Andy Worthington's Blog, page 156

Conservative Judges Demolish the False Legitimacy of Guantánamo’s Terror Trials

When is a war crime not a war crime? When it is invented by the executive branch and Congress, and implemented for six years until a profoundly Conservative appeals court strikes it down.

The invented war crime is “providing material support to terrorism,” and on October 16, 2012, a panel of three judges in the D.C. Circuit Court (the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C.) threw out the conviction of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, who had received a five and a half year sentence for “providing material support to terrorism” at the end of his trial by military commission in August 2008 (although he was freed just five months later, as his sentence included time already served).

In its ruling, the court stated, “When Hamdan committed the conduct in question, the international law of war proscribed a variety of war crimes, including forms of terrorism. At that time, however, the international law of war did not proscribe material support for terrorism as a war crime.”

For anyone who has followed the history of the military commissions in any depth, the result was not completely unexpected. Revived by the Bush administration in November 2001, specifically for trying prisoners seized in the “war on terror,” the commissions were struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2006, but were then revived by Congress, when “providing material support to terrorism” and “conspiracy” were included as war crimes, even though there was no precedent for doing so.

When the Obama administration revived the commissions in 2009, senior figures — Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, and David Kris, the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division of the Department of Justice until 2011 — argued against retaining “providing material support to terrorism” in the legislation, arguing that it could be overturned on appeal. Kris testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that “there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is NOT a traditional law of war offense, thereby reversing hard-won convictions, and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy,” and Jeh Johnson told the committee, “After careful study, the Administration has concluded that appellate courts may find that “material support for terrorism” — an offense that is also found in Title 18 — is not a traditional violation of the law of war.”

Congress, however, failed to acknowledge these warnings.

For those, like myself, who have been critical of judges in the D.C. Circuit Court for gutting habeas corpus of all meaning when it comes to the Guantánamo prisoners, the result was, nevertheless, surprising. When it comes to the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, judges in the D.C. Circuit Court have insisted, in defiance of well-researched evidence to the contrary, that the information relied upon by the government as evidence should be presumptively regarded as accurate. The result is that, after a spate of well-deserved victories by 38 prisoners from 2008 to 2010, not a single prisoner has won in the last two and a half years, and several successful petitions have been overturned.

The judges who have been particularly prominent when it comes to undermining habeas corpus are Senior Judges A. Raymond Randolph and Laurence H. Silberman, and Judge Janice Rogers Brown, but Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, who wrote the opinion in Hamdan v. United States of America, as part of a panel that also included Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Senior Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, has also lent his support.

In March 2011, for example, Judge Kavanaugh wrote a notorious opinion reversing the successful habeas corpus petition of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, granted in February 2010, even though the only evidence against Uthman, as the District Judge had recognized, was derived from prisoners who had been held in “black sites” and subjected to torture.

Although the D.C. Circuit Court’s habeas rulings continue to cast a monstrous shadow of injustice over the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo, the court’s ruling on the military commissions strikes a powerful blow to the legitimacy of those trials.

Salim Hamdan was charged with conspiracy, as well as providing material support to terrorism, although he was acquited of the former charge by his military jury. Of the seven men convicted in trials by military commission — or through plea deals — only one, the Australian David Hicks, who delivered a guilty plea in March 2007, was charged solely with providing material support to terrorism, meaning that his conviction should also be quashed.

However, it is possible that the charge of conspiracy will also wither under scrutiny. The test of this is forthcoming in an appeal filed on behalf of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who was convicted of conspiracy and material support for creating a propaganda video for al-Qaeda and given a life sentence in November 2008, after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense.

Moreover, al-Bahlul is not alone. Of the other four men who have been found guilty, or who have accepted plea deals, Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese man freed as a result of his plea deal in July this year, delivered a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy, and one count of providing material support to terrorism in July 2010, and another Sudanese man, Noor Uthman Muhammed, also pled guilty to providing material support to terrorism and conspiracy in February 2011 — and is scheduled to be freed in December 2013.

The cases of Majid Khan and Omar Khadr (transferred to Canadian custody in September) are more complex, as Khan accepted a plea deal on the basis that he was involved in plotting acts of terrorism, and worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Khadr, notoriously, was obliged to plead guilty to killing a US soldier, in wartime, in a country occupied by US forces, while he was just 15 years old — an act that the Obama administration has the nerve to regard as a war crime.

As President Obama begins his second term as President, the Hamdan ruling has left him with a discredited trial system at Guantánamo, whose credibility he cannot rescue. As the law professor Steve Vladeck explained in an analysis of the ruling for the Lawfare blog:

If [the] decision is a loss for anyone, it’s a loss for the commission system itself, in which, without any dissent, the trial judge and Court of Military Commission Review held that it was simply beyond question that MST [providing material support to terrorism] was a recognized violation of the international laws of war. That view received exactly zero votes from a very conservative panel of a court that has not exactly been sympathetic to claims by Guantánamo detainees. It’s hard to imagine a stronger rebuke of the quality (or lack thereof) of the legal reasoning employed by the military commission or by the CMCR — and that repudiation may be where [the] decision has the greatest long-term ramifications.

If President Obama is paying attention, it may be wise to make plans to do what he promised to do in November 2009, but then backed down from when criticized, and that is to prosecute those charged with genuine terrorist offences — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-accused, and a handful of other men — in federal court, and to abandon the discredited military commissions once and for all. That will not remove the stench of torture from the cases of the “high-value detainees,” or overcome the failure to hold accountable those who authorized the torture, but it would close the door on at least one terrible legacy of the Bush years.

It would also be wise to stop pretending that peripheral figures — like Salim Hamdan, David Hicks, Noor Uthman Muhammed, Omar Khadr and others who, at one time or another, have been put forward for military commission trials — are guilty of war crimes, and to send them home, along with the 86 prisoners still held at Guantanamo (out of 166 in total) who have been cleared for release for many years, but are still held because of the political games and Presidential cowardice that typified Barack Obama’s first term in office.

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.

Lewisham Residents Rally to Save Hospital from Tory Butchers

Please sign the petition to save Lewisham’s A&E and maternity services and send it on to your friends and family!

Residents of the London Borough of Lewisham turned up in force for a public meeting yesterday evening in Lewisham Hospital, to show their opposition to the plans, announced last week, to close the hospital’s A&E (Accident and Emergency) Department and to cut maternity services and other clinical functions. Although Lewisham NHS Trust is financially healthy, a special administrator appointed by the government is making Lewisham pay for the problems of a neighbouring trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, which was declared bankrupt in summer, largely as a result of horrendous PFI contracts.

The South London Healthcare Trust runs — or ran — Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, Princess Royal University Hospital in Orpington and Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup, and under the special administrator’s proposals, it will be broken up, with Lewisham downgraded through no fault of its own trust, and just one A&E Department — in Woolwich — serving the 750,000 inhabitants of the three boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley.

The situation could hardly be more urgent. If the proposals put forward by the special administrator, Matthew Kershaw, are not defeated by pressure from NHS professionals, lawyers, activists and the residents of Lewisham within the next five weeks (by December 13), the Tories’ new NHS butcher, the sleaze-drenched slimeball Jeremy Hunt (who took over from Andrew Lansley, the discredited architect of the NHS privatisation bill that was approved by Parliament in March this year), will approve the plans in the new year, and Lewisham’s slow death will begin.

The A&E Department – which, ironically, has just received a £12 million makeover — will be downgraded to an urgent care centre, meaning that only minor complaints can be treated. Anything more serious will require patients to travel to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, and maternity services will also be restricted to those that do not involve any complications. With emergency services sent elsewhere, the hospital as a whole will, if the plans go ahead, soon be nothing more than a husk, a shadow of its former self, particularly if Kershaw’s plans to sell off half the hospital’s buildings are also implemented.

Yesterday evening, hundreds of Lewisham residents packed into the Lessoff Auditorium in Lewisham Hospital, which was so full that seats and a video were set up in the foyer. Hundreds more crowded into an entirely separate building, the Calabash Centre, a few hundred years from the hospital, where another video link was established. Speakers travelled from one event to the other, and the atmosphere was electric.

Reporting on Thursday’s meeting, the News Shopper, the local newspaper, which joined the South London Press in endorsing the campaign to save Lewisham’s A&E and maternity services in a front-page article this week, stated that Steve Bullock, Lewisham’s Mayor, promised that the council “will throw its full weight behind the campaign to stop it.”

Steve Bullock said, “This is complete nonsense and I am going to deploy the recourses of the council in every possible way to put a stop to it. I know how difficult public services are at the moment but to propose to rip the heart out of a hospital that is so important to a quarter of a million of people as Lewisham is — I find it staggering.”

The Mayor was joined by Heidi Alexander MP, who initiated an important petition which has already secured over 9,750 signatures, and which I urge everyone everywhere who cares about the NHS to sign, and Jim Dowd MP, (and I note also that Heidi Alexander managed to get the Daily Mail to allow her to write an article this week) but the evening’s real emotion and energy came from doctors and nurses in the NHS, and from local residents.

One of the most powerful moments, for me, came when an audience member asked if there was anyone present who had been consulted by Matthew Kershaw before he issued his report. Dr. John Miell, a consultant physician and endocrinologist, with 30 years’ experience, was invited to the stage to explain, as he put it so memorably, that he was part of the consultation process “if you regard turning up and being ignored as consultation.” Pointing out that he was speaking in an independent capacity, and that he was possibly endangering his job, Dr. Miell also stated bluntly that the changes proposed by Matthew Kershaw were “entirely financially driven,” and had nothing to do with improving services or setting in motion changes that would not end up affecting services adversely.

This was a theme repeated by Louise Irvine, the Deptford-based GP who set up yesterday’s meeting, and who has been a major driver in the campaigns to resist the NHS privatisation bill, and now these proposals to kill off Lewisham Hospital. She also stated that the proposals were “not driven by clinical needs,” telling the audience, “It’s financial.”

Also significant were the contributions of Dan, a young nurse who has been working in A&E for the last nine months. He explained how much he loves his job, and how terrible it would be to have to turn away anyone who was seriously ill. As he put it, “To have to say to someone, ‘you’re too ill’ — that disgusts me.”

Also powerful were the comments made by Frankie Turner, a former midwife at Lewisham Hospital, who retired in May this year. She pointed out, as the News Shopper reported it, that “there simply is not room at other hospitals for mums-to-be if the maternity services were to close.”

As she described it, “There were 4,400 births in Lewisham Hospital last year. If you close our maternity services, where will they go? Daily I had to phone around hospitals like the Queen Elizabeth and Kings, and they said, ‘no we can’t take anybody.’ There were times when I was phoning north of the river to get one patient taken. There’s no room in other hospitals.”

The same is true of A&E, of course, as Queen Elizabeth — which already takes in patients from Sidcup, since the closure of Queen Mary’s A&E Department in 2010 — regularly struggles to cope, and the significance of A&E to the viability of Lewisham Hospital as a whole was emphasised by Dr. John Miell, who explained that, on average, 40 people who turn up at A&E every day are admitted to the hospital — that’s 40 people requiring clinical care every day, 280 a week and over a thousand a month, helping to explain why, without an A&E  Department, Lewisham as a proper hospital will cease to exist.

What is also of huge concern is the difficulty of getting to Woolwich, and especially to the remote location of Queen Elizabeth Hospital (see the map here). There are very poor public transport links from Lewisham, and the hospital is five miles away, as the crow flies, from those in the west of Lewisham — Brockley and New Cross, for example. Absurdly, the administrator referred to a Transport for London website to come up with the ridiculous claim that the journey time of the average Lewisham resident travelling to Woolwich instead of Lewisham High Street will only be 14 minutes longer than it is at present. At night, in a speeding sports car, this might be possible, but on public transport at rush hour it could literally take several hours to get from door to door for many Lewisham residents. Not for nothing did I tell the South London Press last week, “A&E is the front line of hospital services. It is extremely distressing to think that, if something terrible happens to someone in Brockley, they will have to be taken through all the traffic to Woolwich. I can see someone dying if this goes ahead.”

Also speaking at the meeting was Eve Turner, of Ealing TUC, who brought a message of solidarity from Save Our Hospitals, a campaigning group in west London, where four out of nine A&E Departments face closure — at Ealing, Charing Cross (in Hammersmith), Hammersmith and Central Middlesex — and where the campaign recently got 5,000 people out on the streets to protest about the plans. Eve explained how the backing of local politicians has been hugely important in west London, in terms of publicity, including printing leaflets and distributing them to every household, and advertising on billboards and other sites, and this is something we need to make sure that Steve Bullock hears loudly and clearly, and as swiftly as possible. 

See below for a video, made by a supporter of the campaign, who filmed BBC London’s report on the meeting last night:

The next big events in the campaign involve meetings being undertaken across south London by Matthew Kershaw, to try and sell his wretched plans. The full list can be found here and here, but the most important dates for now are: Tuesday November 13, from 2-4 pm, at the West Greenwich Community Centre, 141 Greenwich High Road, London SE10 8JA (see here), and Friday November 16, from 10 am to noon, at Goldsmiths College in New Cross (see here). Full details are also on the poster below. Click on it to enlarge it.

If you can attend, please do, and tell Matthew Kershaw that we will not sit back and let him sign a death sentence for our hospital — and very probably for some seriously ill patients as well. Tell him that Lewisham, with 200,000 to 250,000 inhabitants, needs its own fully-functioning A&E Department, as does every London borough, and that this requirement needs to be the starting point for discussions, and not spurious claims that there is no money, when the NHS has been making savings, and the government can find outrageous amounts of money for other projects — just not apparently for the NHS.

Tell Matthew Kershaw that we know that the destruction of the NHS — of which the decapitation of Lewisham Hospital is just a start — is part of a malignant ideology being pushed aggressively by this wretched government, despite promises by David Cameron that the NHS would be safe with him, and tell him that all those who fought to create the NHS would be ashamed of him for going along with it.

There is also a major protest planned for the afternoon of Saturday November 24, and I urge everyone who can get to Lewisham on that date to do so. The protest begins at Loampit Vale, on the grassy knoll by the big roundabout, and the protestors — who hope to exceed Ealing’s 5,000! — will march to Lewisham Hospital and join hands to surround it.

For further information, please see the Save Lewisham A&E campaign, and the Lewisham Keep Our NHS Public campaign. You may also find this interview with Iain Wilson of Save Lewisham A&E useful.

And finally, please respond to the special administrator’s plans. You have until December 13 to let him know what you think here via the “Online consultation response form.” If you need any help filling in the form, Save Lewisham A&E have created a very useful “How to respond” page here.

Most of all, though, please spread the word. Tell everyone you know, by all means available — in person, on the phone, by email, through social networks. Don’t feel despondent, and don’t give up.

This is a national issue, as the Tories try to kill the NHS, and we need to create as wide a coalition as possible to defend our health service, but it also a local issue, and, as is clear from the 10,000 people who have signed the petition to date after just one week, and as is clear from the crowds last night, is one that can bring the people of Lewisham together like no campaign I have seen before.

Those of us campaigning for the NHS have always said that attacking the NHS would be the Tories’ downfall. Let’s make sure it is. But let’s not wait until 2015 to prove that at the ballot box! Fight to save Lewisham Hospital, and do it now!

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 the River Thames: The Solace of the Shore and the Fire of Sunset

The River Thames: The Solace of the Shore and the Fire of Sunset, a set on Flickr.

This is the 54th photo set in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, capturing the second half of a journey I made with my son Tyler from Waterloo, back to our home in Brockley, in south east London, on Sunday October 14, 2012.

The first set is here, and it is also part of a series designed to capture glimpses of London in autumn (or fall, as my American friends describe it), which I began with photos of Halloween and of the turning leaves in Hilly Fields, my local park.

In the first part of this journey, we travelled through Bankside and Borough, which was both lively and crowded, and into Bermondsey, along Shad Thames and past the Design Museum, into quieter streets and the Thames Path that, eventually, takes intrepid cyclists out to where the ever-widening Thames estuary meets the North Sea. In this second part, we found ourselves in Rotherhithe, at low tide, with a red sun falling towards earth in a lurid sunset, and the shore beckoning us beside the only boat with a mooring on this particular stretch of the river.

As in my previous escapade along the shore of the Thames, in Deptford, by Convoys Wharf (which I also wrote about here), I was transported to another place — timeless, calm, enchanting — that I find priceless, an unfathomable concept in the particular coarse times we are living through, in which greed is the only valued commodity.

I hope you enjoy the photos. Next up is a set of photos taken in Brockley Cemetery a few weeks ago — another liminal place where, fortunately, the dead, and the living nature reserve that has grown up around them, appear to be safe from the soulless marauders bent on razing to the ground as much of the old fabric of London as possible, to build more speculative housing and “mixed-use” developments of offices and shops, a zombie pursuit that must surely, at some point, run up against the inconvenient truth that most working people have only a finite amount of money that can be extracted from them, after credit — the engine of the false boom of the 2000s — was axed when the bankers and their political servants almost bankrupted the world in 2008.

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.

Beside the River Thames: Photos of a Journey from Clink Street to Butler’s Wharf

Beside the River Thames: Clink Street to Butlers Wharf, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, and my recent promise to publish a series of photos showing London in autumn, I’m following up on photos of Halloween and of the turning leaves in Hilly Fields, my local park in Brockley, south east London, with two sets of photos recording a bike ride I took with my son Tyler on Sunday October 14, 2012, along the river from Waterloo to Brockley.

This first set of photos — the 53rd photo set in my project — begins at Clink Street, near London Bridge, and records our journey to Bermondsey, just to the east of Tower Bridge and Butlers Wharf, via The Golden Hinde, Southwark Cathedral, Tooley Street and the More London complex, Shad Thames, the Design Museum and the community of barges and boats by Reeds Wharf.

This is a collection of sites of historical significance rubbing shoulders with more showy modern developments. As with everywhere in London today, some of the historical fabric of this part of the city — all of it in the London Borough of Southwark — is at risk of destruction, as developers and those bankrolling them ( as well as complacent council officials) seem to care little about London’s heritage, preferring to steamroller over everything with any trace of history. In case anyone has been in outer space recently, those driving the seemingly endless developments on London’s skyline are, on the one hand, the hypocritical Tory-led coalition government claiming that there is no money in the national coffers, while continuing to spend with reckless abandon (after the orgy of the Olympics) on massive infrastructure projects, and, on the other, the bankers who have not been held accountable for their dangerous and illegal activities that nearly bankrupted the world four years ago.

The next set records the rest of our journey through Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, as the sun fell, and includes a delightful diversion on the shore of the River Thames, untouched by the predatory nature of modern development, but for now I hope you enjoy this set, which revisits the fascinating area east of Blackfriars Bridge that I recently covered in the sets, “Between Bridges: Wealth and Loss in Bankside, Between Blackfriars and London Bridge” and “Eating and Commuting: Borough Market and London Bridge.”

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 Justice Fails: US Refuses to Confirm that Shaker Aamer Will Be Freed from 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. Also, if you’re a UK citizen or resident, please sign the e-petition to the British government calling for the immediate release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and also please sign the international petition, which anyone can sign.

On the eve of the Presidential election in the United States, it remains disgraceful that the injustices of the George W. Bush years still persist, with torturers officially protected, and President Obama’s promise to close the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo unfulfilled and largely unmentioned.

The failure to close Guantánamo is compounded, as we have been reporting since establishing this campaign and website in January, by the fact that 86 of the remaining 166 prisoners at Guantánamo were cleared for release in 2009 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which consisted of around 60 officials from the main government departments and the intelligence agencies, who reviewed all the prisoners’ cases before reaching their careful conclusions. In addition, many of these men were also cleared for release under the Bush administration — in some cases, as long ago as 2004.

It is certainly true that lawmakers have intervened to prevent President Obama from releasing prisoners, but the President has also persistently failed to seize the initiative, refusing, in 2009, to back a plan to bring cleared prisoners who could not be safely repatriated to live in the US (the Uighurs, persecuted Muslims from China), and, in January 2010, issuing a moratorium on releasing any cleared Yemeni prisoners from Guantánamo.

This came about as a result of the hysteria that followed the capture of a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, recruited in Yemen, who had tried and failed to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a flight into the US on Christmas Day 2009. The moratorium was profoundly unjust, tarring all Yemenis as terrorist sympathizers, and it is outrageous that it still stands, nearly three years after being introduced.

The majority of the cleared prisoners still held — 56 of the 86 — are Yemenis. 30 were placed in “conditional detention” by the Task Force, a category invented specifically for them, which depended on a perceived improvement in the security situation in Yemen that was not defined. However, after the Abdulmutallab incident and the moratorium, all the Yemenis were, essentially, stuck in the same endless limbo of “conditional detention.” Just one Yemeni has been released since the moratorium was announced, and, in September, disgracefully, one of the cleared men, Adnan Latif, died, three years after he was cleared for release under the Obama administration, and six years after military officials recommended his release under President Bush.

The Yemenis are not the only victims of the disgraceful inertia when it comes to releasing prisoners cleared for release. Of the 30 others, 29 were included in a list of 55 cleared prisoners made publicly available as part of a court case by the Justice Department in September, and they hail from Afghanistan, Algeria, China, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and the UK.

Some of these men can — and ought to be — released immediately, as should the Yemenis, of course, and those who cannot be safely repatriated (the Uighurs, for example) should be given new homes in the US, if no other country can be found that is prepared to take them.

The urgent need for Shaker Aamer to be freed from Guantánamo

One of the men who is still held but whose ongoing detention is inexplicable is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose name was included in the list of 55 cleared prisoners. Although Congress acted to prevent the release of prisoners to countries regarded as a threat, there is no way that the UK — America’s closest ally in the “war on terror” — could be regarded as a threat, and it has long been considered, by Shaker Aamer’s lawyers, and by others following his case — that he continues to be held because, as a charismatic and articulate man, who has persistently fought for the rights of the prisoners, his release will be embarrassing, as he will speak out about his experiences, and his knowledge of the horrors of Guantánamo and other prisons in the “war on terror.”

Since it became public knowledge that Shaker Aamer was on the US government’s list of 55 prisoners cleared for release, the pressure on the British government to secure his release has increased, because, as is readily apparent, there is no possible excuse for his imprisonment to continue.

Nevertheless, as The Hill reported this week, Shaker Aamer’s release is still a topic hedged in with all kinds of supposed obstacles.

The Hill reported that, on Tuesday, the British foreign secretary William Hague told Parliament that senior Obama administration officials had stated that Shaker Aamer “could be set free” under the National Defense Authorization Act.

Hague said, “Senior US officials have confirmed that the National Defense Authorization Act 2012 has the potential to make Mr. Aamer’s release more likely than the act of the previous year, but no releases have yet taken place under that act and the criteria for the national security waiver remain unclear.” He added, “We will certainly be pursuing this with the reelected or incoming US administration.”

The Hill proceeded to argue, incorrectly, that Shaker Aamer “is one of 56 detainees cleared for release by the executive branch who have so far failed to meet the requirements imposed by Congress in annual spending bills.” This was incorrect for two reasons: firstly, because the number on the list released by the Justice Department is 55, and not 56; but secondly and more importantly because, to prevent his release, lawmakers would have to argue that the UK is a terrorist threat, or that former prisoners freed in the UK are “recidivists”; in other words, that released British prisoners have “returned to the battlefield.” Britain, of course, is not a terrorist threat, and there is no evidence that any former British prisoner has engaged in activities that constitute a threat to the United States.

As The Hill also noted, the National Defense Authorization Act 2012, which was signed into law by President Obama on New Year’s Eve last year, “continues to require the Secretary of Defense to vouch that released prisoners won’t pose a threat to the United States if they’re transferred to another country,” in addition to the restriction on releasing alleged recidivists, as noted above.

However, that provision — Section 1028 — was, as The Hill also explained, and as Tom Wilner explained in an article for “Close Guantánamo” in January, watered down to allow the Secretary of Defense — and the President — the opportunity to bypass Congressional restrictions if they regard it as being in America’s best interests.

Under the waiver, the administration can release prisoners if the Secretary of Defense certifies that “alternative actions will be taken” to “substantially mitigate the risk of recidivism with regard to the individual to be transferred,” and if “the transfer is in the national security interests of the United States.”

The waiver has never been used, which is a great disappointment, but there is no excuse for it not being used as soon as possible to secure the release of Shaker Aamer. The truth is that there has been no excuse for his continued detention, at least since the National Defense Authorization Act 2012, with its waiver, was signed into law on New Year’s Eve last year. As a result, the greatest disappointment in The Hill’s reporting about Shaker Aamer is the claim that he “could be set free” after the election, and not that he “will be set free.”

If justice is to mean anything again in the United States, Shaker Aamer must be released as soon as possible, to rejoin his British wife and his four British children in London, and the other cleared prisoners must also be freed as soon as possible.

The candidates’ silence on the cleared Guantánamo prisoners — and the mainstream media’s refusal to make an issue of it — shames America, and that shame will continue until Shaker Aamer and the other cleared prisoners are free men.

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 on Hilly Fields, Brockley

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

With the wheel of the year turning from autumn to winter, the days getting shorter, the cold settling in, and the leaves first of all turning from green to yellows, oranges and reds, and then falling from the trees, I wanted to make sure that I made available some of my photos capturing these changes before winter firmly takes over.

In my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, in which I recently marked the publication of my first 1,000 photos in 50 sets, I have been out and about relentlessly as the summer gave way to autumn, and now as autumn is giving way to winter, but I have found it impossible to upload the photos to keep up with my productivity. I now have 217 sets of photos to upload — over 4,500 photos in total — taken from mid-July to yesterday, capturing this extraordinary city in bright sunlight, in the rain and the mist, in the early morning, at noon, in the late afternoon and at night, and at all points of the compass, to add to the 1,000 already posted.

In the last few weeks, I have made available photos I took in July, August and September, but none from October, so to remedy that I’m publishing five sets that are rooted in this particular time of year. I began with some Halloween photos, and am now following up with a photo set from Hilly Fields, the hill-top park in Brockley, south east London, near where I live, which was saved from developers in the late 19th century by philanthropists including Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust.

This wonderful space, which has a stone circle erected for the Millennium, and wonderful views south to Blythe Hill Fields and Forest Hill, and east to Lewisham, as well as glimpses of Blackheath, Shooters Hill, the O2 on Greenwich peninsula, and also the towers of Canary Wharf, is a wonderful seasonal barometer — like all parks, of course — and I was delighted to find some time, on October 24, to pay a brief visit as an autumnal sun began its slow descent to a golden sunset, and the turning leaves were a riot of fire or pale decay — a fugue or a last frenzy of life and colour, in every shade imaginable of yellows, oranges and reds.

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 A&E: As Petition Nears 5,000 Signatures, I Tell South London Press, “People Will Die”

As the campaign to save Lewisham Hospital’s A&E Department intensifies, with a petition launched by Heidi Alexander MP close to reaching 5,000 signatures in just four days, the South London Press, the bi-weekly regional newspaper based in Streatham, has added its support, with a front-page story in Friday’s edition, entitled, “Join the fight: Save our A&E.”

This is the kind of campaigning spirit that is sadly lacking in the mainstream media, and it is to be hoped that the SLP‘s assistance will help to persuade more people to become involved in the campaign to save Lewisham’s A&E Department, and also to prevent plans for maternity services to be severely downgraded, and for half the hospital to be sold off.

As I reported on Monday, the plans for Lewisham were included in a draft report put together by Matthew Kershaw, a special administrator appointed by Andrew Lansley to find solutions to the financial woes of the South London Hospital Trust, a “super-trust” serving Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley, which was suspended in July. The trust’s deficit is expected to reach £207 million by next year, although a third of this is because of rip-off PFI deals for rebuilding two of the three trust’s three hospitals under the last government — Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich and the Princess Royal in Orpington (the trust’s third hospital is St. Mary’s in Sidcup). As the Daily Telegraph explained, “The PFIs deals are costing the trust £69 million a year … Some £61 million of that is thought to be interest alone.”

To address the trust’s problems, Matthew Kershaw has proposed that Its “historic debts” should be absorbed by the Department of Health, so that its new owners are not “saddled with the issues of the past”, and has also proposed that the Department of Health should “pay £20 million to £25 million a year to cover the ‘excess costs’ of the PFIs for the two hospitals until the relevant contracts end.” The report also recommends that the trust should be split up, with King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust recommended to run the Princess Royal, and a merger involving Lewisham and the Queen Elizabeth.

It is on this latter point that campaigners in Lewisham — myself included — are up in arms, as the draft report recommends that the A&E Department at Lewisham Hospital should close, to be taken over by Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, which already deals with A&E cases from Sidcup as well. If the plans go ahead, there will be just one A&E Department for the 750,000 inhabitants of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley, which will be a disaster.

As I explained to the South London Press, in the Friday article that is not yet available online, “A&E is the front line of hospital services. It is extremely distressing to think that, if something terrible happens to someone in Brockley, they will have to be taken through all the traffic to Woolwich. I can see someone dying if this goes ahead.”

The bottom line, as I have been saying since the plans were first announced, is that each of the 32 boroughs in London — which typically have between 200,000 and 250,000 residents — should have their own A&E Departments, and this should be the priority when it comes to any considerations regarding the future of the NHS. If, instead, decisions are made on the basis of saving money, then we will end up with more situations like this, in which one region is made to pay for problems elsewhere.

As well as closing Lewisham’s A&E Department, Matthew Kershaw’s plans also mean that Lewisham “could lose its ‘consultant-led’ maternity services — handled by senior staff — so new mums experiencing problems giving birth would have to be ferried to other hospitals,” as the South London Press put it in an article on Tuesday. It was also suggested that the hospital “should become a major centre for planned surgery in worth east London, treating 44,000 patients a year from across south London, and, disturbingly, that half the hospital should be sold, for £17 million, which is just £5 million less than the £12 million that Lewisham spent on refurbishing parts of the hospital this year, including, ironically, the A&E Department.

Defending the proposals in the draft report. Matthew Kershaw said that NHS services across south east London were “not sustainable.” He stated, “We had to look at the whole south east London area and all of the seven hospitals. We cannot resolve this by looking at it [SLHT] on its own. It needs input from the others because all of the hospitals are part of a connected system. Other parts of the south east will face similar changes.”

Heidi Alexander, the MP for Lewisham East, who created the online petition to save Lewisham’s A&E Department, told the South London Press, “I don’t see why Lewisham should pay the price for financial failings elsewhere in the NHS. It is not at all clear to me how these proposals will result in better quality care or more lives saved. My fear is that they could mean the exact opposite.” On Wednesday, she also tackled David Cameron, at Prime Minister’s Questions, over his broken pledge, in 2007, to protect 29 top hospitals, including Lewisham, which he would be “prepared to get into a bare-knuckle fight over.”

Dr. Louise Irvine, from the Amersham Vale Practice at the Waldron Health Centre in Deptford, said, “Closing the A&E will be a total disaster and will lead to the downgrading of the hospital. Without the attached emergency surgical ward it will not be able to provide full maternity care. It will mean women with high risk pregnancies will have to travel further to get to an A&E which could put their lives at risk.” On Friday, she added, “Lewisham has a growing population — if the plans go ahead it will not have the full district hospital it needs. We are delighted the South London Press is backing the campaign.”

Jim Dowd, the MP for Lewisham West & Penge, said, “I cannot understand how damaging the services provided to people in one area can benefit residents in another. Robbing Peter to pay Paul never works and I hope that Lewisham residents will unite to show their determination to defend such an important service.”

In addition, Joan Ruddock, the MP for Lewisham Deptford, said, “Lewisham Hospital must not be made to pay for failures elsewhere and health provision for local residents must not be jeopardised. I will be joining with colleagues to get the best possible outcome for constituents.”

Take action now!

In conclusion, please sign the petition to save Lewisham Hospital’s A&E Department, and please also let Matthew Kershaw know what you think — you have until December 13 to let him know what you think here, or you can email tsaconsultation@nhs.net or phone 0800 953 0110.

As Heidi Alexander explained on her website yesterday, “Join the thousands of people who have called on the Special Administrator to retain our vital services by signing the petition here. You can also print off a paper copy of the petition and collect signatures from friends, family, neighbours and colleagues here. All paper petitions should be returned to the Office of Heidi Alexander MP, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA no later than 6th December 2012.”

Also see the planned consolations in six south London boroughs, including Lewisham, here, and, if you can, please attend a public meeting with Heidi Alexander MP, Jim Dowd MP, Louise Irvine and Steve Bullock, Lewisham’s Mayor, on Thursday November 8 at 6 pm in the Lessoff Auditorium at Lewisham Hospital.

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.

Pumpkins and Skeletons: Photos of Halloween in London

Pumpkins and Skeletons: Halloween in London, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I recently reached a small milestone, as the last set I uploaded, “The Open-Air Street Artists of Ashby Mews, Brockley,” was the 50th set I have uploaded since I began this project in May.

Those 50 sets contain my first 1,001 photos, and although it will take tens of thousands of photos to try and capture in any meaningful sense London’s streets and buildings, its houses, shops and offices, its parks and rivers, its skies and its forgotten places, and the movements of the people who bring these places to life or are crushed or belittled by them, in all 32 boroughs and the City of London, I have another 213 sets that I have photographed over the last three and a half months, but haven’t yet had the time to upload, containing over 4,500 more photos from the trips I have been making on an almost daily basis, so I do feel that I am making some meaningful progress.

For this 51st set, I decided, topically, to upload a handful of Halloween-related photos taken over the last few weeks — some from shops in Brockley, in south east London, where I live; some from a visit to Covent Garden with my family; and others from a visit last week to North End Road in Fulham, the first of what will eventually be many trips to cover west London, which is the most difficult area of London for me to reach from the south east. The set is completed with a few photos from Halloween itself, as celebrated in south east London.

I hope you enjoy these snapshots of the annual Halloween ritual, of the marvellous seasonal blooms of pumpkins and squashes, and, in one instance, of the flurry of firework selling that precedes Bonfire Night, traditionally held on November 5 to commemorate the killing of Guy Fawkes, but now stripped of its anti-Papist associations, for the most part, and held on the nearest Saturday before the 5th.

I’ll be on Blackheath with friends and family on Saturday evening, for the annual — and always impressive — firework display arranged by Lewisham Council (which was formerly run in conjunction with Greenwich Council as well, until they rather disgracefully decided to stop providing any funding).

As for Halloween, I hope yours was as much fun as mine. My son and a friend of his went trick-or-treating in our neighbourhood, as seen in the last photo in the set, as did numerous other local children, and we then had a delicious meal with friends after our cauldron of sweets was emptied by the ravenous hordes. I can’t say that I entirely approve of trick-or-treat, which was imported wholesale from the US sometime on the 1980s, but I’ve always loved the ghoulish paraphernalia, and, in a deeper sense, of course, Halloween and the Catholic Day of the Dead, celebrated with such aplomb in Mexico, find an ancient pagan echo in Samhain, one of the cross-quarters of the Celtic year, when the animals that could not be kept over winter were slaughtered, and a great feast held.

Between 1996 and 2005, when I travelled extensively in Britain in search of ancient sacred monuments, and chronicled the beliefs of the various counter-cultural groups who had become attached, in particular, to Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, I met many people — Druids, Wiccans and various other land-reforming mavericks and iconoclasts — who were drawn to the wheel of the ancient year, and I also grew to appreciate the power of a calendar founded in the movements of the sun, and the rhythms of nature. It is a part of myself that, in some ways, I regret neglecting, as my life has settled into something much more urban and technological.

My relentless bike rides — and my ongoing attempt to map London, in images, and also internally, through my camera and through first-hand experience — may just be a way of trying to reclaim something of that fascination with nature and place that drove me in those years of exploring ancient sacred places.

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.

Please Sign the Petitions to Prevent the Closure of Lewisham Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Department

[image error]Please sign the petition launched by Heidi Alexander MP! And the e-petition to the British government!

On Monday, as I explained here, Matthew Kershaw, an NHS special administrator appointed in summer by the great butcher of the NHS, Andrew Lansley, delivered his draft report on “securing sustainable NHS services” (summary here) — a title laden with spin, as Kershaw’s job was to find a way to carve up the indebted South London Healthcare Trust.

A “super-trust” covering the London Boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley, which was ill-advisedly created in 2009, the SLHT had accrued a deficit of £207 million prior to being placed in administration in July 2012, when the Tory-led coalition government’s “Regime for Unsustainable NHS Providers” was enacted, specifically — in the first instance — to deal with its problems, although if the government can get away with axing entire NHS trusts and let in private contractors, then that is undoubtedly what they will do, and what they have had in mind all along.

The Trust was burdened with unaffordable PFI debts (a toxic legacy of Gordon Brown’s enthusiasm for PFI which hovers like an angel of death over numerous hospitals and trusts, as well as schools and other major projects), and had, it seems, not managed its finances as well as it could have, although Matthew Kershaw’s solution, to break it up, and to punish Lewisham — not in debt, and never part of the South London Healthcare Trust — by axing its A&E department, which serves 250,000 people, and moving it to Woolwich, as part of the failed Trust’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, is a pill that is too bitter to swallow for any of the residents of Lewisham who have not been taken in by the government’s lies about austerity and all being in it together. Just to make it clear, if the plans go ahead, the QEH in Woolwich will be responsible for the A&E needs of 750,000 people, and will be the only A&E department in the three London boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley.

As the website “Save Lewisham A&E” has also explained, when dealing with Lewisham, Matthew Kershaw “also proposes children’s wards, critical care, complex/emergency surgery and perhaps maternity services be closed by 2015/16, and the hospital’s Victorian buildings be sold off for £17million,” which is only £5 million more than the £12 million that was spent on refurbishing the hospital, including its A&E department, earlier this year.

Two petitions have just been launched, and I urge you please to sign them if you’re in south London, or if you’re anywhere else in London, the UK or anywhere else in the world and you care about the future of the NHS.

The first petition was initiated just three days ago by Heidi Alexander MP, the MP for Lewisham East, and it has so far attracted over 3,500 signatures. Please sign it here!

The second petition is an e-petition to the British government, so you’ll need to be a UK citizen or resident to sign it.

Also, if you can, come along to the public meeting to oppose the plans announced in Matthew Kershaw’s draft report, which is taking place on Thursday November 8, from 6-8pm, in the Lessoff Auditorium at Lewisham Hospital, with Heidi Alexander MP, Jim Dowd MP (for Lewisham West and Penge), Lewisham’s Mayor Steve Bullock, Dr. Louise Irvine, local GP and BMA council member, and other speakers to be announced.

Clearly, punishing Lewisham for the problems of another NHS trust is unfair on every level, but also please do consider that, although a reorganisation of the South London Healthcare Trust may well be a necessity, its £207 million deficit ought not to be considered alone, and should be set against the £8.9 billion cost of the Olympic Games (expected to rise to as much as £24 billion when all the costs are tallied up), for example, or, as reported on Monday, the £1.4 billion in savings delivered to the Treasury by the NHS, £1 billion of which has been seized by George Osborne.

As the Guardian reported:

The department of health confirmed that it had underspent its allocated funding by £1.4bn this year, half a billion more than it predicted in March. While £400m will be rolled over for the department to spend in 2012-13, the remaining £1bn has been returned to the Treasury.

Labour highlighted that the cash was being returned while there were 6,000 fewer nurses in the NHS since the coalition took power. “The government is clawing back money from the NHS at the same time as it is handing a tax cut to millionaires and P45s to nurses”, said Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary.

“The prime minister needs to be straight with the public on his Government’s record on NHS funding. On the very same day he was boasting to the Commons about increasing NHS spending, we learn that George Osborne has made another £1 billion raid on the NHS budget.”

For me, the bottom line about the NHS is that every London borough needs a fully functioning A&E department, and this should be the starting point for plans dealing with “securing sustainable NHS services,” and not just looking at budgets and deficits. Money can be saved, but if an axe is placed permanently above the NHS on the basis of cost alone, more and more hospitals and trusts will be undermined, more and more essential services will be lost, and the only people who will gain will be those involved in the private companies who are currently drooling on the sidelines.

The timeline for derailing the plans for NHS services in south London is below, as explained in Matthew Kershaw’s draft report:

Consultation – The TSA [the Trust Special Administrator] must run a consultation over 30 working days to validate and improve the draft recommendations in the draft report. This will take place between 2 November and 13 December 2012.

Final Report – The TSA must use consultation responses to inform the final report to the Secretary of State. This will take place from the end of the consultation to 7 January 2013, when the final report is due.

Secretary of State Decision – The Secretary of State has 20 working days to determine what action to take in relation to the organisation. The Secretary of State must then publish and lay in Parliament a notice containing the final decision and the reasons behind it. The Secretary of State’s decision is final with no right of appeal; this final decision must be published by 1 February 2013.

The time to fight is NOW! Please, please, please get involved if you can, and if this affects you in any way.

Note: The photo above was originally posted on Flickr, as part of two sets of photos of the TUC-organised “A Future That Works” march and rally in central London on October 20. See here and here.

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

Photos: The Open-Air Street Artists of Ashby Mews, Brockley

The Open-Air Street Artists of Ashby Mews, Brockley, a set on Flickr.

Before Brockley, in south east London, was mugged by the selfish and arrogant forces of gentrification, with the arrival of the upgraded East London Line, it had been a haven for Bohemians for many decades — with artists, writers and musicians all taking advantage of its leafiness and its affordability.

At the heart of Brockley are broad, tree-lined Victorian streets, mostly built in the 1880s and 1890s, when the former fields of Brockley were opened up to developers with the arrival of the railway. These roads form a conservation area, first designated as such by Lewisham Council in 1973, in recognition of the area’s “special architectural and historic interest,” which was extended in 1991, 1993 and 2005.

Between the leafy streets are the mews — one of which is the focus of this photo set, after it was adopted by enterprising artists. As Lewisham Council’s conservation area document explains:

The mews in Brockley conservation area are the unmade service roads running behind houses. Early maps show that mews development, such as coach housing, was never as extensive as in other parts of London. The people living in Brockley were more likely to use the new train network to travel and to hire coaches and horses when needed rather than keep their own. In any case, not long after the area had become established, the motor car became available to those with means.

The Council also notes, “Today the mews are leafy lanes containing many mature trees, single-storey garaging and workshops with views to the rears of properties and long verdant gardens,” and notes problems with any proposed developments: “Many constraints make development in the mews undesirable: there is usually no lighting or road surfacing, the mews cannot usually be serviced by modern refuse vehicles and to provide these to enable residential development would alter the calm, leafy and open character of the mews.”

The various mews in Brockley tend to divide opinion. Certainly, they are used by fly-tippers, whose mess is in no one’s interests. However, they also contain workshops — some containing craftspeople, and others containing car mechanics — which some people — myself included — celebrate, while others want the whole of Brockley cleansed of any kind of manual workers, as can be seen in the  whispering campaigns against the various businesses in the area that involve any kind of grittiness and dirt — Brockley’s two MOT centres, for example, one of which (the one near the station) will soon be razed by developers, who will pack the site with overpriced and no doubt hideous apartments, the timber merchants at Brockley Cross, the two used car dealers, and the car wash on the corner of Wickham Road.

Fortunately, one of these mews — Ashby Mews — is currently providing an open-air venue for some enterprising artists, whose efforts snub the snooty, gallery-based world of fine art, and even stand as a kind of pirate, DiY alternative to Brockley’s main artist-based annual event, the Brockley Open Studios, in which local artists — mainly, but not exclusively those fortunate enough to have moved to Brockley before greed became the only arbiter of meaning in London — open up their homes to visitors on the last weekend in June.

On walls and on the hoarding put up to fence off a particular site that had become notorious for fly-tipping, these artists have created an excellent open-air gallery that I regularly visit to enjoy large-scale art in an outdoor setting — one mixing Victorian planning with the celebrated calmness and leafiness of Brockley’s mews — and to see if there have been any updates. Like much street art, it is not necessarily regarded as permanent, and during my visits two particular works have been painted over. These photos were mostly taken on September 7, 2012, after the journey through Soho, Bankside and Borough that I recorded here, here, here and here, with additional photos taken on October 27, 2012. In addition, I’m pleased to note, it is the 50th photo set posted as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike.

I hope you enjoy this open-air gallery, and if you have any information about the artists, then please let me know, as another profound difference between the Ashby Mews open gallery and the fine art business world is that the mews artists barely, if at all, advertise who they are, which is a refreshing alternative to traditional egomania.

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.