Andy Worthington's Blog, page 165

The Dark Side of the Olympics: Kettling Cyclists and Telling Fairytales About Our Heritage

I was at WOMAD last Friday when the £27 million Olympics Opening Ceremony took place, but a screen had been set up especially for the occasion, and I managed to catch everything from the 800 nurses celebrating the NHS, through the tour of Britain’s modern musical history, to the start of the athletes’ processions.

The disorientation I felt initially has not gone away — a celebration of the NHS taking place while the current government, largely unopposed by the British people, has begun the process of destroying it, pushing through dreadful legislation despite the opposition of a majority of healthcare professionals, with the sole purpose of forcing the NHS to be prised open for private companies to profit as much as possible from it, while, over time, cutting the universal provision of services, especially to those who have little or no money.

There was also a disorientating musical celebration, which specifically included music that was either banned or caused consternation at the time of its release — the Sex Pistols performing “Pretty Vacant,” “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and “Firestarter” by the Prodigy. It was a good recap of the music that has defined Britain’s cultural landscape — also including the Clash and the Specials, to name but two of the many overtly political acts included — but at the same time it also failed to explain why such ferocious music had arisen in the first place; how, indeed, much of this music had come about because Britain is such a hard country to live in, in which the establishment has persistently done whatever it can to make life particularly difficult for young people unfortunate enough to be born without a silver spoon in their mouths.

As a child of Thatcher’s Britain, I know that this was obviously true for the 1980s, but it is just as true now, and it is my contention that, with our existing economic difficulties, compounded by an idiotic government that has no policies except savage austerity cuts that are only making a bad situation worse, the focus of any cultural exercise should relentlessly be on how to revive the economy and give hope to the young and the unemployed rather than looking backwards, through rose-tinted, or even nostalgic left-wing lenses at British history, and, in the end, contributing to, rather than challenging the spending an insane amount of unaudited taxpayers’ money on an orgy of corporate bullying, competition, nationalism and military might that is the least appropriate thing that could possibly be happening in Britain right now.

I’ve since seen the rest of the Opening Ceremony, with William Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills rising out of the ground, erasing England’s Green and Pleasant Land, and the Suffragettes and all the other components of the spectacle, but the impression remain the same — a diversion from the painful truth; that the expense of the Olympics is unacceptable, as is its aggressive promotion, and its excuse to quash all dissent. Danny Boyle and his colleagues did as good a job as possible, if we lived in a vacuum, but as it stands they would have been better off walking away and allowing something more obviously imperial to have taken place instead. This is not the time for a “feel good” spectacle; given the scale of the assault on the very fabric of the nation by the Tories and their Lib Dem stooges, it is the time for rebellion.

Before I left London — for a refreshing multicultural bubble in Wiltshire with no aggressive corporate sponsorship — I had noted that the monthly Critical Mass event, the leaderless gathering of cyclists in London that has been taking place on the last Friday every month since 1994, happened to coincide with the Olympics Opening Ceremony, and I wondered if there would be trouble.

Had I been in London, I would have taken part, but as I was in Wiltshire, and avoiding the news for a few days, it was not until I returned to London that I read that the Critical Mass cyclists, who have always shunned attempts to let themselves be organised by the authorities — and who secured a court ruling in their favour in November 2008, when the Law Lords ruled that the police did not have the right to demand prior notice of the date, time and route of Critical Mass events and the names and addresses of the organisers — had disobeyed an instruction to stay south of the river, and 182 of those taking part in the ride had been arrested, either on Stratford High Street, or in a side street where some of them had been kettled by the police for several hours before they too were arrested.

Jonathan White, in his 50s, a former investigations officer in the Customs department, told the BBC that “he and other cyclists were kettled ‘for three hours’ close to the stadium at about 21:00 BST before being arrested,” adding that “he was taken first to Charing Cross police station and then moved to Kilburn police station where he was bailed just after 06:00 BST on Saturday.” He also explained that “his bail conditions, which apply until 19 September, prevent him from going within 100 yards of any Games venue or entering Newham with a cycle.”

A 32-year old electrician, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian he had been “picked up by police, even though he was not part of the event.” He said that “he was simply riding his bike past the Critical Mass group when he was arrested near the Bow flyover and held overnight in Croydon in a windowless room with a bare concrete floor.” As he explained, ”I’d left my home at about 20.20 in east London. I literally got on my bike, rode around Stratford and just started riding up the road on my way to my friend’s house … I was then arrested.”

Others also mentioned being taken to Croydon and held overnight in what was also described as a windowless police garage. One, a computer programmer for a London university, who also did not want to be named, said he was held in the police garage :for more than four hours before he was processed.” He explained that the police said that Critical Mass “was a kind of protest against the Olympics. They’ve really made it into some kind of anti-capitalist, horrible thing. Personally, I was on a bike ride with my girlfriend and friend and there were other cyclists around us. I wasn’t a part of anything. I couldn’t care less about the Olympics.”

Another arrested man, who identified himself as Henry, told the Guardian that, while he was waiting to be processed, “he was beside a 13-year-old who had his hands handcuffed behind his back, along with others who had been picked up by police.” He explained, ”I can honestly say I had absolutely zero intention of disrupting the Olympics — I really don’t think anyone did. It was about enjoying cycling, not hating the Olympics.”

A video of the arrested cyclists, handcuffed and waiting on buses to be driven to Croydon, can be seen here, and on the Guardian‘s Bike blog, Tom Richards provided further information, explaining:

The Met attempted to limit the ride under provisions in section 12 of the Public Order Act 1986, which states that the police can impose conditions on a public procession if they hold the reasonable belief that “it may result in serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community”. As Critical Mass, which uses the roads entirely legally, has been taking place monthly since 1994 without ever previously incurring the imposition of a section 12 order its potential to “result in serious public disorder” seems doubtful. It is open to all and welcomes cyclists, skateboarders, roller-bladers, wheelchair users and other self-propelled people.

In a statement, the Met said that the order was put in place “to prevent serious disruption to the community and the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games”. Considering the vast policing effort and military concentration in the Stratford area, it is difficult to understand how a couple of hundred cyclists could possibly have disrupted the opening ceremony even if they had intended to.

He added:

Any way you look at it, mass arrests for the heinous crime of “cycling in a group north of the River Thames” on the opening night of an Olympics, which is supposed to be promoting access to sport and active travel, sends a clear message about how committed Games organisers LOCOG [the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] are to any legacy other than a financial one.

A diverse group of people attempting to celebrate their right to use the road safely and in an environmentally friendly manner should be promoted by the Olympics, rather than persecuted for fear of their creating a four or five minute delay on the precious ZiL lanes [named after the lanes used by members of the Politburo in the Soviet Union]. As Critical Mass is a long-running sporting tradition in London and many other cities across the world, LOCOG should have made sure they accommodated it — the Olympics are disrupting normal life in the city enough already without infringing the rights of the participants in one of few sporting events which no one is able to make a profit from.

Some would argue that any kind of disruption during a major national or international event is unacceptable, but I have always felt that this is exactly the sort of mentality that allows totalitarian regimes to come into existence. Like Brian Haw outside Parliament, reminding politicians of their complicity in the mass murder of Iraqi civilians, those who wish to criticise the Olympics should be allowed to do so, in a democracy, in close proximity to the object of their concern — right outside the Olympic Park, in this case.

However, to return to the disturbing themes I discussed at the start of this article — essentially, the dangers of presenting a comforting view of the past, even one that ticks a lot of left-wing boxes, while the country is currently undergoing an unprecedentedly cruel and counter-productive age of austerity for malevolent ideological reasons — the biggest problem with the Olympics now they are underway (to add to the corporate tax evasion, the exploitation of workers and the other fundamental problems I discussed here and here), is that people will forget that the clowns in charge of the UK — David Cameron, George Osborne and their Cabinet colleagues — are performing so poorly that they should be facing a new general election rather than, as our athletes begin winning medals, basking undeservedly in the reflected glory of Bradley Wiggins — and the 15 other British medal winners, at the time of writing.

As Aditya Chakrabortty explained in the Guardian, while the Danny Boyle Show led even his own paper to describe it as “a night of wonder,” it actually contained hints of “a country adjusting to relative economic decline” — entirely appropriate following the news that Britain’s GDP shrank by 0.7% this spring, and the analysis of John Ross, a visiting professor at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, who has calculated that, in the last five years, “the UK has been the third-worst economy in the world, just behind Iceland and Ireland,” with an economy that he calls “the incredible shrinking economy.”

Chakrabortty added that, in Going South, the new book his colleague Larry Elliott has co-written about Britain’s relative economic decline:

[Elliott] uses the Olympics as a gauge of just how the UK has come down in the world. When Britain first staged the Olympics in 1908, it was the world’s superpower; by 1948, it was merely the least bombed-out economy in war-torn Europe. This time, however, the UK is among the most badly capsized economies in northern Europe, desperately hoping to drum up some business through what Boris Johnson tastefully describes as a “schmoozeathon.”

That would be the same Boris Johnson, who, yesterday, got caught on a zip-wire and found himself suspended above Victoria Park like a physical manifestation of the other clowns — his colleagues in Downing Street and the Cabinet — who continue to preside over the ongoing economic decline of the UK, a disaster area that no amount of Olympic medals can mend.

Critical Mass should have launched the opening salvo in a carnival of resistance — to excess, hubris, incompetence, jingoism, militarism and the corporate takeover of countries that claim to be democracies. Will it be the case, or will authoritarianism win out, the intolerant succeeding while the shepherded people pretend that the spirit of Blake is alive and well, and that a rock’n'roll hall of fame can change the world?

Note: For more information, photos, links to videos and other articles, see this London Indymedia article.

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.

Big Skies and Global Beats: Photos from WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival (2/2)

Big Skies and Global Beats: WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival (2/2), a set on Flickr.

Yesterday I published my first set of photos from this year’s WOMAD world music festival in Charlton Park, Wiltshire, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. The product of a great flowering of interest in festivals, WOMAD, which began in 1982, as the brainchild of Peter Gabriel and five friends and colleagues, tapped into the thirst for festivals that Michael Eavis had identified at Glastonbury, when the modern era of Glastonbury began with the 1981 festival and a name change from the Glastonbury Fayre to the Glastonbury Festival.

Long-time readers of my work will know how much the festival culture that has since bloomed into a phenomenon that draws millions of people into fields every summer came out of the upheavals of the 1960s and free festival movement of the 1970s, and, at its best, drew on Utopian, cooperative, environmentally aware ideals that were ahead of their time. A trajectory of these counter-cultural movements, and their successors in the 1980s and 1990s, in the rave scene and the road protest movement, can be found in my books Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield.

Although those early festivals — and particularly the traveller-focused circuit of free festivals that homed in on Stonehenge every June — was eventually suppressed by Margaret Thatcher, it is a measure of the resonance of the movement that it has ended up achieving a success beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. However much it may have been watered down or commercialised, the Utopian desire to gather in fields, to mingle and to watch music has ended up appealing to a wide cross-section of society.

One of its best examples is WOMAD, based, for the last six years, at Charlton Park, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, whose organisers present extraordinary musicians every year without fail, at an event that is packed with children and teenagers, as well as catering to an aging population of world music aficionados, where the food is excellent, the sun mostly shines, the corporate involvement is close to non-existent (the Guardian are the festival’s main sponsors) and the original Utopian vibe of the festival pioneers continues to thrive

WOMAD also has a truly global reach, holding regular events in Spain (in Cáceres), the Canary Isles (Gran Canaria), Australia (Adelaide) and New Zealand, and since its founding in 1982, there have, in total, been more than 160 WOMAD festivals in twenty-seven countries including Abu Dhabi, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Sardinia, Sicily, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and the US, at which over a thousand artists from over a hundred different countries have appeared, entertaining over a million people.

For myself, my family and a number of close friends, WOMAD is a high point of the calendar. Since 2002, my wife has been running children’s workshops for the Greenwich-based community arts organisation Emergency Exit Arts, and every year our big crew of workers and children — ten adults and eight children this year — gets to hang out together for five days. At the workshops, the children at the festival can take part in all kinds of wild and wonderful projects, and the culmination of the weekend is the children’s procession on the Sunday evening, when the whole festival stops to watch the children pass by, wearing or carrying what they have made, in a weaving, colourful procession that also features groups of drummers and huge sculptures made by the various community arts groups with the help of the children.

This second set of photos from this year’s WOMAD includes photos from the procession, featuring the Birdman, a winged spirit creature that was the centrepiece of the EEA presence, as well as various photos of the musicians, the site and the crowds.

I hope you enjoy them.

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.

On the 10th Anniversary of Yoo and Bybee’s “Torture Memos,” Col. Morris Davis Reminds Americans About Justice and the Law

[image error]Exactly ten years ago, two memos written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were signed by his immediate boss, Jay S. Bybee. In these two memos, Yoo, also a law professor at UC Berkeley, attempted to redefine torture so that it could be used on Abu Zubaydah, an alleged “high-value detainee” seized in the “war on terror,” even though the US is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, which prohibits the use of torture under any circumstances.

These two memos, generally known as the Bybee memos, but forever known to anyone with a conscience as the “torture memos,” marked the start of an official torture program that will forever be a black mark on America’s reputation — as well as providing cover for torturers worldwide, and turning America into such a dubious and lawless nation that President Obama and his administration have shied away form holding any of their predecessors accountable for their actions, and have swallowed the Bush administration’s rhetoric about a “war on terror” to such an extent that, although torture has been officially repudiated, the administration has presided over a massive increase in the use of unmanned drones to assassinate those regarded as a threat, without any judicial process, and in countries with which the US is not at war, including US citizens.

In an article to follow soon, I will examine this anniversary more closely, but for now I wanted to make sure that I marked it in some manner, having been away at the WOMAD world music festival for most of the run-up to it, and I’m delighted to use the occasion to cross-post an op-ed from the Los Angeles Times written by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, who resigned five years ago, when he was placed in a chain of command under William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, and one of the main drivers of the torture program.

Col. Davis, who is now on the faculty of the Howard University School of Law, is a colleague and a friend, with whom I meet every January to complain about the ongoing existence of Guantánamo in various public forums, and I anticipate that I will be seeing him again in another five months, on the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo. For now, however, I’m glad that he was sufficiently aware to mark this dark anniversary with an article, when almost the whole of the US mainstream media overlooked it.

Accountability, after all, is still needed for senior officials who knowingly committed crimes that led to the use of torture by US forces.

Consign Bush’s ‘torture memos’ to history

By Morris D. Davis, Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2012

How should we mark the 10th anniversary of the effort by the Bush administration to justify torture? By ensuring it never happens again.

The Bush administration “torture memos” will be 10 years old this week. As the administration developed its interrogation policies, it concealed various forms of torture under the moniker “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It consulted with the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice on the legality of these techniques, including waterboarding, walling (slamming detainees against walls), forcing detainees into stress positions and subjecting them to sleep deprivation. Ultimately, the OLC provided legal cover for the use of most of these techniques.

On Aug. 1, 2002, in a memo addressed to the general counsel of the CIA, Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee wrote: “When the waterboard is used, the subject’s body responds as if the subject were drowning … The subject may experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning.”

I know something about the feeling of drowning. The closest I’ve come to death was more than 20 years ago, while I was white-water rafting in West Virginia with some Air Force friends. As the raft careened through the rapids, two of us were tossed out. As the current pulled us past a large rock that jutted out into the river, it curled down and took me with it. I could see the surface five or six feet above me, but the water pushed me down harder than my legs could push me up. As I struggled to live, I thought about my wife who was pregnant with a child I might never see.

It was as if time slowed down. I experienced 10 minutes worth of thoughts in the minute I was underwater. Finally, my lungs aching, I pushed away from the rock rather than up toward the surface, and seconds later, I popped up, gasping, terrified.

As the CIA memo makes clear, that is the point of waterboarding. “Any reasonable person undergoing this procedure … would feel as if he is drowning … due to the uncontrollable physiological sensation he is experiencing …,” Bybee wrote. “It constitutes a threat of imminent death.” Nonetheless, he concludes that such treatment would not be torture because the harm would not be prolonged.

I suspect that Bybee never fell off a raft into white water, and never came close to death by drowning, because if he had, I feel certain he would have had a very different view of whether it causes prolonged harm.

Past administrations, both Republican and Democratic, had opposed torture, but the Bush administration embraced it by renaming it enhanced interrogation techniques and claiming that it was necessary for our national security. Upon taking office, President Obama issued an executive order halting the use of torture.

Torture is counterproductive. Professional interrogators — Ali Soufan of the FBI, Matthew Alexander of the Air Force and Glenn Carle of the CIA — have said this clearly.

Torture is always illegal. The United States ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture in 1994, agreeing to abide by the following proscription: “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.”

Torture is also a moral abomination. As the National Religious Campaign Against Torture — made up of member institutions representing followers of the Bahai faith, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and more — attests, it runs contrary to the teachings of all religions and dishonors all faiths. It is an egregious violation of the human rights and dignity of each and every person and results in the degradation of all involved — the victim, perpetrator and policymakers.

“Any reasonable person” understands that the United States engaged in torture during the Bush administration. And yet members of that administration still defend their actions. They argue that the enhanced interrogation techniques they used or authorized were not torture. Referring to the now discredited torture memos, they claim that the Department of Justice verified that these techniques were not criminal acts.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has undertaken an investigation into the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques allowed by the memos. It is essential that its findings be released to the public so that the American people can know the truth about what was done in their name.

And we should mark the 10th anniversary of the effort by the Bush administration to justify torture, remembering that as a nation founded on religious and moral values, we must work to ensure that U.S. government-sponsored torture never occurs again.

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 from WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival, Wiltshire, July 2012 (1/2)

WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival, Wiltshire, July 2012 (1/2), a set on Flickr.

In the history of British music festivals — and especially those with an appeal that spreads beyond these shores — the behemoth that is Michael Eavis’s Glastonbury, with its roots in the free festival movement, may well be the best known, but also of great significance is WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), the world music festival, founded by Peter Gabriel and five others, which began in Shepton Mallet in Somerset in 1982, and has since expanded to include regular events in Spain (in Cáceres), the Canary Isles (Gran Canaria), Australia (Adelaide) and New Zealand.

In the last 30 years, there have, in total, been more than 160 WOMAD festivals in twenty-seven countries including Abu Dhabi, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Sardinia, Sicily, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and the US, at which over a thousand artists from over a hundred different countries have appeared, entertaining over a million people.

I have been attending WOMAD — which, in the UK, runs from Thursday evening to Sunday on the last weekend in July — since 2002, when my wife, via Emergency Exit Arts, based in Greenwich, began working on the children’s workshops that are such an integral part of the WOMAD experience, culminating in a children’s procession throughout the entire festival site on the Sunday evening. For the first five years, these events were in Reading, by the River Thames, and since 2007 they have been in Charlton Park in Wiltshire, a much more spacious and beautiful site that survived its first year wobbles, when the entire site became a mudbath, and has gone on to become a perfect place for a festival — mostly open spaces, where the main stages, shops and food stalls are to be found, but also with an Arboretum, which provides a welcome respite from the sun, as well as a number of other stages and stalls.

In our ten years, we have been entertained by many hundreds of extraordinary musicians from around the world, and this year, as part of the photographic projects I am undertaking alongside my work as a freelance investigative journalist, I am delighted to publish photos I took at this year’s WOMAD — including photos of the site, and of the flags that are such a distinctive part of its presentation, photos of some of the performers that I was privileged to watch, and photos capturing the changes in the weather over the weekend, as well as a handful of photos that I took on the Thursday evening, before the crowds arrived, when the resident funfair was enchantingly empty.

I’ll be publishing a second set of photos tomorrow, and will then return to my ongoing project of photographing London by bike, as well as — of course — continuing to write about Guantánamo and the ongoing crimes committed by the US in its seemingly endless “war on terror,” as well as the dreadful state of politics in the UK, where the Tory-led neo-liberal coalition government continues to plunge the country into a terminal depression, while entertaining the world in the Olympic Park at the taxpayers’ expense.

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.

Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri: The Torture Victim the US Is Desperate to Gag

A millionaire Saudi businessman accused of being the brains behind the terrorist attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000, in which 17 US soldiers died, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is also a notorious victim of the torture program initiated by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.

No less a source than the CIA Inspector General noted in a report in 2004 on the “high-value detainee” interrogation program (PDF) that — while held in a secret facility in Thailand after his capture in the United Arab Emirates in the fall of 2002 — he was threatened with a gun and a power drill, while hooded and restrained, to scare him into talking, even though the federal torture statute prohibits threatening prisoners with imminent death. Moreover, in February 2008, then-CIA director Michael Hayden admitted that al-Nashiri was one of three prisoners subjected to waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning.

In Poland, where al-Nashiri was moved after Thailand, in December 2002, he has been recognized by a prosecutor investigating the CIA’s secret prison on Polish soil as a “victim,” but in the US, since his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, he has been silenced, like the other 13 “high-value detainees” transferred with him, even though the Bush administration put him forward for a trial by military commission in July 2008, and the Obama administration followed suit in November 2009.

Prosecuting a man whose torture is public knowledge, while trying to prevent him from mentioning his torture, might seem like a lost cause, but the US authorities have a long history of denying reality when it comes to the “war on terror,” and so two weeks ago, eight months after he was arraigned, and three months after his last pre-trial hearing, al-Nashiri’s case once more came up before Army Col. James Pohl, the military commissions’ chief judge, who first of all dismissed objections, filed by the defense, that, as the Associated Press described it, he “could not be impartial because he had a financial incentive to side with the Pentagon, which paid his salary, and he was serving as the judge in other Guantánamo cases,” having chosen to preside over the cases of all the former CIA prisoners.

As the Miami Herald explained, al-Nashiri’s lawyers spent the rest of the first day asking the judge to “fund several consultants and additional legal staff for the death-penalty case — from a memory expert to one on handling national security evidence,” requests on which he did not immediately rule.

His lawyers also tried to replace Col. Pohl with either “an active-duty military judge whose contract is not up for annual review by the Department of the Army,” or “a variety of judges.” Col. Pohl has a 32-year career in the Army, with 12 years presiding over courts martials, but defense attorney Richard Kammen, a criminal defense attorney from Indianapolis, argued that the novelty of the military commissions, which deal with “completely unknown, untested, unheard issues,” would benefit from having different judges.

When Kammen tried to dismiss Col. Pohl’s defense of the “process” at Guantánamo, by pointing out that the Spanish inquisition and the Soviet show trials were a “process” too, Col. Pohl took exception. “Mr. Kammen, this process was set up by the United States Congress and set up by the president of the United States,” he said.

On Day 2, there was a 90-minute closed session, involving Col. Pohl and the lawyers, but not al-Nashiri himself, to discuss the ongoing attempts to block all mention by his lawyers about his torture, and whether that should make certain evidence inadmissible.

His Pentagon-appointed defense lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Reyes, had argued that his client had a right to attend Wednesday’s closed session, although Justice Department attorney Joanna Baltes had stated that the session would involve classified information — even though, of course, that classified information relates to al-Nashiri himself. The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, confirmed, absurdly, that al-Nashiri “does not have a clearance” to hear evidence in his own case, as the Miami Herald explained.

At issue were two defense motions seeking discovery. The motions were kept under seal, but it was clear that al-Nashiri’s lawyers were endeavoring to get the government to turn over information about their client’s capture and treatment during the four years he spent in secret CIA prisons before his transfer to Guantánamo.

Inconclusively, Brig. Gen. Martins refused to provide a detailed explanation of what had happened in the closed session, saying only that defense lawyers had “agreed to postpone court arguments on the two sealed motions” until a future hearing.

Seeking to pierce the secrecy, without crossing any of the lines erected by the government, Richard Kammen explained that the military commission rules, plus what he described as “the government’s illegal over-classification” of information relating to the case, meant that the lawyers had to argue their motion in the closed session. He also explained that, although the commissions were revised under President Obama, and were allegedly fairer for the accused, “When you get past some of the superficial stuff nothing has really changed since 2006.”

The defense lawyers, he explained, continue to seek more resources, as they did under President Bush, and they also “dispute the government’s rules of classification surrounding the former CIA captives,” as the Miami Herald put it. “And in that sense,” as Kammen added, “the system is not any more open, transparent or fair.”

Brig. Gen. Martins tried to defend the secrecy, stating, “This is an adversarial process. It is as open and transparent as we can make it.” He added that “national security and the rules compelled secrecy for the hearing.”

Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how the case can move forward, when the impasse is such that the defense team needs to push for the release of information relating to al-Nashiri’s capture and treatment in secret CIA prisons, whereas the government is dedicated to preserving a wall of silence.

Such is the stalemate that, on Day 2, al-Nashiri chose not even to visit the court, where he would only have spent the day in a holding cell, and on Day 3 he also decided to stay put. As Richard Kammen described it, he “voluntarily chose not to attend,” but, in a vivid demonstration of the over-classification that prevails for the “high-value detainees,” he pointed out, as the Miami Herald described it, that “he was barred from elaborating by the intelligence agencies’ security rules governing the ‘presumptive classification’ of anything an ex-CIA captive says.”

With an empty chair for the accused — always a poor sign at a trial — the lawyers argued for the case to be dismissed, or, alternatively, for it to be televised. Col. Pohl made no decisions, and it will now be another three months — until October 23-25 — before anything more will be heard.

The next day, as Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald, “the Guantánamo war crimes court went dark for the month of Ramadan.” Next up, on August 22, will be further hearings in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but it is surely appropriate to ask, ten and a half years after Guantánamo opened, and nearly six years after the “high-value detainees” arrived from secret prisons, to be silenced first by George W. Bush and then by Barack Obama, whether it would not be more appropriate to consider that  justice itself has been switched off at Guantánamo, and may never be found again.

Note: The courtroom sketch at the top of this article is by Janet Hamlin, and is reproduced courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

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.

I’m Off to WOMAD, Back on Monday: Please Listen to Me Discussing Bagram on the Radio with Scott Horton

Every year, on the last weekend in July, WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), the world music festival, takes place in the UK — for the last few years, in Wiltshire, on a wonderful site in Charlton Park — and this year is its 30th anniversary. My wife has been running children’s workshops there since 2002, and every year a group of us — friends and our kids — get to hang out together for four days, to do the workshops and create a wonderful sculpture for the children’s procession on the Sunday, to eat great food (unlike the kind of catering that will be in place for the Olympics), to watch great music, and to chill out backstage, and also in the backstage camp. My guitar is tuned, and I’m looking forward to some strumming and singing.

I’m back on Monday, but while I’m away, please check out the photos I’ve been posting regularly over the last month, if you haven’t yet seen them, beginning with yesterday’s excursion to the Olympic Park in the blazing sun – and see below for a bonus photo from Greenwich, which I took on my way back home. Click on the photo to enlarge it — and I’ve also just added it to the Olympics set on Flickr.

Two security guards demonstrating the laid-back atmosphere in Greenwich on July 25, 2012, a day before the start of the Olympic Games. Photo by Andy Worthington.

If you want something to read, please check out my latest articles about Guantánamo, For Ramadan, Write to the Forgotten Prisoners in Guantánamo and At Guantánamo, Another Bleak Ramadan for 87 Cleared Prisoners Who Are Still Held.

If you have the time, I’d also like to urge you to listen to my latest interview with the ever-indignant Scott Horton, formerly of Antiwar Radio, who is now working independently. Scott and I go back many years. Our first interview was five years ago, and there have been dozens more interviews since. He’s one of the most persistent supporters of my work, and if you can support him at all, it would be very much appreciated.

Our latest 20-minute interview is here, and it came about because Scott had read my most recent article about the ongoing injustice of the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Geneva Conventions and a place from which it is as impossible for cleared prisoners to be freed as Guantánamo. That article was Bagram: Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners, and this is how Scott described the show:

Andy Worthington discusses how Bagram prison in Afghanistan is “Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners;” President Obama’s contempt for the Geneva Conventions and the Boumediene Supreme Court decision that granted Guantánamo prisoners habeas corpus rights; problems with keeping prisoners of war for the duration of an interminable “War on Terror;” and how the Bush torture legacy remains intact under Obama.

OK, that’s it. I’m back on Monday. I leave you with the headlining act at WOMAD this year, the excellent Jimmy Cliff, still in fine voice after all these years, singing “Many Rivers to Cross” on the BBC show, “Later with Jools Holland,” just a few years ago.

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

The Olympics Minus One Day: Photos from the Frontline in Stratford

The Olympics Minus One Day: Photos from the Frontline in Stratford, a set on Flickr.

So the Games are nearly upon us! I won’t be here in London, as I’ll be at the WOMAD festival in Wiltshire; that’s World of Music, Arts and Dance, the wonderful world music festival celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, where my wife has been running children’s workshops since 2002, and a whole crowd of us has a wonderful escape from the normal routine for four days.

However, I couldn’t leave without paying one more visit to the Olympic Park in Stratford to see how everything was proceeding with preparations for the Games, with just one day to go before the Opening Ceremony on Friday July 27. I last paid a visit three weeks ago — the photos can be seen here — and I had wondered whether security would be hectic.

The bad news, of course, is the same as ever. In the run up to the Games, we have been subjected to jingoism, militarism, the corporate tax evasion of the Games’ sponsors, the brand police patrolling up and down the land, the International Olympic Committee’s inflexibility and arrogance, the dubious “cleansing” of the Lea Valley, and the inexcusable decision by two successive governments to write blank cheques for the Games without even a proper audit.

However, the good news is that today, in Stratford, after I took the train to Whitechapel, and then cycled up to Stratford and then up to Leyton and around the back of the Olympic Park, paranoia was nowhere to be seen, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and the security people were polite. In fact, it resembled the biggest festival of all time, which, in many ways, is what it actually is. I was, of course, slightly perturbed to see so many soldiers and police on the streets, although it is their wage bill that disturbed me the most, and my abiding impression would be that the security industry remains a growth industry, with lots of black-clad bodybuilders buzzing around Stratford town centre like giant ants, even though G4S — stung by scandal — were nowhere to be seen.

Nevertheless, I’ll be happy to leave those who wanted London to win the bid for the Games on July 6, 2005, when I was cheering for Paris, to join the crowds and the security and the corporate brainwashing and the mediocre food and drink of the Games, with, hopefully, some decent athletes thrown into the mix, while I’m in Wiltshire watching some great musicians from around the world and hanging out in the backstage campsite, singing and playing guitar with friends, where there will be a minimal corporate presence, minimal security, and excellent food!

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 Life in South London: Photos of a Journey through Nunhead, Peckham, Walworth and Borough

Real Life in South London: A Journey through Nunhead, Peckham, Walworth and Borough, a set on Flickr.

Since I began my project, ten weeks ago, to cycle the whole of London by bike, armed only with a camera, I have managed to become quite familiar with the whole of south east London, Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, and the banks of the Thames — on the north from London Bridge to the Royal Docks, and on the south from Blackfriars Bridge to Thamesmead, as well as travelling to Stratford — in search of the Olympics — and back, and in this latest set, taken a few weeks ago on a bike ride into central London from south east London — to be followed imminently by a rainy set of photos from the City of London — I found some parts of south east London I had never found before — in Nunhead (in the London Borough of Lewisham) and Peckham, Walworth and Borough (in the London Borough of Southwark), and some that were familiar, which I came across in a largely unplanned manner.

The parts of London I have covered in the last ten weeks are, I concede, only a fraction of this vast metropolis, but the dozens of journeys I have undertaken have made me fit, and have stretched my eyes and my mind, which had become cooped up after six years of researching and writing about Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” and after the 21 months that I have spent railing against the cruelty and myopia of the Tory-led coalition government, which, through an obsession with destroying the state and privatising whatever was not already privatised by Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, has initiated a savage and deluded age of austerity.

This is driving the economy into a death spiral, while maintaining the bubble of super-wealth that grew out of the financial deregulation of Thatcher and Reagan, and then of Clinton and Blair, which, in turn, crashed the global economy through its insatiable greed in 2008. Since then, rescued by taxpayers, this monster has continued behaving as before, addicted to its own amoral criminal enterprises, and manifesting a growing obsession with property as a replacement for all other meaningful economic activity.

On my journeys along the river, I have seen, repeatedly, the effects of this remorseless property bubble, which politicians and regulators are also desperate to preserve, to avoid a reality check that, objectively, is desperately needed to restore sanity to the cost and value of bricks and mortar everywhere in London — in the terraced Victorian houses which ordinary workers can no longer afford, as well as in the shiny towers of glass and steel — and the converted wharves and warehouses and the endless speculative new builds that cover every riverfront, every canalside, and every other space unoccupied long enough to be rebranded as desirable.

However, on my journeys through the back streets, through the world inhabited by real Londoners — the 60, 70, 80, 90 percent who don’t have access to the self-generating crooked fortunes of the City and elsewhere — I have been catching glimpses of the new era of grinding poverty that is growing and spreading like a slow cancer, and I have been confronted, time and again, by neighbourhoods being gutted through gentrification, with prices rising beyond the means not only of ordinary workers but of professional couples, as has never happened before.

With demand outstripping supply — as  a result of an effective 30-year freeze on social housing projects — the unregulated private rental sector continues to grow, attracting foreign speculators, who join homegrown landlords establishing property portfolios, and even individuals — those with a single spare property as an investment — are caught up in a frenzy of cranking prices up, squeezing the pool of those unable to afford to buy with ever higher rents until they have less and less to spend on anything else than servicing their landlords, and all other economic activity dwindles.

Logically, this cannot end well, but for now it is as if only the first cracks are appearing, and only those watching closely can see them. Perhaps this new world will limp on, so the rich can continue to fulfil their unwarranted sense of entitlement, while those exploited to achieve it work longer and longer hours just to keep a roof over their heads, and those in the lowest paid jobs — or those unfortunate enough to be unemployed — are shuffled to the margins, shoved from slum to slum with no one watching.

I doubt, however, that it is sustainable.

In the meantime, though, this is what a journey from Brockley to Blackfriars looks like, with eyes wide open.

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

At Guantánamo, Another Bleak Ramadan for 87 Cleared Prisoners Who Are Still Held

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.

On Friday, when the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, 168 men still held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba must have wondered if their long ordeal will ever come to an end. Now held for as long as the First and Second World Wars combined, these men — of whom only a handful are accused of any involvement with terrorism — have become scapegoats, the victims of a cowardly administration, a cynical Congress and fearful judges.

How else are we to explain the presence of 87 men whose release was approved by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, appointed by President Obama himself, when he took office in January 2009 and promised to close Guantánamo within a year? Consisting of around 60 representatives of the relevant government departments and the intelligence services, the Task Force concluded in its final report (PDF), issued in January 2010, that, of the 168 men still held, 33 should be tried and 46 should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, while the other 87 should be released.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are rigorously and implacably opposed to President Obama’s claim that it is acceptable to hold 46 men indefinitely without charge or trial, because it is fundamentally unjust to claim, as the administration does, that these 46 men represent a danger to the United States, even though there is insufficient evidence to put them on trial. What this means is that the so-called evidence is fatally tainted, produced through the use of torture, or other forms of coercion, and is therefore fundamentally unreliable.

However, while the struggle to overturn indefinite detention without charge or trial continues, the most urgent issue at Guantánamo — and the one we have been publicizing since establishing this campaign in January this year, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison — is the release of the 87 men whose ongoing and apparently indefinite detention makes a mockery of any claim that the United States believes in fairness and justice. As we demonstrated in our report last month, entitled, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago,” some of these men were cleared eight years ago, and yet they are still held.

Of the 87, 58 are Yemenis, whose release was prevented by President Obama in January 2010. After the discovery that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen, the President announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, in response to criticism from opportunistic lawmakers and media pundits, whose goal, evidently, is to keep Guantánamo open forever. This moratorium still stands, even though it constitutes “guilt by nationality,” and is an insult to the Yemeni people, to the men cleared for release, and, as I mentioned above, to any claim that the United States believes in fairness and justice.

Compounding this injustice, the release two weeks ago of Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner, can only have added to the sense of misery permeating Guantánamo this Ramadan. Al-Qosi, though not a major player in al-Qaeda by any means, had been an accountant for a company run by Osama bin Laden in Sudan in the 1990s, and had traveled to Afghanistan when bin Laden traveled there in 1996, where he worked as a driver for the al-Qaeda leader and also as a cook in a compound associated with al-Qaeda. Put forward for a trial by military commission at Guantánamo, he agreed to a plea deal in July 2010, under the terms of which he was to serve just two more years before being freed.

While it is appropriate that al-Qosi has been released, his freedom only makes it even more apparent that the ongoing imprisonment of the 87 cleared prisoners — most of whom never even met Osama bin Laden, let alone working for him — is unforgivable. What makes it even more intolerable is that, four years ago, many of them were already cleared for release when another driver for bin Laden, Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, received a five and a half-month sentence after a trial by military commission, leading to his repatriation in November 2008 and his release from Yemeni custody in January 2009.

There are hints that change is coming. Just two weeks ago, for example, a Tunisian website, Tunisia Live, reported that the Tunisian Secretary of State for American and Asian Affairs, Hedi Ben Abbes — a man who speaks perfect English — explained that the five remaining Tunisians, out of the 12 who have been held throughout the prison’s history, will hopefully “be brought home before the end of the year.”

He explained that he had traveled to Guantánamo to meet them just a few weeks ago, when he had the opportunity to talk for three-quarters of an hour to each of them, and he stressed that the five men, “never given a trial or formally charged with a crime,” were “cleared for release by under the Bush administration.” This was known, as was the fact that the five men faced no charges in Tunisia, because the new government had extended an amnesty to former political opponents of the former dictator, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, who was overthrown last January at the start of what is now regularly referred to as the Arab Spring.

However, what had not been heard before were details, from a representative of the new government, regarding the men’s planned return. Hedi Ben Abbes explained, “There are no charges against them,” adding that they “were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” and would be returned in “a few months.” A video of him talking about the men, and his visit, is below:

Speaking of his visit to meet the men, he stated, “Their situation has improved. They have a number of facilities, they watch TV, listen to the radio. During the interview, they were informed of what is happening in Tunisia. They were in good shape physically. Mentally they were really strong. They are believers, their strong beliefs have shielded them.”

Tunisia Live also reported that Imed Hakeemy, the brother of Adel Hakeemy, one of the five, had said that Ben Abbes visited his family before making his trip to Guantánamo. “This is a huge step taken by the Tunisian government,” he said, “but we do not want to be given false hope. Our mother’s health condition is a bit difficult. I hope she will get the chance to see him [Adel] before she dies.”

Last month, as he prepared to leave his assignment in Tunis, Gordon Gray, the US Ambassador, pointed out that the American government had been “reluctant to release the remaining detainees prior to 2011 for fear that they would be abused by the Ben Ali regime.” This is not entirely true, as two men were released to Ben Ali’s custody in 2007, and were subsequently convicted and imprisoned after show trials, leading a US judge to block attempts to transfer a third. However, as Ambassador Gray noted, with the fall of Ben Ali, “Tunisia has improved in implementing policies that respect the human rights of its citizens, so hopefully the matter will be resolved.”

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” that, of course, is our hope too, and we look forward to hearing more positive news from a place that, to those paying attention, has become synonymous with the loss of hope under President Obama. That must change, and to keep the pressure on, please write to your Senators and Representatives, if you are in the US, and, wherever you are, please join our campaign — just an email is required to be added to our mailing list, and to join those demanding the closure of Guantánamo — and please also ask your family and friends to join up as well, and to tell all their contacts.

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

Photos: The Olympic Torch in Lewisham, and Some Last Thoughts on the Dodgy Games

The Olympic Torch in Lewisham, a set on Flickr.

So the time is nearly upon us. The Olympic Games — corporate, militarised, jingoistic — begin on Friday, and, after a plague of disasters in recent weeks, everything appears to be running relatively smoothly on the last lap. This morning I popped down the hill with my family, to Ladywell Leisure Centre, on the main road between Lewisham and Catford, to watch the Olympic torch pass by, and to watch those watching.

Despite the early hour — the torch passed by just after 8am — there were hundreds of people present for the passage of the torch itself, and of the corporate sponsors’ vehicles — in this case, those of Coca-Cola and Lloyds TSB, although sadly no one asked me about my T-shirt, which features a Union Jack and the message, “Extradite Me, I’m British.” Available here (for just £9), the shirts were created to publicise the plight of Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon and Richard O’Dwyer, who face extradition to the United States under the US-UK Extradiiton Treaty of 2003, a creation of Tony Blair’s government that allows British citizens to be spirited away to the US — and its out-of-control judicial system — without the US having to provide any evidence, even if the alleged crimes took place in the UK, and even if the alleged crimes are not crimes in the UK. See here, here, here and here for further information.

Nevertheless, despite the concerted effort to focus on the supposedly positive sporting message of the Games, the stink caused by the recent scandals still lingers. It can be noted with some sense of satisfaction that G4S, the inept security firm, has done permanent damage to the cynical corporate — and governmental –  mantra that “private is best” by failing to employ enough security, despite being paid £284 million to do so.

With the Ministry of Defence providing 3,500 troops to cover the shortfalls in G4S’s employment contract, for 13,500 staff in total, permanent damage has been done to the company’s fortunes — although it remains to be seen if they will be made to return the eye-watering amounts of money they are supposed to be given by the taxpayer for doing very little, very badly.

On Thursday, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee attempted to exert pressure on G4S and on the government, publishing a report questioning what it described as an “astonishing” rise in the price of the contract to provide guards for the Olympics, for which there was “no credible explanation.”

As the Guardian noted:

G4S agreed in December to provide 10,000 guards for the venues, rather than the 2,000 originally asked for, increasing the value of the contract by almost £200m to £284m. This included £83m to cover labour, and a 12-fold increase in management costs, from £10m to £125m. G4S also secured a 22-fold increase to cover uniforms — from £3m to £65m.

Margaret Hodge, chair of the committee, said: “The chaos which has emerged over the security contract was predictable and undermines confidence in those responsible for managing the Games. No credible explanation has been given for an astonishing 12-fold hike in management costs and G4S still has not been able to deliver. Now troops are having to be drafted in. The Home Office needs to get a grip.”

She said the committee was worried that G4S will still “receive substantial sums of public money without providing the contracted number of guards. Value for taxpayer’s money demands G4S not only pays for all additional costs incurred by the government, but also incurs financial penalties for the failure to deliver.”

The committee “also urged ministers to do a proper audit of exactly how much the Olympics had cost,” noting that its £9.3bn budget “does not include the £766m paid for the Olympic Park, or the funding of elite athletes or transport improvements in London.” Hodge said, “We have faced considerable difficulty in pinning down just how much the Games is costing the taxpayer,” adding, it was a “big concern” that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport “has no intention of producing a single auditable account for the Games, drawing together both the costs within the public sector funding package of £9.3bn and those outside. Such an analysis must be produced.”

In addition, the Tories looked as cack-handed as usual over their failure to ensure that enough Border Force staff were trained and employed to deal with the additional visitors for the Games, while staff numbers were being cut as part of the government’s obsessive desire, in its idiotic age of austerity, to create as much unemployment as possible.

On Wednesday, Border Force staff, who are members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, voted for industrial action, “raising the spectre of strikes affecting passport queues at Heathrow during the busiest days of the Olympics,” as the Guardian put it, noting that members “agreed in principle to strike and other action, which could include an ongoing work-to-rule, in protest against their pay and working conditions being eroded and the privatisation of civil service jobs, and to highlight what they describe as a ‘public service falling apart at the seams.’”

In response, Culture minister Jeremy Hunt compounded the government’s incompetence by telling the Daily Telegraph that some ministers had, apparently, serious discussed sacking anyone who went on strike. With just days to go, this would have been a disaster for visitors, but never let it be said that anything comes between a good Tory and his or her desire to thrash someone to within an inch of their lives — or to sack them summarily.

Another disaster — the tax avoidance scam perpetrated by the Games’ corporate sponsors, who are supposedly exempt from taxes during the course of the Games, and who, as a result, could avoid paying at least £600 million in tax — seems to have been nipped in the bud by the campaigning group 38 Degrees, which launched a petition that so far has over 220,000 signatures. As a result, the group has so far secured promises from nine sponsors — Coca-Cola, McDonalds, EDF, Visa, GE, Omega, P&G, BMW and now Adidas — that they won’t be Olympic tax dodgers — although I will only believe this when proof is provided that tax has indeed been paid on revenue made during the Games.

Other problems remain — the exploitation of cleaners at the Olympics, and the largely unseen and unthought of exploitation of the workers making Olympic products (see this campaign against exploitation by Adidas, for example).

In addition, the brand police travelling up and down the country making sure no one uses the Olympic name or logo, and the ludicrous arrest last week of graffiti artists including Darren Cullen, a professional graffiti artist who worked on a campaign for Adidas last year, and who “says he has never painted illegally on a wall or train” — and the decision to bar those arrested from coming within a mile of any Olympic venue — will provide a permanently sour after-taste to the whole spectacle, and one which could be addressed by scaling back the unforgivable expense of the Games to have more freedom from the demands of the corporate sponsors — although that, it seems, is  a heretical point of view.

As we count down to the opening ceremony, what will remain in my mind — more than the fleeting glimpse of a torchbearer this morning — will be Sebastian Coe tying himself in knots by claiming, erroneously, that, as the Independent put it, “ticket holders would not be able to gain entry wearing a Pepsi T-shirt because Coca-Cola was one of the main Olympic sponsors.” Coe told the BBC’s Today programme, “We have to protect the rights of the sponsor because in large part they pay for the Games. You probably wouldn’t be able to [walk in] with a Pepsi T-shirt because Coca-Cola are our sponsors and they’ve put millions of pounds into this project but also millions of pounds into grassroots sport. It is important to protect those sponsors.”

Later, representatives of LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, of which Coe is the head), “appeared to contradict its chairman and suggested there would be no controls over what spectators wore to the Games.” A spokesperson said that “as an individual you are free to wear clothing of your choice” and “confirmed this would also include a T-shirt emblazoned with a non-sponsors logo.” The spokesperson said that Coe “could have got muddled because of differing rules for spectators and those working and volunteering at venues.” However, as the Independent noted, LOCOG’s advice for those with tickets for the Games states that there are restrictions of “any objects or clothing bearing political statements or overt commercial identification intended for ‘ambush marketing.’”

So you’d probably better leave your “Extradite Me, I’m British” shirt at home then …

Note: If you’re in the north of England, you’ll find an article I wrote about the Olympics, entitled, “The Olympics: A Sporting Triumph, or a Huge Waste of Money?” in the latest issue of The Big Issue in the North.

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.