Andy Worthington's Blog, page 162

A Call for 90 Men to be Freed from Guantánamo on the 11th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks

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.

Eleven years after the terrible terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, 167 men are still held in the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, following the death of one prisoner on the eve of the anniversary, the Yemeni Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who had long-standing mental health issues. They include five men allegedly responsible for the attacks, who still await justice, and the story of these men — who include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the supposed mastermind of 9/11 — is a reminder of why it is important to adhere to existing laws and treaties.

Had they been arrested and put on trial in federal court, their alleged victims would no longer be waiting for justice to be done, as their trials would have concluded many long years ago. However, on capture they were spirited away to secret prisons run by the CIA, where they were subjected to torture, approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration, and, since arriving at Guantánamo in September 2006, they have been allowed almost no opportunity to speak publicly about their experiences — a situation driven solely by the desire to suppress all mention of their torture by US forces.

Similarly disastrous policies were enacted at Guantánamo. Although the majority of the 779 men held in total since the prison opened were not held in “black sites” prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, all were abused in Afghanistan, where they were processed after their capture — mostly in Pakistan or Afghanistan — and many were then abused in Guantánamo, where torture techniques including prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation were introduced, and were approved by George W. Bush’s first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

That regime of systematic abuse has, thankfully, come to an end — largely as a result of two Supreme Court rulings. The first, Rasul v. Bush, was in June 2004, granting habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, which not only allowed them to meet lawyers for the first time, but also brought to an end the secrecy that had shrouded Guantánamo  since it opened, and that was needed for abuse to take place with impunity. The second, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, was in June 2006, when the court ruled that the protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions — which prohibit torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” — applied to all prisoners seized in wartime. This brought to an end the disgraceful situation whereby, since February 7, 2002, when President Bush issued a memorandum declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the “war on terror,” the US government had pretended that prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “war on terror” had no rights.

Nevertheless, creating a more humane environment is one thing, but actually releasing the men held or bringing them to justice is another, and on this count those still held in Guantánamo have been failed by all three branches of the US government.

Although the Supreme Court reiterated in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the men had habeas corpus rights, which led to dozens of victories in court, as District Court judges ruled that the government had failed to demonstrate that their supposed evidence was credible, the appeals court judges — in the Circuit Court in Washington D.C. — fought back, redefining the standards of evidence required to hold prisoners, and obliging the lower court judges to give the government’s evidence the presumption of accuracy. In the two years and two months since the D.C. Circuit Court stepped in, not a single prisoner has had their habeas petition granted, and in June this year the Supreme Court refused to become involved, effectively killing off habeas corpus as a remedy for the men still held.

In Congress, lawmakers have also conspired to prevent the release of prisoners, imposing onerous restrictions on the President, even though his interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed the prisoners’ cases in 2009, concluded, at least as long ago as January 2010, when its final report was issued (PDF), that 87 of the 167 men still held should be released.

In addition, President Obama himself has refused to fight for these 87 men, most noticeably by issuing a moratorium preventing the release of any cleared Yemenis in January 2010. This followed a frankly hysterical response to the discovery that the failed underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, arrested after trying and failing to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a flight into Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had been recruited in Yemen.

58 of the 87 cleared prisoners are from Yemen, and, as we revealed here in June, in our exclusive report, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, dozens of those men were first cleared between five and eight years ago, by military review boards under the Bush administration, but were not subsequently released. Now President Obama has repeated these decisions, approving the men for release but not releasing them. For up to eight years, therefore, all notions of justice and fairness have been mocked when it comes to the Yemenis, who cannot secure their release by any means, and who would be forgiven for wondering why their captors are crueller than the kind of totalitarian state that openly practices arbitrary detention. Totalitarian states wouldn’t dream of emulating America, which, since 9/11, pretends that it has processes in place to decide when prisoners seized in its “war on terror” do not constitute a threat, and no longer have any intelligence value, and should be freed, but then refuses to honor the decisions made as a result of those processes.

The 87 prisoners still held include men of other nationalities who cannot be returned home safely — some Syrians, for example, and three Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), who legitimately fear persecution by the Chinese government. These men had their habeas corpus petitions granted in October 2008, and an argument can be made that the US ought to take them as no other country has been found that is prepared to offer them a new home. The 87 cleared men also include a number of Algerians, who regard it as unsafe to be repatriated, even though the US government does not appear to agree, except in the case of one man, Ahmed Belbacha, who was tried and convicted in his absence in what looked to be a kangaroo court. For more information, see the stories of two of these men — Djamel Ameziane and Nabil Hadjarab.

Also cleared but mysteriously held is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose story has been discussed here in the articles, 10 Years in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer, Cleared for Release But Still Held and “I Affirm Our Right to Life”: Shaker Aamer, the Last British Resident in Guantánamo, Explains His Peaceful Protest and Hunger Strike. Petitions calling for his release can be found here (for British citizens and residents) and here (for anyone anywhere in the world).

While the release of these 87 men remains of enormous significance to anyone concerned with justice and human rights — even though it is being shamefully ignored on the Presidential campaign trail — they are not the only victims of an ongoing injustice. When the Guantánamo Review Task Force issued its final report in January 2010, it also recommended that 36 men should be tried, and 48 other held indefinitely without charge or trial, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

For the 36, justice has slowed to a crawl, as just eleven men have been tried or put forward for trials since Obama came to power, and for the other 48 men, justice was never an option, as the President decided that, in their case, continuing to hold them without charge or trial was appropriate, given their alleged dangerousness.

Trusting information about the prisoners which was compiled by the Bush administration, when US personnel tortured, abused and bribed prisoners to tell lies about themselves and others is a dangerous policy for the Obama administration to have embraced, as there are serious doubts about the alleged significance of many of the 48.

As this campaign continues, I hope to cover more of these stories in detail, but for now those who support the closure of Guantánamo are encouraged to look at just a few examples of the 48 — the cases of Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah, the last two Kuwaitis in the prison, for example, which we covered in an article six months ago, entitled, Justice Denied: The Stories of Fawzi Al-Odah and Fayiz Al-Kandari, the Last Two Kuwaitis in Guantánamo. The case against both men is essentially non-existent, based on innuendo and unsubstantiated allegations from a variety of untrustworthy sources, and we can confidently assert that similarly empty allegations plague the cases of other men consigned to the category of the 48 men to be held indefinitely without charge or trial. When President Obama issued the executive order authorizing their detention 18 months ago, he promised that there would be periodic reviews of their cases, and we would like to take this opportunity to encourage him to let the public know if any of these planned reviews have actually taken place, as we have heard nothing more about them.

Finally, for now, we would like to add our voices to those of the Egyptian government representatives who last month called for the release of Tariq al-Sawah (aka El-Sawah), the last Egyptian in Guantánamo. An instructor at a training camp in Afghanistan, al-Sawah is no innocent, but he has cooperated so extensively with the US authorities that his ongoing detention makes no sense, as it serves only as an example of why cooperating with the US authorities is pointless.

In March 2010, the Washington Post explained that al-Sawah, who is 54 years old, and another prisoner, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian, had “become two of the most significant informants ever to be held at Guantánamo,” and were “housed in a little fenced-in compound at the military prison, where they live[d] a life of relative privilege — gardening, writing and painting — separated from other detainees in a cocoon designed to reward and protect.” Despite their cooperation, the authorities have refused to release either man, sending a dangerously counter-productive message to any would-be informants. As W. Patrick Lang, a retired senior military intelligence officer, told the Post, “I don’t see why they aren’t given asylum. If we don’t do this right, it will be that much harder to get other people to cooperate with us. And if I was still in the business, I’d want it known we protected them. It’s good advertising.”

In Slahi’s case, despite having his habeas petition granted, the D.C. Circuit Court intervened to dismiss that ruling, but in al-Sawah’s case no such obstacle exists. Back in 2010, returning him to Egypt would have been dangerous, but that is clearly not the case now that the dictator Hosni Mubarak is gone, and Mohammed Morsi is President. Al-Sawah, like the Kuwaitis, the Yemenis, the Uighurs, the Algerians, Shaker Aamer and others, should be released immediately– in the US if no other safe place is available — to wipe away some of the guilt and shame that still clings to America as a result of the Bush administration’s brutal and misguided “war on terror,” and the Obama administration’s feeble and failed attempts to bring those injustices to an end.

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

Andy Worthington Discusses Bagram on the BBC World Service, and 9/11 and Guantánamo with Scott Horton

This week the legacy of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” is under the spotlight, as is the response to it of his successor, Barack Obama. Tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that first prompted George W. Bush and his administration to discard all domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners, and to hold those seized in its “war on terror” not as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, but as “enemy combatants,” who could, the administration contended, be held without them having any rights whatsoever.

Today is also significant for the fallout from the first war on which the Bush administration embarked — the invasion of Afghanistan, which began a month after the 9/11 attacks. As has been extensively reported, this morning US officials handed over formal control of the Parwan Detention Facility, the replacement for the notorious Bagram prison, where several prisoners were killed in the early days of the “war on terror,” to Afghan control.

This morning I was delighted to be asked by the BBC World Service to comment on the Bagram handover on the “Newshour” program with Robin Lustig, which was live at 1 pm, but is repeated regularly, and is available online. Although it was announced that the US had transferred 3,082 prisoners to Afghan control since reaching an agreement in March, I was particularly interested in commenting about those still held by the US, including recently captured prisoners, who will not be handed over until the US has screened them, and, more particularly, the foreign prisoners — thought to number around 50 — who will continue to be held by the US.

These men — who include Pakistanis, as well as prisoners from the Gulf and elsewhere — include men seized in other countries, including Thailand and Iraq, who have been held for up to ten years. In 2009, three of these men secured a court victory in the US, when a judge granted them habeas corpus rights, judging, correctly, that their situation was essentially no different to that of the prisoners in Guantanamo, who secured habeas rights in 2004 and again in 2008.

That ruling, however, was overturned by the appeals court, the D.C. Circuit Court, leaving the men in limbo. Earlier this year, President Obama hinted that he would be releasing some of these men, as I reported in my articles, Obama Considers Repatriating Foreign Prisoners from Bagram and Bagram: Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners, but there has been no further news on that front, and they therefore remain in a legal black hole.

However, while doubts remain about whether the Afghans will be either more lenient or more brutal that the US, what also concerns me — as I also had the chance to explain — is that Bagram has always been the focal point for the Americans’ unilateral decision to discard the Geneva Conventions, a situation that has never been reported or discussed as widely as it should have been, and the handover of the prison to Afghan control also needs to be seen in this context, as, since discarding the Conventions, prisoners have been held in a peculiar legal limbo in which their cases have been subjected to a cursory review some time after their capture, and decisions have then been made about whether to release them, continue to hold them or transfer them to Afghan control. As I have often explained in the past, imagine the uproar there would be in the US if the military of another country captured Americans in wartime, tore up the Geneva Conventions and subjected them to a similar scenario.

On the 9/11 anniversary, and with reference to its umbilical relationship with Guantanamo, I have already written an article, Eleven Years After 9/11, Guantánamo Is A Political Prison, and following its publication I spoke to Scott Horton, formerly of Antiwar radio and now supported by the Future of Freedom Foundation (for whom I write a weekly column), in a half-hour interview that is available here. Scott and I have been talking to each other for five years now, ever since the US “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla was tried back in the summer of 2007, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to him.

This is how Scott described the show, and I hope you have time to listen to it, as Scott and I covered much more than just the anniversary and the depressing situation in Guantánamo, where 168 men are still held, including 87 who have been cleared for release:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses his article “Eleven Years after 9/11, Guantánamo Is a Political Prison;” the many Gitmo prisoners still held despite being long-ago cleared for release; why liberals give Obama a pass on his broken promise to close the prison; Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to prosecute Bush-era torture; and how a corrupted US justice system invites terrorist blowback.

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.

Prisons and Abandoned Factories: Photos of a Journey from Belmarsh to Plumstead

Prisons and Abandoned Factories: A Journey from Belmarsh to Plumstead, a set on Flickr.

On July 11, 2012, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike (or see here), I cycled east from Greenwich, intending to travel to the Thames Barrier, on the border of Charlton and Woolwich, but then carrying on, through Woolwich to Thamesmead, the satellite town originally built in the 1960s, and used as the setting for Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film “A Clockwork Orange,” and back via Belmarsh Prison and Plumstead, before rejoining the Thames Path once more for the journey back west, and home.

I’m posting these photos in four sets, and this is the last of the four, following Chasing Clouds in Greenwich: Photos of a Journey East Along the Thames,  Industry and Decay: Photos of a Journey Along the Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich and Lost Glories: Photos of a Thames Journey from Woolwich to Thamesmead (also see here, here and here). In those, I recorded the first stage of the journey, through Greenwich under a brooding, rain-filled sky; the second stage, through New Charlton, past the Thames Barrier and into Woolwich, through industrial estates, and with a diversion to an evocative set of river stairs; and the third, through the housing developments in the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, and then on to Thamesmead.

I hope to make a return visit to Thamesmead soon, as I only had a short amount of time before returning home, which I managed in a fairly haphazard manner, after getting lost and emerging near a giant roundabout on the busy A2016, which runs from Plumstead to Erith. From this road, I discovered that I was close to Belmarsh Prison, the maximum security prison — aka Category A prison — notorious for the detention of alleged terror suspects, held without charge or trial. Next to Belmarsh is a Category B prison, Thameside, built and run by Serco, the private security firm dogged by controversy for its work with asylum seekers and in the health service, as well as its involvement with private prisons, and, across the road from Thameside, a number of derelict factories and warehouses which also attracted my attention.

From these ruins, I swiftly made my way home via Plumstead, rejoining the River Thames near the Woolwich Ferry, and then trying to get home ahead of another storm — an aim that failed when, on Greenwich peninsula, I was soaked to the skin in a huge deluge, and was thankful that my camera case proved to be waterproof.

For the next few photo sets, as well as posting some more photos from my Italian holiday last month, I’ll be posting photos I took north of the river in London — just some of the 1500 or so photos I have still to post from my journeys over the last two months. As ever, I hope you’ll be joining 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.

Eleven Years After 9/11, Guantánamo Is A Political Prison

[image error]Eleven years since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the majority of the remaining 168 men in Guantánamo are not held because they constitute an active threat to the United States, but because of inertia, political opportunism and an institutional desire to hide evidence of torture by US forces, sanctioned at the highest levels of government. That they are still held, mostly without charge or trial, is a disgrace that continues to eat away at any notion that the US believes in justice.

It seems like an eternity since there was the briefest of hopes that George W. Bush’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo would be shut down. That was in January 2009, but although Barack Obama issued an executive order promising to close Guantánamo within a year, he soon reneged on that promise, failing to stand up to Republican critics, who seized on the fear of terrorism to attack him, and failing to stand up to members of his own party, who were also fearful of the power of black propaganda regarding Guantánamo and the alleged but unsubstantiated dangerousness of its inmates.

The President himself also became fearful when, in January 2010, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which he himself had appointed, and which consisted of career officials and lawyers from government departments and the intelligence agencies, issued its report based on an analysis of the cases of the 240 prisoners inherited from George W. Bush (PDF). The Task Force recommended that, of the 240 men held when he came to power, only 36 could be prosecuted, but 48 others were regarded as being too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

The rest, the Task Force concluded, should be released, although they also advised that 30 of these 156 men — all Yemenis — should continue to be held in “conditional detention,” dependent on there being a perceived improvement in the security situation in Yemen.

There were severe problems with the Task Force’s recommendations, particularly regarding the 48 prisoners deemed to be too dangerous to release despite the lack of evidence against them, because detention without charge or trial is unacceptable under any circumstances. Also troubling, however, was the Task Force’s decision, without reference to Congress, to designate 30 men for “conditional detention,” as this was a detention category that they invented.

Nevertheless, it was reasonable to assume, when the Task Force’s report was issued, or at the latest in May 2010, when it was made public, that, fairly swiftly, 36 men would be put on trial, and 126 others would be released, allowing the status of the 48 others to be the focus of intense scrutiny.

That, of course, never happened. Plans to try the men faltered when the administration fudged the issue, opting for both federal court trials and an updated version of the military commissions that Dick Cheney had first revived in November 2001. In an announcement made in November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would be tried in New York City. However, a backlash derailed New York as a trial venue, and then derailed the entire notion of federal court trials for Guantánamo prisoners, despite the successful prosecution and conviction of the one man the Obama administration managed to transfer from Guantánamo to the mainland, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. An associate of the 1998 African Embassy bombings, he was convicted in November 2010, and given a life sentence, to be served in a Supermax prison on the US mainland, in January 2011.

With the only option after Ghailani being military commission trials at Guantánamo, a version of the charade that had dominated the Bush years resumed, and to date only four prisoners — Ibrahim al-Qosi, Noor Uthman Muhammed, Omar Khadr and Majid Khan — have seen their cases proceed to trial, although in each case a plea deal was negotiated. Still outstanding are the cases of the 9/11 Five, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Last month the Pentagon announced that another man, Ahmed al-Darbi, tortured in “black sites” before his transfer to Guantánamo, and previously charged under President Bush, would also be charged, but that only makes eleven men in total out of the 36 recommended for trials by Obama’s Task Force.

On the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it is fair to wonder if justice will ever be delivered — and seen to be delivered — in the cases of these men, although arguably the situation is even bleaker for the 48 men designated as being too dangerous to release. Back in March 2011, President Obama formalized their ongoing detention without charge of trial through an executive order, but although he promised periodic reviews of their cases, no evidence has emerged to indicate that any reviews have actually taken place.

With trials delayed for most of those recommended for trials, and with the President’s decision to hold 48 men indefinitely regarded as unacceptable by human rights activists and lawyers, the only area in which progress can be made ought to be in securing the release of the 87 men cleared for release — including the 30 in “conditional detention.” However, Congress passed legislation imposing restrictions on releasing prisoners, and President Obama also capitulated to pressure following a failed bomb plot at Christmas 2009, by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian recruited in Yemen, to ban the release of any cleared Yemeni prisoners, issuing a moratorium in January 2010, bringing a halt to the release of any Yemenis in Guantánamo, which still stands two years and eight months later.

This is in spite of the fact that 58 of the 87 cleared prisoners are Yemenis, in spite of the fact that many of those men were first cleared by military review boards under President Bush between five and eight years ago, and in spite of the fact that holding them indefinitely constitutes a type of guilt by nationality that is an insult to all notions of justice, and to the Yemeni people as a whole. For the 168 men still held — those cleared but not released, those designated for trials but not tried, and those being held without charge or trial — American justice has failed them so many times that it is appropriate to conclude, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, that the overwhelming majority of the men are being held as political prisoners, and that ought to be a source of great sadness and shame.

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.

Lost Glories: Photos of a Thames Journey from Woolwich to Thamesmead

Lost Glories: A Thames Journey from Woolwich to Thamesmead, a set on Flickr.

On July 11, 2012, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I cycled east from Greenwich, intending to travel to the Thames barrier, on the border of Charlton and Woolwich, but then carrying on, through Woolwich to Thamesmead, the satellite town originally built in the 1960s, and used as the setting for Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film “A Clockwork Orange,” and back via Belmarsh prison and Plumstead, before rejoining the Thames Path once more for the journey back west, and home.

I’m posting these photos in four sets, and this is the third, following Chasing Clouds in Greenwich: Photos of a Journey East Along the Thames and Industry and Decay: Photos of a Journey Along the Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich (also see here and here) in which I recorded the first stage of the journey, through Greenwich under a brooding, rain-filled sky, and then through New Charlton, past the Thames Barrier and into Woolwich, through industrial estates, and with a diversion to an evocative set of river stairs.

Thamesmead, an experiment in social housing since the 1960s, is not generally on any tourist itineraries, although the journey there, along the river at least, is wonderful, literally transporting the visitor to another world, away from the hectic nature of the city. From Woolwich, the path alongside the river is surprisingly rural, and even when I reached the main housing developments in Thamesmead, I found lakes and space that reinforced the notion that I was far from central London, in a liminal place that, it seemed to me, was unable to disguise the fact that it was initially claimed back from marshland.

Thamesmead has often received a bad press, although any area that doesn’t bear the visible and audible stamp of the aspirational middle class tends to be given that stigma. I hope to pay another visit to explore it further, but I hope these first impressions capture something of it for those who have never visited.

Looking back at them now, two months later, I recall the emptiness of its spaces near the Thames, and especially the lake I visited, Thamesmere, which was something of an oasis, dotted with people fishing. I also recall the general shortage of amenities and transport links, and the ease with which I got lost, but I was drawn to the solitude and the sense of space, probably because, like all liminal riverside locations, it reminded me of growing up outside Hull, close to the River Humber.

Tomorrow I’ll post the last photos in this series, before moving on to other sets from the ever-increasing archive of London photos that I’m compiling — as well as further photos from my recent two-week holiday in Italy — of Abruzzo province, as well as the last of the photos from Rome. Please feel free to check out my photo sets or collections as organised in Flickr, or to search for photos via tags. I have also been locating all the London photos on a map, as mapping is a major part of my project to photograph London by bike.

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.

Industry and Decay: Photos of a Journey Along the Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich

Industry and Decay: A Journey Along the Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich, a set on Flickr.

On July 11, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I cycled east from Greenwich, intending to travel to the Thames barrier, on the border of Charlton and Woolwich, but then carrying on, through Woolwich to Thamesmead, the satellite town originally built in the 1960s, and used as the setting for Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film “A Clockwork Orange,” and back via Belmarsh prison and Plumstead, before rejoining the Thames Path once more for the journey back west, and home.

I’m posting these photos in four sets, and this is the second, following Chasing Clouds in Greenwich: Photos of a Journey East Along the Thames (or see here), in which I recorded the first stage of the journey, through Greenwich under a brooding, rain-filled sky. In this second set, as the rain fell, I passed some of the surviving industrial sites alongside the river, in east Greenwich and Charlton — or, to be strictly accurate, New Charlton — and on past the Thames Barrier to Woolwich, through industrial estates, and with a diversion to an evocative set of river stairs. The rain had passed by the time I reached Woolwich, and the sun was shining once more, but the weather was so restless that there were wonderful lively skies, as captured in the next photo set, which I’ll be posting tomorrow.

I hope you enjoy these photos of a part of London that is not generally on any tourist itineraries — although intrepid visitors do make it out to the Thames Barrier — and if you’d like to see more of the 500-plus London photos I have so far uploaded — bearing in mind that there are many more to come! — then feel free to check out my photo sets or collections, or to search for photos via tags. I have also been locating all the photos on a map, as mapping is a major part of my project to photograph London by bike.

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.

Disgusting! As Tories Lurch to the Right, Criminal Jeremy Hunt Takes Over Health

Please sign the campaigning group 38 Degrees’ open letter to Jeremy Hunt, warning him not to mess with the NHS.

Sometimes it’s almost unspeakably depressing to be living in England, in a dystopian fantasy that no one voted for, with a useless coalition government of the Tories and the Lib Dems that required Frankenstein-like engineering just to come into being.

Yesterday was one of those particularly depressing days, as David Cameron shuffled his cabinet and lurched even further to the right. Of course, there is desperation in the Prime Minister’s manoeuvring, and we should be thankful for that. Cameron has not got rid of George Osborne, of course, as he is the prime architect of the Tories’ economic policy, which involves allowing the rich to hoover up whatever they can, including that which has been secreted offshore, while obliging the rest of us to have to try and prise five pound notes out of Osborne’s hands, who it turns out, has the tenacity of a corpse with advanced rigor mortis. However, when 48 percent of voters recently gave Osborne a vote of no confidence, it was obviously significant. Cameron may be the whey-faced buffoon who can come up with an opinion at any time of the day or night, but Osborne is the whey-faced buffoon in charge of economic policy — Gordon Brown to Cameron’s Tony Blair, if you will.

48 percent of voters recognised the toxicity of Osborne, thereby providing a stunning vote of no confidence in the government, but he remained in place in the reshuffle while other buffoons got shifted around or axed. Andrew Lansley, who trailed the Chancellor with a 37 percent disapproval rating in the Guardian/ICM poll on August 28, was shifted out of health, to be replaced by Jeremy Hunt, who had a 24 percent disapproval rating as culture secretary. Michael Gove (on 36%) keeps his job as the butcher of education, Kenneth Clarke (on 28%) was replaced at justice by the incompetent employment minister Chris Grayling, and William Hague (on 21%) kept his job as foreign secretary.

Some of the shuffling needs analysing. Iain Duncan Smith held on to the Department of Work and Pensions — although apparently not without a fight — where his Victorian social Darwinism will continue to wreak havoc on the lives of those in need, even though he seems determined to prevent George Osborne from slashing the welfare bill still further. However, Grayling’s replacement, Mark Hoban, the former Treasury minister, is rather an unknown quantity, although what is known has been ferreted out by Johnny Void. There is also Esther McVey — blonde, former TV presenter — who replaces Maria Miller as minister for the disabled, as Miller now fills Hunt’s shoes. Miller was known by disabled campaigners as “Killer Miller,” and will not be missed, but McVey appears to be no better. She worked under Grayling, and earlier this year showed a worrying enthusiasm for workfare — the wheeze whereby eyewateringly wealthy corporations get welfare claimants to work for them for nothing.

What is particularly shocking about the shuffle is the replacement of Andrew Lansley with Jeremy Hunt — firstly, because David Cameron spent so long supporting Lansley’s wretched NHS reform bill, only to drop him just six months after it was finally passed, and, secondly, that he chose Hunt, a man that all but the most hardline Tories know is the epitome of sleaze and smugness, tainted by his involvement in the Murdoch takeover scandal, when he replaced Vince Cable, who had shown independence of spirit when it came to the Murdochs. Hunt, it turned out at the Leveson Inquiry, blatantly broke the law, but wormed out of being held accountable, and allowed his assistant, Adam Smith, to take the fall, as I explained in my article at the time, Can Jeremy Hunt Prevent a Tsunami of Sleaze from Engulfing David Cameron?

Alarmingly, Hunt is also — of course — opposed to the existence of the NHS. Back in August 2009, the Daily Mirror reported, “Three of [David Cameron's] Shadow Cabinet — Michael Gove, Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt — called for the health service to be dismantled. They claimed it was ‘no longer relevant’ in a book, Direct Democracy, co-authored with Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.” Mr. Hannan, the Mirror explained, “sparked outrage last week by calling the NHS a ’60 year-old mistake’ on US TV.”

As the Guardian explained, it also seems that Hunt attempted to exclude scenes celebrating the work of the NHS from Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony for the Olympics. Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, stated, “Right now the NHS needs somebody who believes in its values and is ready to stand up for it. Instead, the prime minister has given it to the man who reportedly tried to remove the NHS tribute from the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.”

Anyone in doubt that the NHS needs Jeremy Hunt like it needs a hole in the head should read the following article that Alysson Pollock, professor of Public Health Research and Policy at Queen Mary, University of London and the author of NHS plc: the Privatisation of Our Healthcare, wrote for the Guardian last week, which I’m posting in its entirety because it helps define the severe threats that face the NHS — and patients — as a result of Lansley’s evil bill, whose implementation, of course, Jeremy Hunt will be only too happy to deliver.

NHS franchising: the toxic world of globalised healthcare is upon us

By Alysson Pollock, The Guardian, August 27, 2012

Staff wages and benefits eroded through privatisation is nothing compared to what is in store for patients

Under the government’s franchise plan for the NHS, shareholders and equity investors will use the service’s logo as a Trojan horse to prise open the budgets of other countries’ health systems and to front up their unethical, fraudulent and inequitable activities. However, prospective customers will be buying neither NHS services nor the NHS model of care.

Since 1948, the NHS has been the model for universal heathcare on the basis of need and free at the point of use. In 2012, parliament in England passed a law effectively ending the NHS by abolishing the 60-year duty on the government to secure and provide healthcare for all. From 2013, there will be no National Health Service in England, and tax funding will increasingly flow to global healthcare corporations. In contrast, Scotland and Wales will continue to have a publicly accountable national health service.

NHS hospitals and services are being sold off or incorporated; land and buildings are being turned over to bankers and equity investors. RBS, Assura, Serco and Carillion, to name but a few, are raking in billions in taxpayer funds for leasing out and part-operating PFI hospitals, community clinics and GP surgeries that we once owned.

Strangled by PFI debts and funding cuts, NHS foundation trusts compound their problems by entering into joint ventures. The great NHS divestiture, which began in 1990 with the introduction of the internal market and accelerated under the PFI programme, now takes the form of franchising, management buyout and corporate takeovers of our public hospitals. Virgin has been awarded £630m to provide services to vulnerable people and children in Surrey and Devon. Circle has been given the franchise for NHS hospital Hinchingbrooke and is now struggling to contain its debts. London teaching hospitals are merging to give them greater leverage for borrowing and cuts.

As for public accountability, there is none. Commercial contracts are redacted so that crucial financial information is not in the public domain. Government departments and companies refuse to release the necessary information on the grounds of commercial confidentiality and allow companies to sequester their profits in offshore tax havens. NHS staff transferred from the public to the private sector see their wages and benefits eroded. But all this is nothing compared with what is in store for patients.

In the new world it will no longer be possible to measure coverage or fairness. Former NHS hospitals, free to generate half their income from private patients, will dedicate their staff and facilities to that end, making it impossible to monitor what is public and what people are paying for.

The belief that markets distribute resources more efficiently is the basis of regional economic agreements like the European Union as well as policies imposed on developing countries by the World Bank and IMF. Britain led the way, starting with gas, water, telecoms and railways. By 2004, the whole of Whitehall was committed to putting corporations in control of what had formerly been publicly administered services. This year it is the turn of the NHS.

Loss of public control means higher cost and fewer services, as we have learned from the toxic record of the US corporations which are now part of England’s new healthcare market and helped design it. Billing, invoicing, marketing and advertising will add between 30% and 50% to costs compared with 6% in the former NHS bureaucracy.

Patient charges will become commonplace. Fraudulent billing and embezzlement will become endemic. Take HCA, one of the largest and most profitable US chains and controlled by private equity firms including Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital. In 2006 HCA International described its first joint venture with the NHS, the PFI University College London Hospital (UCLH), as “the establishment of Harley Street at UCLH”.

HCA-UCLH provides cancer treatment to those who can pay from the 15th floor of the hospital. But currently some of HCA’s American hospitals are under investigation for refusing care and performing unnecessary investigations and treatment, including cardiac surgery. A decade ago it paid the federal government $1.7bn to settle fraud charges, while former chief executive Rick Scott — now the Republican governor of Florida — managed to avoid prosecution.

This is the pattern elsewhere. Unitedhealth, which is currently providing services to the NHS, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement of mischarging allegations in the US; Medtronic paid $23.5m for paying illegal kickbacks to physicians to induce them to implant the company’s pacemakers and defibrillators; GlaxoSmithKline and Abbott paid $4.5bn in fines relating to improper marketing and coercion of physicians to prescribe antidepressants and antidementia drugs respectively. Novartis, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Eli Lilly have all paid large fines for regulatory breaches.

The list is not exhaustive. In the absence of information and strong laws to prevent corporate crime and tax evasion, England’s business-friendly environment is rapidly becoming a banana republic. Franchising is not an easy win for the public. It is a profit opportunity for big business in whose interests healthcare is increasingly being run both at home and abroad.

Note: The campaigning group 38 Degrees has just initiated an open letter to Jeremy Hunt, which says, “Our NHS is precious, and worth protecting. We want Britain to always have a public health service we can all rely on. As you begin your new job as Health Secretary, we want you to know that we’re watching you. We’ll challenge you every step of the way if you try to do our NHS any further harm.” 38 Degrees add, “When we reach 100,000 signatures, we’ll take out a full page ad in The Times – Hunt’s favourite newspaper – reprinting the letter in full.” Please sign the letter if you can!

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.

Chasing Clouds in Greenwich: Photos of a Journey East Along the Thames

Chasing Clouds in Greenwich: A Journey East Along the Thames, a set on Flickr.

On July 11, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I decided to revisit a journey I had made last year, when my wife’s sister visited from Scotland and we went cycling along the Thames Path from Greenwich to the Thames Barrier, out to the east on the border of Greenwich and Woolwich.

Green London: Photos of Surrey Quays, Brockley, Telegraph Hill, Blackheath and One Tree Hill

Green London: Surrey Quays, Brockley, Telegraph Hill, Blackheath and One Tree Hill, a set on Flickr.

These photos are the latest contributions to my ongoing project, on Flickr, to photograph the whole of London by bike — the sixteenth instalment in what will eventually comprise many hundreds of photos sets. I currently have 60 sets to post, mostly taken in a very busy month before my summer holiday in Italy, so please bear with me. I have also been adding the photos to an interactive map, which can be found here, and I am also engaged in bringing the photos together in collections, for which maps also exist, which I hope help to contextualise the photos. Tags may also be a good way of seeking out photos, and tags are available here.

The project is my way of getting to understand London, the city that has been my home for the last 27 years, and came about because I needed — for reasons involving my health and what I think can accurately be described as my spiritual existence — to combine exercise, exploration and my neglected love of photography.

I intend to formalise the project by looking for funding, but for now, since I embarked on it, on May 11, it has become the physical manifestation — online — of my journey to a greater understanding of London than I previously thought possible, as the city, its geography, its history, its shifting moods and its secret places seep into my consciousness, transforming me in ways that I have only just begun to understand.

In the coming week I’ll begin posting photos of some long journeys I took in July and August, but for now, as a follow-up to Green London: Photos of Nunhead, Dulwich and Blythe Hill, a set I posted six weeks ago, I’m posting photos of some of the lovely green spaces that are so essential to the mental health of Londoners, some of which have an almost transcendent quality — of the woodland at Surrey Quays, which I regard as the greatest achievement of the whole Docklands redevelopment project that began in the 1980s; of the great elevated plain of Blackheath; of secrets alongside the River Ravensbourne; and of the hills of south east London; in particular, Hilly Fields in Brockley and the extraordinary One Tree Hill, seeped in history, which offers unparalleled views over central London.

Join me tomorrow for the first of four sets of photos of a journey east, along the side of the River Thames, from Greenwich to Thamesmead and back, via the Thames Barrier and Woolwich, and I also hope to post more photos of my holiday in Italy, as well as finding the time to write updates about the situation facing the men still held in Guantánamo, and to keep haranguing the Tory-led government here in the UK for their cruelty and ineptitude.

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 Paralympics Demonstration Against Atos Healthcare in London

The Paralympics Demonstration Against Atos Healthcare in London, a set on Flickr.

Yesterday, Friday August 31, was the last day of the Atos Games, a week of events organised by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and UK Uncut against the jaw-dropping hypocrisy involved in Atos Healthcare, the French IT giant, being allowed to sponsor the Paralympic Games, while the company is also in charge of running the government’s Work Capability Assessments, a review process that is designed to find disabled people fit for work.

As a result, huge numbers of disabled people, who are not fit for work by any genuinely objective measure, are being driven into poverty — a wretched and cruel policy for a government that claims to have Christian values — and the results are leading directly to suicides, or other deaths through the stress involved. Undeterred, however, the government recently renewed Atos’ contract, to the tune of £400 million, and ministers are permanently involved in ignoring the inconvenient truth that, on appeal, tens of thousands of decisions made by Atos’ representatives are being overturned. The average is 40 percent, but in Scotland campaigners discovered that, when claimants were helped by representatives of Citizens Advice Bureaux, 70 percent of decisions were overturned on appeal.

As the Guardian explained when Atos’ contracts were renewed:

The government will replace the working-age Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with a new Personal Independence Payment (PIP), from next year and aims to cut spending by 20% over the next three years. DLA, which pays out a maximum of £130 a week, is a welfare payment designed to help people look after themselves and aimed at those who find it difficult to walk or get around.

Richard Hawkes, the chief executive of the disability charity Scope, told the Guardian how flawed the tests are. “Just this week the government and Atos … have come under a great deal of criticism about how this assessment is being delivered to disabled people,” he said. “Yet in less than a year from now, disabled people could have to go through two deeply flawed assessments in the same month to get the essential financial support they need to live their lives. Disabled people are incredibly anxious and afraid that the switch from DLA to PIP is just an excuse to cut the support they need. The decision about which private company will run the assessment is of little significance to the thousands of disabled people who are just deeply worried about losing their financial lifeline.”

As campaigners also explained, setting a pre-determined amount of government spending to be saved, as the Tories have done, “would lead to arbitrary judgments being made,” as around 500,000 people would — or will — have to have their benefits cut.

As with every ill-conceived and brutally destructive plan put forward by this government, it appears to be almost impossible to get ministers to acknowledge that they are wrong, although this week the spotlight of the mainstream media has at last focused on the horrors of the government’s attitude to the disabled, and Atos’ key role in supporting and implementing it. The spur for this has been the Paralympic Games, and has largely been triggered by Atos’ involvement as a sponsor. For myself, the most significant protest was made by the British athletes, who hid their Atos-sponsored lanyards during the opening ceremony, but it is a tribute to all the disabled campaigners who have been making their voices heard since the Tories seized power over two years ago in their unholy coalition with the Lib Dems that the mainstream media is finally waking up to the fact that something is deeply wrong in Britain today, and that much of that rot focuses on how the government is treating disabled people, as well as the important corollary: that the hypocrisy involved in praising disabled people whose disabilities do not prevent them from engaging in competitive sport while cutting financial support to others whose disabilities prevent them from doing so is disgusting.

Yesterday, to support the week-long events organised by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and UK Uncut, I traveled to Atos’ UK headquarters in Triton Square, on the other side of the Euston Road from Warren Street, where Santander and Virgin Healthcare (heavily implicated in the carve-up of the NHS) are also based, for a protest that involved many hundreds of disabled campaigners and their supporters, where I took the photos in this set. Please feel free to use the images, although a credit would be appreciated! I was delighted to note that Tara Flood, a gold medal-winning former Paralympian, came out in support of the campaign, speaking out while contractual obligations prevent competing athletes from criticising any of the Games’ sponsors. “It is a shocking irony that Atos is a main sponsor of London 2012 whilst destroying disabled people’s lives on behalf of the government,” she said.

There was no trouble from the authorities at Triton Square, but I was dismayed to hear that a separate group of campaigners who protested outside the Department of Work and Pensions, where ten protestors in wheelchairs actually made it into the lobby, were treated roughly by the police, as this video shows (and also see DPAC’s coverage here, and a statement in which it was noted that one disabled protestor had his shoulder broken):

The most poignant message I saw yesterday is the one that I have placed first in the photo set — marking the passing yesterday of Cecilia Burns, a disabled Scottish woman who died of breast cancer yesterday morning. As her friend’s placard noted, “Cecilia Burns — RIP. Declared ‘fit to work” in February by Atos. Died this morning. “Nil points’ for her breast cancer. Atos is a sick joke.”

I couldn’t agree more. So please, if you agree, and still have a heart, do all you can to support the disabled people of this country. Harangue your MPs to represent their disabled constituents more effectively, and let the government — and Atos — know that we will not be satisfied until their reign of terror is at an end.

Note: For my recent articles about the disabled, see: Today the Tories Took £100 A Week from Some of the UK’s Most Disabled People: How Can This Be Right?, RIP Karen Sherlock, Another Victim of the Tories’ Brutal, Heartless Disability Reforms, Doctors Urge Government to Scrap Callous Disability Tests and Where is the Shame and Anger as the UK Government’s Unbridled Assault on the Disabled Continues?

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.