Andy Worthington's Blog, page 168

US in Talks to Return the 17 Afghan Prisoners in Guantánamo

Earlier this year, there was much discussion in the US media about the possibility that, as part of negotiations aimed at securing peace in Afghanistan, the US would release five high-level Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo to Qatar, where they would be held under a form of house arrest.

Those plans came to nothing, but last week the Associated Press reported that the Obama administration was “considering a new gambit to restart peace talks with the Taliban,” which would involve some — or all — of the 17 remaining Afghan prisoners still held in Guantánamo being transferred to Afghanistan, to be held in the Parwan Detention Facility near Bagram, the huge prison established to replace the original prison at Bagram, where several prisoners were killed in the early years of the “war on terror.”

As part of the Obama administration’s 2014 deadline for withdrawing forces from Afghanistan, the Parwan Detention Facility is scheduled to be transferred to Afghan control in September this year, and the fate of the remaining Afghans in Guantánamo is clearly part of the negotiations for all parties involved — the Taliban and the Karzai government, as well as the US.

The previous plan — to transfer five senior Taliban figures to Qatar — floundered in part because the Taliban withdrew from direct negotiations, blaming the US for being inconsistent, and for involving representatives of the Karzai government in discussions — but also because Republicans in Congress opposed the plan.

Last week, defense secretary Leon Panetta moved to reassure critics that no actions would be taken if there was any threat to US. He explained, as the AP put it, that he “would have to sign off on the transfer and certify that the men did not pose a danger,” and stated, “There are no specific commitments that have been made with regard to prisoner exchanges at this point. One thing I will assure you is that any prisoner exchanges that I have to certify are going to abide by the law and require that those individuals do not return back into the battle.”

At present, no one is able to confirm whether or not the five Taliban leaders are included in negotiations. The AP noted that a senior US official said that any transfer was “unlikely” to include the five, although Afghan officials and other diplomats said the inclusion of the five had “not been ruled out.”

Members of President Karzai’s peace committee — Afghan elders attempting to liaise the Taliban on the government’s behalf — have been discussing the issue with US officials in Washington D.C., and Ismail Qasemyar, the international relations adviser for the Afghan High Peace Council, said that there was a strong possibility that a transfer would include the five. The AP noted that Afghans “involved in the discussions” were “still angling” to secure the release or transfer of all 17 prisoners.

Significantly, the Taliban’s position has long been that the talks are partly dependent on the release of all the Afghans in Guantánamo, and the AP also noted that President Karzai “has long sought the return of all 17,” who “he sometimes calls brothers, as a point of national pride.” He has stated that their continued detention “undermines his credibility as a national leader,” and that “Afghanistan’s own institutions should deal with captured insurgents.”

Speaking of the latest plan, Ismail Qasemyar said that it “would appeal to the Taliban,” and added, “The High Peace Council could use that opportunity as a goodwill gesture.” He also said that, based on what he heard in Washington, the Obama administration “was afraid that if they released a prisoner and he went back to fighting,” they “would lose faith before the Congress or before the people of the United States,” but that sending them to the Afghan government would overcome that problem, because “that responsibility would be shifted to our side.”

To be honest, I can’t see that argument persuading critics in Congress, who have become so rattled by their own paranoia — largely played out for cynical reasons — that they don’t want anyone to be released from Guantánamo for any reason, but from Karzai’s point of view, and for the US plans to withdraw from Afghanistan, it is of course essential.

What has not been talked about in the media is who these 17 men are, and whether or not they actually constitute a threat to either US or Afghan interests, but that is clearly also worth discussing.

The 17 Afghans

Five of the 17 are, of course, the Taliban leaders whose cases were discussed in relation to Qatar, and they are: Mullah Mohammad Fazl and Mullah Norullah Nori, military commanders in northern Afghanistan, who are accused of having taken part in war crimes, involving massacres of the Hazara, Afghanistan’s main ethnic group of Shia Muslims; Abdul-Haq Wasiq, the deputy head of Taliban intelligence; Khairullah Khairkhwa, the former Taliban governor of Herat province in western Afghanistan; and Mohammed Nabi, described as a senior Taliban official, who allegedly helped smuggle weapons to attack US troops and finance the Taliban.

To add to these five, another Afghan regarded as significant is Muhammad Rahim (aka Muhammed Rahim al-Afghani), the last prisoner to arrive at Guantánamo, in March 2008. Almost all that is known about him is one line from the press release announcing his arrival, in which it was stated that he “was a close associate of Osama bin Laden and had ties to al-Qaeda organizations throughout the Middle East,” and “became one of bin Laden’s most trusted facilitators and procurement specialists prior to his detention.”

The rest, based on my own detailed analysis of their cases, are not a threat to anyone, and in most cases, would have been released years ago if they had been held in Bagram and not sent to Guantánamo, although the US authorities, and the judges in the D.C. Circuit Court who have been defining the rules regarding the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, do not think so.

Three of the eleven were put forward for trials by Military Commission under George W. Bush, even though the cases against them could not plausibly be described as constituting war crimes. Abdul Ghani, for example, a poor villager who scavenged for scrap metal, was put forward for a trial in 2008 because he authorities claimed that he had played a part in attacks and planned attacks as part of the insurgency against US forces. Ghani has always refuted the charges, and the charges against him were dropped before George W. Bush left office, and have not been reinstated.

Another insignificant Afghan prisoner is Mohammed Kamin, accused of spying and planting mines, who was also put forward for a trial in 2008, although the charges were dropped in December 2009, and a third insignificant Afghan put forward for a trial under President Bush is Obaidullah (also identified as Obaydullah), who was also chosen for trial under President Obama, although that plan has also not progressed to any kind of a hearing. He faces allegations that he “stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment”; that he “concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices”; and that he “knew or intended” that his “material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.”

A fourth man, Abdul Zahir, was accused of being a translator for al-Qaeda member Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (who was transferred to Guantánamo as a “high-value detainee” in 2007) and a money courier for members of al-Qaeda and Taliban, and of taking part in a grenade attack on a vehicle carrying Toronto Star journalist Kathleen Kenna, her husband Hadi Dadashian, photographer Bernard Weil, and an Afghan driver in Zormat on March 4, 2002. Zahir was put forward for a trial by Military Commission in January 2006, when he stated that he did not take part in the grenade attack, and was the only one of the ten prisoners charged in the first incarnation of the Commissions who was not charged again after the Commissions were ruled illegal by Congress in June 2006, and were revived by Congress later that year.

Four of the Afghan prisoners also lost their habeas corpus petitions, despite there being nothing that could be regarded as evidence, except, perhaps, in the case of Khairullah Khairkhwa, mentioned above, who lost his habeas petition in June 2011. Another was Obaidullah, also mentioned above, who lost his habeas petition in October 2010, and the others are Shawali Khan and Karim Bostan.

Shawali Khan, whose habeas petition was denied in September 2010, was a shopkeeper, who seems, quite clearly, to have been falsely portrayed as an insurgent by an informant who received payment for doing so. To add further shame to the ruling, the judges of the D.C. Circuit Court refused his appeal last September, apparently consigning him to Guantánamo forever on an apparently legal basis.

Karim Bostan, a preacher and a shopkeeper, was seized on a bus that traveled regularly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was reportedly “apprehended because he matched the description of an al-Qaeda bomb cell leader and had a [satellite] phone,” which he had apparently been asked to hold by a fellow passenger. Other allegations were made by Obaidullah, who said in Guantánamo that he had made false allegations (and had also falsely incriminated Bostan), while he was being abused by US soldiers in Afghanistan. Despite this, Bostan’s habeas petition was denied in October 2011.

The other five Afghans have not been put forward for trials, or had rulings made on their habeas corpus petitions, but there appears to be be no good reason for them to be held, with two possible exception — Haji Wali Mohammed, who was reportedly involved in some serious financial transactions involving the Taliban, but does not appear to constitute a military threat; and Haroon al-Afghani, who was transferred to Guantánamo from Afghanistan in June 2007, and was described by the Pentagon on his arrival as a “dangerous terror suspect,” who was “known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan,” and had apparently “admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL).” Like Muhammad Rahim, however, not a word about his case has emerged publicly since his arrival five years ago.

Of the other three, the first is Khi Ali Gul, who was captured in Khost and accused of taking part in a bomb plot and being part of a Taliban assassination team. During his long years in Guantánamo, he has stated that he fought with US forces in Tora Bora, and described one occasion when “the Americans were sleeping and we were guarding them.” He added, “If I were their enemy, I would have killed them all.” He was captured at a checkpoint, where, he said, “there were some people that I had a dispute with,” and he added that they “told the American soldiers a lie,” and he was then arrested.

The second is Mohammed Zahir, 48 years old at the time of his capture in July 2003, who stated in Guantánamo that he was a teacher, and said that he had been set up by Taliban sympathizers, who arranged for his arrest by telling lies to the US forces. In contrast, however, the US authorities claim that he was employed by the Taliban in the Secret Information Office in Ghazni, and that he “possessed information associated with weapons caches, arms dealings and Taliban personalities.”

The third man — and the last of the eleven — is Haji Hamidullah, the son of a Mullah and someone with political influence, who explained that he had been imprisoned by the Taliban, and had then fled to Pakistan, only returning after the US-led invasion, when, he said, an opponent fed false information about him to US forces, alleging that he controlled a cache of weapons and led a group of 30 men who had conspired to attack coalition forces near Kabul.

Reasons for release

Whether freedom or justice will ever be delivered to these men is unknown. In December 2009, Kathleen Kenna, who was seriously injured in the attack that was allegedly undertaken by Abdul Zahir, wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star, which should have shamed the US authorities. She wrote, “For almost eight years, we have all waited for justice. We don’t seek retribution. We’ve made it clear we cannot identify our attackers. We seek real justice, not a contrived justice.”

She added, “I don’t believe in indefinite detention without trial … The Pentagon has assured us, almost annually since his arrest, that this would be the year of Zahir’s trial. My husband and I hoped this meant true justice would be served, and also hoped it brought us all closer to the shutdown of Guantánamo … We’re not lawyers, nor armchair arbiters of how the men of war from Afghanistan should be treated by the United States. After living in a war zone for months in Afghanistan, and closely following the war’s progress since then, we have strong convictions that any prisoner-of-war should be treated with dignity, and afforded all the rights guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions and international human rights laws. It’s what we would demand for any Canadian, American or other citizen — whether combatant or aid worker — captured and held in a country of war. It’s what we want for Zahir and all the Guantánamo detainees.”

Further shame should come from the case of Obaidullah, who was discussed in an article in February this year in the New York Times, after his lawyers had sent an investigator to Afghanistan who had uncovered a case of mistaken identity that I reported here. Charlie Savage noted that it was “an accident of timing” that he was at Guantánamo, because a US official “who was formerly involved in decisions about Afghanistan detainees said that such a ‘run of the mill’ suspect would not have been moved to Cuba had he been captured a few years later; he probably would have been turned over to the Afghan justice system, or released if village elders took responsibility for him.”

As Charlie Savage also noted, Obaidullah was not included in the discussions relating to Qatar, because, “[l]ike some of the other Afghans at Guantánamo, he is not an important enough figure to be a bargaining chip.”

Perhaps he has now been promoted to the role of bargaining chip, but what he needs, more than this, is for there to be a recognition that he, Abdul Ghani, Mohammed Kamin, Shawali Khan, Karim Bostan and others should not be sent from one prison to another, but should be freed. There may be arguments that the senior figures in the Taliban described above still need to be detained, but not these men. For them, the loss of nine or ten years of their lives is more than enough.

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 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.

My Photos on Flickr: The Isle of Dogs and Regent’s Canal, July 2012

The Isle of Dogs and Regent’s Canal, July 2012, a set on Flickr.

In the latest set of photos uploaded to my recently established Flickr account, I’ve posted photos that I took on the American Day of Independence, July 4, 2012, when I spoke at a screening of “Extradition,” a film about Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, two British citizens facing extradition to the US on the basis of the grossly unfair and unjust US-UK Extradition Treaty. The screening was at no.w.here, a not-for-profit artist-run organization based in Tower Hamlets, which “combines film production alongside critical dialogue about contemporary image making,” and it was an excellent evening, even though the subject matter, and the urgency of the men’s plight, cast a sense of anguish over the entire event.

As part of my new and ongoing project to cycle everywhere in London, and to photograph my journeys, capturing aspects of the built environment, of nature, and of money and power, set against decay, poverty and the odd, untouched backwater (see here, here and here for the previous sets of my London journeys), I was delighted to travel to the east end of Bethnal Green Road, near Cambridge Heath Road, which, it slightly shames me to admit, I had never visited before, although I am familiar with the western end of the road — at the northern end of Brick Lane.

What I found was a vibrant, ethnically mixed neighbourhood, with independent businesses in tall terraced Victorian buildings, although I soon learned, from immediately striking up a conversation with Brad Butler, one of the founders of no.w.here (along with Karen Mirza) that the forces of gentrification have designs on the street, as they do on so much of London — right here and right now — despite the recession that is afflicting all but the rich and the super-rich. As ever, it alarms me profoundly that this appears to be, essentially, the first engineered recession in history, as the rich are excluded from the effects of the government-engineered austerity that otherwise stalks the land, driving the working poor, the young, the old, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled into unprecedented poverty, while protecting those with money from any kind of suffering, even though those in the City who drove the artificial and illegal wealth creation that caused the financial crash in 2008, and those who made money out of it, are the ones who should paying the most.

My journey from south-east London took me down to Greenwich, through the Victorian foot tunnel, and through the Isle of Dogs, where, mostly keeping away from the phallic displays of Canary Wharf, I travelled through Millwall — its history struggling to survive the encroachment and ther giant, testosterone-fuelled footprint of the Docklands project — and then cut through to Limehouse via Westferry Road. The foot tunnel has, for many years, been the only route across the river from south-east London between Tower Bridge, to the west, and the Woolwich Ferry, to the east, although the brand-new cable cars from North Greenwich to the Royal Docks now provide a new crossing point west of the Silvertown-Woolwich crossing.

At Limehouse, after crossing the faded grandeur of Commercial Road, I joined the extraordinary cross-city artery of the Regent’s Canal (aka the Grand Union Canal), heading north to Roman Road, where I left the canal, heading east to Bethnal Green Road and crossing Cambridge Heath Road as the first signs of the coming sunset cast its warm, rich light.

After the screening, as night fell, I made my way back, along roughly the same route, and I’ll be including my photos of that particular — and particularly haunting and affecting — journey in “London At Night,” another set that I will be uploading soon.

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 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.

NHS Chief Quits, Calls Austerity a Weapon to “Dismantle the State”

Dr. Gabriel Scally, who resigned in April, also talks of “a very deliberate policy across all of the public sector to roll back the achievements that have been made in this country since the second world war,” and “a systematic downgrading, if not destruction, of civil society in England” by the Tory-led coalition government, as well as speaking about “the circling birds of prey of the private sector seeking to make big profits out of healthcare.” 

For those hoping to keep the government’s malignant NHS reforms under the spotlight, the Guardian‘s interview this week with Dr. Gabriel Scally is important. Dr. Scally held a senior position in the Department of Health, as the regional director of public health for the south-west of England, but he resigned in April “as a direct result of his alarm at the coalition government’s health policies,” and “because he wanted the freedom to oppose them,” as he told Denis Campbell in his first interview since resigning.

“The time had come for me to step outside the formal system and do things in a different way,” he said. “My job is helping people live healthier lives in healthier communities, and there are better ways of doing it than participating in the changes that are taking place in the public sector in England.”

He also said, “Since 1993, I’ve been restructured and reorganised eight times, I think, and that’s enough really. Throughout these restructurings I’ve seen a loss of talent, of momentum and of coherence, in both the NHS structures and public health structures.” He added, crucially, “This one [Andrew Lansley's fiercely opposed Health and Social Care Act] was the final straw.”

As Campbell explained, the upper echelons of NHS management contain many senior figures who are dismayed by the government’s NHS reforms, but, significantly, “contracts that forbid criticism of official policy have meant that, despite widespread doubts internally, no one working in the service has been able to publicly voice the concerns that many hold privately.”

That, of course, is a disgrace, as enforced silence can be taken to signify consent, and as a result Dr. Scally, described by Campbell as “an articulate and passionate defender of the NHS,” who is “[n]o longer muzzled,” is “set to become a thorn in Lansley’s flesh, and a key voice in the debates about public health issues, such as obesity, tobacco control and public health’s impending transfer from the NHS to local government.”

As Campbell also noted, his expertise and experience — having worked for 16 years as a regional director of public health — means that he has been sought out by thinks-tanks and universities. He is now an associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and a visiting chair at Bristol University and the University of the West of England, which “will provide further platforms for research and policy development.”

Moving on to the specifics of the NHS reforms, Dr. Scally said that he believes that the government’s changes are “part of a planned enfeebling by the government of public services generally.” As he explained, in a powerful indictment of the artificial age of austerity imposed by the government for ideological reasons:

I think there’s a very deliberate policy across all of the public sector to roll back the achievements that have been made in this country since the second world war — including the NHS — and that financial austerity is being used to pursue an agenda aimed at dismantling the state.

He also said, “At the end of the war this country was hugely indebted but within a couple of years had free healthcare and free education for everyone – what an achievement! This government is putting a huge price on education, especially young people seeking to go to university, and is in the process of dismantling the NHS.”

Rejecting Andrew Lansley’s claim that the NHS will be “liberated” by “abolishing primary care trusts and strategic health authorities (SHAs) and handing control of £60bn of patient treatment budgets from next April to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs),” he also said, importantly, “What we’re going through now is a systematic downgrading, if not destruction, of civil society in England with a de-layering of structures and organisations and, at the same time, a huge amount of responsibility being handed to the local level, especially to local authorities, at the same time as their budgets are being cut.”

Dr. Scally added that the abolition of regional development agencies, government offices in the regions and SHAs was “all part of the same process,” and also said, “To many people that sounds great, like we’re getting rid of bureaucracy. But this is a very big country and cannot be run by a very much smaller civil service in London and a huge, disparate patchwork quilt of local authorities all pulling in different directions.”

In fact, he stressed, the coalition government’s entire commitment to local power is “a sham,” and he described “the creation of the new NHS Commissioning Board, which will oversee the local GP-led commissioning groups” as “part of another worrying trend, the centralisation of power in the hands of political appointees.” He explained, echoing one of the core criticisms of the NHS reforms — along with privatisation by stealth — “GPs are not the right people to commission health services.”

“I trained as a GP and I know that it’s no part of a GP’s training to deal with tens, and in some cases hundreds, of millions of pounds’ worth of commissioning budgets,” he said. “It’s not what most GPs want to do, so handing them a huge amount of commissioning power doesn’t bode well for the future of the NHS.” He added that postcode lotteries are inevitable when the clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) take control of that £60bn budget next April.

Dr. Scally’s disappointment with the government’s treatment of the health service manifested itself on my fronts: his staff were cut from 50 to nine; he was dismayed by Lansley’s feeble “responsibility deal” to tackle obesity and alcoholism; he was also dismayed by “the disappearance of the regional public health observatories, which provided independent research and data collection”; and by the creation of Public Health England, the new Department of Health agency, whose establishment “helped to persuade him to get out.” He explained that NHS policy has deliberately contributed to what he called “the circling birds of prey of the private sector seeking to make big profits out of healthcare.” he added, importantly, “That’s less money for patients.”

In conclusion, contrasting David Cameron’s lies about claiming to love the NHS with “the dedication of those working in it,” he said, “Healthcare professionals see an ethos coming into government policy and permeating the new [NHS] organisations being set up that is not in keeping with the ethos of vocation NHS staff — that they go to work not just to earn the salary but to help people who need their help who are sick or troubled.”

That spirit of service is hugely important, but is ruthlessly ignored by politicians who see everything in terms of money — and opportunities for private companies in which profitable investments can be made — and fail to understand how many people who work in health, education and other public services cannot have their working lives measured solely through a prism in which all work becomes a commodity, for which, moreover, the final intention is for the whole of the state provision of services to be transferred to the private sector.

Speaking of this, Dr. Scally noted that what he calls the “binding glue of the NHS” is, as the Guardian described it, “at risk from a new era in which one hospital is now run by a private company, more services are being outsourced, and private firms will be helping many CCGs to run their operations.” As he explained, “It’s hard to know what the NHS is going to be in the future. There’s a real danger it becomes nothing more than a brand — that blue and white logo.”

Nevertheless, he remains optimistic that the struggle for the NHS — which involved many health professionals and members of the public, even if, eventually, the specific battle against the reforms was lost — will continue. As he said, “There was an awakening among health professionals and the public that their NHS was under threat. The task over the next couple of years is to use all of that concern, interest and commitment as part of a rich debate about how we put the NHS back together again, when the opportunity arises. The NHS will only be destroyed if the people of this country let it be destroyed.”

Those of us who care about the NHS need to take Dr. Scally’s words to heart, and to find ways to bring healthcare professionals and concerned citizens together to stop the destruction of the NHS and to work towards reversing Andrew Lansley’s reforms as soon as the opportunity arises.

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 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.

My Photos on Flickr: Bermondsey and the River Thames, June 2012

Bermondsey and the River Thames, June 2012, a set on Flickr.

This set of photos, recording elements of a journey I made by bike on June 28, 2012 from south east London to the West End and back, is the third set of photos of London that I’ve uploaded to my recently established Flickr account, based on my newly-discovered means of escape from the chains that tie me to my computer and my work as a freelance investigative journalist — cycling around London with a camera, recording whatever captures my attention: buildings old and new, the sky, the river, trees and parks, and street art.

I’m also drawn to signs of emptiness, untidiness and decay that stand in contrast to the shiny new corporate buildings and endless “luxury” housing developments that are still springing up as part of a rigged economy, and that stand in such marked contrast to the savage age of austerity to which London’s poorer citizens are being subjected.

On the populist front, this journey coincided with the Olympic rings having recently been placed on Tower Bridge, and views of The Shard, but the back streets of Bermondsey — and my return home via Deptford — held more surprises.

I’ll be uploading more photos soon, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy these glimpses of London — the corporate river, the relentless development, and the back streets that so far remain untouched by gentrification. My journeys are certainly helping to make me fit after too many years sitting and writing in — to be honest — a rather obsessive manner, but they are also allowing my eyes and my mind to wander, which, with the exercise, is obviously very good for me.

However, the undiminishing gap between the rich and the poor, which is visible everywhere, continues to enrage me and often to make me feel as though I am not quite awake and the city has become a strange and unsettling dream, a thinly-veiled dystopia, still with the semblance of normality, but one in which, on the one hand, obscene amounts of money continue to be conjured out of nowhere, more aggressively than ever before, and the display of wealth and the ongoing gentrification seems both relentless and remorseless, and, on the other, poorer areas decline, businesses fail, shops are permanently closed, and the cuts begin to drive people into abject poverty.

The lines between rich and poor seem to me to be starker than they have ever been in my lifetime, and yet, for reasons that are frankly alarming — selfishness, heartlessness, a sense of entitlement — the rich continue to be motivated solely by greed, while everyone else is too distracted, deluded, indifferent, ignorant or exhausted to care.

Whatever is coming our way, especially after the militarist, corporate Olympics moves on, removing the last “bread and circuses” distraction from the truth that we have a suicidal economy managed by idiots and thieves, the current situation simply doesn’t feel sustainable, and I fear some sort of unseen storm is coming, particular when warm sunny days like the one recorded here have passed by, and we face a troubling winter of discontent …

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 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.

Criminal Bankers Are Not Above the Law

That’s an optimistic headline, obviously, as, to date, bankers have demonstrated that they are in fact above the law, and that they can do what they want — wrecking the global economy, for example, and being bailed out instead of being punished, as happened in 2008. However, in the wake of the inter-bank rate-rigging scandal that became public knowledge last week when Barclays were fined £290m in the US and the UK, the time may have come for there to be a reckoning — one which, appallingly, was avoided four years ago when the global crash happened that has poisoned our economic health ever since.

This time, perhaps, the odd high-profile scalp — Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, for example, who finally walked on Tuesday — and the promise of some sort of toothless inquiry may not be enough to quell the growing calls for the entire financial sector to be thoroughly overhauled and regulated, and for those who have committed crimes — in the many banks other than Barclays which are still being investigated — to be prosecuted.

Certainly, as Yves Smith explained on his Naked Capitalism blog, there are reasons to believe that this story has only begun in the US (where £230m of Barclays’ fine was imposed), because price fixing — of the type uncovered at Barclays, in which many other banks are also implicated — “is a criminal violation under the Sherman Antitrust Act.” As Smith noted, “The Department of Justice stressed that Barclays had been the first bank to cooperate with the investigation and had been extremely forthcoming, and for that reason it would not be prosecuted if it complied with the settlement terms for two years. The implication is that the DoJ will not be as generous with other banks involved in the price-fixing scheme.”

Smith also added a useful overview from the Financial Times of Barclays’ misdeeds:

The bank admitted that it lowballed estimates of its borrowing costs from late 2007 to May 2009 because it wanted to reassure investors of its strength during the financial crisis and it believed other banks were doing the same. It also admitted that its traders improperly influenced the rate submissions from 2005 to 2008 to make money on derivatives.

The rigging from 2007 to 2009, it may transpire, was a manoeuvre that went beyond the individual banks, and was known to some in government — or governments — as part of a panicked response to the total meltdown of 2008, but the manipulations dating back to 2005 — just to make money — look like criminal actions, pure and simple, and it will be interesting to see how widespread this activity was. At the very least, though, it signals that mere resignations may not to be enough, and that some in the City may — finally — face criminal charges.

It is certainly time. As Will Hutton explained on Sunday in the Observer:

Investment banking is an organised scam masquerading as a business. It is defined by endemic conflicts of interest, systemic amoral behaviour and extreme avarice. Many of its senior figures should be serving prison sentences …”

Hutton added that this has not happened because British regulators believed in “light touch” regulation, and, even when it became clear, after 2008, that this had not perhaps been such a great idea, very little changed. Disgracefully, the challenge of tackling financial crimes like those exposed last week was not helped by George Osborne’s decision to savagely cut the budget of the Serious Fraud Office. Hutton described the cost of financial crimes as “a tax on wealth generation and an enemy of honest endeavour — the beast that is devouring British capitalism.”

In yesterday’s Guardian, Seumas Milne followed up, bemoaning the “huge economic and social cost” of the banks’ crimes, which have revealed the world of finance to be “corrupt, incompetent, rapacious and economically destructive.”

As he proceeded to explain:

The crash of 2008 offered a huge opportunity to break that grip and reform the financial system. It was lost. The system was left as good as intact, and even the part-nationalised banks, RBS and Lloyds, have since been run at arm’s length to fatten them up as quickly as possible for re-privatisation (savage RBS cost-cutting lies behind its humiliating performance last month), instead of as motors of investment and recovery.

It is indeed truly disgraceful that the eye-wateringly huge amounts of public money pumped into the City have done nothing to help the economy, and have, perversely, just enriched bankers further at public expense. As Milne put it, the banks are “pumped up with state subsidies and liquidity that they are still failing to pass on in productive lending five years into the crisis.”

He also pointed out that “[t]he City’s claims to be an indispensable jobs and tax engine for the British economy are nonsense,” because “the bailout costs of 2008-9 dwarfed the financial tax revenues of the boom years,” and that they were “below those of manufacturing even at their peak.”

The banking sector’s role is regularly overplayed, as it employs only around a million people and only makes up only 10 percent of Britain’s GDP, whereas manufacturing makes up 11 percent of GDP and employs around 2.5 million people, but as Milne explained, the City has succeeded in creating this illusion — and largely maintaining it, despite the horrors of 2008 — because of “the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City: its colonisation of Whitehall and public life, effective grip on its own regulation, revolving-door pull on politicians and civil servants, and purchase of political parties.” As he added, powerfully, “Finance has usurped democracy.”

So what now? Is meaningful change possible, or will the parasitic and unbearably greedy monsters of the financial world keep pillaging us until they provoke some currently unthinkable revolution?

For Seumas Milne, the rate-rigging scandal “offers a second opportunity to build the pressure for fundamental change,” even if that is “hard to imagine being carried out by a coalition dominated by the City-funded Tories,” and even though Labour has “yet to break fully with its pre-crisis economic model.”

Even if Sir John Vickers’ recommendations last year — for making the banking system safer by ring-fencing banks’ retail operations from their investment components — were fully implemented (and that is a big if, as George Osborne subsequently watered them down), this “will not be enough to shift the City into productive investment,” as Milne noted, “or even prevent the kind of corrupt collusion that has now been exposed between Barclays and other banks.” As he explained, a report by Manchester University’s Cresc research team, published this week, and well worth reading, argues that “the size and complexity of the modern banking system makes it ‘near ungovernable.’”

Milne concluded:

Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round. Private sector banking has spectacularly failed — and we need a democratic public solution.

This may sound radical — or, more probably, fanciful — but unless we can mobilise in numbers that seem unthinkable at present — given the numbers of people who are worn out, overworked, indifferent, apathetic or ignorant — they are worth looking at as solutions to aim for, to hold up as a viable and crucial alternative to the current monster that deregulation and government collusion created — an alternative to prevent the robber-barons of the City of London and Wall Street from being allowed, any more, to indulge in the kind of destructive policies that have generated obscene wealth for themselves — and themselves alone — since the 1980s, and that, since the 2008 crash, have moved into dangerous new territory, in which their risk-taking is underwritten by the very taxpayers whose economies are endangered by the risk-taking itself.

In any other context, this would imply criminality and/or serious mental illness, and, as a result, it is surely time for decent, honest hard-working people’s tolerance of this savagely selfish greed and arrogance to be brought to an end.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg 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.

Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad: “Extradition” Film Screenings in London, and an Appeal to the European Court of Human Rights

As part of the campaign to prevent the extradition to the US of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad — who, along with others, including Richard O’Dwyer and Gary McKinnon — face extradition to the US under the terms of the much-criticised US-UK Extradition Treaty, Talha’s brother Hamja has been working flat-out to promote a new documentary film, “Extradition,” which tells the stories of his brother and of Babar Ahmad, with screenings up and down the country. Directed by Turab Shah, the film features interviews with the human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, the playwright Avaes Mohammad, the fathers of Babar and Talha, and Talha’s brother Hamja, all framed by Talha’s prison poetry.

On Wednesday July 4, and later in the month, I will be taking part in Q&A sessions following screenings in London, and I also want to alert readers in the London area to other screenings this week, on Friday July 6 and Saturday July 7.

As I explained in an article two weeks ago, promoting a meeting in the House of Commons to discuss the US-UK Extradition Treaty, it has been “a source of consternation since its establishment in 2003, as it allows British citizens to be extradited to the US for the flimsiest of reasons, where they will face a legal system that is, in many ways, out of control, in which cases that involve activities that can be described as providing material support for terrorism, for example, attract horrendously long sentences.”

In that article, I also explained briefly why Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Richard O’Dwyer and Gary McKinnon face extradition, despite the fact that none of the men has ever even visited the US:

Talha Ahsan is a poet and writer with Asperger’s syndrome who has been detained for six years without charge or trial; Babar Ahmad has been detained without charge or trial for eight years, longer than any other British citizen in modern British history (and both men are accused of alleged crimes involving web-based militant activity); Gary McKinnon, who also has Asperger’s Syndrome, is accused of hacking into US agency websites ten years ago and has been fighting extradition ever since; and Richard O’Dwyer is accused of breaching US copyright laws, despite the fact that what he is accused of does not constitute a crime in the UK.

In recent weeks, Richard O’Dwyer’s case has been taken up by parts of the mainstream media, and a petition initiated by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has attracted over 200,000 signatures. However, we are still no closer to amending the treaty so that it is fair and proportionate, as Liberty has been demanding, calling for the following three amendments:

Someone should not be extradited to another country for actions that are not criminal in the UK;
A basic case should be made to a British court before someone can be sent abroad to face trial in another country; and
If a significant part of the conduct that led to the alleged crime took place in the UK, then a British court should be able to decide if it is in the interests of justice to extradite.

As Noam Chomsky has stated, in Talha’s case:

With the sharp deterioration of protection of elementary civil rights in the US, no one should be extradited to the country on charges related to alleged terrorism. The constitutional lawyer in the White House, after all, has just made it clear that the due process provisions of the US Constitution (and Magna Carta) can be satisfied by an internal discussion in the executive branch. And that is hardly the only example.  Furthermore, the prisons and the incarceration system in general are an international scandal. The shallow and evasive charges in this case strongly reinforce that conclusion. I wish you the best success in your campaign to block extradition for Talha Ahsan.

The screenings of “Extradition” are as follows:

Wednesday July 4, 7pm: no-w-here lab, 316-318 Bethnal Green Road, London, E2 OAG.

Speakers: Andy Worthington (Guantanamo campaigner), Pippa Koszerek (Arts Against Extraditions) and Hamja Ahsan.

Tube: Bethnal Green.

See no-w-here’s website, and also see the Facebook page for this event.

Friday July 6, 6.30 pm: Hallows on the Wall, 83 London Wall, London, EC2M 5NA.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with short presentations by relatives and activists who will offer tools to help lobby.

RSVP: Stephen Sizer – 07970 789549.

Nearest station: Liverpool St.

Also see the Facebook page for this event.

Saturday July 7, 6.45 pm: IHRC Bookshop, 202 Preston Road, Wembley, London, HA9 8PA.

Speakers and writers tbc.

Tube: Preston Road.

The other screening I will be attending will be on Tuesday July 17 or Wednesday July 18 at St Augustine’s Church, Tooting, and I will provide an update when I find out which date has been chosen, and also find out the time of the screening.

In conclusion, I’d like to encourage readers in the UK to check out the Early Day Motion about extradition, submitted to the UK Parliament by the indefatigable Caroline Lucas MP (Green Party), and to contact your MP if he or she has not supported it (just 52 MPs have signed up at present), and also to urgently send a letter to the European Court of Human Rights asking the judges to re-examine the cases of Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan.

The EDM “notes that it has been over five months since [Parliament] passed a motion on 5 December 2011 calling on the Government to reform the UK’s extradition arrangements to strengthen the protection of British citizens by both introducing, as a matter of urgency, a Bill to enact the safeguards recommended by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in its Fifteenth Report of Session 2010-12,HC 767, and by pursuing such amendments to the UK-US Extradition Treaty 2003 and the EU Council Framework Decision 2002 on the European Arrest Warrant as are necessary in order to give effect to such recommendations.”

The letter to the European Court of Human Rights was publicised yesterday by the “Free Babar Ahmad” campaign, although it also applies to Talha Ahsan. As the campaigners noted:

On 10 April 2012, the European Court of Human Rights dismissed the appeal of Babar Ahmad against his extradition to the US finding that this would not breach his human rights. Babar’s solicitors have until 10 July 2012 to request permission from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights for the Court to re-examine the case. If they grant permission, Babar’s case will be examined one final time. If they refuse permission, Babar could be on a plane to the US within days.

We are requesting all campaigners to write to the President of the European Court of Human Rights and request that he grants permission for Babar’s case to be reconsidered for the following reasons:

The Court knowingly accepted false evidence from the UK government that prisoners in ADX Florence (where they propose to imprison Babar) spent on average 3 years only in solitary confinement before entering the ‘Step Down’ programme to end their isolation. However, the Court refused to accept accurate rebuttal evidence from Babar Ahmad’s lawyers that dozens of ADX Florence prisoners have been in solitary confinement for over 10 years, on the basis that there was not enough time to consider it. This was despite the fact that the Court had already been considering the case for almost five years.
The Court refused to accept submissions on solitary confinement by the eminent Professor Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
The Court ruled that the ADX Florence prison regime does not amount to isolation because its inmates can shout to each other through the ventilation system.
Just over a week after the judgement, the UK Attorney-General Dominic Grieve QC MP unashamedly admitted in public that the pressure the UK government had been applying for political reform of the ECtHR had led to rulings in the UK’s favour, such as the Hamza ruling.
The Court concluded that imposing an irreducible whole life sentence on Babar Ahmad would “not be grossly disproportionate” (Paragraph 243 of Chamber judgement) even though he has not been accused of a capital offence, in which someone was killed. The Court came to this conclusion by lumping together six distinct cases as one without considering the individual facts of each case.

Please write to the European Court of Human Rights. A sample letter is available on the website of the “Free Babar Ahmad” campaign.

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 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.

My Photos on Flickr: Visiting Kuwait to Campaign for the Last Two Kuwaiti Prisoners in Guantánamo

Visiting Kuwait to Campaign for the Last Two Kuwaiti Prisoners in Guantánamo, a set on Flickr.

In the six months following the opening of the Bush administration’s cruel and lawless ”war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on January 11, 2002, twelve Kuwaitis joined the hundreds of other “detainees” deprived of their rights as “enemy combatants.” In Guantánamo, these men were subjected to torture and abuse that was supposedly designed to produce “actionable intelligence,” but that, in reality, was a house of cards constructed of false statements made under duress  — not only in Guantanamo, but also in other “war on terror” prisons, including those where “high-value detainees” were held and tortured — or made by those who, having had enough of the abuse, volunteered false statements in exchange for better living conditions. (For more, see “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” my ongoing analysis of the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011).

Of the twelve Kuwaitis, ten were eventually released, between 2005 and 2009, but two remain — Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah. Both men are victims of the false statements that plague the government’s supposed evidence, as I have repeatedly reported (see here, here and here, for example), but they are also victims of the legal fallout of the “war on terror”; namely, the limited opportunities for a review of their cases, through their habeas corpus petitions, which they and the other prisoners struggled to secure for many years.

Although the Guantánamo prisoners secured major victories in the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008, when they were granted habeas corpus rights, the impact of those rulings has suffered from imprecise terms of reference, from an all-out assault by right-wing judges in the court of appeals in Washington D.C., who have conspired to gut habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners, and, most recently, through the complete indifference of the Supreme Court, which has refused to wrest control from the Circuit Court judges. Despite the absence of evidence against them, both Fayiz and Fawzi had their habeas petitions turned down (see here and here).

In February, as part of the ongoing campaign to secure the release of Fayiz and Fawzi, I traveled to Kuwait to take part in events designed to raise awareness of their plight (see the TV program here, for example, which I took part in with the attorney Tom Wilner, my colleague in the “Close Guantánamo” campaign), and also to meet with lawyers, with former prisoners, with the journalist Jenifer Fenton, and with members of the remaining prisoners’ families.

The photo set above, posted as part of my recently established Flickr account, shows some of these events, as well as capturing my impressions of Kuwait, in my first-ever visit not only to Kuwait, but to any of the Gulf countries. Further information can be found in the articles I wrote at the time, In Kuwait, Looking for American Justice — and Showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” on Alrai TV and After a Wonderful Visit to Kuwait, New Plans to Close Guantánamo and to Free the Last Two Kuwaiti Prisoners.

In the days to come, I will be posting more photos, including some which will be part of an article on the rehabilitation center constructed for the former Guantánamo prisoners, which I visited during my trip in February. For now, however, I am glad to have the opportunity to shine a brief light back on the cases of Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah, because, as was reported last week, the long-standing military charges against Fayiz — who, ludicrously, was put forward for a trial by Military Commission under President Bush, in 2008, despite there being no evidence against him — were dropped by the Retired Admiral Bruce MacDonald, the Convening Authority for the Military Commissions, last week.

This caused a flutter of interest in the mainstream media, and is noteworthy because it probably signifies that the Pentagon has concluded that there is no case against al-Kandari that it can reasonably pursue, but it does not mean, as some sources appeared to suggest, that preparations are underway for his release. If anything, it does the opposite, consigning him to indefinite detention without any opportunity to even argue his case, which is why publicizing his story — and that of Fawzi al-Odah — remains of fundamental importance.

The day before the charges against Fayiz al-Kandari were dropped, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US, Sheikh Salem Abdullah al-Jaber al-Sabah said that a Kuwaiti delegation had “held official talks with US officials where they discussed the release of the two Kuwaiti detainees,” as KUNA, the Kuwait News Agency, explained. He added that “the meeting was part of a series of other meetings that were held, and will be hold in the upcoming weeks with the Americans,” and that the talks “follow the directives of His Highness the Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah to find a quick solution to bring back the detainees to their homeland as soon as possible.” The Ambassador also asserted that “the file of the Kuwaiti detainees in Guantánamo Bay prison has been a top priority for both the Kuwaiti and US governments.”

The extent of the problems still facing campaigners was, however, clear from the words of a US official who spoke to Reuters anonymously. He “confirmed that a Kuwaiti team had recently visited Washington to discuss the matter but suggested the talks would be long and challenging,” as Reuters put it. In his own words, he said, “There are a great number of obstacles and this will be a lengthy and difficult process. We are aware that they want them back. Because of legal restrictions and our own view of these people, this will be a protracted and difficult process.”

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 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.

In Appeal for Moral Leadership, Jimmy Carter Calls for an End to Drone Attacks and the Closure of Guantánamo

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Last Sunday, in “A Cruel and Unusual Record,” an op-ed in the New York Times, just two days before the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, former US President Jimmy Carter delivered an impassioned plea for the US to undo the ruinous effects of ten years of the “war on terror” — or the “long war,” as it is now more fashionably known — and to regain its moral authority around the world.

The former President began by stating that the United States was “abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights,” and seized, in particular, on the fact that senior officials in the Obama administration “are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens,” and the recent revelation that President Obama personally approves drone attacks based on a “kill list” as “only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended.”

As President Carter stated, correctly:

This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

Crucially, President Carter noted that, although the declaration “has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs,” we are now in such a “disturbing” situation that, “instead of strengthening these principles,” the US government’s counterterrorism policies “are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’”

As well as complaining about the government’s drone policy, the former President also complained about how “recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications,” and how some laws, in individual states, “permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.”

He also launched a withering attack on the passages in the National Defense Authorization Act, introduced by Congress, which “made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or ‘associated forces,’ a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress.” While noting that this particular part of the NDAA was recently blocked by a federal judge, he added that it is fundamentally unacceptable because it “violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.”

President Carter also discussed the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, although he did not explicitly draw parallels between the detention provisions in the NDAA and Guantánamo, which was a pity, as the men held in Guantánamo provided — and still provide — the supposed justification for “the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or ‘associated forces,’” even though they have also, for the most part, been deprived of “the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty,” through the founding document of the “war on terror,” the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, the AUMF claims to justify the detention of prisoners seized in wartime to be held not as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, but as “detainees,” essentially without rights, who, the US asserts, can be held until the end of hostilities, even though it is widely accepted that this ill-defined “war” may last for generations, and there are no mechanisms in place to challenge this claim.

In discussing Guantánamo, President Carter did, however, note that “the prison now houses 169 prisoners,” and that about half of these men — actually 87 of them — “have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom,” a key component of our complaints here at “Close Guantánamo,” and one which we are grateful to President Carter for highlighting.

He also explained that “[m]ost of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either,” which is clearly unacceptable, and, with a palpable sense of outrage, also commented on the torture of the “high-value detainees,” and the manner in which evidence of their torture is being suppressed by senior officials. As he explained:

[I]n order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of “national security.”

President Carter’s powerful critique of US policy under President Bush and President Obama also contained an implacable revulsion at the sleight-of-hand and fundamental illegality of the drone attacks. “Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist,” he wrote, “the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable.”

Providing further detail, he specifically noted, “After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington.”

Significantly, he added, “This would have been unthinkable in previous times.”

After noting that the counterproductive effects of the attacks, which have “turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behaviour,” President Carter concluded by pointing out that, “when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

“But instead of making the world safer,” he continued, “America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends. As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years.”

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 and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

When Will Immoral, Unprincipled Bankers Be Held Accountable for Their Crimes?

They say that patriotism is the last refuge

To which a scoundrel clings

Steal a little and they throw you in jail

Steal a lot and they make you king

Bob Dylan, “Sweetheart Like You” (1983)

The record-breaking fine of £290m to which Barclays was subjected this week for financial crimes committed from 2005 onwards sounds significant, until you realise that Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond was paid £17m for last year alone (and that the bank also paid £5.7m to cover his tax bill), that he has been paid almost £100m since 2006, and that the amount of the fine (£60m in the UK and £230m in the US) is basically peanuts — just 10 days’ worth of profit for Barclays, as Paul Lewis of Radio 4′s Money Box programme explained to the BBC.

The first thing that occurred to me was that, however much bankers are caught committing financial crimes, they always seem to get away with it, as Bob Dylan explained back in 1983. Moreover, Bob’s recognition of the disparity between the rich and the poor when it comes to crimes involving money also rings horribly true still, as is clear from the punishment for Barclays — a slipped wrist — and the punishment for those involved, however peripherally, in last August’s “riots” in the UK, when judges decided to “make an example” of the mostly unfortunate young people who came up before them. The most shocking example I came across was described in the Guardian as follows:

At Camberwell Green magistrates, Nicholas Robinson, 23, an electrical engineering student with no previous convictions, was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton. He had been walking back from his girlfriend’s house in the early hours of Monday morning when he saw the store being looted, his lawyer said, and had taken the opportunity to go in and help himself to a case of water because he was thirsty. He was caught up in the moment, and was ashamed of his actions, his defence said.

But the prosecution told judge Alan Baldwin: “This defendant has contributed through his action to criminal activities to the atmosphere of chaos and sheer lawlessness.” There were gasps from the public gallery as his sentence was delivered.

To listen to Barclays boss Bob Diamond, you would think that the crimes uncovered by the Financial Services Authority in the UK and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice in the US were insignificant — and presumably, less significant than £3.50 worth of bottled water, for the theft of which Nicholas Robinson received a six-month sentence — but as Jonathan Freedland explained in the Guardian:

Confronted with a clear ruling that Barclays traders had lied and cheated in seeking to rig a key interest rate used to determine everything from mortgages to credit card bills, Diamond put his hands up and conceded that the traders’ action had been “wholly inappropriate”.

Inappropriate? Inappropriate is wearing a tie to a barbecue. Wholly inappropriate is burping during the wedding vows. Distorting for personal gain a rate that underpins contracts worth $350 trillion worldwide is rather more than “inappropriate”.

On the Guardian‘s letters page, a reader, Mike Davies from Leeds, also provided a simple but powerful explanation of the bankers’ crimes. He wrote that the rigging of the Libor and Euribor rates — the rates at which banks lend money to each other — by Barclays bankers and the employees of other major banks in the UK, US and Europe, including Lloyds and RBS, which are also under investigation (and which were both bailed out by taxpayers) “sounds just technical. It isn’t.” He added:

The Libor rate is the average rate at which UK banks lend to each other. It is also the rate used as a benchmark for everything from the interest due for late payment on many contracts to the interest rate on many mortgages — real payments by millions of real people. These rates also serve as benchmarks for much of the trade in financial “derivatives”: obscure instruments created by financiers whose total value is hundreds of trillions of pounds, an unbelievable amount. The money to be made by fraudulently manipulating this market simply beggars belief.

Adding that, because “finance capital continues to act purely to make huge profits, legally or illegally,” the entire banking system “is not a support to the real economy but a criminal conspiracy against it,” Davies recommended that, “Instead of propping up the unaccountable private banking system at the expense of ordinary people, we must replace it with a publicly owned, publicly run, publicly accountable national bank.”

I hope that many people agree, and that consumer indignation accompanies the forthcoming revelations that other banks were intimately involved in the rate-rigging scandal. As the Observer explained today:

The interest rate rigging scandal that has engulfed Barclays was the result of a coordinated attempt at collusion by traders working for a coterie of leading banks over at least five years, according to a series of lawsuits and legal rulings filed in courts in Asia and North America. The lawsuits allege the fraud was extensive, spanning at least three continents and involving trades worth tens of billions of pounds.

In a 28-page statement of facts relating to last week’s revelation that Barclays had been fined a total of £290m, the US Department of Justice discloses how a network of traders working on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to influence both the Libor and Euribor interest rates — the rates at which banks lend to each other. It was, in effect, a worldwide conspiracy against the free functioning of the market.

The Observer further explained that it was the knock-on effect of the rigging of the interest rates on other parts of the world of finance that was particularly prompting further investigations. For example, one significant US broker, Charles Schwab, alleged in a lawsuit in April that he did not receive “rightful payments” as a result of the rate-rigging, and this, the Observer noted, suggests that “a plethora of similar lawsuits seeking compensation could soon be issued” — affecting as many as 16 banks in the UK, the US, Japan, Canada, the European Union and Singapore, including HSBC, Lloyds and RBS, as well as Barclays,  and involving nine different government agencies.

Officials at a bank in Canada, who have agreed to become whistleblowers, have stated that a number of different banks “communicated with each other … to form agreements,” and that this “was done for the purpose of benefiting trading positions.” A trader at this particular bank is also “alleged to have communicated with traders at HSBC, Deutsche Bank, RBS, JP Morgan and Citibank.”

The Observer also noted that a “crucial question” is whether senior managers knew of, or approved of the traders’ activities. A former RBS trader in Singapore, who was fired, stated in a lawsuit that “it was ‘common practice’ among RBS’s senior employees to make requests for the Libor submissions to be set at certain rates.”

RBS denied these claims, but it is difficult to see why the banks’ protestations should be believed.

As the rate-rigging scandal erupted last week, politicians and those in positions of economic influence queued up to express their disgust. Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, “said something had gone ‘very wrong’ with Britain’s banks that needed to be put right,” as the Guardian put it, and Lord Turner, the chairman of the FSA, said that there was a “culture of cynicism and greed that is quite shocking.” Vince Cable, the business secretary, described the problems in the UK banking system as “a moral quagmire of almost biblical proportions”, and Ed Miliband called for a public inquiry into the industry’s “institutional corruption.”

Predictably, the Tories, calling the shots in the coalition, decided instead to order a review of the inter-bank lending rate, which is obviously intended to be nothing more than a whitewash.

I suspect that rage — public rage on a colossal scale — is probably what is needed, but I have no idea when or if the crimes committed by the rich and powerful will provoke a significant response. However, we surely cannot tolerate forever the unfettered greed that crashed the global economy in 2008, but has been allowed to continue its ruinous work unpunished. In deliberately manipulating the inter-bank lending rates, bankers were clearly engaged in criminal activity, but even if there is a loophole — as there was, for example, in so many of the complex schemes developed by bankers, which were purportedly legal, but which brought the world crashing down just four years ago — it is time for all this cynical, unproductive profiteering to be brought to an end, permanently.

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 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.

Polish Senator’s Startling New Allegations About the CIA Torture Prison in Poland

[image error]In the long quest for accountability for those who ordered, authorized or were complicit in the Bush administration’s torture program, every avenue has been shut down within the US by the Obama administration, the Justice Department and the courts, and the only hope lies elsewhere in the world, and specifically Poland, one of three European countries that hosted secret CIA prisons, where “high-value detainees” were subjected to torture.

Whereas the other two countries — Romania and Lithuania — have either refused to accept that a secret prison existed, or have opened and then prematurely shut an investigation, Poland has an ongoing official investigation, which began four years ago and shows no sign of being dismissed, even if numerous obstacles to justice have been erected along the way.

Last week, two US news outlets — the Los Angeles Times and ABC News — reported the latest claim by Senator Jozef Pinior, who, as ABC News explained, told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that prosecutors “have a document that shows a local contractor was asked to build a cage at Stare Kiekuty,” the Polish army base that was used by the CIA as its main prison for “high-value detainees” from December 2002 (when the previous prison in Thailand was closed down) until September 2003, when, for six months, the main “high-value detainees” were held in a secret prison within Guantánamo, before being transferred back to facilities in Europe and Morocco. 14 “high-value detainees” were eventually returned to Guantánamo, as military prisoners, in September 2006.

“In a state with rights,” Pinior said, “people in prison are not kept in cages.” He added that a cage was “non-standard equipment” for a prison, but that it was standard “if torture was used there.” He was also asked “if he was sure the cage was for humans,” to which he replied, “What was it for? Exotic birds?”

Pinior said that he had not actually seen the order for the cage, but had learned that the prosecutor’s office investigating the prison, which is based in Krakow, has a copy of it. He also explained that the prosecutor’s office has an order signed by Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, who was the head of Polish intelligence in 2002, authorizing the establishment of the prison. ABC News claimed that a source told Gazeta Wyborcza that the agreement “has a space intended for an American signature, but that the Americans did not sign the document ‘because they do not want to sign documents inconsistent with their own Constitution and international law.’” That is a rather risible conclusion, as it is the use of torture that is “inconsistent with their own Constitution and international law.” A more honest analysis would have been that the US wanted plausible deniability; that, in other words, they did not want to leave any traces of their actions.

Pinior is a key player in the Polish investigation, as he worked on the EU investigation into European complicity in rendition and torture that preceded the Polish investigation, when he was first told about documents proving the prison’s existence, by a reliable source who explained that he had seen papers that dealt with the procedures to be followed in case any of the prisoners died — which, it should be noted, was not mentioned last week in the US reports.

For this, Pinior was ridiculed by an establishment that closed ranks to protect Alexander Kwasniewski and Leszek Miller, the President and the Prime Minister at the time of the prison’s existence, although with the passage of time Pinior and his source have come to be regarded as trustworthy, even though the official denials continue.

Pinior said that he presented his evidence “with regret,” because he “always valued” Kwasniewski’s presidency, but to date the only senior official to be charged is Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, who, as reported in March this year, has been charged with allowing prisoners of war to be subjected to corporal punishment. Siematkowski has publicly acknowledged that he is under investigation, but has refused to say more. Asked about the existence of the agreement, he said, “if my signature is on it, it means it is secret and I can not discuss it, nor even confirm or deny its existence.”

In the Los Angeles Times, there was speculation that the case might eventually “result in criminal charges” against the former political leaders, as well as Siemiatkowski. The paper noted that the story of the CIA’s secret torture prison on Polish soil “has deeply shaken many Poles’ faith in the United States and in Poland’s sense of itself as a successful democracy born from the ashes of the Cold War,” and has “damaged the reputation of the country that Poles thank for helping them to cast off Communist oppression.” It was also noted that many Poles “believe the US took advantage of their gratitude, loyalty and eagerness to please by setting up a torture site that it would never have allowed within its own borders.”

Mikolaj Pietrzak, a lawyer who represents Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, one of the men held in the “black site” in Poland, said, “It’s the kind of thing we expect from Soviet Russia. We remember the Soviet occupation; we remember the German occupation. The fact that this beacon of liberty which is America would allow this — it’s a great disappointment in the United States as the land of the free.”

In March, the current President of Poland, Bronislaw Komorowski, declared, “The reputation of Poland is at stake. Certainly this is a sensitive and touchy issue, and possibly painful for the Polish state, but it is the task of the legal apparatus to clarify this.”

Despite this, lawyers, journalists and human rights activists have complained that, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “the investigation has been halting, opaque and prone to political meddling because of its potential repercussions for US-Polish relations and for prominent public figures” involved in the establishment of the prison, most recently when, for reasons that have not been explained, the case was transferred from Warsaw to Krakow.

Mikolaj Pietrzak said that he was “frustrated by prosecutors’ refusal to give him access to classified files” beyond the brief access he was granted when the case began. His client, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of plotting the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, in 2000, which killed 17 US sailors, and is currently facing a trial by military commission at Guantánamo, where he faces the death penalty — a fact that makes Pietrzak even more frustrated with the glacial pace of the prosecutors’ case in Poland.

“It’s not a robust investigation if it takes you four years,” he said, adding, crucially, “This is the single worst case of human rights violations known in Eastern Europe in the last 20 years,” and that the public “has a right to know” what took place.

The exact contours of what took place do indeed need to be uncovered, to explain, for example, exactly who knew what. The Los Angeles Times noted that Polish reporters have suggested that Zbigniew Siemiatkowski “faces possible charges of exceeding his authority and abetting torture” by working with the CIA to establish the prison at Stare Kiejkuty. However, Adam Bodnar of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights said it was “hard to believe Siemiatkowski acted on his own authority in an operation requiring coordination among the intelligence service, the military and the border control agency,” although he understood that “chasing responsibility higher up the chain of command, perhaps all the way to the president’s and prime minister’s offices, could open a can of worms.”

He was also disturbed that some prominent Poles were defending the secret prison, including former President Lech Walesa, the former leader of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement, of which Jozef Pinior was also a member. Unlike Pinior, however, Walesa, while declaring that he is “against torture,” has also stated, “This is war, and war has its particular rules.” Bodnar lamented, “The same guys who helped create the constitution now seem to be approving the violation of the constitution.”

The Los Angeles Times also noted that some Polish commentators “fear negative repercussions for Poland’s relationship with its most valued ally, the US,” which, predictably, has failed to cooperate with the Polish prosecutors, although Mikolaj Pietrzak has vowed to continue to push for accountability, noting, as the paper put it, “If it turns out that senior Polish leaders are implicated in the end, causing political and social uproar, so be it.” As he explained, “The truth is going to come out sooner or later. The question is whether it’s going to come out thanks to Poland, thanks to the active role of the prosecutor, or whether it’s going to come out in spite of the prosecutor’s failure to act.” He added, “It is a hot potato, but I don’t care. This case isn’t going away.”

For now, the agreement about the establishment of the prison, which was handed over to prosecutors in April — and the information about the cage, which has just surfaced — demonstrates, not for the first time, that documents exist revealing what was supposed to remain hidden. My friend Anna Minkiewicz — who took me to Poland last February to tour the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with Polly Nash — explained further details that were not mentioned in the US accounts, and added her own interpretations.

Noting that the agreement that bore no US signature — just that of Zbigniew Siemiatkowski — was written in both English and Polish, she suggested that someone in the service kept the document in spite of it having no “official” value, either through bureaucratic zeal, for conscientious reasons, hoping that one day it would serve the purpose it is serving now, or out of a sense of self-preservation, pointing the blame on those who were culpable if the whole sordid scenario ever became public.

She also noted that the emergence of the latest documents suggested that someone was “regularly leaking documents in small doses,” and added that Jozef Pinior said that “more and more people are contacting him with information, including people who live in the area” where the prison was established, as well as the insiders with whom he has, presumably, been in communication for many years.

In conclusion, she explained that the current situation is particularly interesting, because, as a senator, Pinior has parliamentary immunity, and therefore cannot be stopped from speaking out, and it is to be hoped that, as more information continues to leak out, Senator Pinior will continue to point out that too much of a paper trail exists for this shameful episode in Poland and America’s recent history to be suppressed.

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 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.