks, as ever, for your support.

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

Photos of Commercial Road: The 21st Century Rag Trade

Commercial Road: The 21st Century Rag Trade, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, this is the second of five photo sets that I’m belatedly publishing, many months after they were taken, which capture a journey that I took, on a particularly hot and sunny Tuesday in July, just before the Olympics madness took off.

The first set focused on the start of my journey, through New Cross and Bermondsey, south of the River Thames, and after crossing Tower Bridge, this second set features my journey to Commercial Road, and then east along that great artery of east London.

Very straight, almost like a Roman road, Commercial Road runs for two miles east from Aldgate East to to the junction with Burdett Road in Limehouse, where it becomes the East India Dock Road. Despite its appearance, it was actually built by the East India Company in the early 19th century as a major artery when London’s Docklands were being developed, and resumed that role after the development of Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs under Margaret Thatcher, which, ironically, really took off under Tony Blair.

Although there are pockets of modern development and gentrification, it consists primarily of small businesses surrounded by council housing (mainly wholesale clothes manufacturers and import/export businesses, at its eastern end), with a significant Asian population, and is both lively and time-weathered, although a major drawback is the constant traffic.

This set deals mostly with the shops that are packed in densely at Commercial Road’s eastern end (and various sights from the streets I took to get there), while the two sets to follow focus on the more diffuse attractions further east, as the shops thin out — as well as photos from some diversions down side streets, heading south towards Cable Street. A final set from this journey provides a surreal juxtaposition, as, where Commercial Road becomes East India Road, I peeled off down West India Dock Road to Canary Wharf — to buy a spare battery for my camera, as I had exhausted it by that point — where I was confronted by Canary Wharf’s clinically clean and self-contained mall experience, which provided a marked contrast to the grittiness of Commercial Road.

The next day, I headed out to Whitechapel Road and Mile End Road, much happier with grit than with greed, but that’s another story. For now, I hope you enjoy exploring Commercial Road with me.

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.

President Obama, It’s Time to Fulfill Your Promise to Close Guantánamo

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. 

Now that the dust has settled on last week’s Presidential election, we at “Close Guantánamo” pledge that we will continue to demand that President Obama fulfills his promise to close the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which he made on his second day in office in January 2009.

Although we acknowledge that the President has released 71 prisoners since that time, and we accept that Congress has been monstrously obstructive, this is not sufficient to excuse Barack Obama for his failure to fulfill his promise. 166 men still languish in Guantánamo, almost all abandoned by the justice system on which America prides itself.

Particularly galling is the fact that 86 of the men still held were cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, a sober and responsible collection of officials from the major government departments and the intelligence agencies, who analyzed the cases of all the prisoners throughout 2009. The Task Force concluded that 56 of those men should be released, and 30 others — all Yemenis — should be held in “conditional detention” (a category of detention invented by the Task Force) until it was decided that the security situation in Yemen had improved.

After 66 prisoners were released by the Obama administration — many given new homes in third countries, because it was unsafe for them to return home — Congress intervened to impose onerous restrictions on the President’s ability to release prisoners, with the result that just five prisoners have been freed in the last two years.

Further complicating matters, half of the 56 cleared prisoners — as well as the 30 in “conditional detention” — are Yemenis, and the President himself issued a moratorium on releasing any cleared Yemenis in January 2010, in response to a failed bomb plot by a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been recruited in Yemen, and a wave of hysteria that followed his capture, even though holding these men responsible, in any sense, for what happened to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Yemen is the most outrageous form of “guilt by nationality,” for which the President should be ashamed.

We believe it is time for all the cleared prisoners to be freed, as swiftly as possible, and that the President has all the tools he needs to do so, as a waiver in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act allows him to bypass Congress in matters relating to the release of prisoners if he regards it as being in America’s national security interests.

The first release should be of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who could be returned home today. An end to the moratorium on the Yemenis should follow swiftly so that they too can be freed, and, for the other cleared prisoners, if they cannot be repatriated, and third countries cannot be found that will take them in, they should be freed in the US.

The fact that other countries have given new homes to men who could not be safely repatriated, while every branch of the US government — the executive branch, Congress and the courts — have all declared America to be off-limits, is another source of shame that needs remedying.

In just two months’ time, on January 11, 2013, the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, concerned citizens will gather in Washington D.C., as they do on January 11 every year, to call for the closure of Guantánamo.

Let this be the last year that the US government needs reminding, by its people, that Guantánamo remains an abomination, and that its closure is necessary to bring to an end 11 years of horrendous injustice.

Let this be the last year that the US government needs reminding, by its people, of the disgraceful reality that, over 11 years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which prompted the Bush administration to declare a brutal and il-advised “war on terror,” the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo are subjected to indefinite detention.

This is a situation that remains unacceptable, and every day that men are held indefinitely, outside of the normal rules of detention (whether through the US criminal code, or the Geneva Conventions), brings great shame on the United States of America.

Before 9/11, indefinite detention used to be associated only with regimes that prided themselves on their disdain for the rule of law; dictatorships, in other words. Nearly eleven years after the prison at Guantánamo opened, two successive US administrations — that of George W. Bush, and, since 2009, that of Barack Obama — have demonstrated that America is no better than these dictatorships.

Let this be the last year that Guantánamo remains 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.

From Deptford to Bermondsey: Photos of a Summer Journey Through London’s History

From Deptford to Bermondsey: A Summer Journey Through London’s History, a set on Flickr.

After posting five set of photos of autumn in London,  as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I’m briefly returning to summer to post five of the 46 sets I have from July and August that have not been published yet, containing over a thousand photos.

I have thousands more photos from September, October and November, from al parts of London, and will return to more recent photos after this reminder of summer, but for now, please join me on July 24, 2012 (a hot Tuesday), when I decided to take a visit to east London — and, specifically, Commercial Road, which runs from Aldgate East to Limehouse, and was built by the East India Company 200 years ago.

To reach Commercial Road, I cycled from my home in Brockley, in south east London, via New Cross and Bermondsey, and then across Tower Bridge. I took three sets of photos on and around Commercial Road, which runs from Aldgate East to Limehouse, and another set on the way back in the shopping malls of Canary Wharf, and these will follow in the days to come, but the first set that I’m posting here (the 56th London set to date) is of the first stage of my journey, through south east London.

Striking out in roughly the right direction, I passed through, and photographed, the industrial developments around the remains of the Grand Surrey Canal in New Cross and South Bermondsey, and various other enterprises off the beaten track on and around St. James’s Road, which runs north from Rotherhithe New Road, near the Old Kent Road. I then found myself in the fascinating area of Bermondsey Spa, where a troublingly large regeneration project — aka gentrification — is taking place for the benefit not of Southwark residents, but of rich incomers who seek the proximity to the City, and who are also tempted by the developers advertising Bermondsey as “the new Hoxton.”

In fact, Bermondsey — and Southwark in general, the vast sprawling borough that encompasses so much of south east London closest to the City — is overflowing with a history much more fascinating than that of the faceless, soulless drones competing to knock down whatever they can and rake in big money with speculative “luxury” apartments, or even new social housing, now rebranded and essentially privatised,  which is being sold or rented to ordinary working people for more money than they can afford.

Some of this history — and the current stories of the new leeches preying on ordinary working people, as they have done for so long in Southwark, both from the outside and with the collusion of elected representatives — can hopefully be glimpsed in these photos, as can aspects of disputed areas in the London Borough of Lewisham as well. Those who want to see more can rest assured that I have many more photo sets to come, featuring photos taken between the end of July and now, in both boroughs, and archives of everything I’ve published to date can be found through the relevant tags — see New Cross and Bermondsey. For Southwark, also see Rotherhithe and for Lewisham also see Deptford and Brockley, in particular.

I hope you enjoy travelling with me through the boroughs of Lewisham and Southwark. The former has been my home for most of the last 16 years, and is very dear to me, and although I have only ever lived in Southwark for a year or so (in Peckham Rye, in 1997-98), it too is a place that I am permanently fascinated by and drawn to, especially since I began this project in May. One of the things that helped me to get to know it much better, and quicker than I thought, was when non-folding bikes were banned from all trains during the entire Olympic period, and, in order to get anywhere central or northern or in the east, I had to either cycle through Southwark, or through the Isle of Dogs. In summer, it was a particular delight, and a surefire way of getting fit.

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.

Protest Groups Challenge the Tories’ Mission to Wreck England’s Schools and Universities

As has been apparent for the last two and a half years, ever since the wretched Tory-led coalition government was formed, no area of British life — or more correctly, English life — is safe from the Tory butchers intent on destroying the state for malevolent ideological reasons.

Health, welfare, education — all have come under ferocious attack, as I have been reporting extensively for the last two years. An early target was education, as poorer school pupils had their financial support — the Education Maintenance Allowance — scrapped, and David Willetts, the minister for universities and science, presided over the near-tripling of university fees from £3,290 a year to a maximum of £9,000 a year, and the removal of all government support for arts, humanities and the social sciences.

A new organisation seeks to defend universities from Tory butchers

This week, a new body, the Council for the Defence of British Universities, is being launched. Its 66 founding members include David Attenborough, Alan Bennett, Melvyn Bragg, A.S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Michael Frayn and Andrew Motion, and, on its website, the CDBU states, “Britain’s universities are amongst the world’s best. But misguided policies are rapidly undermining them.”

Announcing its intention to “defend academic values,” in the absence eof any such organisation to date, the CDBU also points out:

For decades, UK universities have been bound by increasingly restrictive management practices, loaded with endlessly augmented administrative burdens, and stretched virtually to breaking point. Now, in the two years since the publication of the Browne Review, ‘a radical reform of the higher education system’ has begun, designed to change its character fundamentally, permanently, and virtually overnight.

Although these radical changes were planned in detail before the last election, no democratic mandate for them was ever sought. Although opposed by student protests, devastated by scholarly criticism, and unsupported by even the most elementary analysis of the empirical evidence, these changes are being driven forward relentlessly without benefit of Parliamentary debate or public scrutiny.

In an article in the Times Higher Education supplement, another CDBU member, the historian Sir Keith Thomas, declared:

[T]he very purpose of the university is grossly distorted by the attempt to create a market in higher education. Students are regarded as “consumers” and encouraged to invest in the degree course they think most likely to enhance their earning prospects. Academics are seen as “producers”, whose research is expected to focus on topics of commercial value and whose “output” is measured against a single scale and graded like sacks of wheat. The universities themselves are encouraged to teach and research not what they think is intrinsically worthwhile but what is likely to be financially most profitable. Instead of regarding each other as allies in a common enterprise, they are forced to become commercial competitors.

Thomas also wrote about the “deep dissatisfaction” that “pervades the university sector,” which primarily “arises from the feeling that an understandable concern to improve the nation’s economic performance, coupled with an ideological faith in the virtues of the market, has meant that the central values of the university are being sidelined or forgotten.”

He added:

A university education should assist students to develop their intellectual and critical capacities to the full — that is a good in itself, but it will also give them the transferable skills that will be essential in an uncertain future. Scientists and scholars should be permitted to pursue knowledge and understanding of the physical and human world in which we live and to do so for their own sake, regardless of commercial value. Out of such free enquiry comes a broader, moral concern for nature and humanity, standing in total contrast to market values. The task of the council is not just to challenge a series of short-term political expedients: it must also combat a whole philosophy.

Thomas also expressed his hope that the council would “press for the replacement of the present higher education funding councils — which are tools of government lacking intellectual and moral independence — by autonomous intermediate bodies, which, like the old University Grants Committee, can command respect by acting as buffers between the universities and the politicians.” He also added his hope that the council “will campaign for the research councils to be freed from government pressure. They should become less proactive in deciding the direction of research and revert to the responsive mode as their normal way of proceeding. Scientists and scholars, not politicians and bureaucrats, are the persons best qualified to determine the direction that intellectual enquiry should take.”

As the Guardian noted last week, dozens of academics resigned last year from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), one of the government funding bodies criticised by Sir Keith Thomas, “in a row over academic freedom when the ‘big society’ was introduced as a research priority.”

In the Observer on Sunday, Howard Hotson, professor of early modern intellectual history at the University of Oxford and the chair of the steering committee of the CDBU, laid out the horrors of the Tory-led reforms:

Universities are among the UK’s most successful institutions. Collectively, they enjoy a global reputation that few British institutions can match. Their research produces innovations of the highest order. Their teaching attracts a hugely disproportionate share of the world’s international students.

Yet their future is being gambled on an unprecedented programme of radical reforms. Nothing similar has been tried elsewhere. No democratic mandate has been sought. These changes are grounded in wishful ideological assumptions. Evidence suggests they will do more harm than good.

Such is the frantic pace of this revolution that few outside universities are aware of its gigantic scope. Its financial dimension is familiar in outline to the general public. Domestic tuition fees, unheard of only 15 years ago, have been trebled this academic year, while 80% of direct public funding has been withdrawn from undergraduate teaching. Even before these changes, public spending on higher education was lower in the UK than almost any other developed country, while business spending on research and development was equally low and falling. Now, tuition fees in England are, on average, the highest in the world.

The Council for the Defence of British Universities is holding its inaugural meeting tomorrow (November 13) at the British Academy.

Campaigners tackle Michael Gove’s regressive notions of school education

Another campaigning group, Bacc for the Future, recently sprang to life, to oppose the plans of another reviled government minister, the education secretary Michael Gove, who, on September 17, announced the start of a three-month consolation period (ending on December 10) regarding his intention to replace GCSEs with the English Baccalaureate (EBacc).

According to Gove, the GCSE system, introduced under Margaret Thatcher, has become devalued, because pupils have been achieving better results almost every year since the system was introduced. Gove’s solution is to return to the 1950s and to make failure official policy. Out will go the continual assessment that has done so much to help young people who do not excel at exams, replaced by a return to a “traditional” exam system.

Disturbingly, Gove’s EBacc requires pupils to achieve a certificate in five subject areas — maths, English, sciences, languages and humanities (defined as only history or geography). He argues, cheerfully, that some will fail, believing, for some arrogant reason, that it is not politically suicidal to tell parents that he wants more children to fail at school.

However, what is particularly troubling is the probability that, because pupils have to pass all five subjects, many more will fail than the 10 percent figure being bandied about. Last week — although I can’t find verification online — I heard a researcher explain that, although the government expects 90 percent of pupils to pass the EBacc, those passing all five subjects, based on an analysis of pupils’ current abilities, would actually be just 18 percent.

In addition, of course, Gove’s 1950s-style backward Tory vision “threatens the very future of creative subjects — like Music, Art, Design & Technology, Drama and Dance,” as Bacc for the Future explains, adding, “By missing them off its list of core areas children must study, the Government is undermining their place at the heart of learning.”

In response to Michael Gove’s proposals, numerous leading figures in the arts, including Nicholas Serota of the Tate and the artist Grayson Perry (who both wrote articles for the Guardian), as well as Richard Eyre, David Hare, Nicholas Hytner, Richard Rogers and Julian Lloyd Webber, told the Guardian that they were “deeply worried.”

David Hare called the planned changes “the most dangerous and far-reaching of the government’s reforms,” and Richard Rogers said, “Our writers, artists, designers, dancers, actors and architects are the envy of the world. Arts education should definitely not be marginalised or censored.” In addition, Thomas Adès, the composer whose opera “The Tempest” is currently being performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, called the move “suicidal, if we want to have any arts at all in Britain in 30 years.” He told the Guardian that “mandatory school music lessons had ‘made all the difference’ to him.”

As the Guardian put it, these important figures in the arts concluded that “Britain’s creative economy could be destroyed ‘within a generation,’” if the plans go ahead, and this is echoed by Bacc for the Future, who point out that the proposed EBacc “will harm the economy,” because “our creative industries are world-beaters — they contribute 6% of GDP, employ two million people and export over £16 billion annually.”

Bacc for the Future calls for the arts to be added to the EBacc proposal, and has a petition to that end, which, specifically, “calls for the Education Select Committee to hold an inquiry into the lack of creative and cultural subjects in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and the speed of GCSE reforms.”

However, although this would be a huge improvement on the current plans, it does not go far enough. What we need is for Michael Gove’s plans to be scrapped altogether. Intelligent people are aware of failings in the existing GCSE system, which is far too prescriptive and target-driven, as the result of decades of meddling and inept governments. However, Gove’s plans, as with everything this government touches, are exactly the opposite of what is needed.

As Louise Robinson, the president of the Girls’ School Association (and the headmistress of Merchant Taylor’s Girls’ school in Crosby, Liverpool), told the Independent today, “You can’t be forcing a 1960s curriculum and exam structure on schools. These children are going to be going out into the world of the 2020s and 2030s. It is going to be very different from Michael Gove’s dream of what it should be.”

She added, as the Independent put it, that the government was “‘moving too far, too fast’ on the reforms by not allowing time to pilot them in schools first.” As she said, ”I don’t think it is taking into account the future. I personally think we’re going back to a bygone era where everything was considered rosy. I don’t like the idea of the creative curriculum being forgotten about and treated as though it is second class.”

“Pleading for an emphasis on developing skills needed for the future,” as the Independent put it, and foreshadowing her call for “a more modern curriculum” as the “key focus of her address to her annual conference later this month,” she added, “The Star Trek society is already here. We need to look at the way the world of the future is going. At present the way we run our schools is based on the 19th century.”

If the head of the girls’ independent sector is so critical, I can only hope that Gove’s plans are doomed.

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.

Reflections on Mortality: Photos of Autumn in Brockley Cemetery

Reflections on Mortality: Autumn in Brockley Cemetery, a set on Flickr.

The 55th photo set in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began exactly six months ago, focuses on Brockley Cemetery, one of a pair of Victorian cemeteries just down the road from where I live in south east London, and a visit I made as the sun was beginning to fall on a weekday evening in October, casting a golden light on the gravestones and on the wonderful trees that are part of the cemeteries’ attraction.

Located between Brockley Road and Brockley Grove, in the neighbouring area of Ladywell, the 37-acre site of Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries (formerly known as Deptford and Lewisham Cemeteries) opened in 1858, and the two cemeteries were separated by a wall until 1948. They are now just separated by trees, and a low bank, but each has its own distinctive character. In fact, there is only one official entrance between the two cemeteries, which I didn’t find out until after I had visited Brockley Cemetery on many occasions, and which, as a result, was something of a Narnia moment for me (from the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which was one of my favourite books as a child, along with the rest of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series).

Both cemeteries are nature conservation sites of great Importance and havens for wildlife, plants and wildflowers, and they are also hugely atmospheric, mostly consisting of old graves, with many parts of the cemeteries being overgrown.

I hope you enjoy this set. I have another set, featuring photos of winged angel statues from both cemeteries, which I took in March, before I started my project to photograph London by bike, after being inspired by the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who, and will post them when I get the opportunity, That might take a while, however, as I have yet to publish the photos from over 80 trips I have made in London over the last four months, as a result of which I have over 5,000 photos in 230 sets that I have not yet been able to make available, covering all 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.