Andy Worthington's Blog, page 160

The First Squatter Is Jailed Since Being Homeless Was Criminalised by the Tories

This afternoon, on my way back from a disturbing bike ride around Mayfair, where money is almost literally oozing out of every orifice of those who find it easier than ever to enrich themselves at the expense of society as a whole, I arrived back at Charing Cross, to catch the train back to south east London, where I was confronted by the front page of the Evening Standard announcing, “London Squatter First to Be Jailed,” which threw me into an angry depression.

The squatter in question — actually a 21-year old from Portsmouth, Alex Haigh, who only arrived in London in July — is indeed the first person to be jailed for squatting since the law on squatting was changed on September 1, transforming it from a civil to a criminal offence, punishable by a six-month prison sentence and a £5,000 fine.

Haigh was given a 12-week sentence after pleading guilty to squatting a property in Pimlico owned by the housing association L&Q (London & Quadrant), which, ironically, is supposed to be in the business of providing homes to those in need, like all providers of social housing. He is now in Wormwood Scrubs, where his accommodation for the next three months will be provided by the British taxpayer. Depriving people of their liberty costs, on average, between £27,000 and £29,000 a year, and £2.2 billion is spent in total on the 80,000-plus prisoners in England and Wales.

Surely, if we are faced with such a pressing need to cut costs, as the government asserts with grindingly monotonous regularity, it would be worthwhile not spending around £7,000 on depriving a 21-year old of his liberty for having stayed in an empty flat. Haigh’s father Peter, who runs a construction business in Plymouth, accurately told the Evening Standard, “They have made an example of him. To put him in that prison environment, I don’t understand it. If he broke the law he should be dealt with but it is like putting someone who has not paid their tax into Dartmoor Prison.”

The right-wing spin on the story has been predictable. The Evening Standard — which is the only excuse for a newspaper in the whole of London — claimed that the new law “was brought in amid a squatting crisis in London as organised eastern European gangs and other squatters targeted family homes.” This managed to play a racist card, and to stir up unwarranted fears about squatters taking over people’s houses while they popped out to the shops for a pint of milk, which are totally unfounded and/or dangerously inflammatory.

The truth is that the processes that were in place to deal with squatting before September 1 were perfectly adequate, and what the new law, which was designed to appeal to right-wing Tories, does is to protect those who sit on empty properties while there is a genuine housing crisis — one in which, to cite the example of London, a huge number of people find it impossible to pay the astronomical rents that unprincipled and unregulated landlords are charging.

Throughout the country, there are almost a million empty properties, and a comparable number of people in need of shelter. At any one time, there are around 50,000 squatters, who, tonight, must be fearing the worst. While the criminalisation of their need for shelter ought to appal anyone who believes that homes, rather than prisons, are suitable places for the homeless, the cheerleaders for adding to Britain’s overcrowded prisons by stuffing them full of homeless people have also not done their sums. As the Guardian reported in March this year:

The cost of a new law to further criminalise squatting could run to almost 20 times official estimates, wiping out government legal aid budget savings, according to the findings of a newly published report.

The study, commissioned by Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes (Squash) and supported by academics and politicians including a former Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson, finds that the Ministry of Justice’s new law fails to account for extra spending on housing benefit squatters will claim once they are evicted.

The Can We Afford to Criminalise Squatting? report, published on [March 16, 2012], finds the total costs of the law — clause 136 in the Legal Aid and Punishment of Offenders Bill (Lapso) — could run to between £316.2m and £790.4m over five years, depending on the number of squatters in England and Wales. This compares with the £350m in savings the MoJ hopes to make by cutting the legal aid budget.

Every time I wake up and ask what’s happening in my country, I find that the Tory idiots who claim to be in charge are almost unable to sleep, as they’re kept so busy rushing from one group of vulnerable people to another, making sure that all of them get a good kicking.

Squatting is based on need — a need for shelter, which is a fundamental human right. There may be the odd example of opportunism, and even of pointedly bad behaviour, but the law that has just imprisoned a 21-year old — and very possibly ruined his future — for something that could have been sorted out without him getting a criminal record is a cruel law indeed, and one of which all decent people should be ashamed.

*****

Below, I’m cross-posting an article by that was published in the Guardian on August 31, the day before squatting became a criminal offence, which was written by Joseph Blake, Squash’s press officer. I had meant to cross-post it earlier, under the heading, “Criminalising Squatting: The Hideous Triumph of Greedy Right-Wing Property Owners,” in which my first line would have been, “Britain — or England in particular — is under the control of a government with no redeeming features whatsoever, but in this world of cruelty, stupidity and cynicism, the decision to criminalise squatting is a new low.”

I had also intended to draw on another Guardian article, by George Monbiot, published in January, written when the House of Lords was about to consider the bill containing the proposal for criminalising squatting, which he described as “a cruel and unnecessary clause, whose purpose is to protect landlords who keep their houses empty.” Succinctly, Monbiot explained the situation that existed until September 1, and here are the quotes I’d planned to use, because they describe all that is wrong with the criminalisation of squatting:

Under current law, if squatters move into your home (or a home that you are soon to occupy) and fail to leave the moment you ask, the police can immediately remove them. The only houses with weaker protections are those that remain empty. There are 700,000 such homes in England alone, almost half of which have been empty for a long time. They have long been a refuge for street sleepers and other homeless people. Landlords already possess civil powers to remove them, and the police can step in if squatters ignore the court orders.

Last year the government launched a consultation on criminalising all squatting in residential buildings; 96% of the respondents argued that no change in the law was necessary. But on 1 November, just five days after the consultation ended, the government jemmied an amendment into the legal aid bill, already halfway towards approval. This meant that the House of Commons had no chance to scrutinise it properly, and objectors had no chance to explain the issues to their MPs.

The result of this blatant insult to democracy is that people who have housed themselves at no cost to anyone are likely to be summarily evicted. Houses will fall back into disuse, and the government’s housing bill will rise: by between £35m and £90m, according to the campaign group Squash. Worse still, the new law will help unscrupulous landlords to evict tenants where there is no written contract, by declaring them squatters and calling the police.

And finally, for now, here’s Joseph Blake’s article:

Criminalising squatting hurts the poor and benefits the rich

By Joseph Blake, The Guardian, August 31, 2012

This rightwing law protects unscrupulous landlords and property speculators keeping properties empty to maximise profits

From Saturday, a massively unjust, unnecessary and unaffordable new law will come into force in England and Wales. In the middle of one of the worst housing crises this country has ever seen, up to 50,000 squatters who are currently squatting in empty properties across the UK face becoming criminals, and this because they are occupying abandoned residential properties to put a roof over their heads.

Of course, we have all heard the horror stories of the innocent homeowner who “goes out to buy a pint of milk and comes back to find their home squatted” – and we have sympathy with this situation. But most people don’t realise that such instances are extremely rare and overplayed in the media for political gain. They are also already a criminal offence, and homeowners are already strongly protected by existing legislation. One hundred and sixty leading legal figures wrote to the Guardian to explain this point.

In the face of this new law, thousands of vulnerable people will possibly become criminals overnight, facing up to six months in jail and fines of up to £5,000. With homelessness rates rising and the number of empty properties currently in the region of more than 930,000 according to the Empty Homes Agency, we must ask: who is this law protecting? It protects unscrupulous landlords and property speculators who are keeping properties empty to up their profits. The new law encourages these properties to remain empty and is worryingly open to abuse by rogue landlords, which could mean trouble for tenants.

96% of responses to the government’s consultation didn’t want to see any action taken on squatting, but the government ignored the results of its own consultation. What is the point of even having a consultation in the first place? Out of 2,217 responses, 2,126 of those were from members of the public concerned about the impact of criminalising squatting, and only 10 people bothered to write in claiming to be victims of squatting.

On top of all this, the new law is completely unaffordable. Squash produced a report while the law was going through the House of Lords – after it bypassed the normal process in the Commons – which shows that this law will cost the taxpayer £790m over five years. The report concludes that this law alone will wipe out the entire expected costs of the legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill, which is supposed to be a cost-cutting bill.

Unlikely bedfellows such as the Metropolitan police, The Law Society, The Criminal Bar Association and numerous Homeless Charities such as Crisis have come out strongly against it and squatters know they have this on their side. We believe that possibly even the government ministers pushing this through will admit it is not popular legislation.

So how has this all happened? The political process that has criminalised squatting in residential properties was undertaken by an elite minority who actively ignored the opinions of the vulnerable and their advocates. Using manipulative rhetoric and purposefully obfuscatory propaganda to delegitimise the experiences and arguments of opponents, they made their decisions in the dark hours of the night and in scripted performances, deploying authoritarian and discretionary power. This is a sham democracy.

The attack against squatting has always been a rightwing ploy to defend and enhance private property rights over the human right to shelter. New groups have sprung up to support and defend squats from evictions in response to the new law, so it could get nasty in the next few weeks. Who can blame them? They have nowhere else to go.

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

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Horrors of Guantánamo at Aafia Siddiqui Protest in London

On Sunday, in torrential rain, I cut short a dry afternoon in the Catford Bridge Tavern — a formerly notoriously rough pub reborn after its recent takeover by the Antic group, which is spacious, friendly, well-decorated, and which also does excellent food, including Sunday roasts — to take my bike on the train to Charing Cross, and, from there, to cycle up to Piccadilly and through Mayfair to Grosvenor Square, to speak at a protest outside the US Embassy to mark the second anniversary of the sentencing, in a court in New York, of Aafia Siddiqui.

The story of Aafia Siddiqui, which I have been covering for many years, remains one of the most disturbing in the whole of the Bush administration’s brutal “war on terror.” A Pakistani neuroscientist, she is currently two years into a horrendously unjust 86 year sentence in a prison hospital in Texas for allegedly having tried and failed, in August 2008, to shoot a number of US soldiers who were holding her in Ghazni, Afghanistan. This followed her resurfacing after a mysterious five and a half year absence, in which many people believe she was held in one or more secret CIA “black sites,” where she was severely abused and lost her mind.

Although the turnout for the protest, organised by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, was only moderate, numbers were swelled by the many thousands of people who had turned up for a protest about the terrible racist and Islamophobic video, “The Innocence of Muslims,” which, to my mind, like all examples of bigotry, is best ignored, to avoid providing the oxygen of publicity to those peddling such filth. However, the organisers of the Aafia Siddiqui protest were presented with an excellent opportunity to inform numerous people about the plight of Dr. Siddiqui, which was obviously useful.

Although the presence of two protests was confusing, and the weather saw off the PA system for the Aafia Siddiqui event, obliging those of us who were speaking to have to shout our message at the crowd that clustered around us, I was delighted to have the opportunity to highlight Dr. Siddiqui’s ongoing plight, and also to discuss the wider issue of the scapegoats of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” who continue to be punished disproportionately, whether they were guilty of anything, or, as is often the case, innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A video of my talk is posted below:

These unjustly deprived of their liberty in the “war on terror” include those held beyond the law at Bagram prison (renamed the Parwan Detention Facility) in Afghanistan, where the Geneva Conventions were torn up by the Bush administration, and have not been reinstated by Barack Obama, and, of course, Guantánamo, where 167 men continue to languish neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects, but as human beings essentially with no rights, as the Bush administration first intended.

Although they ostensibly have the right to challenge their detention in the US courts, through habeas corpus, those rights have been struck down by right-wing judges in the appeals court in Washington D.C., and with Congress having imposed onerous restrictions on releasing anyone from Guantánamo, and the Obama administration having taken a position of extreme cowardice and indifference when it comes to releasing any of the men, they find that the only way out of Guantánamo is in a coffin.

The disgraceful death, three weeks ago, of Adnan Latif, a mentally troubled Yemeni, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the position that Barack Obama has taken regarding the men still held in Guantánamo. Although Latif was repeatedly cleared for release, by a mIlitary review board under George W. Bush in 2006, and by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009, and although he also won his habeas corpus petition, he was not released. Obama and Congress have refused to release any Yemenis after a failed terror plot in 2009 was revealed to have originated in Yemen, thereby implying that all Yemenis are terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, and the D.C. appeals court struck down Latif’s successful habeas petition.

For the scapegoats of the “war on terror,” as I mentioned on Sunday, enough is enough. It is clear that no one in a position of power or authority cares, and that the mainstream media has largely given up on doing its job, but those of us who do care must not let ourselves be silenced. Aafia Siddiqui should be repatriated to Pakistan, the Geneva Conventions should be fully reinstated in all war zones, and Guantánamo must be closed.

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

Photos of Deptford: A Life By The River Thames

Deptford: A Life By The River Thames, a set on Flickr.

In May, when I first conceived of the notion of travelling the whole of London by bike, taking photos to compile a portrait of the city at this troubling time in its history (caught between the Olympics and its role as a harbour for the global rich on the one hand, and on the other subjected to the Tories’ ruinous and ideologically malignant “age of austerity”), the first places I visited were Greenwich and Deptford (or see here), down the hill from my home in Brockley, in south east London.

Greenwich, of course, is internationally renowned, and deservedly so, as it is the home of the Royal Observatory (and the location of the prime meridian), and is also the home of the recently renovated Cutty Sark tea clipper, and the splendid Royal Naval College.

Deptford, in contrast, Greenwich’s westerly neighbour and the site of the former Royal Dockyard, is unknown to many Londoners, and has few obvious attractions beyond its two historically significant churches — the Church of St. Nicholas on Deptford Green, where the playwright Christopher Marlowe is buried, and the Church of St. Paul, located off Deptford High Street.

However, although far too much of its old housing was razed to the ground when it should have been saved and renovated, as much of the housing in Greenwich was, it does not follow that Deptford is some kind of poor and wretched place, as the BBC suggested in a flawed documentary as part of its series, “The Secret History Of Our Streets,” which provoked a campaigning website to be created in response, entitled, “Putting the Record Straight.” Also see the responses of various Deptford blogs — Crosswhatfields, the Deptford Dame and Deptford Misc.

Unlike the Deptford portrayed by the BBC, the real Deptford has a wonderfully vibrant street market and a high street that is the least corporate in London, and has long been a magnet for all kinds of artists and creative types, alongside its varied and often misrepresented locals.

So Deptford, it turns out, is actually a historically fragmented but endlessly lively and interesting part of London’s inner city, with two rivers playing a huge part in that history. One is the Thames, dominated for centuries by a royal dockyard, now known as Convoys Wharf, abandoned and owned by foreign property developers who want to turn it into a mini-city like Canary Wharf, in a hugely inappropriate manner, which will be extremely socially divisive. The other is the Ravensbourne, which feeds into the Thames at Deptford Creek.

This set of photos follows up on that initial photographic visit in May, and a follow-up visit here (or here), and I also made several other visits before these photos in July. I have since visited Deptford on several occasions — in fact, I find myself drawn back repeatedly — and will post those photos in due course.

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.

This Week at Guantánamo: More on Adnan Latif, Omar Khadr’s Birthday, A French Appeal, and the Release of Cleared Prisoners’ Names

I wrote the following article for the “” 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.

In a busy week for news relating to Guantánamo, the most significant development was the court-ordered release of the names of 55 of the 86 prisoners who have been cleared for release from Guantánamo but are still held.

Beginning this coming week, and in the weeks to come, we will be analyzing this list in detail, telling the stories of many of these men, but what we can note upfront is that 28 of the 55 names were featured in our groundbreaking report in June, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago.”

Adnan Latif: Please sign the open letter

For now, however, we’d like to revisit the story of Adnan Latif, the mentally troubled Yemeni man who died at Guantánamo two weeks ago, and to call your attention to an open letter and petition to the US government issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Please sign and circulate it, if you can.

As his father, Farhan Abdul Latif, explained last week in an interview with The National, an English language newspaper in the UAE, “Where are the international human rights organizations? Why are they not helping us in our just cause? This case is far from over. We are holding US president Barack Obama responsible for the killing of my beloved son.”

Speaking of the few occasions when the family was allowed to speak to Adnan by phone, Farhan Abdul Latif said, “Towards the end of our calls with him, he would scream, saying he was being tortured and continually beaten by the US forces in Guantánamo. That is when guards forcibly closed the phone line.” He added, “The US had no proof Adnan had any links to Al-Qaeda or Taliban. All along, he was being held illegally.”

The National also revealed that, last June, Adnan Latif sent his mother, Mona Abdullah Saeed, a photo of himself wearing an orange prison suit inside his cell at Guantánamo, with a note saying, “Mother, do not to be sad and accept the fate of God.” His mother said, “I prayed to see him before I die. My prayer was not accepted. He was the sweetest of people and most obedient of all my children.” She added that her son, who always maintained that he had traveled to Pakistan for treatment for a head wound received in a car crash in Yemen, “only wanted good health. This was his only crime.”

Below is the text of the open letter put together by the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif died on September 8, 2012, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after more than ten years of detention without charge and, from his perspective, without foreseeable end. While the cause of his death is not yet known, what is clear is that it is Guantánamo that killed him.

The cruel irony is that by the government’s own admission, Mr. Latif did not belong at Guantánamo. He was approved for transfer three times by two different administrations in 2004, 2007, and 2009. In reviewing his petition for habeas corpus, the district court had agreed that he should be released, finding that the single secret document that was the basis for his detention was too flawed to be credited. But the Department of Justice appealed the order, and the Court of Appeals, as it has in virtually every appeal by Guantánamo detainees, deferred to the government. A dissenting judge on the appellate court condemned the majority for not only “moving the goal posts,” but also “call[ing] the game in the government’s favor.”

Adnan Latif remained in Guantánamo despite having been approved for transfer not because of anything he had done, but because of where he was from. Mr. Latif was a citizen of Yemen, and in December 2009, the Obama administration issued a moratorium on all repatriations to that country. Fifty-six other Yemenis have been approved to leave Guantánamo; but for the fact of their citizenship, they could go home.

There are 167 men who remain imprisoned at Guantánamo today. Most will never be charged, and the majority have been cleared for transfer by every government agency with a stake in the matter. As Mr. Latif once wrote to his attorneys, Guantánamo “is a piece of hell that kills everything.” It is long past time for the Obama administration to make good on its promise to close the notorious prison and resettle or repatriate the men it does not intend to prosecute. It can begin with transferring the 87 — now 86 — men it has already determined can be released.

Omar Khadr: Another birthday at Guantánamo

In other news last week, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner whose story we have covered here and here, marked his 26th birthday in Guantánamo (on September 19), even though he was supposed to have been released last November, to serve the last seven years of an eight-year sentence, negotiated as part of a plea deal he agreed to in October 2010.

For a change, Omar’s ongoing detention — unlike that of the 86 cleared prisoners, and, until his death, that of Adnan Latif — is not America’s fault, but is, instead, the fault of the Canadian government, his home government, which is dragging its heels regarding his return. To bring this disgraceful situation to an end, please sign Sen. Roméo Dallaire’s petition demanding that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews signs the paperwork to secure Omar’s return from Guantánamo now, and also have a look at the Tumblr and Facebook pages for “Omar Khadr Welcome Here,” in which Canadian supporters of Omar have been posting photos of themselves announcing their intention of welcoming Omar home. New messages are welcome!

Nabil Hadjarab’s uncle files criminal complaint against French government

The last piece of news concerns Nabil Hadjarab — one of the 55 cleared prisoners on the list just released by the US government, and one of the 40 in our report in June — whose story we reported back in May, in an article entitled, “Nabil Habjarab, An Algerian Known as the ‘Sweet Kid,’ Seeks a New Home So He Can Leave Guantánamo.” Last week, his lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve noted that Ahmed Hadjarab, a French citizen and Nabil’s uncle, had just filed a criminal complaint with the French government regarding Nabil’s ill-treatment in Guantánamo.

Specifically, as Reprieve noted, Ahmed Hadjarab’s complaint states that Nabil’s “indefinite detention and ongoing torture violates articles of the French Criminal Code and the Geneva Convention.” In his complaint, Nabil’s uncle also asked the investigating magistrate, Madame Zimmerman, to “open an investigation into his nephew’s imprisonment and torture by the US authorities.”

As Reprieve explained, at Guantánamo Nabil has been “short-shackled, subjected to temperature extremes, sleep deprivation, beatings, abusive interrogations, and isolation,” and is still held, despite being cleared for release in 2007, and despite being “told by his American interrogators that his identity had been confused with that of another man and that his detention was a mistake.”

Nabil’s father — also a French citizen — died in 1994, and since then his uncle Ahmed has regarded Nabil as his own son. As Reprieve noted, under French law, “any interested party – in this case Mr. Hadjarab – can register a complaint with the French government.” As a result, Ahmed Hadjarab “is asking the French authorities to meet with him and discuss his nephew’s detention and torture, and future return to his home in France.”

Discussing the complaint, Polly Rossdale, of Reprieve’s Life After Guantánamo Project, pointed out that “Nabil Hadjarab has now been held beyond the rule of law for more than ten years. For almost half of this time he has been cleared for release. It is difficult to overstate the devastating impact this had had on his loved ones at home in France.” She also explained that the French government now has “the opportunity to end this family’s suffering,” and that it is up to senior officials “to do what is right and energetically seek Nabil’s release.”

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 Old and the New: Photos of a Journey through Waterloo, Borough and Bermondsey

The Old and the New: A Journey through Waterloo, Borough and Bermondsey, a set on Flickr.

These photos are the last in a series of photos from Friday August 31, 2012, when, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I cycled through central London and back to my home in Brockley, in south east London, after attending a protest in Triton Square, just off Euston Road, outside the offices of Atos Healthcare, the multinational company that is running the government’s vile review process for disabled people, which is designed to find them fit for work when they are not. See the Flickr set here.

After the protest, I cycled through Fitzrovia to Oxford Street, and then on to Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross and the Southbank Centre. The previous Flickr sets are here, here and here.

This last set from that particular journey covers parts of south east London that are not, for the most part, on any kind of tourist itinerary, and some of the places I visited are unknown to Londoners in general — parts of Waterloo, Borough, Walworth and Bermondsey that I have been getting to know much more thoroughly than ever before since I began cycling and taking photographs of London on a regular basis four months ago.

I hope you enjoy the photos, which capture elements of the fabric of London that are representative of how the city is at this particular moment in time — with the visible effects of gentrification in former workers’ cottages that are now stratospherically expensive, similarly overpriced new builds, showy modern architecture, pubs, cafes, shops, street art and various social housing projects that continue to house large numbers of Londoners beyond the circles in which the moneyed people move. I continue to keep an eye on these developments, because, as I will be showing in other photo sets over the coming months, much of this housing is disappearing, razed to the ground to make way for projects that are mostly for sale to workers in the City and Canary Wharf, and not to the displaced locals, who, in any case, would be unable to afford them. There is a scandal here that is barely touched upon in the media, and it is something that I am currently researching.

As I mentioned in the article that accompanied the last set of photos, I have so many photo sets from the last two months to make available that I was hoping to post new photos on a daily basis, although that schedule has slipped because of developments in relation to Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” which needed — and continue to need — my attention. However, I promise to make new photos available whenever possible, as my project to photograph the whole of London continues to inspire 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.

Why Does the Government So Desperately Want Indefinite Detention for Terror Suspects?

[image error]Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington Speaks at Event in London Marking Two Years Since Aafia Siddiqui’s Barbaric 86-Year Sentence

[image error]I’m sorry to report that it’s two years since the Pakistani neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui received an 86-year sentence in a court in New York for allegedly having tried and failed to shoot the US soldiers in whose custody she was being held in Afghanistan in August 2008. There is a protest outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square tomorrow afternoon — September 23 — at which I’ll be speaking, along with many other people, so if you’re in London please come along. See a map here, and the Facebook page here.

The trial of Aafia Siddiqui, which culminated in her sentence, and which I described at the time as “barbaric,” appeared to be a cover for a much grimmer story — one of the darkest in the whole of the torture-filled “war on terror” — in which, on the basis of alleged connections with terrorism that have never been proved, she had disappeared with her children in Pakistan in March 2003 and was then held in a “black site” until her engineered reappearance in Ghazni in 2008.

According to the US authorities, after being captured in a bewildered state, she allegedly tried and failed to shoot the Americans guarding her, which provided an excuse to render her to the US to be put on trial — an unusual move given that most people accused of anti-American activities in Afghanistan did not end up in the US — and for her to be silenced as a result of the 86-year sentence handed down after a trial that critics called “a grave miscarriage of justice,” and to be held in isolation in a psychiatric prison/hospital for women in Carswell, Texas, notoriously referred to as the “hospital of horrors”, where her health continues to deteriorate, and where she is denied meaningful contact with her family.

I have written extensively about the troubling case of Aafia Siddiqui over the last four years, and have spoken at a number of events organised by the Justice for Aafia Coaltion, which is responsible for Sunday’s event. For further information, see the International Justice Network’s 2011 report, “Aafia Siddiqui: Just the Facts.”

As time passes, the only reassuring news is that several significant figures have very publicly expressed their disgust at Aafia’s plight, and the severity of her sentence. Recently, for example, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark visited Pakistan and stated, “Justice demands that Aafia Siddiqui should immediately be released. I haven’t witnessed such bare injustice in my entire career.” In addition, Khurshid Kasuri, Pakistan’s foreign minister under Pervez Musharraf, the President at the time of Aafia’s disappearance, has stated, “I’m so sorry for handing over the innocent Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to the Americans. It was my biggest mistake ever.”

Furthermore, just this week US Senator Mike Gravel, accompanied by the attorney Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, also visited Pakistan, where, as the Express Tribune described it, they “said that the Musharraf regime had illegally kidnapped Dr. Aafia along with her three children from Karachi in March 2003, and handed her over to the US government for illegal interrogation and secret detention based on completely false information.” The Express Tribune added that Sen. Gravel “maintained that Dr Aafia’s trial in the United States was illegal,” and “added that the US government had no moral or legal justification for their actions.”

Both he and Tina Foster stressed, however, that the Pakistani government “would have to take serious action if it wanted Dr. Siddiqui to be repatriated.” Foster said, “We have received no cooperation from the Government of Pakistan in securing Dr Siddiqui’s repatriation to Pakistan. There’s been a lot of talk, but no concrete steps have been taken despite numerous requests for assistance.” She added, “I’ve come on a humanitarian mission to ask Pakistani leadership for its assistance in returning Dr. Siddiqui to Pakistan. It’s obvious that the will of the Pakistani people is being ignored by their leadership.”

Sen. Gravel also stated, “Dr. Siddiqui is not a US citizen, so the US government should not be left to determine her fate, she should be returned to Pakistan so that she can begin to recover from the horrible torture and abuse that she has suffered.”

Below is the planned timing for the event. For further information, please contact Abdul Jaleel on 07985 382188 or Maryam Hassan on 07535 751312.

3.00-3.05 Introduction

3.05-3.15 Sultan Sabri

3.15-3.25 Andy Worthington

3.25-3.35 Omar Hajaj

3.35-3.45 Lauren Booth

3.45-3.55 Faisal Hanjara

3.55-4.05 Abdullah Hasan

4.05-4.15 Sheikh Khalid al Fikri

4.15-4.25 Sheikh Suliman Gani

4.25-4.35 Ilyas Townsend

4.35-4.40 Taji Mustafa

4.40-4.50 Adnan Rashid

4.50-5.00 Hamza Tzorztis

5.00-5.10 Uthman Lateef

5.20 Conclusion

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

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 5: The Future of My Guantánamo Work Is In Your Hands

Please support my work!

Hello, my friends, readers and supporters. For several years now, I have been asking you, every three months, for donations to support my work as an independent freelance journalist and researcher, specializing in Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” which I first began researching and writing about on a full-time basis six and a half years ago.

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

In my six and a half years of working on Guantánamo, as well as writing a book and co-directing a documentary film, and making numerous appearances on TV and radio, I have written nearly 1,300 articles about Guantánamo, and have also embarked on a project to tell the stories of all the prisoners based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, on which I worked as a media partner. In that project, I have so far analyzed and told the stories of over half the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo throughout its long and wretched history, and have been able to demonstrate, in more detail than before, how untrustworthy are the government’s allegations against the majority of the men held.

Although some of this work has been and continues to be funded, I have always undertaken a considerable amount of work on an unpaid basis, and this has only been viable because of your support. When I began this fundraising week, I asked for $2500 to support my work for the next three months. That’s less than $200 a week, but although I can survive on less, I am still over $1900 short of that amount.

If you can help out at all, to join the 13 friends and supporters who have very generously donated nearly $600 to help me, then I may well be able to continue working as I do, and to keep writing regularly about Guantánamo, as well as continuing with “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” the project I mentioned above, which draws on the files released by WikiLeaks. If not, I will probably have to seek out other work. Perhaps it’s time to do so, but I continue to hope that my work is a valid demonstration of what an independent political website can be.

Over to you.

Andy Worthington

London

September 21, 2012

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

A Future for Occupy? Why We Need A Campaign for Genuinely Affordable Housing

A year ago, when Occupy Wall Street began, people occupying public spaces in large numbers and refusing to go home was innovative and radical, but then those spaces were reclaimed by the establishment — with violence, or through legal machinations — essentially bringing the first phase in this new era of protest and activism to an end.

Anyone thinking that the Occupy movement has gone away, however, is missing the point. Just as the movement introduced a powerful new concept — the 99 percent versus the 1 percent — into political discourse, so the complaints that motivated people to occupy public spaces in the first place have not gone away.

Essentially, we live in a broken system, broken by criminals who have not been held responsible for their actions, criminals on Wall Street and in the City of London and Canary Wharf, motivated by greed on a colossal scale, who, aided and abetted by venal and/or stupid politicians, crashed the global economy in 2008 but then got away with it.

Saved by government bailouts, the criminals continue to live lives of almost unprecedented wealth and greed, while the rest of the people — the 99 percent — are being made to pay for the crimes of these thieves through savage austerity programs that are driven by malignant ideologies and are also, it should be noted, economically suicidal.

In the UK, the Tory-led coalition government that came into being two years and four months ago presides over a moribund economy, for which it is directly responsible, in which, as part of an “age of austerity” that is actually part of a wretched attempt to destroy the state provision of services and return Britain to the Dark Ages, or perhaps to the inequalities that prevailed in pre-revolutionary Europe, over 200 years ago, the poor, the young, the old, the sick, the unemployed and the disabled are all being driven into poverty and despair on an unprecedented scale. This ruthless destruction of the state is still unfolding, and is underreported because, for the most part, those who should be paying attention — including mainstream journalists — have become too complacent or indifferent to care.

The great scandals of modern life in the countries of the West are chronic self-absorption and the extermination of empathy, but such is the selfishness that dominates our lives that most people have forgotten, and even when they recognise what is happening, they fail to feel it deeply enough to do anything about it.

That may be harsh, and it may be that more people do care, but are simply too constrained by the pressures of their lives to do anything about it, but whatever the reasons, the silence of the majority has led to a terrible and ongoing situation in which, although the government is steadily losing popularity, the butchery of the state continues, essentially unopposed. When I Googled “Tories destroy state” looking for others writing about this, almost the only source was the excellent Richard Murphy, chartered accountant and scourge of the Tories, whose Tax Research UK blog is essential reading.

On September 2, for example, in a post entitled, “The Tories are bankrupting government – and society will fall with it,” he explained, writing about how the destruction of the state is deliberate Tory policy:

When will people realise just how dangerous this is to the very fabric of our society, which will be torn apart by such policies? And when will they also realise that without functioning and effective government the chance of ever creating wealth in this country will be undermined for generations to come?

Politics has not been this raw in our country for generations: we are quite literally facing the destruction of the whole fabric on which our society is based. And that means we all have a choice to accept this destruction of our democracy or fight it. Sitting on the fence is not an option: that’s acceptance.

I’m fighting.

In the last two years, the assault on the state has been unprecedented — the tripling of university fees, the privatisation of the NHS, and the assault on welfare being just three of the most heinous crimes committed by the government. As part of its intention to cut £18 billion from welfare, the government has been particularly savage in its pursuit of disabled people, establishing a review process, the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), implemented by the multinational corporation Atos, “by which,” as JJ, co-founder of the Black Triangle Campaign explained in a recent article, “the majority of the sick can be illegitimately found fit for work.”

The government’s assault on welfare also involves an assault on those claiming housing benefit, capping the amount that will be paid while portraying those in receipt of housing benefit as scroungers on a colossal scale, without ever mentioning that the majority of the money they receive goes directly into the pockets of private landlords. What is also not mentioned is that publicly-owned social housing would be far cheaper — which would be useful, when unemployment stalks the land so vigorously, for any government genuinely interested in saving money, rather than making life as miserable as possible for as many people as possible.

While the cap — at a total of £500 a week, including private rents — will force thousands of people, particularly in London, to have to move elsewhere, causing huge disruption to people’s lives and relationships, and, in the majority of cases, their children’s lives, forcing them to move schools, of course, as their families relocate, the government has gone further, scrapping actual affordable rents for new social tenants by insisting that they pay 80 percent of market rents, insisting that those with one spare room or more downsize (as though they were pieces in a game, and not real people with settled lives and homes), even though properties with less rooms are not available.

The list of ways in which the government is assaulting those in social housing — whether council-run or in the hands of housing associations, which are, essentially, privatised providers of social housing, whose tenants should be immune from excessive government meddling — goes on and on, but even less fortunate are those subjected to the whims of the private rental market, where, in London and the south east, landlords are charging exorbitant rents, and are able to get away with it because of a shortage of new and affordable housing, and because they are essentially unregulated and can do what they want. Horror stories abound, when those at the mercy of landlords are particularly vulnerable, but even when landlords don’t treat their tenants with disdain, they are still responsible for a situation in which, throughout London, anyone taking out a mortgage or renting a property is expected to pay anywhere between £12,000 and £15,000 a year for the privilege. Generally divided between two people, this means a minimum of £120 to £150 a week, although a glance at the property pages will reveal that it is exceptionally easy to pay much more than that.

Buoyed up by wealthy foreign investors, and by enough wealthy parents providing deposits to young professionals, London’s housing bubble refuses to burst, even though more and more people cannot buy into it, and as unscrupulous landlords proliferate, matching the outrageous amounts demanded from first-time buyers, more and more people are trapped, possibly renting forever, and paying a fortune to do so.

As Labour’s Jack Dromey, the MP for Birmingham Erdington and the shadow housing minister, explained in the Guardian last November, when the government launched its housing strategy for England, the approach taken to social rents was to introduce what Dromey referred to as an “Orwellian affordable rent model, which will be completely unaffordable to those who need it most, those on low incomes.” He added, ” In Haringey in London, a rent set at 80% of local market rents would require a household income of £31,000 at a time when the median income for social tenants is £12,000.” He also explained that research suggested that there would be “a £1.3bn rise in the benefit bill as a result,” rather than any reduction in expenditure.

This hidden extra cost is typical of the government’s idiotic and ill-thought out plans, in which, although their intention is to deliberately dismantle the state, the Tory playboy butchers haven’t gone so far as to work out what to do with the hordes of homeless, desperate people their policies will create. Instead, although they obviously all love the idea of privatising everything in Britain — except their own pay, of course, and some aspects of the courts and the MoD, and perhaps (although not with any certainty) the police — they seem to have made sure that anyone intelligent was not in the room when they hatched their cruel and ill-conceived plans and forgot to do the sums.

That, however, is of little help to the numerous people needing incomes of £31,000 (for social housing) to £40,000 and up (in private properties) just to get by. Even if they are not completely cast adrift from the housing market, with the median income nationally standing at £14,000, many — if not most — will be spending half their week working just to pay whichever unscrupulous landlord is exploiting them, and there seems little that they can do about it, now that a noticeable sop to the Tories’ extreme right-wingers — the criminalisation of squatting — came into effect on September 1.

As the Occupy movement enters its second year, and people may be open to thinking about what was or wasn’t accomplished, and what needs to be undertaken from now on, I’d like to see activists push for genuinely affordable social housing, and by that I mean social housing — or not-for-profit housing, as it should legitimately be described — in which rents are set at, I would say, a maximum of £50 per week per working adult.

In the London Borough of Lewisham, where I live, People Before Profit, a political party, has been agitating on this very topic, occupying five properties that Lewisham Council was about to sell in an auction, even though there are over 16,000 people on the housing waiting list in Lewisham, and around 1,000 families in temporary accommodation, a further 350 in hostels, and around 50 families in bed & breakfast accommodation, paid for by Lewisham’s council tax payers. People Before Profit activists made the homes habitable, and then moved people in, calling on the council to refurbish them, and they secured a victory when the council backed down, stating that the houses would be “renovated for future occupancy,” and that they were “looking at working with local charities and organisations employing young people to carry out the work.” A spokesman told the East London Lines blog, “The Council is keen to ensure that local young people in the borough have opportunities to learn, earn and train” — another key aim of People Before Profit, it should be noted.

On September 15, People Before Profit held a conference, “The Future of Social Housing,” in New Cross, discussing many of the challenges currently facing those in social housing, or those in even more precarious housing situations. I was only able to attend for a while, but I met some great people, and had some extremely interesting conversations.

People Before Profit’s house occupations in Lewisham provide only one indicator of what can be done to trigger discussions about how all the assaults on affordable housing mentioned above are creating a situation that is both unjust and economically counter-productive, and I was disappointed, after the Lewisham PBP occupations, that activists in other boroughs didn’t follow their example, as a London-wide campaign of occupations would really prioritise the issues, and attract much more media attention.

There are, however, other actions that can be taken. Although the ban on squatting has led to numerous evictions in London and elsewhere, which have generally been underreported, or not reported at all, one way of highlighting the injustice of criminalising people for being homeless would be for activists to focus attention on commercial buildings, which are not covered by the new legislation, and which provide opportunities both to highlight the economic decline of the UK under the Tory-led coalition government, and also, I believe, to encourage a model of communal living and live/work experiments that can provide a positive example of how we could be living. One example of this is the ongoing occupation of Friern Barnet Library in north London. Barnet Council closed the library in April due to cuts, but occupiers reopened it, and, “along with local campaigners, are running a book-lending service, exercise classes and mother and toddler groups.”

There are other creative options — claiming unused land and building on it independently, or camping on it, for example — but these are, of course, just my suggestions. Anyone interested in pursuing this matter further is encouraged to contact People Before Profit, and, of course, my email remains as public as ever.

“Think global, act local” was not a phrase invented by the Occupy movement — it is attributed to the Scottish town planner and social activist Patrick Geddes, the author of the 1915 book Cities in Evolution — but it meshes perfectly with our needs here and now, and the importance of fighting back against the neoliberal austerity programs designed to consign all but the rich to various types of suffering, from wage slavery to destitution.

Note: For further resources on squatting, see the Advisory Service for Squatters and Squash (Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes), as well as the Eviction Resistance Network, linked to above.

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

Video: On Omar Khadr’s 26th Birthday, Supporters Call for his Return to Canada from Guantánamo

[image error] Sign the petition!

Watch the video!

Post your own “Omar Khadr is Welcome Here” photo!

The imprisonment of Omar Khadr, just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan, has always been a disgrace of colossal proportions. The US and the Canadian government have both ignored their obligations to rehabilitate rather than punish children caught up in armed conflict, and the Obama administration then arranged for him to agree to a plea deal in which he admitted that he had thrown the grenade that killed a US soldier prior to his capture, and was an alien unprivileged enemy belligerent whose actions constituted a war crime. It is by no means clear that Omar did in fact throw the grenade, although it is understandable that he agreed to the plea deal to be released from Guantánamo. As a result of the plea deal, announced at the end of October 2010, Omar received an eight-year sentence, with one year to be served at Guantánamo, and the remaining seven in Canada.

Although it remains unforgivable that the US government arranged for a prisoner who was a child when captured to be regarded as a war criminal for being involved in combat during a war, and although it will be an indelible black mark against the Obama administration when the history books about this period are written, the baton of injustice has, for the last eleven months, passed back to Canada, where the government of Stephen Harper is refusing to honor its part of the plea deal, according to which Omar would have returned to Canada last October.

Today, September 19, Omar turns 26 in Guantanamo, and as the Canadian government continues to drag its heels, making a mockery of any claim that Canada cares about human rights or the law, I’d like to ask you to watch the video below, put together by my friend Sara Naqwi, which features a brief recap of Omar’s story, followed by poignant stills of various concerned citizens holding up placards that read, “Omar Khadr is Welcome Here,” from the Facebook page where the idea originated and where the photos first appeared. Please note that you’ll need to watch it full-size, as the text is very small at the beginning.

If you can help to circulate this film it would be very much appreciated, and please, if you haven’t already done so, sign Sen. Roméo Dallaire’s petition demanding that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews signs the paperwork to secure Omar’s return from Guantanamo now! There’s also an Amnesty International page that people can use to send him messages via his lawyers, and if you’re on Twitter right now, please post tweets with the hashtag #khadr to let people know about Omar’s plight.

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.