Andy Worthington's Blog, page 164

The holiday starts here …

OK, so I’m away for two weeks, on my annual family holiday — this year to Italy, and, specifically, to Rome for a week, and then Abruzzo for a second week. It will be good to get away. I’ve been finding Guantánamo weighing heavily on me, and the state of Britain under the Tories has been no easier to bear, so an opportunity to rest and recharge the creative batteries will be most welcome.

I’ll be trying to publish a few articles while I’m away, but I won’t make any rash promises. The most likely scenario is that I’ll manage to publish a few more photo sets from the ongoing project that has been particularly motivating me over the last three months — cycling around London by bike, taking photos of whatever interests me, to add to a body of work chronicling London in 2012, as I try to understand — both physically and mentally — this enormous and enthralling city that has been my home for the last 27 years, and that is permeated by history, illuminated or dulled by the weather, and enlivened by nature.

Cycling around London with a camera also demonstrates a chasm between the rich and the poor that continues to grow, with the glass and steel towers of speculative finance rising up everywhere as though the economy was healthy, and not in a double-dip recession, and, on the other hand, the many other places where  businesses continue to go bust. Some areas of London — where the chattering classes rarely venture, if ever — have begun to resemble ghost towns, with the unemployed — on the anniversary of last summer’s unrest — supposed to stay quiet and not express any kind of dissatisfaction while chasing non-existent jobs.

This rich-poor divide and the intended silencing of the discontented, deprived and disenfranchised continues even though any objective analysis of the current crisis reveals that (a) those who caused the global crash of 2008, from which all our problems originally emanate, are unpunished and still free to pursue their dubious — or downright illegal — practices, and (b) the idiotic Tory-led government is making matters worse by punishing the young, the working poor, the old, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled for the crimes of the rich and the super-rich, through a programme of savage and unprecedented austerity that is counter-productive, stifling demand — and extinguishing hope — when hope and demand are what are urgently needed.

I have no rose-tinted notion that Italy will be any more functional, as the crash of 2008 was an explosion that severely wounded everyone who had been close to or involved in the bubble that began in the late 1990s. It may be that no solution will be found until the old order is overthrown, and a new, visionary political system implemented — an as yet inconceivable system that recognises the need to create work in the Western economies — very possibly be stemming the outsourcing that has haemorrhaged jobs in the last 25 years — and to rein in the unparalleled greed that has prevailed during that same period.

I may find time to comment on the situation in Italy, and to post some photos,  but if not, enjoy the summer, and I’ll see you in two weeks.

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 London At Night: From the Olympics at Greenwich to Deptford and Surrey Quays

London At Night: From the Olympics at Greenwich to Deptford and Surrey Quays, a set on Flickr.

On August 8, 2012, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — and also to fully understand, both physically and mentally, the scale of the city and how its various neighbourhoods join together, I cycled down to Greenwich from my home in Brockley, and then along the River Thames through Deptford to Surrey Quays, and back, inland, to Deptford and home.

I was not alone on this journey, as I also took my son Tyler along as a bit of an adventure  — for both of us — and we began by checking out the Olympic screen in the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, and then cycling through Deptford, partly on the Thames Path along the river, which I first recorded here, through the Pepys Estate (formerly part of Deptford’s extensive docks) to the remaining docks of Rotherhithe –  the South Dock and the colossal Greenland Dock — which are the last of the docks that once covered the whole of Rotherhithe.

A peninsula facing Shadwell, Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, Rotherhithe, like those areas, was redeveloped in the 1980s onwards as part of the Docklands development initiated by Margaret Thatcher. Most of Rotherhithe’s docks were filled in and refashioned as residential areas, and only two other remnants of the docks survive at Surrey Water and Canada Water. I will be looking at more of the history of Rotherhithe in other photo sets to follow.

On my bike ride with my son, I took a few evocative images of the towers of Canary Wharf from Greenland Dock, and we then cycled through the Surrey Quays shopping centre, past Surrey Quays station, and along the main inland road that runs roughly parallel to the river, the A200, known as Lower Road at the Rotherhithe end, which becomes Evelyn Street as it passes through Deptford, and becomes Creek Road on the approach to Greenwich, where it terminates, to be replaced by the A206, Trafalgar Road, which heads out to Woolwich and beyond.

Just past Deptford Park, we took a side road, cutting through the back streets of Deptford to return home at the end of a short but fascinating little tour around Greenwich, Deptford and Surrey Quays, and I hope you enjoy the photos.

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.

Real London: Photos of New Cross, Bermondsey and the Old Kent Road

Real London: New Cross, Bermondsey and the Old Kent Road, a set on Flickr.

“Real London” is a short-hand, of course, for a London that is not the shiny one of glass and steel built and sold by property developers, and bought by those in the top few percent of earners — as well as by foreign investors. It is a world of workers, some of whom live in their own houses, having secured mortgages before the boom that began in the late 1990s, and often well before that, when it was still affordable for working people to take out mortgages and be able to repay them. Others live in social housing, built by local councils and run either by the councils or by housing associations, or, less frequently, owned or owned and managed by co-ops, and others have to cope with the increasingly greedy, unregulated private rental market . And amongst them, of course, are the unemployed — part of the current total of two and a half million unemployed people in the UK as a whole. According to the London Skills and Employment Observatory, 1.38 million people are currently either unemployed or “economically inactive” in London, and the unemployment rate is 8.9 percent.

These workers and homeowners were, perhaps, on salaries between the median and the average — currently £14,000 and £26,000, as I discussed in my article, The Housing Crisis and the Gulf Between the Rich and the Poor: Half of UK Workers Earn Less Than £14,000 A Year — but whereas in the past it would have been possible for a household on average or below average wages to buy a house, now it is completely impossible.

As I explained in a recent article, Unaffordable London: The Great Housing Rip-Off Continues, on a multiplier of three times earnings, which was how the housing market functioned before the Blair and Brown boom years, a couple buying a house in London for the average price — £388,000 — need a combined income of nearly £130,000, or something slightly less plus a whopping great deposit.

Not only is this changing the face of London, as the well-off and/or parentally subsidised gentrify areas that were previously solidly working class, in many cases pricing out the children of those workers able to buy their houses in the affordable past, but after a lull followed the bankers’ and governments’ self-inflicted global economic crash in 2008, the speculative housing market is more rampant than ever before, even though we are in a double-dip recession — the first time that a recession has left the rich unscathed, which ought to indicate how rigged the housing market — and the general economic picture — really is.

Almost everywhere I have travelled in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which i began three months ago, I have seen, along with the tendrils of gentrification reaching out into new neighbourhoods, glass and steel blocks continuing to rear up along shorelines, by rivers, in already established areas, but developments — large and small — are also penetrating previously unfashionable areas. It is hard to see how this bubble can continue, especially as these developments are aimed at those whose household income is over £70,000 a year. Anything less than that, and property developers think that would-be buyers are not a safe bet, even though only a relatively small percentage of Londoners have a household income that large.

In this set of photos, which I mostly took on two trips about a month ago, I continued exploring the main roads and side streets of New Cross, Bermondsey and Peckham — mostly on or around the Old Kent Road, that great artery connecting Kent to central London — where the recession is much more apparent, but also where real life continues, away from the hyperbole of the developers and the money markets.

I hope you share my interest in how real life continues under the extreme economic difficulties facing most people in Tory-led Britain, dragged into a double-dip recession, with no light at the end of the tunnel, through the government’s suicidal obsession with austerity, when what is needed is economic stimulus, and I also hope you share my interest in liminal and marginal places, and — I confess — my fascination with derelict and forgotten buildings.

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 a Journey Across the Thames on the Olympics Cable Car

A Journey Across the Thames on the Olympics Cable Car, a set on Flickr.

On August 6, as I explained in a previous article, Jamaican Independence and a Giant Tent: Photos of a Visit to the Olympic Site at the O2, featuring photos and commentary, I cycled along the river from Deptford to Greenwich peninsula with my wife and son, to visit the O2 (recorded in that previous set of photos), and also to travel on the Emirates Air Line, the cable cars across the Thames, which run from North Greenwich, near the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome) to the Royal Docks. The visit was for fun, but was also part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I have been recording here since June.

Intended to transport Olympics visitors from one venue to another, the Emirates Air Line project — named after the Emirates airline company, the biggest sponsor of the cable cars, who provided £36 million in a ten-year sponsorship deal — also provides a useful way of crossing the river at a point where there are few other options — just the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to the west, and the Woolwich Ferry to the east — and it is both remarkable and commendable that bicycles are also allowed.

After first visiting the O2, our little family group queued for the Air Line, in a queue that, though long, was also fast-moving, and were then ushered into the cars, which move in an out of the terminal very swiftly. Because we had bikes, and only two are allowed in each car, my wife and son travelled in one car, and I had the following car all to myself, which seemed like a particularly good deal for just £3.60.

And then there was the journey! Although it lasted just five minutes, it was extraordinarily exhilarating — a rush into the air, to what seemed like an impossible height, with the most wonderful panoramas of the whole of east and south east London. I hope you enjoy the photos, and if you’re in London, and not nervous of heights or of travelling at speed high above the Thames in a slightly wobbly vehicle, then I encourage you to try it. See here for details.

Not everyone will like it, of course, as I found out on arrival, when one of our party had had the opposite experience to my own — a response that led to a lightly longer than expected return journey, by bike through Silvertown and Poplar, via the East India Docks Basin, and then down the western shore of the Isle of Dogs (which I photographed here) to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel and home — a lovely journey that  am always happy to make, now that I have discovered that there are few things better in life than cycling around London “with no particular place to go,” as Chuck Berry used to say.

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.

Where is the Shame and Anger as the UK Government’s Unbridled Assault on the Disabled Continues?

What has happened to my country? I grew up in a Christian household — my father was Church of England, my mother Methodist — and both believed in Christian charity; in other words, the need for people of faith to look after those less fortunate than themselves. In the case of my Methodist heritage — as a working class religion, rather than the establishment C of E — this care for those in need was absolutely central to how the world was perceived, providing a social and political perspective as much as one based on religion.

Christians — and, of course, believers of other faiths — have their own share of hypocrites, and certainly do not have a monopoly on caring for the poor and the sick, as can be seen by the number of atheists with a well-developed social conscience, but in the Britain of today, driven by the Tory-led coalition government, concern for the poor and the ill appears to have become deeply unfashionable, leading to a callousness in society as a whole that has been encouraged by governments themselves (not just this shower of heartless Etonians), and by large parts of the media.

The defining characteristics of this cruel new world appear to be a preoccupation with selfishness and materialism, and, as part of a decline in empathy and the dissolving of the kind of political solidarity that was central to those opposing Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, for example, a narrow and horribly misplaced focus for dissent — not on the bigger political picture, and on the corporate and banking elites getting way with financial murder, but on people’s neighbours, or those regarded as different, or inferior, or feral, or workshy scroungers.

Relentlessly, as part of an ideologically motivated programme of cuts aimed at ending the state provision of the services entail for a well-functioning civil society, the butchers of the Tory-led government have been attacking schoolchildren, students, the working poor, the unemployed, the old, the ill and the disabled.

On this latter point, the panic and fear in the disabled community, as the government cuts the financial support that makes life tolerable, has received far too little attention in the media and from ordinary British people, who have been content to push a deeply cynical message about scroungers, and have not been willing to examine what it means when, for example, a severely disabled person with a partner who earns just £7,500 a year is no longer entitled to any financial support whatsoever from the government — a saving of up to £5,000 a year that will plunge these people into horrendous poverty and powerlessness. In fact, even the Department of Work and Pensions estimates that fewer than 0.5% of incapacity claims are fraudulent, but that inconvenient truth is never mentioned in the tirades against scroungers in the mainstream media.

As the centrepiece of its mission to impoverish the disabled, the government has implemented a Work Capability Assessment, designed to establish that people with serious physical and/or mental disabilities are, in fact, fit for work, and can have their financial support cut — and, in some circumstances, be forced into unpaid work. Beginning next year, with the stated aim of cutting spending by 20 percent over the next three years, the Disability Living Allowance (DLA), which, as the Guardian put it, “pays out a maximum of £130 a week [and] is a welfare payment designed to help people look after themselves and aimed at those who find it difficult to walk or get around,” will be replaced by the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), heavily criticised by disability campaigners. Moreover, the fact that the government has announced its intention to cut spending by 20 percent indicates that it is driven by cost and not by need, as is also clear from an examination of the tests run for the Department of Work and Pensions by the French company Atos Healthcare.

The tests, are, by any objective measure, a disaster, as they deliberately fail to provide an accurate assessment of claimants’ illnesses, and are overturned on appeal to such an extent that Employment Minister Chris Grayling was recently caught out trying to censor a Ministry of Justice courts service information video that helped people in their appeals.

I’m glad to note that both the BBC and Channel 4 recently broadcast programmes examining this disgraceful state of affairs — both from the point of view of the cruelty and incompetence of the assessments, and of the aim not of providing the best service possible to disabled people, but of saving a fixed amount money. For Channel 4, Dispatches went undercover at Atos for “Britain on the Sick,” in which Dr. Steve Bick, a GP, became an assessor. As Jackie Long explained on the Channel 4 website:

While training he’s told more than once to understand the new Employment Support Allowance process is “meant to take people off benefit.”

Despite repeated claims by the government and Atos that there are no targets for taking claimants off benefit, it’s made clear to Dr. Bick that if he finds too many people unfit for work, his own assessments will be monitored.

The trainer explains: “You are being watched carefully for the rate of support group (people found unfit for work and therefore eligible for the highest level of ESA). If it’s more than, I think, 12 or 13 percent you will be fed back ‘your rate is too high.’”

It’s a view repeated later in the footage by another doctor who says the targets come from the Department for Work and Pensions — a claim once again denied by the government and by Atos.

The Channel 4 article also noted:

The footage also suggests just how tough it is to be found “unfit for work.” The trainer talks through how people with a disability affecting their arms must be assessed: “If they have one problem, one frozen shoulder, one impeachment syndrome, one broken elbow, one hand problem , no limb, amputation, they may score a little but the problem has to be bilateral.” She goes on to concede that it’s a “very, very tough benefit.”

How tough is made clear when Dr. Bick asks what sort of job someone with only one hand might be able to do. The trainer elaborates: “As long as you’ve got one finger and you can press a button you don’t score anything for manual dexterity.”

The BBC’s programme, for Panorama, was “Disabled or Faking It?” and is available below, after being posted to YouTube:

Disgracefully, just last week it was announced that Atos has been awarded contracts worth more than £400m to continue with the discredited assessments. As the Guardian explained, “The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced the award of three contracts in England and Wales, with Atos unexpectedly winning the lion’s share of the work. The smaller of the three contracts, covering Wales and parts of central England, was won by the outsourcing company Capita.”

G4S, tainted by its failure to fulfil its contract at the Olympics, despite taking £284 million in taxpayers’ money, had “begun its own tests with disabled people two years ago,” and had “hoped to be awarded a number of contracts,” but lost out, for the most part. Even so, the company was “still in line for two smaller contracts — one in Northern Ireland and the other a national trial,” according to the Guardian, which also noted that industry insiders estimated that these contracts were “worth about £200m in total.”

As the Guardian also noted, Richard Hawkes, the chief executive of the disability charity Scope, emphasised what a disgrace it was that the tests — which will be applied to two million people from next year — were continuing at all, noting that the government and Atos had “come under a great deal of criticism about how this assessment is being delivered to disabled people.”

He added, “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.” Mentioning how the cuts are aimed primarily at saving money, he also said, “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.”

The Guardian‘s article further emphasised the point about saving money, noting that campaigners stated that “achieving the level of saving required would mean cutting about 500,000 people from the benefit roll, which would lead to arbitrary judgments being made.”

Quite how we bring sanity and sympathy back to the UK is beyond me, but as the country will shortly be returning to normality after its Olympic fever, I hope that the run-up to the Paralympic Games might provide an opportunity for some of the best impulses to have come out of the Games — a kind of Utopianism regarding the peaceful co-existence of athletes from all around the world, despite their competition in the Games themselves — to be applied by British people to those less fortunate than themselves.

One useful series of events to focus on is The Atos Games, five days of activities, from August 27 to 31, initiated by Disabled People Against Cuts, in protest at Atos’s sponsorship of the Paralympic Games — a clear example of how, in the modern world, even satire has been preempted by corporate PR. Do come along to some or all of the events if you can, to show the government, and the International Olympics Committee (IOC) and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), that it is entirely inappropriate for Atos to be sponsoring disabled athletes on the one hand, while, with the other, doing so much to take away vital support from hundreds of thousands of other disabled people.

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.

Close Guantánamo: A Reminder of Why We Demand the Prison’s Closure, and a Call for Support for Shaker Aamer

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.

Ten years and seven months after the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison opened at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, it is less clear than it was under George W. Bush that the prison is a moral, legal and ethical abomination, a place where men bought for bounty payments are held, and men picked up on the basis of deeply flawed intelligence, and others labeled as terrorists when they were nothing more than soldiers fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in an inter-Muslim civil war that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks or any other acts of international terrorism.

It is worth remembering that, of the 168 men still held, only around three dozen were allegedly involved in terrorism — and even those claims require scrutiny, as they include Omar Khadr, the Canadian former child prisoner obliged to admit that he committed war crimes by engaging in military conflict with US forces, which, to right-minded people, is a permanent mark of shame against Barack Obama. They also include the kind of low-level prisoners already freed after trials — the Australian David Hicks; Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden; and Ibrahim al-Qosi, a cook in an al-Qaeda compound, and also an occasional driver for bin Laden. Only a handful of the men still held are actually regarded as dangerous international terrorists.

Under President Bush, when international criticism began to sting — primarily during his second term in office — 532 prisoners were released. It was clear that the process was political, and the subtext, though never admitted publicly, was also clear — that Guantánamo was a huge, embarrassing mistake.

However, since President Obama came to power, a political fiasco has turned into a deeply cynical game of political football. The President promised to close Guantánamo within a year of taking office, and convened an interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force to examine the cases of the 242 men held at the time his Presidency began, to provide recommendations about who should be tried and who should be released — and, it turned out, who his advisers believed should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial. However, he failed to follow up with swift and decisive action, and Republicans, and members of his own party, soon turned against him, with the most cynical law-makers — and their cheerleaders in the media — reviving the myth that Guantánamo is full of terrorists, and passing legislation intended to prevent the President from ever closing the prison.

Distressingly, 87 of the remaining prisoners were cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, consisting of sober career officials and lawyers and other experts from the main government departments and from the intelligence agencies. However, primarily as a result of Congressional obstructions, just five prisoners have been released in the last two years — a shocking statistic that ought to alarm anyone who believes that Guantánamo must be closed, as it remains a stain on America’s belief in justice, and provides a thoroughly damaging demonstration of how the Bush administration managed to create a third category of prisoner — neither criminal suspects nor prisoners of war, but “enemy combatants,” who can be held without any rights whatsoever, at the whim of the government, possibly for the rest of their lives.

This is wrong, however you look at it, but the President has yet to take advantage of a waiver included in much-criticized legislation passed at the end of last year — the National Defense Authorization Act, with its alarming proposal for the mandatory military custody of terror suspects seized in the future, which was clearly inspired by the example set at Guantánamo — which allows him to bypass Congress and release prisoners if he believes that doing so is in the interests of national security.

According to the cynical supporters of Guantánamo, who relentlessly try to strike fear into the hearts of their fellow citizens, the interests national security demand that none of the 168 men still in Guantánamo should be released, even though over half of them have been cleared for release. The demands are insulting to those 87 men, and counter-productive in general, as Guantánamo remains a damaging global beacon of injustice, and only its closure will make America safer.

Of the 87 men cleared for release but still held, one who should be released immediately is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose story we told here. Cleared for release under President Bush in 2007, and by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009, his case would be a useful opportunity for President Obama to use his waiver, as no lawmaker could realistically argue that their restrictions on releasing prisoners to countries regarded as dangerous could apply to the UK, America’s closest ally in the “war on terror.”

Shaker Aamer’s supporters in the UK have recently put together a new website, which we urge you to visit, and we remain committed to the two petitions in support of his release from Guantánamo — a petition to the British government, which needs 100,000 signatures by next April to be eligible for debate in Parliament, and an international petition, to be delivered to the US and UK government when it reaches 10,000 signatures.

Shaker Aamer has a long-standing complaint against the British government, alleging that British agents were in the room when he was tortured by US soldiers in Afghanistan, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo in February 2002. A judge ruled in his favor in December 2009, ordering the British government to release whatever information they possessed to his US lawyers, to help them put pressure on the Obama administration to clear Shaker for release. This unprecedented move led to his case being submitted to the Metropolitan Police, to investigate possible wrongdoing by the security services. Last week, ITV News announced that a a joint Crown Prosecution Service and Metropolitan Police panel had assessed twelve cases, and had referred three to the Metropolitan Police for further investigation, including Shaker’s, based on specific allegations that “British officials visited him, or asked questions, while aware that he was being tortured.”

As ITV News noted, the decision “could lead British detectives to ask for US government permission to interview Shaker Aamer at Guantánamo Bay.” That is one option, but another — far more practical — would be for detectives to interview Shaker at home, in London, with his British wife and his four British children.

We encourage President Obama to do the right thing, and to release Shaker Aamer now.

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

Jamaican Independence and a Giant Tent: Photos of a Visit to the Olympic Site at the O2

Jamaican Independence and a Giant Tent: A Visit to the Olympic Site at the O2, a set on Flickr.

As Olympics fever continues to grip the UK, I can just about about cope with the competitiveness of the Games on an individual level, and have admiration for athletes’ self-discipline and determination, although I maintain that the greatest achievement of humanity is cooperation and not competition, and I also believe that it is important to bear in mind, as the hyperbole threatens to engulf us, that, as well as not being the highest form of human achievement — something that should be reserved for endeavours that improve all our lives — sport is not generally an undertaking that contributes to the political well-being of a nation and its people, beyond a kind of short-term thrill.

In thinking of the disturbing subtexts of the Games — including their humourless corporate greed, their ballooning costs, unchecked by government, the instigation of various forms of social cleansing, and their use as an excuse for empty nationalistic displays, which always do more for warmongers than for peacemakers, by encouraging a sense of supremacy amongst groups whose athletes do particularly well — I have been reminded of the phrase “bread and circuses” (from the Latin panem et circuses), for which an excellent description exists on Wikipedia: “In the case of politics, the phrase is used to describe the creation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion, distraction, and/or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace.”

I suspect that this is always true of the Olympic Games, which seem to be the epitome of “bread and circuses,” leaving host countries groaning under debt, while their governments desperately try to divert any criticism of their own behaviour by pointing to happy patriotic crowds of citizens. However, in the case of the UK, here and now, the words ring particularly true, as the Tory-led coalition government is actually incapable of “exemplary or excellent public service or public policy,” and is, in fact, committed to destroying state involvement in the provision of all services except for parts of the judiciary, parts of the military, and, of course, MPs themselves, whose privatisation cure does not, of course, extend to themselves.

Nevertheless, as I am not a complete killjoy, I have been travelling around London soaking up the atmosphere over the last ten days, and yesterday I took a trip by bike from Brockley, in south east London, to the Greenwich peninsula, with my wife and son, to take the Emirates Air Line — the cable cars more popularly known as the Olympic cable cars across the River Thames from North Greenwich, near the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome) to the Royal Docks. To get there, we took the Thames Path from Deptford to the eastern shore of the Greenwich peninsula, and, on arrival, decided to check out the O2 itself, which is the venue for the Olympics gymnastics events.

Happily, the O2 is also home to the Jamaican Olympics team, and yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Jamaican Independence, and so, after discovering that we could wander around inside the O2, we passed through security, which resembled the kind of security in place at airports, where the staff were very friendly, and, we learned swiftly, overworked and underpaid, and then took a tour around the O2, which is a surreal kind of US-derived mall at the best of times, and is now groaning under the added burden of presenting a friendly face of the Olympics’ faceless trans-national corporate sponsors. While there, we paid a visit to the Jamaican House, a much more relaxed, low-key Jamaican affair, where Independence Day celebrations were taking place, and then, gasping for air after another promenade down the O2′s fake streets, made our way out, into the fresh air and on to the Emirates Air Line. I’ll be publishing photos of that extraordinary experience very soon, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy this set of photos.

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.

Union Jack Summer: Photos of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics

Union Jack Summer: The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics, a set on Flickr.

I have no great love for either the Royal Family or the Olympics, and on this latter point, my articles should make clear where I stand — Our Olympic Hell: A Militarised, Corporate, Jingoistic Disgrace, Olympics Disaster: The G4S Security Scandal and Corporate Sponsors’ £600 Million Tax Avoidance and The Dark Side of the Olympics: Kettling Cyclists and Telling Fairytales About Our Heritage. You can also find some more photos here.

As for the Queen, I have long adored “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols — one of the greatest rock songs of all time, along with “Anarchy in the UK” — and I did dream of mounting a black sound system to a black bike with a black flag, pumping out the Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” and cycling around every street party I could find in London on the Diamond Jubilee weekend.

That never came to pass, and in truth, although I find the existence of the Royal Family objectionable, some of the individuals involved work hard (the Queen and Princess Anne come to mind) and I also don’t trust any politicians to preside over the dissolution of the Royal Family and the disposal of their assets in a way that would benefit the majority of the people. More sensible, then, would be for their role to be scaled down enormously, as in other European countries, but there appears to be no hint of that on the horizon, and so we are stuck with something that looks like the divine right of kings (or queens), but is in fact a very expensive charade.

On the extended weekend of June 2-5, when we the people were granted two days off as holidays — or, in fact, just one extra day, as the government held the Whitsun bank holiday back for a week, in some pale and insulting imitation of Moses — I had little interest in the music show at Buckingham Palace, with its generally uninspired and uninspiring performers, and its dull commentators — Lenny Henry being an exception — and little interest in the patriotism that the BBC tried to graft onto the 1000-boat flotilla that took part in the River Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant on the Sunday.

However, I did think it might make an interesting spectacle, and so my son Tyler and I cycled from Brockley to Bermondsey Wall, by the River Thames, for the end of the flotilla, as this was where all the boats were gathering afterwards. We saw very little, and it was one of the wettest experiences of my life, and certainly the wettest in my son’s life, but it was exhilarating, and bonding in the sense that I had never been with so many thoroughly soaked people, even if that was not the type of patriotic bonding that the organisers — and the wretched politicians — had in mind.

During that weekend, and in the weeks that followed, I also took photos of Jubilee-inspired behaviour — mainly decorated houses — and also of flags that related to the brief frenzy that attended England’s typically sluggish performance in the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship — with the intention of finally putting a photo set together, and the trigger has been the Olympic games, another frenzy of flag-waving whose jingoism and nationalism persistently appals me, and whose organisers have also taken corporate greed and coldness to new depths. I have added some photos I took of the Olympic screen in Potters Fields by City Hall to this set, to complete it, along with a few other photos taken yesterday, and while most of these photos are short of flags, they do share similarities with the Jubilee — through that familiar evocation of patriotism that I find so perpetually troubling.

In fact, of course, the athletes in the Olympics, though wearing flags and indicators of their nationality, are, first and foremost, driven individuals whose motives in many ways run counter to the point of nationalism, which is to create subservient beings whose individuality can be suppressed. There is, of course, a blurred line where, for example, six UK gold medallists on one day — Saturday — creates an illusion of national togetherness and achievement, and it is true that supportive crowds give athletes a home advantage, but it is never worth playing this card too aggressively, as nationalism is treacherous, most readily identifiable in situations of war, or other episodes involving violence, and the scapegoating of the “other.” Nationalism’s home may, indeed, be the battlefield rather than the sports stadium.

So while I too was thrilled by Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah, I felt mostly for them as individuals who had worked incredibly hard, and for Jessica as a woman of mixed race, and as someone from Sheffield. For Mo Farah, my hope is that the achievement of this Somali-born Muslim might combat racism and Islamophobia.

Time will tell. For now, I remain concerned about three particular issues: firstly, that the corporate sponsors, who were planning to walk off with £600 million from the temporary tax haven that is the Olympics, will pay their taxes, after a successful 38 Degrees campaign to force them to do so, as this will help this lame government recoup some of the money it is otherwise extorting from taxpayers; and secondly, I hope that MPs and the people of Britain will call for a proper audit of the Games, whose ballooning budget appears to have been justified because politicians are ruthlessly disdainful about those who pick up the tab for their big gestures; we the taxpayers, in other words, and not the Tories’ chums, who make sure that all their income is immediately spirited away to tax havens.

Thirdly, I hope that the idiot butcher David Cameron and his fellow clowns and sadists in Downing Street and the Cabinet — and Boris Johnson in City Hall — don’t get to bask in any reflected glory as a result of the British athletes’ excellent performance. Labour certainly deserve thanks for investing in British sport, but the Tories deserve nothing. They remain the most wretched bunch of incompetents ever to have held office, and as soon as the Games are over, God help us, as the gloom and savagery of Tory Britain will be back with a vengeance.

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.

Ten Years of Torture: Marking the 10th Anniversary of John Yoo’s “Torture Memos”

[image error]Exactly ten years ago, on August 1, 2002, Jay S. Bybee, who, at the time, was the Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, signed two memos (see here and here) that will forever be known as the “torture memos.” Also known as the Bybee memos, because of Bybee’s signature on them, they were in fact mainly written by John Yoo, a law professor at UC Berkeley, who worked as a lawyer in the OLC from 2001 to 2003.

Although the OLC is supposed to provide impartial legal advice to the executive branch, Yoo was not interested in being impartial. As one of six lawyers close to Vice President Dick Cheney — along with David Addington, Cheney’s Legal Counsel, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, White House Deputy Counsel Tim Flanigan, William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, and his deputy, Daniel Dell’Orto — he played a significant role in formulating the notion that, in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” prisoners could be held as “enemy combatants” without the traditional protections of the Geneva Conventions; in other words, without any rights whatsoever.

This position was confirmed in an executive order issued by President Bush on February 7, 2002, and was not officially challenged until the Supreme Court reminded the government, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in June 2006, that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment,” applies to all prisoners seized in wartime.

What was never officially mentioned, and is still unknown to many US citizens, is that the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which Ronald Reagan signed in 1988, confirms that there are never, ever any excuses for the use of torture. Article 2.2 states, unambiguously, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

In the “torture memos,” Yoo — with Bybee’s approval — attempted, cynically, to redefine torture so that it could be used on Abu Zubaydah, the “high-value detainee” seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, claiming that torture was the infliction of physical pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” or the infliction of mental pain which “result[s] in significant psychological harm of significant duration e.g. lasting for months or even years.” Compounding his arrogance, it was later discovered that he had lifted his definitions from a Medicare benefits statute and other health care provisions.

Yoo — and Bybee — also approved ten techniques for use on Abu Zubaydah, including waterboarding, an ancient torture technique, known as tortura del agua to the more honest torturers of the Spanish Inquisition, which involves controlled drowning. As a result, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, and another “high-value detainee,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was waterboarded 183 times.

[image error]Unforgivably, Yoo and Bybee have never been prosecuted for their cynical decision to claim that torture is not torture — and they are joined in this lack of accountability by all the other torturers of the Bush administration, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Tim Flanigan, William J. Haynes II and Daniel Dell’Orto, as well as Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who was included in a Spanish anti-torture lawsuit as part of the “Bush Six,” along with Addington, Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes and Yoo.

In Yoo and Bybee’s case, a four-year internal investigation into their ethical conduct concluded in 2009 that they were guilty of “professional misconduct.” This was a conclusion that would have led to professional sanctions, and that may have opened an entire can of worms for Yoo, the law professor, and Bybee, who, by then, was a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. However, a notorious DoJ fixer, David Margolis, was allowed — or encouraged — to overwrite the report’s conclusions, deciding instead that the two men had only exercised “poor judgment,” a decision that carried no possibility of any sanctions or accountability whatsoever, as I explained in an article at the time.

The decision to allow Margolis to allow Yoo and Bybee to evade accountability is typical of the Obama administration, which has refused to engage with any attempt — internally or internationally — to prosecute those involved in the Bush administration’s torture program, even though crimes were undeniably committed, as I explained in an article a month after Margolis’s whitewash.

As a result of this refusal to hold anyone accountable for torture, America’s entire belief in itself as a country founded on the rule of law has been poisoned, and the only hope for those demanding accountability appears to be the possibility that other countries will do what senior US officials have refused to do.

In Spain, for example, two cases, including the case mentioned above, against the “Bush Six,” are still ongoing, and in Poland an investigation into a secret CIA torture prison that existed from 2002 to 2003 is also ongoing, with charges already leveled against the country’s former spy chief Zbigniew Siemiatkowski.

Time will tell if these attempts will eventually ensnare the architects of America’s descent into a nation that officially embraced torture, but it is important that anniversaries like this are remembered, even if amnesia has stricken almost the whole of the mainstream media.

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.

The Wealth of Empire: Photos of the City of London in the Rain

The Wealth of Empire: The City of London in the Rain, a set on Flickr.

To describe these photos of the City of London, I used the word “empire” in the title because I believe that, in many fundamental ways, it is apt, although I realise that the British Empire is not, of course, the only source of money and power in the City of London and in its modern offshoot, Canary Wharf. In many ways, the mafia would be a better reference point for what these well-connected crooks have been getting up to as a result of the financial deregulation initiated by Margaret Thatcher (which benefitted David Cameron’s father, who made a fortune through the creation of tax havens) and Ronald Reagan, the subsequent repeal, under Bill Clinton, of the crucial Glass-Steagall Act — which was introduced after the Depression in 1933, separating “domestic” banking from its potentially fatal speculative aspects — and New Labour’s enthusiasm for filthy lucre, and whatever scum happened to have loads of it. The current shower of clowns in Downing Street and the Cabinet are only different from New Labour in the sense that most of them are already rich, millionaires out of touch with the people and thoroughly unconcerned about it.

In particular, the modern money markets are international, and much of the expertise in dodgy financial engineering — of the kind that ought to be illegal, and of the kind that nearly bankrupted the world in the global crash of 2008 — came from Wall Street as much as from the robber barons of the British establishment, although, crucially, it was the long-cherished secrecy of the City that allowed Wall Street bankers to initiate policies in London that were illegal at home.

To understand the role of the City of London in the world of colossal theft and towering arrogance that is the modern financial world — epitomised by the phallic skyscrapers of the financial elites — it is important to understand that the City of London has an ancient history of wealth, power and unaccountability, which ties the past to the present, as was made clear last autumn when Occupy London, the London offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, occupied the land outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, having been refused entry to Paternoster Square, the privatised square beside the activists’ original target, the London Stock Exchange.

The Occupy London activists soon became intensely interested in the City of London — or, more accurately, the Corporation of the City of London — and, at the end of October, 17 members of the camp put together a statement, which pointed out that “democratic reform” of the Corporation of the City Of London was “urgently needed,” and described City institutions as “unconstitutional and unfair,” as I explained in an article at the time.

The statement also called for “an end to the corporations’s own police force and judicial system which affords the square mile vast amounts of freedom to run its own affairs,” as the Guardian described it, or, in the protestors’ own words, “The risk-taking of the banks has made our lives precarious — they are accountable to no one but themselves, unduly influencing government policy across the centuries both at home and abroad. This is not democracy.”

The activists also called for “an end to business and corporate block-votes in all council elections, which can be used to outvote local residents,” the “abolition of existing ‘secrecy practices’ within the City, and total and transparent reform of its institutions to end corporate tax evasion,” the “decommissioning of the City of London police with officers being brought under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan police force,” the “abolition of the offices of Lord Mayor of London, the Sheriffs and the Aldermen,” and the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission “to examine corruption within the City and its institutions.”

For further information, I recommend Nicholas Shaxson’s book Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, and an article by George Monbiot, “The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest,” published in the Guardian on October 31 last year, which describes in detail how the City operates, and how unacceptable its activities are. As Monbiot explained:

[T]he Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom. The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London’s mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.

Several governments have tried to democratise the City of London but all, threatened by its financial might, have failed. As Clement Attlee lamented, “over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster.” The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate.” It deprives the United Kingdom and other nations of their rightful tax receipts.

It has also made the effective regulation of global finance almost impossible. Shaxson shows how the absence of proper regulation in London allowed American banks to evade the rules set by their own government. AIG’s wild trading might have taken place in the US, but the unit responsible was regulated in the City. Lehman Brothers couldn’t get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead.

The photos in this set — the 15th in my ongoing series in which I am photographing the whole of London while travelling around it by bike — are my first of the City of London, and were taken on July 13 on a rainy afternoon and early evening, which, I thought, was somehow appropriate. In the photos, I hope to have captured something of the startling nature of the architecture that, like that of Canary Wharf, is technically at the cutting edge of what is possible, but is also the product of the kind of eye-wateringly huge amounts of money that only materialise through the dubious practices — and outright illegality — discussed by Nicholas Shaxson, George Monbiot, the activists of Occupy London, and, when I can find the time, myself — see my articles, When Will Immoral, Unprincipled Bankers Be Held Accountable for Their Crimes? and Criminal Bankers Are Not Above the Law, for example, which followed the recent Libor rate-fixing scandal, which might rein the banks unless, as in 2008, they are judged by politicians as being “too big to fail” — or, as it should be, ” too big to be held accountable for their crimes.”

I hope you enjoy the photos. There are some more intimate moments in the set, but in reflecting on my glimpses of the huge and unprecedented building projects that are ongoing in the City, I can only conclude that unless the speculative aspects of the global banking institutions are stopped by another self-inflicted global financial disaster — or by the will of the people — those of us who do not benefit from the City’s greed will need to get used to a new kind of feudalism, as we get less and less while the bankers continue to take the lion’s share of everything.

I will be returning to the City soon, with some photos I took on a recent visit at night, but before that expect some photo sets of journeys in which money is both less important and less visible.

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.