Andy Worthington's Blog, page 169

My Photos on Flickr: The Isle of Dogs, the River Lea and the Olympics

The Isle of Dogs, the River Lea and the Olympics, a set on Flickr.

Regular readers will know that, after the rainiest spring in living memory, I found myself unable to stay in the house when the sun started shining again. My mission to take advantage of the good weather, and to take exercise and stretch my eyes and my mind beyond what I was beginning to regard as the confines of my computer, has resulted, over the last few months, in numerous journeys around London by bike. With my camera close at hand, the intention of these journeys has generally had less to do with getting from A to B than with wandering, getting lost and exploring.

I recently set up a Flickr account, initially posting photos of my trip to the US in January to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo, and of other protests in the UK, but this week I also began posting photos from my London journeys, beginning with a set of photos of my initial cycle journey around Deptford and Greenwich, and continuing here. Others will follow soon.

I am, I think, fulfilling a long dormant need to be in motion physically rather than constantly undertaking the mental journeys of the last five years of my life as a full-time freelance investigative journalist, and I am also at the beginning of a long project to travel — and photograph — the whole of London by bike. I have discovered that, as well as looking for spectacular views of the city that has been my home for 27 years, including many that I have never seen before, I am also in search of forgotten corners, and images of decay, often set against those of what is often termed “regeneration,” as well as the explosions of dissent and nonconformity and colour that are to be found in London’s street art.

I am also getting to know London as a huge living entity, in some ways dominated by history, in other ways expressing itself almost entirely in the present, and with its boroughs and neighbourhoods each having their own stories, and their own personalities.

Through it all runs the river, the sky and nature, although my journeys, more often that not, have also involved me reflecting on the place of property in London’s life — the ancient housing stock, largely gentrified, and in many places a magnet for the aspirational middle classes and those financing them and keeping a bubble alive beyond normal expectations; the council estates conceived by utopian, though often misguided town planners; and the remorseless modern developments that have left virtually no piece of land unclaimed in the capital, and which, over the last 30 years, have completely transformed the river, with new blocks and refurbished wharfs everywhere to the east of the City, on both the north and the south banks of the Thames.

On Tuesday, as a minor heatwave hit London, I decided to cycle down to the River Thames at Greenwich, and to take my bike through the foot tunnel that connects Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs, the home of Canary Wharf, Margaret Thatcher’s vision for a new City of London that really came in to its own under Tony Blair’s Labour government, when the boom years took off once more on the back of the kind of thinly-veiled criminality that has recently been exposed in the scandal of Barclays involvement in the illegal rigging of interest rates.

I had no plan when I set off, beyond a hope that I would be able to cycle alongside the Thames, and pursuing this plan became my latest adventure — taking me opposite the Millennium Dome, past Canary Wharf, and into Tower Hamlets — to pockets of decay and creativity where the River Lea feeds into the Thames — and, from there, to the Royal Docks, where some Olympic events will take place next month, and where the newly installed cable cars which can be used to cross the river from beside the Dome — and which are technically known as the Emirates AirLine — end their short but spectacular journey across the Thames.

It was here that my journey also ended, as my camera battery ran out, but I fully intend to revisit  the area soon, and to capture what I can of developments relating to the Olympics, as we count down to the start of the Games, less than a month from now. Anyone who read my article, Our Olympic Hell: A Militarised, Corporate, Jingoistic Disgrace, will know I have no love for the Olympics — and that, in particular, I find the orgy of spending on the Games to be morally indefensible when so many poor and vulnerable people are suffering ideologically imposed austerity cuts — but I am interested in how the Olympics site impacts on its surroundings, and what the security will be like as the start date approaches.

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.

The Saudi Gazette Urges President Obama to Close Guantánamo

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Note: Please feel free to visit the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I founded in January with the attorney Tom Wilner, and please join us to receive updates — just an email address required.

On Monday, in an editorial entitled, “Close Guantánamo,” which, I am pleased to note, drew on my recent report, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, the Saudi Gazette called for President Obama to honor his promise to close Guantánamo, which, of course, he made on his second day in office in January 2009, issuing an executive order promising that the prison would be closed within a year. As the editors urged, “This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. He still has six months in office and can right a wrong and set out to close Guantánamo which he pledged to do even before he became president.”

The Saudi Gazette also took unerring aim at the recent decision by the Supreme Court not to accept appeals by seven prisoners whose cases had been dismissed by politically motivated judges in the court of appeals in Washington D.C., which I wrote about here and here (and discussed on TV here and here). The judges, led by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who supported every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation under George W. Bush that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, have been rewriting the rules governing the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions to such an alarming extent that judges are now obliged to believe any dubious submission put forward as evidence by the government unless it can specifically be refuted, and, as a result, no prisoner has had his petition granted since July 2010.

The Saudi Gazette also claimed that defense secretary Robert Gates had “asked Obama to keep a little more than 100 detainees in indefinite detention … because they constituted an immediate danger to the security of the US but could not be put on trial” — a statement that requires some additional observations, and some corrections. The advice almost certainly came not from Gates but from the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama to review the cases of all the prisoners, whose final report recommended that 84 prisoners should either be tried or held indefinitely.

The Task Force indicated that 36 prisoners should be tried, and 48 should be held indefinitely — a disgraceful continuation of the specific policies introduced by President Bush, which President Obama shamefully adopted as official policy in March 2011, when he issued an executive order authorizing the indefinite detention of these 48 men — two of whom have now died at Guantánamo — because the supposed evidence against them is too weak or tainted to be used in a courtroom. That is a disgraceful concession to the damage wrought by George W. Bush on notions of justice and fairness, and it must one day be challenged, but first of all calls must be renewed — from the international community, as well as from within the US — for the 87 men who have been cleared for release to finally be freed from their otherwise unending and deeply disturbing legal limbo.

In the hope of contributing, however humbly, to this international awareness, I am cross-posting the Saudi Gazette‘s editorial below:

Close Guantánamo

Editorial, The Saudi Gazette, June 25, 2012

The US Supreme Court’s recent decision not to take a new look at the rights of foreign prisoners held for the past decade at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba effectively seals the fate of the 169 foreigners remaining in the notorious prison. Of those still stuck behind bars, 87 have been long-approved for release, some as far back as during the George W. Bush administration. The figure means that almost half of the prisoners still held at Guantánamo – men that the US government acknowledges it does not want to continue holding or to put on trial — have been waiting for their freedom for between four and eight years, a period which is as shocking as it is perplexing. And it appears they will have to wait even longer.

If President Obama was to be believed, today there would be no Guantánamo. After his inauguration in 2009 Obama announced the closure of Guantánamo within a year. The decision was received with much fanfare by human rights organizations in the US and abroad. But it appears that Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense in Bush’s second term and who was kept in his post by Obama, had a different opinion about closing Guantánamo. Gates is reported to have asked Obama to keep a little more than 100 detainees in indefinite detention there because they constituted an immediate danger to the security of the US but could not be put on trial since any court would dismiss whatever evidence had been secured against them on the grounds that it was extracted under duress. If these detainees were released, Gates said, they would rejoin Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups and attack the US again.

So Obama never kept his promise of closing Guantánamo, and in fact the White House hasn’t even tried. The US executive branch is allowed to abduct prisoners, detain them indefinitely, and decide unilaterally whether or not they are prisoners of war and whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to them — which is not a decision to be taken by individual countries.

Four years after pronouncing that Guantánamo detainees who face no charges have a right to challenge their ongoing confinement, the justices recently rejected appeals which argued that the federal appeals court in Washington has largely ignored the high court’s command. But by refusing to hear these cases, the Supreme Court abandons the promise of its own ruling guaranteeing detainees a constitutional right to a review of the legality of their detention.

This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. He still has six months in office and can right a wrong and set out to close Guantánamo which he pledged to do even before he became president. Perhaps Guantánamo is no longer in the news as when Obama was on the campaign trail. Still, Guantánamo must be closed and the remaining prisoners must be tried in US courts or repatriated. It is disappointing that Obama has not ended this failed experiment, for there is no detainee at Guantánamo who cannot be tried and should not be tried in the regular US federal courts system.

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.

Meet the Canadian Professor Who Has Been Teaching Omar Khadr at Guantánamo

Last week, lawyers for Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen and former child prisoner who has been imprisoned in Guantánamo for nearly ten years, held a press conference in Ottawa to complain about the Canadian government’s failure to honor a deal that was supposed to guarantee his return to Canada eight months ago.

It is to be hoped that the press conference has succeeded in putting pressure on the government — and particularly on Public Safety Minister Vic Toews — to stop procrastinating, and to secure Khadr’s return, as agreed in the plea deal he signed at his military commission in Guantánamo in October 2010, when he was told that he would serve one more year at Guantánamo, and then be returned to Canada to serve the last seven years of an eight-year sentence.

At the press conference, John Norris, one of Khadr’s Canadian civilian lawyers, explained that his client was “trying to pursue an education as part of his rehabilitation,” and his two US military lawyers — Lt. Col. Jon Jackson and Maj. Matthew Schwartz — explained that they had spent hundreds of hours with him, and described him as “an intelligent young man” who is quick to learn and has a “love of learning.” As the Toronto Star put it, “Schwartz taught him geography, history and practiced singing O Canada and the American anthem with him,” and “Jackson taught science and mathematics, and read Shakespeare, The Hunger Games and The Road [by Cormac McCarthy] with him.” Lt. Col. Jackson explained, “His insights into those books shows he gets it, he gets what it means to be a useful member of society.”

In my article last week, I explained that the lawyers’ descriptions correspond exactly with the findings of Arlette Zinck, an English professor at King’s University, a small Christian university in Edmonton, who was involved in an extraordinary exchange of letters with Khadr in the years before his plea deal, and who, it emerged this week, has actually been allowed to visit Guantánamo to play a major part in what the Calgary Herald described, with a predictable touch of paranoia, as “an effort to rehabilitate Khadr” — something that dangerous right-wingers in Canada argue is impossible, but that Zinck and Khadr’s lawyers know is not difficult at all.

He is “learning like a sponge,” Lt. Col. Jackson explained, speaking by phone from Washington D.C., and “revealing details” of two “highly unusual visits” to Guantánamo, by Arlette Zinck, in April and May this year. “The U.S. has an interest in him becoming an educated person,” Jackson added, noting that his government wants to “maximize the rehabilitation potential” before Khadr is sent back to Canada.

Jackson, it turns out, didn’t actually teach Khadr English, but “sat in on several lessons with Zinck.” He said of Khadr, “I was impressed by his native intelligence and his desire to learn,” and how quickly he worked.

Zinck first wrote to Khadr in November 2008, inspired, she said in 2010, by her Christian faith, which “asks people to comfort those in need, including prisoners.” This week, however, she particularly credited Dennis Edney, one of Khadr’s former civilian attorneys. She met Edney and Nate Whitling, Khadr’s other Canadian civilian attorney at the time, three years ago, as all three are from Edmonton. As a result of that meeting, Edney “encouraged Zinck to organize lessons for Khadr, whose formal schooling stopped in Grade 8.” Zinck explained, “Dennis gets 100 per cent of the credit.”

She added that she “never thought she would be able visit her unusual pupil” in Guantánamo, but was invited to spend a week at the prison, from April 23 to May 1, “meeting Khadr for six or seven hours a day doing lessons on Canadian novels such as Who Has Seen the Wind, by W.O. Mitchell and The Icefields, by Edmonton writer Thomas Wharton.” Next on the list, the Calgary Herald noted, is Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje.

Zinck then returned, staying from May 21 to May 24. She explained that Khadr “was chained to the floor during the lessons, which took place in a small interview room with military personnel present,” a sign of the prevailing obsession with security at the prison. Despite what were described as “the adverse prison conditions,” she said that her student was “diligent and dedicated” to his studies, and “an avid reader,” whose “progress is impressive.” In the Toronto Star, she added that, while mathematics is Khadr’s passion — and he described it as being “like oil for my rusty brain” — she believes he has a “poetic temperament.”

By way of explanation, she stated that, by the end of her second visit, “he was mastering the techniques of essay writing (on The Hunger Games novels) and learning to analyze the poetry of John Donne.” She also noted that he “continues to work on physics, math and biology,” and that he has “lessons on human psychology [and] social studies including the Canadian Constitution,” part of “a curriculum devised by a team of 15 Edmonton professors and cleared by the Guantánamo camp’s commanders,” as the Toronto Star explained, which is called “Educating Omar Khadr.” Zinck also sent a copy of the popular CBC TV program, “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” about a Muslim community in a fictional prairie town, which Khadr was given permission to watch.

She also explained that, in his first lesson, he read Obasan, a novel by Joy Kogawa, about the internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II. Zinck said that he “got to the heart of that story,” as he subsequently did with The Hunger Games, adding that he understands the “moral complexities of the novels.” The Toronto Star also noted that “Romeo and Juliet was a favourite to read aloud, with his 6’6” Pentagon lawyer [Jackson] playing the role of Juliet.”

John Norris, who was visiting Guantánamo at the time, also stopped by to teach Khadr about the Canadian Constitution. He said that he was “impressed by Khadr’s grasp of the functioning of Canadian courts,” where his lawyers won several important victories, all the way to the Supreme Court, demonstrating that his rights as a Canadian citizen had been violated in US custody. “He understood the liberal democratic values our system is based on,” Norris said, adding, “He also understood his is a political case.”

The Calgary Herald noted that Khadr had also impressed the US authorities in Guantánamo, because he “continued to ask for school work after he was transferred to a more isolated cell upon conviction.” Lt. Col. Jackson noted that none of the handful of other prisoners convicted in their trials by military commission — or who, like Khadr, had accepted plea deals — were making similar requests.

Zinck attributed this to his personality, but also to his age. “One of the more remarkable things about Omar,” she said, “is that he finds a way to stay positive and hopeful when many grown men would not. The energy and determination he puts into his studies is impressive, especially in the exceptionally difficult circumstances.”

She added that she was aware that “a vocal group of Canadians don’t want Khadr to return home” — people who “see him as a radicalized terrorist who is dangerous to the public,” and “don’t approve of the effort to rehabilitate him” — but they will be disappointed. Apart from the fact that he was born in Canada and is a Canadian citizen, and therefore cannot be prevented from returning to Canada, Zinck pointed out that the punishment brigade have failed to realize that “what she and the other professors are providing will be readily available when Khadr returns to a Canadian prison,” because “access to courses and academic upgrading is routine” in Canada, and “[r]ehabilitation is part of the Corrections Canada philosophy.”

In the Toronto Star, Zinck also pointed to her faith to explain “why she continues working with a prisoner who some Canadians hope remains locked in Guantánamo forever.” Speaking about her “duty as a human being,” she asked, paraphrasing Hamlet, “If each was treated according to his deserts, who among us would escape whipping?” and noted that she “prays regularly” for the children and widow of Sgt. Christopher Speer, the US Special Forces soldier who was killed in the firefight in July 2002 that led to Khadr’s capture. “This is not about the needs of one to the neglect of the other,” she said. “So to the many who say, ‘How can you be concerned about Omar? Haven’t you any Christian charity for the soldier’s wife?’ I say, you misunderstand me entirely.”

In the Toronto Star, Michelle Shephard also noted that the clinical psychologist Katherine Porterfield, who works at New York’s Bellevue Hospital and “has spent hundreds of hours working with Khadr over the years,” said that she was “amazed at Zinck’s rapport” with Khadr. “She has made a good student out of him,” Porterfield said. “I watched her do a lesson on world religion … They both talked about the depths of their faiths and how they overlapped and where they didn’t. It was so interesting.”

One evening, Zinck explained, she gave Khadr an assignment — to compare the themes in Obasan, The Hunger Games trilogy and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — and “made sure the lawyers and Porterfield did the homework, too.” The next day, at the presentation, Khadr was thoroughly “prepared and organized and thoughtful,” according to Zinck, who also explained, “He is a very morally centred person and could identify that in the literature. He just kicked their butts, frankly.”

I look forward to the day when Omar Khadr and Arlette Zinck can meet again in Canada, but for that to happen the Canadian government needs to stop dragging its heels on the deal to bring him home. As I noted last week, readers are encouraged to contact Vic Toews to demand Omar Khadr’s return to Canada.

Hill Office: House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6. 

Telephone: 613-992-3128, Fax: 613-995-1049

Email: vic.toews@parl.gc.ca  Website:  www.victoews.com

Constituency Office: 227 Main Street, Suite 8 (Main Office), Steinbach, Manitoba, R5G 1Y7.

Telephone: 204-326-9889, Fax: 204-346-9874.

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: Deptford and Greenwich, May 2012

Deptford and Greenwich, May 2012, a set on Flickr.

The latest set of photos I have posted to my new Flickr account is something of a departure for me, after my three US photosets and a UK protest set: the first instalment of a regular, ongoing series in which my intention is to visit — by bike — as much of London as possible, and to photograph whatever takes my interest: trees, rivers, skies, architecture and street art, derelict places, industrial sites, decay, hubris, forgotten corners and unusual juxtapositions.

I have been a cyclist from an early age, and first began taking photos around the age of 17, a passion that I let slip for many years, after my last analogue camera gave up the ghost, and that I did not renew — apart from regularly hijacking my wife’s camera on holidays — until she bought me a digital camera at Christmas: the small and attractive Canon Ixus 115 HS.

On May 11, when the sun started shining after the wettest spring in living memory, I found myself unable to stay indoors, and began to cycle — at first, as this set shows, down the hill from my home in Brockley, in south east London, to Greenwich and Deptford, and, as future sets will reveal, also around Brockley, Lewisham, Hither Green, Lee, Catford, to Forest Hill and on to Dulwich, and along the Thames north and south of the river.

My intention is eventually to branch out and to cycle the whole of London, although that is dependent on there being a wealth of sunny weather, and on having enough time to balance my writing with what I have discovered is a need for exercise and also for exploring my creativity through visual means. It is a journey of discovery — or discoveries — for me, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

There’s hopefully something for everyone — from the restored Cutty Sark in Greenwich, where the Navy’s biggest warship was briefly moored as part of the militaristic run-up to the Olympics, to Deptford Creek, where pockets of industry still survive the encroachment of huge riverside housing developments, offering “lifestyle choices” at colossal expense, and where sly street artists post ironic and satirical commentary on the cruelty and hypocrisy of the times that most of us are being obliged to endure. I have a particular fondness for the image of David Cameron, which was just a few inches high, but was completely captivating — and, I believe, expresses a truth about what it really means to decide to crush the welfare state, and to return to the Victorian notions of the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor” that led to eugenics, and, eventually, to the social “solutions” of Adolf Hitler.

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.

On 25th Anniversary of UN Convention Against Torture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Lawyers Submit Case to Rapporteur

Exactly 25 years ago, on June 26, 1987, the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment came into force, and in December 1997, the UN General Assembly proclaimed June 26 the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, “with a view to the total eradication of torture and the effective functioning of the Convention against Torture.”

As is painfully clear today, despite the support of 150 countries, the use of torture is still rife, and many of the countries that claim to adhere to the Convention have, in fact, shown a cynical — and in some cases blatant — disregard for its provisions.

One of those countries is, of course, the United States of America, which, under President George W. Bush, cynically attempted to redefine torture so that it could be used on “high-value detainees” seized in the “war on terror” in a network of secret prisons, and, moreover, withdrew the protections of the Geneva Conventions from the prisoners in Guantánamo, who were also tortured, and also tortured prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq — most notoriously in Bagram, the “Dark Prison” and the “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, although its use was also widespread at other locations in Iraq.

To date, no one — beyond a few low-level personnel who did not design the abusive detention and interrogation regime that was introduced after 9/11 — has been held accountable for these crimes, and in the meantime, numerous torture victims — including 13 of the 14 “high-value detainees” who were delivered to Guantánamo in September 2006 from secret torture prisons run by the CIA, where they had been held for up to four and a half years — remain imprisoned, with no indication, for most of them, of when, if ever, they will even receive a trial.

One man who has been put forward for a trial is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, who, last month, was arraigned for his planned trial by military commission with four other “high-value detainees.” He, notoriously, was subjected to waterboarding — a form of controlled drowning and an ancient torture technique, regardless of the opinion of bent lawyers at the Justice Department — on 183 occasions.

This is an uncomfortable truth that two successive administrations — first that of George W. Bush, and now that of Barack Obama — have been trying to work out how to keep hidden during a trial, with the result that no one is in any hurry to actually have him tried.

Today, in recognition of the importance of the UN Convention Against Torture, his attorneys — who describe him as Khalid Shaikh Mohammad — revealed that on the eve of his arraignment on May 5, 2012, they filed a Letter of Allegation under the Convention Against Torture with Dr. Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment.

Army Capt. Jason Wright, one of the military lawyers detailed to represent Mr. Mohammed, explained that “No human being should be tortured. In the period since 9/11, the US has misplaced its moral compass. Through accountability, we can hopefully find our way again, and pursue a path of rediscovery and redemption.”

In a statement, Mohammed’s lawyers also noted, “Under Special Rapporteur procedures, a Letter of Allegation is the first step in a UN investigation of claims of torture. The Letter of Allegation asks the Special Rapporteur to ‘initiate a full, fair, and impartial inquiry’ into the conduct of the United States and any other potentially complicit State Party to the Convention.”

This is an important submission, as it is crucial to remember that the prohibition on the use of torture is absolute — not to be used on anyone, even the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. In America’s case, it remains a disgrace that John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee cynically bent the law out of shape in a wretchedly unprincipled attempt to redefine torture, that neither they nor the senior officials who also approved the use of torture (up to and including George W. Bush) have been held accountable, and that the US completely disregarded Article 2.2 of the Convention — the one that is particularly applicable to the aftermath of a disaster like 9/11 — which states, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Below are the first two pages of the submission by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyers:

Subject: Letter of Allegation Against the U.S. and any Other Undisclosed Potentially-Complicit State Party

Dear Mr. Méndez,

We are the defense attorneys for Mr. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, a Pakistani national who has been tortured by the U.S. Government.

After subjecting Mr. Mohammad to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment following his capture on March 1, 2003  in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the U.S. Government has silenced him. No one without a Top Secret security clearance is allowed to meet with him or speak to him. His defense attorneys are told to treat his every word as “presumptively Top Secret,” especially if it relates to: allegations involving (i) the location of secret detention facilities, (ii) the identity of potentially cooperating foreign governments, (iii) the identity of U.S. or foreign personnel involved in the capture, detention, transfer, or interrogation of detainees, (iv) interrogation techniques as applied to specific detainees, and (v) conditions of confinement. The U.S. Government will not even allow Mr. Mohammad to speak with his own family.

On April 4, 2012, the U.S. Government evinced its intent to impose the final silence on Mr. Mohammad. Prosecutors formalized capital charges against him and seek to execute him, after conducting a trial — a trial that lacks legitimacy to such an extent that were he to be acquitted, the U.S. would not release him, but would hold him indefinitely until he dies of natural causes.

“For generations, America has served as a beacon of hope and freedom for those outside her borders.” — Spencer Bachus

Sadly, this is no longer true. The U.S. has demonstrated to the World that it can act with impunity outside her borders, and has sanctioned torture practices for States that will define this century. For the current generation of “those outside her borders,” America’s beacon is now Guantánamo — not the shining torch on the hill, but a siren of detention and despair.

The U.S. Government seeks to close this painful and dark chapter in our Nation’s history by killing Mr. Mohammad after a show trial.

There is a better way. This chapter can end in hope — hope for torture victims around the world that even powerful States like the U.S. can be held accountable for torture.

We hope that this Letter of Allegation against the U.S. and any other alleged, undisclosed potentially-complicit State Party will initiate a full, fair, and impartial inquiry. We submit the attached Letter of Allegation as Mr. Mohammad’s defense attorneys to stop the politics of impunity — no human, be they inside or outside America’s borders, should be subject to torture, and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. We invite you to meet with Mr. Mohammad in Guantánamo Bay at your earliest possible opportunity in furtherance of this important inquiry.

Should you accept this important Letter of Allegation, we expect that the U.S. Government may deny you confidential access to Mr. Mohammad in violation of the Convention Against Torture. If this is the case, please keep us apprised of the situation so that we may assist as appropriate and necessary.

Respectfully Submitted,

Counsel for Mr. Mohammad

David Nevin

Lead Defense Counsel

Nevin Benjamin McKay & Bartlett, LLP

Derek A. Poteet

Major, U.S. Marine Corps

Defense Counsel

Department of the Defense

Office of the Chief Defense Counsel

Jason D. Wright

Captain, U.S. Army

Defense Counsel

Department of the Defense

Office of the Chief Defense Counsel

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.

The Housing Crisis and the Gulf Between the Rich and the Poor: Half of UK Workers Earn Less Than £14,000 A Year

Note: For US readers, £14,000 is approximately $22,000.

In a new series, Breadline Britain, the Guardian is examining how the Tory-led government’s cuts are impacting on British families and individuals, and on the first day of the ongoing series, Amelia Hill provided an overview of the project, which has involved the Guardian commissioning a comprehensive study  of the household finances of those in employment (or who are self-employed). As her introductory article explained:

Almost 7 million working-age adults are living in extreme financial stress, one small push from penury, despite being in employment and largely independent of state support … Unlike the “squeezed middle”, these 3.6m British households have little or no savings, nor equity in their homes, and struggle at the end of each month to feed themselves and their children adequately. They say they are unable to cope on their current incomes and have no assets to fall back on, leaving them vulnerable to something as simple as an unexpectedly large fuel bill.

Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead and former welfare minister, told the Guardian, “These figures are a mega-indictment on the mantra of both political parties, that work is the route out of poverty. What’s shocking about this is that these are people who want to work and are working but who, despite putting their faith in the politicians’ mantra, find themselves in another cul-de-sac. Recent welfare cuts and policy changes make it difficult to advise these people where they should turn to get out of it: it really is genuinely shocking.”

Bruno Rost, the head of Experian Public Sector, which conducted the research, and removed households in the “most deprived” categories from the findings, focusing instead solely on those who are working but “are nevertheless suffering high levels of financial stress,” said the group under scrutiny were “traditionally proud, self-reliant, working people”, who “are the new working class — except the work they do no longer pays.” He added, “These people say that being forced to claim benefits or move into a council property would be the worst kind of social ignominy and self-failure.”

Importantly, the Guardian‘s research has established that the Tories’ simplistic and deceptive claims — that there is either work (good) or benefits (bad) — is shockingly inaccurate. “Challenging the government’s claim that people are better off in work than on benefits,” Amelia Hill explained, “the exclusive research found that 2.2 million children live in families teetering on an economic cliff-edge — despite one or both adults earning a low to middle income. The households in trouble include couples without children who earn a gross annual income of between £12,000 and £29,000, or couples with two children on between £17,000 and £41,000.” She also explained that the research reveals that “having a job is no protection against homelessness and destitution in modern-day Britain.”

The findings echoed a recent report by Oxfam, noting that, as the Guardian put it, “more people in poverty were working than unemployed and the number in work but claiming housing benefit had more than doubled since 2005, to nearly 900,000″ — an alarming statistic in and of itself, but all the more alarming with the realisation that the Tory-led coalition government is savagely axing the benefits needed to keep poorer working families afloat. Oxfam added that people who were working but struggling to survive “were increasingly turning to charities for help,” and that thousands more were “accessing food banks this year than last.”

On Friday, the Guardian produced an interactive page in which, when you enter details of your income and family circumstances, you can find out where you stand financially in the UK as a whole — whether you are in poverty, on the edge of poverty, in the squeezed middle, comfortable, well-off, rich or super-rich.

This is a fascinating project, but what impressed me the most was that it contained a graph (click to enlarge) showing how much people earn, which, significantly, demonstrates the problem with the much-quoted average income in the UK. As the Daily Telegraph noted in November, “The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that the average gross salary for full-time employees was £26,200 in 2011.”

In contrast, the graph presented by the Guardian shows that the median income — after tax — is a much more startling £14,000 a year, meaning that half the working population earn less than this amount. It is also clear from the graph that over 15 percent of all workers are below the poverty line — earning less than 60% of the median income (around £8,400, which is roughly the amount a full-time worker on the minimum wage — £5.20 an hour — takes home).

I was interested in how this situation corresponded with the housing situation in the UK, where, as the Guardian reported last Tuesday, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that the average UK house price was £229,000, but with significant regional variation. In London for example, the average house price is £388,000.

A couple on the median income — on £28,000 a year — are therefore excluded from entering the housing market as at no other time in living memory (or, as Shelter put it in a disturbing analysis of the housing crisis), “The UK is now more polarised by housing wealth than at any time since the Victorian era”), as can easily be appreciated from the traditional multiplier (3.5 times income) that was traditionally used to calculate the affordability of a mortgage (and is still a sensible indicator). Even with tax included in the median household income, taking it to around £34,000 a year, that makes an affordable house one that costs £120,000 — almost half the average cost of a house in the UK, and less than a third of the average cost of a house in London.

People don’t need to own their own houses, of course, but unaffordability also stalks the rental market. As I explained in an article last month, Rents Out of Control: How Londoners Are Being Fleeced by Greedy Landlords:

[I]n March, Shelter [the charity for housing and homelessness] reported that “renting a two-bedroom home in London is unaffordable for families earning less than £52,000 a year,” and, that “in eight London boroughs, including Hackney and Tower Hamlets, families would need to earn more than £60,000 a year.”

Shelter also established that “almost one in four London families now rents from a private landlord — an increase of 70 per cent in the past two years,” and discovered that “the rate of inflation on private rents in London was seven per cent in 2011, almost double the rate of inflation on the average London wage,” meaning that, with the typical London household income at less than £35,000 a year, “growing numbers of families are at crisis point, paying up to half of their income in rent each month as they struggle to continue living and working in the capital.”

Shelter’s report is here, and what is particularly clear from any study of the private rented sector is how completely unregulated it remains, after controls were removed under Margaret Thatcher, and how unscrupulous landlords are now pushing up rents to levels that are even higher than mortgages — especially in London and the south east.

Also under attack from the government is social housing — cynically and inappropriately described as subsidised housing — which has never recovered from Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy program, and the ban on councils building new social housing with the proceeds. The sector, which deals with around 3.6 million properties (with 1.4 million run by housing associations, according to 2005 data) has seen under-investment in new builds for many years, and is now suffering from government demands, in the Affordable Rent Programme, that rents for new tenancies be set at 80 percent of the cost of market rents — which will add to the strain on poorer workers, and, perversely, to the housing benefit bill.

In another ludicrous policy, more housing chaos will become apparent next April, when, as the Guardian described it, “tens of thousands of people living in social housing will have to find more money to pay for their accommodation or leave their homes.” Under the government’s ill-thought out and inflexible plans (although this is a description that is true of almost all their policies), social tenants “will have their housing benefit cut by £40 a month if they have a spare room and by £70 if they have two spare rooms,” or they can opt to be rehoused. At first glance, it perhaps sounds reasonable to try and address under-occupation in social housing, but many housing associations have, apparently in vain, warned the government that they have “a dearth of suitable homes” to rehouse tenants who “have received letters informing them that they may have to switch to smaller properties” — nearly 100,000 in total.

To cite just two examples, Iain Sim, the chief executive of Coast & Country, based in the north east, said his company “had 2,500 ‘under-occupiers’ but only 16 spare one-bedroom homes on its books,” and Monica Burns, north-east manager for the National Housing Federation, which represents England’s housing associations, called the new rules “futile and unfair.” She said, “Housing associations in the north-east have always been encouraged by government to build bigger homes so families could live in the same homes for life.” She also “warned the welfare bill could rise as social housing tenants migrated to the private sector,” explaining, “The government will then have to pay a higher rate of housing benefit to cover their rents for smaller homes,” and adding, “These are the consequences of a blanket policy that failed to listen to local people.”

Personally, I find it cruel that people with children will no longer have security of tenure under these plans, and will be required to move, for example, the moment a child leaves home. The Guardian also noted that, under the new rules, “children of the same sex will be required to share a room up to age 16, while those of different sex will have to share up to age 10.” This might sound reasonable, but in fact overcrowding is already at epidemic levels in social housing (although it is never mentioned in the mainstream media), and it strikes me as inconceivable that the rules can or will actually be enforced.

The ongoing effects of an overpriced, but artificially sustained housing sector in London and the south east — and the residue of Labour’s housing bubble elsewhere in the country — are causing widespread misery. As the Guardian also explained last month, data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed that, in 2011, almost 3 million people aged 20-34 were living with their parents, an increase of 20% (or around 600,000 people) on the figures for 1997, when Tony Blair’s government presided over the start of what would become an unprecedented housing bubble, one that has not been allowed to burst, and that is still hideously over-inflated in any areas of substantial employment.

The Guardian explained that, although the ONS stated that there were “a number of reasons why 1.8 million young men and 1.1 million young women were now living with their parents,” including “higher university costs, increasing rents and a credit squeeze,” it was “noteworthy that the increase over the past decade coincides with an increase in the average price paid by first-time homebuyers of 40% between 2002 and 2011.”

Earlier this month, the Observer also reported the dismal news that millions of young families “are entering an era of insecurity in which renting becomes the norm,” according to a Cambridge University study, commissioned by the independent Resolution Foundation and Shelter, which “warns of steep increases in the number of parents unable to buy their own homes,” and states that, “if the British economy remains stagnant, just over one in four people — 27% — will be in ‘mortgaged home ownership’ by 2025, compared with 43% in 1993-94 and 35% now.”

“Most alarmingly,” the article noted, “it is no longer just young, single people who are locked out of the property market and forced into an under-regulated rental sector due to rising house prices, falling real wages and banks that are unwilling to lend,” and explained, “The same difficulties are now besetting families with children, many of whom are paying half or more of their income in rent and, as a result, have little or nothing left at the end of the month to save for a deposit.”

The Observer added that, in the last five years, “the number of families with children having to rent private accommodation has soared by 86% — more than double the increase across all households (41%).”

The report also predicted that, without some sort of major economic upturn (something that is difficult to envisage in the West as a whole, but impossible to imagine under this wretched government) the shift from ownership to renting “will continue apace for more than a decade,” and “[t]he increase in the proportion of families with children who are renting privately will be most stark in London … rising from 25% now to 33% by 2025. Overall, it predicts that more than a third (36%) of British households will be renting by 2025.”

Realistically, there is only one answer to this growing epidemic of squeezed families and individuals, and increasing poverty, misery and homelessness, and that is to initiate a massive home-building programme — of genuinely affordable, not-for-profit social housing — with government support, creating much-needed economic demand in the economy, and much-needed jobs for the legions of the unemployed, and especially the young unemployed (over a million aged between 16 and 24).

To do that, of course, we need to depose the idiots and scoundrels currently clinging to power through their discredited coalition government, and — it would appear — either re-programme Labour politicians, or set up a whole new political movement.

This is a pretty serious demand — but just look at the alternative: doing nothing and watching the country sink into an economic death spiral, as the tax-evading criminal class — of politicians, bankers, businessmen and women, and unscrupulous celebrities — hide their loot in global tax havens, and the rest of us die a slow death.

Note: For another good analysis, see Polly Toynbee’s most recent Guardian article here.

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.

Bring Omar Khadr Home: His Lawyers Demand His Return to Canada from 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.

Frustrated that Omar Khadr, the only Canadian citizen in Guantánamo, is still detained, eight months after he was supposed to be returned to Canada under the terms of a plea deal negotiated in October 2010, his US and Canadian lawyers — and the Canadian Senator Romeo Dallaire — held a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday to demand that the Canadian government honors its part of the agreement and secures Khadr’s return to Canada, the country of his birth.

Khadr was seized in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan where he had been taken by his father, Ahmed Khadr, who is generally described as a fundraiser for Osama bin Laden. At the time of his capture he was just 15 years old, and should have been rehabilitated, under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories.

Instead, however, he was horribly abused in US custody, and abandoned by the Canadian government. In October 2010, under the terms of the plea deal, he accepted that he had killed US Special Forces soldier Sgt. Christopher Speer, who died in a grenade attack during the firefight, and that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who had no right to engage in combat with US forces at all, even though there is serious doubt about the claim that he threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer, and even though his confession effectively established a scenario in which the US claimed that it was illegal to raise arms against US forces in a war zone.

Nevertheless, in exchange for his confession, Khadr was assured that he would serve an eight-year sentence, and would be returned to Canada after the first year of that sentence was served in Guantánamo.

That is the agreement that has not been honored by the Canadian government, and that led Khadr’s lawyers, and Senator Dallaire, to complain publicly on Thursday.

John Norris, one of his Canadian civilian lawyers (along with Brydie Bethell), told the press conference, as CBC News described it, “The Canadian government has consistently failed to live up to its obligations to Omar Khadr. While Omar, a child, was trapped in a place that has been condemned around the world, the Canadian government stood idly by and said simply, ‘We will let the process run its course.’ Well, that process has now long run its course. In October of 2010, Canada committed to return Omar to complete his sentence in Canada after he served one additional year in Guantánamo Bay. Yet today, he still sits in a cell in Guantanamo, eight months after he was eligible to return to Canada.”

His Pentagon-appointed defence lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, launched what the Toronto Star described as “a scathing critique of Ottawa’s behavior in the case.”

“The ‘Khadr effect’ is alive and well in Guantánamo Bay,” he told the press conference, explaining that Canada’s “stonewalling” on what he and the other lawyers described as “a commitment in a diplomatic note to the US,” at the time the plea deal was signed, “amounts to failing an ally as well as a dereliction of its duty to a Canadian citizen.”

Lt. Col. Jackson also reiterated an important diplomatic point that has been repeatedly mentioned in reports about Khadr over the last few months — that Canada’s stance means that US military prosecutors and defense lawyers “are unable to secure plea bargains with other detainees who don’t believe deals will be honoured because of Canada’s inaction.”

In Lt. Col. Jackson’s words, “There is a great deal of frustration” amongst US personnel at Guantánamo. He said that a senior US official had said to him, “When the hell is Omar going back to Canada?” and he added, “You made a deal. Honor the deal.” He also said, “Canada must honor the agreement it had with Omar Khadr and return him immediately to Canada.”

Lt. Col. Jackson also took the opportunity to humanize Khadr, which is hugely important in breaking through the wall of horrendous prejudice that exists in Canada, where the Canadian people’s often-claimed differences with the US are not at all apparent in Khadr’s case. His humanity is something that his lawyers have worked at explaining over the years, and it has also been revealed in the extraordinary exchange of letters between Khadr and Canadian university professor Arlette Zinck, and runs through the new book, Omar Khadr, Oh Canada, edited by Janice Williamson, featuring 400 pages of contributions by “leading legal experts, poets, novelists, sociologists, political scientists, essayists, playwrights, documentarians, military experts, diplomats, human rights activists, communications scholars, and literary critics.”

“He is not a threat,” Lt. Col. Jackson told reporters, adding, “My government is not known for being soft on terrorism. The US would never agree to transfer a detainee, especially to an ally, if they believed that that detainee was in any way a threat.” He also explained, “I’ve spoken to dozens of guards and staff at Guantánamo Bay and they all say the same thing about Omar Khadr. It needs to be clear to Canadians: He’s a good kid and he deserves a chance at life.” He also noted that he didn’t know why Ottawa was dragging its feet, but that he “understands public skepticism” because, as he put it, “the politics of fear work. Scaring people works.”

Explaining that they were painting “a more personal portrait” of Khadr “to show Canadians he deserves their support,” the lawyers pointed out that, since agreeing to his plea deal, Khadr has been “in restrictive post-conviction custody,” providing him with “limited movement or interaction with other inmates.” As they also noted, “He sits shackled by his feet in a cell most of the day,” and John Norris explained that he was “trying to pursue an education as part of his rehabilitation.”

The two US military lawyers — Maj. Matthew Schwartz as well as Lt. Col. Jackson — “have more access” to Khadr, and have spent hundreds of hours with him. They described him as “an intelligent young man” who is quick to learn and has a “love of learning,” which corresponds exactly with Arlette Zinck’s findings.

As the Toronto Star put it, “Schwartz taught him geography, history and practiced singing O Canada and the American anthem with him,” and “Jackson taught science and mathematics, and read Shakespeare, The Hunger Games and The Road [by Cormac McCarthy] with him.” Lt. Col. Jackson explained, “His insights into those books shows he gets it, he gets what it means to be a useful member of society.”

In a CTV News article, it was noted that Lt. Col. Jackson also said, “It’s been a joy to see him as a student, he has such a love of learning which is something I think is important when you look at what someone’s going to be like when they do get out of prison.”

Lt. Col. Jackson also said, “I believe actions speak louder than words,” and explained that, in 15 years as a military lawyer, he had “represented radical jihadis and soldiers who’ve committed crimes,” but Khadr was not like them. “He is a good person with a good heart and he wants to get an education and make a positive difference in society,” he said. “Could he fool me and could he fool hundreds of guards over a 10-year period? I guess it’s possible. But at the end of the day we rely on what we see and how we interact with Omar.”

In responding to the lawyers’ appeal, the Canadian government still showed no signs of doing anything other than dragging its heels for as long as possible. Spokespeople for the Canadian government have long contended that the government “never gave a guarantee, only that it would ‘favourably’ consider Khadr’s transfer,” and Khadr’s lawyers were advised in a letter on Wednesday that the government still hasn’t made a decision regarding Khadr’s repatriation. As the CBC News website described it, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews “said again Wednesday there was nothing new to say about the case.,” and stated, “I’ve made no decision in that. I’ll make a decision in due course, in accordance with the law.”

Khadr’s lawyers said this was “the first word … they’d heard in months of trying to determine the reason behind the delay,” but were unimpressed. The diplomatic note between the US and Canada, they say, “may have been couched in the language of legal treaties,” but Lawrence Cannon, who was the Foreign Affairs Minister at the time of Khadr’s trial, vowed to “implement the deal” in a statement to Parliament in November 2010.

John Norris added that Khadr’s legal team were “now considering launching another legal action in Federal Court to force the Canadian government to live up to its word.”

Lt. Col. Jackson also lamented, “The United States and Canada are supposed to be the good guys. We’re supposed to stand for human rights, dignity and the rule of law, and the cornerstone of the foundation on which the rule of law is built is honoring your agreements.”

In addition, Senator Dallaire, who, as CBC News put it, “has advocated on behalf of child soldiers,” pointed out that Khadr “was recruited as a 13-year-old and since his arrest following the Afghan battle has clearly had his human rights violated.” He also “called on the government to explain the delay in bringing him back,” asking, “Why not tell us outright why you don’t want him back?”

We all know why, I’m sure. No one in the government is in a hurry to repatriate Omar Khadr, because they don’t want to. Forget Khadr’s rights, trampled by his government. Forget Canada’s obligation to rehabilitate child soldiers, and its work doing just that with child soldiers from other countries. Omar Khadr was a child and a victim of his father’s militancy when he was shot, tortured and taken to Guantánamo, but the Canadian government doesn’t want to know.

Thursday’s press conference was a useful reminder to the world of the Canadian government’s disgraceful and unjustifiable position regarding Omar Khadr. I can only wonder how much more shame and indignation must be expressed before ministers finally fulfil their obligations and free him from his long ordeal in US custody.

Note: Please contact Vic Toews to demand Omar Khadr’s return to Canada. 

Hill Office: House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6. 

Telephone: 613-992-3128, Fax: 613-995-1049

Email: vic.toews@parl.gc.ca Website: www.victoews.com

Constituency Office: 227 Main Street, Suite 8 (Main Office), Steinbach, Manitoba, R5G 1Y7.

Telephone: 204-326-9889, Fax: 204-346-9874.

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.

Andy Worthington’s Photos on Flickr: Protest 2012 – Guantánamo, Aafia Siddiqui and Shaker Aamer

Protest 2012 – Guantánamo, Aafia Siddiqui and Shaker Aamer, a set on Flickr.

Since setting up my new Flickr account last week, I’ve posted three sets of photos from my US tour in January, to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison – in New York, on the national day of action in Washington D.C., and in San Francisco and Chicago.

This latest set contains photos from a number of campaigns and protests in which  I’ve been involved this year, since I returned from the US — my visit to Brussels to show “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (the film I co-directed with Polly Nash) at the European Parliament, and two protests in London — a rally for the imprisoned Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui outside the US embassy in London on the 9th anniversary of her initial disappearance in Pakistan, and a protest outside Parliament calling for the return to the UK from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. Other protests — with UK Uncut and Occupy London — can be found here, here, here and here.

My thanks to the MEPs Jean Lambert, Sarah Ludford and Ana Gomes, for their persistence in exposing the injustices of Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” and to the Justice for Aafia Coalition and the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign for their hard work on behalf of Dr. Siddiqui and Shaker Aamer.

For US Independence Day on July 4, Aafia Siddiqui’s family has launched an urgent initiative requesting that supporters send postcards to the US State Department calling for the release of Aafia Siddiqui, to bring to an end her unjust 86-year sentence. As the campaign notes, “We request all postcards are sent by 4th July 2012, to coincide with Independence Day, where the concepts of freedom and liberty are celebrated in the US.” Copies can be downloaded from the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition, and readers in the UK can get postcards sent to them by emailing info@justiceforaafia.org.

For Shaker Aamer, cleared for release from Guantánamo for over five years, but trapped by the inactivity of both the US and UK governments, those who are interested in trying to secure his return to the UK are requested to sign an e-petition to the UK government, which needs 100,000 signatures by next April to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate. Only British citizens and residents can sign it, but anyone anywhere in the world can sign the international petition on the Care 2 Petition Site, which will be delivered to both the US and UK governments when it reaches 10,000 signatures.

I hope you enjoy the photos. More will be coming soon, from my visit to Kuwait in February to raise awareness of the plight of the last two Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantánamo, Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah.

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.

Still No Accountability for Torture

Last week, the bad news from the Supreme Court was not just manifested in the court’s decision to abdicate its responsibilities towards the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by turning down appeals submitted by seven of the 169 men still held, although that was a dreadful decision, establishing, as it did, that the D.C. Circuit Court could continue in its mission to extinguish the habeas corpus rights that had been granted to the prisoners by the Supreme Court in June 2008.

However, it was also accompanied by a refusal to consider an appeal by Jose Padilla, the US citizen held as an “enemy combatant” in a military brig on the US mainland for three and half years from June 2002 to November 2005, and tortured, particularly through the use of prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation.

On May 2, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in California, reversed a lower court decision (PDF) allowing Padilla to pursue a lawsuit against John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the notorious “torture memos,” in which he cynically attempted to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA. Padilla — and his mother, Estela Lebron — sought to hold Yoo “liable for damages they allege they suffered” during his “unlawful” detention, which was “in violation of his constitutional and statutory rights,” but the court disagreed. As Scott Horton explained for Harper’s Magazine:

The Ninth Circuit granted Yoo immunity, concluding that the law surrounding torture was so muddled when he dispensed his advice that he should be given the benefit of the doubt. The best authority the judges could muster for this outlandish perspective was a European Court of Human Rights decision from 1978, which found that a series of grim techniques used by Britain against Irish internees was not torture — rather it was “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

This, however, was not the appeal that was turned down by the Supreme Court. The appeal in question followed a ruling on January 23, in which the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar lawsuit (PDF) by Padilla and his mother against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, former DoD General Counsel William J. Haynes II, former DIA director Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, as well as Leon Panetta, and two commanders of the brig where Padilla was held.

Padilla and his mother sought “a declaration that defendants’ policies were unconstitutional,” and “nominal damages of one dollar from each defendant,” in a case which was initiated in February 2007 and dismissed by the District Court in February 2011, even though Padilla clearly had a valid argument when he stated that Rumsfeld and the other defendants “formulated an unconstitutional policy for detaining enemy combatants in the war on terrorism, which included the legal defense of that designation and the harsh interrogation measures used pursuant thereto.”

In refusing to accept Padilla’s appeal, the judges stated that “[t]he designations of persons and groups as special threats to national security may be subject to a variety of checks and to habeas corpus proceedings,” but “they are not reviewable by the judiciary by means of implied civil actions for money damages.”

Claiming that its remit does not extend to “national security” problems like the torture of a US citizen may have been convenient for the Fourth Circuit court — and now, it seems, to the Supreme Court as well — but, as David Cole explained in the New York Review of Books after the May ruling in Padilla’s case against John Yoo, the end result is that judges have refused to accept any responsibility for the victims of torture, even though, as his lawyers explained, “the state cannot treat anyone, even someone convicted of the most heinous of crimes, the way it treated Padilla, who had not even been charged, much less convicted, of anything at the time.”

As David Cole continued:

For support, Padilla’s lawyers pointed to multiple precedents prohibiting mistreatment of anyone held in detention: convicted prisoners, pretrial detainees, and those held in preventive detention as sexual predators. Under these precedents, they reasoned, it was clear that if a federal prison warden had treated even a death row inmate convicted of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the way Padilla was treated, his actions would plainly violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. If a suspect in a serial murder case were subjected to similar treatment pre-trial, it would clearly violate the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. It has long been clear that the Constitution strictly forbids the intentional infliction of physical pain on anyone in the government’s custody.

Responding to the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider Padilla’s appeal, Ben Wizner of the ACLU, who worked on the case, lamented, “The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider Jose Padilla’s case leaves in place a blank check for government officials to commit any abuse in the name of national security, even the brutal torture of an American citizen in an American prison.”

Wizner added, “To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture regime has received his day in court,” and that is certainly true. In February, in the ABA Journal (the magazine of the American Bar Association), Leslie A. Gordon wrote about two other cases, which, at the time, were still ongoing — Doe v. Rumsfeld, in which, using the pseudonym John Doe, a former military translator, who is also a US citizen and a civilian, claimed to have been abducted and tortured by US forces at Camp Cropper, one of the major US military prisons in Iraq. In August 2011, the US District Court in Washington D.C. denied Rumsfeld’s motion to dismiss Doe’s claims.

The other case is Vance v. Rumsfeld, in which Donald Vance, a former US Navy veteran, who was working as a security contractor in Iraq, was also detained at Camp Cropper after being seized by US soldiers at the company where he worked, even though it was he who had alerted the FBI to the possibility of illegal weapons trading at the company. A week after the Doe v. Rumsfeld ruling, three judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago also denied Rumsfeld’s motion to dismiss, although, in October, the court agreed to a government motion to hear the case en banc.

As the ABA Journal explained, Doe and Vance both “revive claims stemming from the watershed 1971 decision Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, in which the US Supreme Court said the Constitution itself provides a cause of action when a federal officer violates the law.”

Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University, told the ABA Journal that the cases were “the only examples of civil suits against officers for post-9/11 abuses that have gone anywhere. Courts have traditionally been pro-government.” He added, “In the last 30 years, the [Supreme] Court has been scaling back Bivens so much so that we ask whether there is even anything left to Bivens. The 7th Circuit and the D.C. District Court are saying ‘maybe.’ That’s a surprise.”

Bivens was also a factor in Padilla’s case, but, unlike Padilla, neither Doe nor Vance were “enemy combatants” accused — however groundlessly — of plotting terrorist attacks in the US, so there was perhaps a good reason for observers to think that Rumsfeld might not evade accountability in either of their cases.

However, last Friday, June 15, as Reuters explained, the D.C. Circuit Court refused to accept Doe’s attempt to hold Rumsfeld “personally liable for violating his rights on the grounds that Rumsfeld as Pentagon chief had developed, authorized and implemented the policies that caused him harm,” and ruled that “the special factors in this case counseled against creating a new category of cases in which government officials can be personally sued.”

In his opinion, Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote, “Litigation of Doe’s case would require testimony from top military officials as well as forces on the ground, which would detract focus, resources and personnel from the mission in Iraq” — even though that conflict has officially ended — and added, “Allowing such an action would hinder our troops from acting decisively in our nation’s interest for fear of judicial review of every detention and interrogation,” a familiar argument used to justify any kind of abuse related to detentions in any area that can be termed a battlefield.

Michael Kanovitz, one of Doe’s attorneys, pledged to continue the legal struggle, and stated, “We think that the result is wrong, that it upsets the fundamental notion in our democracy that the judicial branch exists to enforce the constitutional rights of US citizens, and that it ignores the express command of Congress, the people’s elected representative.”

Realistically, it seems unlikely that Doe will prevail, leaving Donald Vance as the last chance for Donald Rumsfeld to be held accountable for the torture of prisoners. Whether he can succeed where Doe failed also seems unlikely, but the ABA Journal noted that Vance’s case offered “what some academics argue is the perfect fact pattern for a Bivens extension: namely, US citizens — civilians, no less — alleging torture at an American military prison in an active war zone.”

The decision to allow Vance to proceed with his lawsuit stated, “United States law provides a civil damages remedy for aliens who are tortured by their own governments. It would be startling and unprecedented to conclude that the United States would not provide such a remedy to its own citizens.”

In the cases of Jose Padilla and John Doe, the “startling and unprecedented” has come true. As a result, those who find it intolerable that the judiciary can allow senior government officials to have tortured US citizens with impunity must be hoping that Donald Vance will prove the exception to this drift towards institutionalized unaccountability, and that someone will be held responsible for his torture.

As Vance explained in December 2008, when he initiated legal proceedings against Donald Rumsfeld, he was routinely subjected to sleep deprivation, taken for interrogation in the middle of the night, and held in a cell that was permanently lit by fluorescent lights. Subjected to the use of music as torture, he explained that it “sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you’re in an environment like that.” He also explained that he had written a letter to the commander of Camp Cropper “stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”

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.

Britain’s Tax Avoidance Scandal and David Cameron’s Colossal Hypocrisy

When David Cameron responded to a Times investigation into offshore tax avoidance schemes, which found that around 1,000 individuals — including the comedian Jimmy Carr, and other celebrities, including musicians and sports stars — were paying as little as 1% of their earnings in tax through a legal, but morally unacceptable scheme in Jersey, a notorious tax haven, he decided to take the moral high ground.

Saying that media reports of Carr’s financial arrangements suggested “straightforward tax avoidance,” the Prime Minister added:

I think some of these schemes — and I think particularly of the Jimmy Carr scheme — I have had time to read about and I just think this is completely wrong [sic]. People work hard, they pay their taxes, they save up to go to one of his shows. They buy the tickets. He is taking the money from those tickets and he, as far as I can see, is putting all of that into some very dodgy tax avoiding schemes. That is wrong. There is nothing wrong with people planning their tax affairs to invest in their pension and plan for their retirement — that sort of tax management is fine. But some of these schemes we have seen are quite frankly morally wrong. The government is acting by looking at a general anti-avoidance law but we do need to make progress on this. It is not fair on hardworking people who do the right thing and pay their taxes to see these sorts of scams taking place.

The Times revealed that Carr was a significant member of K2, based in Jersey, a tax avoidance scheme promoted by Peak Performance Accountants (based in Scotland). He apparently paid £3.3 million a year into the K2 trust, which then returned the money in the form of a loan, which was not subject to income tax.

The Times also claimed that Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen of Take That — and their manager, Jonathan Wild — “invested at least £26m in another scheme run by Icebreaker Management Services,” as the Guardian explained, and that those using K2 “shelter £168m from the taxman each year.”

A spokesman for HMRC (the revenue and customs service) said they had “successfully challenged an avoidance scheme run by Icebreaker LLP, winning on the main arguments in the tribunals,” as the Guardian put it, and noted that “the K2 scheme was already under investigation.” He also explained, “We are now preparing to litigate Icebreaker 2 but for legal reasons cannot say more at this time. We examine the implementation of avoidance schemes in detail and will not let any aspect of these cases go unchallenged.”

Downing Street’s media machine was all over the story after the PM’s statement. A spokeswoman said that David Cameron backed George Osborne’s description of aggressive tax avoidance as “morally repugnant,” and another Downing street source “appeared to harden the government’s position on celebrities’ tax affairs,” saying, “All tax avoidance schemes need to be addressed by HMRC whichever big-name stars are involved.” In addition, as the Guardian also noted, “No. 10 sources stressed that a general tax avoidance rule, due to come in next year, is the best way of handling these kind of tax loopholes, rather than constantly chasing down every individual tax scheme.”

If this were true, it would be welcome news, but after Jimmy Carr took most of the heat (amusingly, having appeared in a sketch attacking corporate tax avoidance), and then apologised for his “terrible error of judgment,” we’re now left to reflect on how far beyond Jimmy Carr this scandal will go, and whether David Cameron will regret speaking out, when his mock concern is so stinkingly hypocritical.

As UK Uncut explained in a press release, “Wealthy individuals buying tax avoidance schemes from high-flying accountants, in order to put as little money as possible into the public purse, are clearly acting immorally. However, this is not just a case of a few bad apples, this is a systemic problem because tax avoidance has become an industry in this country.”

UK Uncut are correct. Since arriving on the activist scene in October 2010, with their theatrical occupations of the high street outlets of notorious tax evaders, beginning with Vodafone, which had avoided paying £6bn in tax, they have had a manifesto available on their website, which states, “We are told that the only way to reduce the deficit is to cut public services. This is certainly not the case. There are alternatives, but the government chooses to ignore them, highlighting the fact that the cuts are based on ideology, not necessity. One alternative is to clamp down on tax avoidance by corporations and the rich and tax evasion, estimated to cost the state £95bn a year.”

That figure comes from “There is an alternative: The case against cuts in public spending,” a briefing produced by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which stated:

Addressing the ‘tax gap’ is a vital part of tackling the deficit. Figures produced for PCS by the Tax Justice Network show that £25 billion is lost annually in tax avoidance and a further £70 billion in tax evasion by large companies and wealthy individuals.

An additional £26 billion is going uncollected. Therefore PCS estimates the total annual tax gap at over £120 billion (more than three-quarters of the annual deficit!). It is not just PCS calculating this; leaked Treasury documents in 2006 estimated the tax gap at between £97 and £150 billion.

As activists note, tackling these problems rigorously would be a fair alternative to the £81bn, four-year programme of cuts that the government has embarked on instead, putting the burden onto students, the poor, the old, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled, rather than on those avoiding tax.

The PSC also explained:

If the modest Robin Hood tax — a 0.05% tax on global financial transactions — was applied to UK financial institutions it would raise an estimated £20–30bn per year. This alone would reduce the annual deficit by between 12.5% and 20%.

Unfortunately, the government has no interest in the Robin Hood tax — and there is no sign, despite the fine words, that ministers are interested in curbing tax avoidance at all. George Osborne may have described aggressive tax avoidance as “morally repugnant,” but that obviously doesn’t mean that he has a problem with moral repugnance. As the Guardian noted after the budget in March:

For all the chancellor’s rhetoric about clamping down on tax dodging as a quid pro quo for abandoning the 50p tax rate, some of the biggest handouts will be in tax cuts and tax-avoidance-made-simple for multinationals. But this is no surprise, given that the multinationals themselves have been closely involved in rewriting the tax rules.

The budget will usher in major changes to the way UK-based multinationals are taxed on profits from their overseas subsidiaries, as well as huge cuts in corporation tax. Over the lifetime of this parliament, about £20bn will be lost in tax receipts as a result, according to the Treasury’s own estimates [PDF].

By the time George Osborne’s cuts to corporation tax — from 28% when the coalition took power, to 23% by 2015 — have been phased in, they will have resulted in losses of more than £5bn a year to the revenue. A further cut — to just 20% — was floated this month.

In addition to these losses in revenue, the exchequer will be deprived of close to £1bn a year by 2015 in taxes on foreign subsidiaries. The tax changes involved — to the controlled foreign companies rules — are so complex and arcane, much of the proposed cuts to taxing offshore profits have slipped in under the radar.

The Treasury argues the reforms are necessary to stimulate growth and to make our corporate tax system “more competitive”. But this is a race to the bottom. The changes will encourage multinationals to shift more of their business to tax havens. There is no benefit to small- and medium-sized British companies. The reforms represent a triumph of corporate regulatory capture, begun under the last Labour government and accelerated under this one.

These £20bn losses — on top of the eye-watering figures identified for the PCS — certainly indicate what action David Cameron should be taking if his indignation about actions that are “morally wrong” were credible. As with the Chancellor, however, the PM is actually enormously comfortable with “morally wrong” activities, so long as they’re by members of his own party, and/or the corporate interests with whom he associates.

The most notorious example, which emerged in the run-up to the General Election, but sadly failed to mire the Tories in sleaze, was the revelation, in March 2010, that Lord Ashcroft, the Conservative Party’s former treasurer and deputy chairman at the time, who donated more than £10m to the party, was “non-domiciled” in the UK, and therefore did not pay UK tax on earnings outside the UK.

Another notorious figure is Sir Philip Green, whose Arcadia retail clothing empire includes Topshop and Miss Selfridge. Green was working as an adviser to the government on efficiency in 2010, when he was targeted by UK Uncut, facing allegations that he avoided a personal tax bill of £300m. As the Guardian explained, “Green’s family banked one of the biggest pay cheques in corporate history in 2005 when his Arcadia fashion business … paid a £1.2bn dividend. The record-breaking payment was made to his wife, Tina, who lives in Monaco and is the direct owner of Arcadia. As a result, no UK income tax was due.”

The Guardian also noted that, in April, Sarah Southern, “the lobbyist at the centre of the recent cash-for-Cameron scandal,” told undercover reporters that “[a]n unnamed Tory donor avoided tax by flying outside UK airspace on his private jet at night,” and was “said to have routinely flown out of Luton airport in the evening so he could sleep on his jet.” The Guardian added, “Because he was outside British jurisdiction at night, this allowed him to extend the number of days he could stay in the UK without paying tax. As a non-resident, he could spend just 91 full days in the country each year.”

Another example cited by the Guardian involved Lycamobile, a mobile phone company based in Canary Wharf, and valued at £88m, which “has paid no corporation tax for three years,” and is also the Tories’ “most generous corporate donor after giving more than £300,000 over the last nine months.”

Hopefully, David Cameron’s outburst of moral indignation will focus attention on his own party, and will enable us to scrutinise the tax dealings of those who are subjecting everyone except the rich to the savage austerity programme that is described as necessary — but only to those who, like the Tories, have no intention of dealing with the epidemic of tax avoidance in which, evidently, they are as mired as so many others with money.

Unsurprisingly, the signs, so far, are that the opposite is true. Although, in April, David Cameron proposed that he and senior ministers would disclose their tax returns, a spokeswoman at Downing Street suggested on Thursday that they were preparing to abandon the plans, as the Guardian put it, noting that she said that the proposal was still being “looked into,” and that Ministers were “not closed to the idea”, but that it was “not a very near-future thing.”

“Privately,” the Guardian added, “senior Tories are concerned that Cameron’s comments on Carr … were a tactical mistake because they gave journalists a green light to investigate the tax affairs of Conservative ministers, MPs and donors.”

Quite so. Those who want to know more are advised to check out this excellent report from the Guardian in April, looking at how David cameron’s father was major player in the offshore banking business. As was explained:

Ian Cameron took advantage of a new climate of investment after all capital controls were abolished in 1979, making it legal to take any sum of money out of the country without it being taxed or controlled by the UK government.

Not long after the change, brought in by Margaret Thatcher after her first month in power, Ian Cameron began setting up and directing investment funds in tax havens around the world.

Leaving his full-time role as a City stockbroker, Ian Cameron went on to act as chairman of Close International Asset management, a multimillion-pound investment fund based in Jersey; as a senior director of Blairmore Holdings Inc, registered in Panama City and currently worth £25m; and he was also a shareholder in Blairmore Asset Management based in Geneva.

The Guardian also noted:

Cameron’s father was “instrumental” in setting up the Panamanian company, Blairmore Holdings, in 1982, which was exempt from UK tax, when David was a pupil at Eton aged 16. [...]

A lengthy prospectus for Blairmore Holdings written in 2006 and meant to attract high net worth “sophisticated” investors, with at least $100,000 to buy shares, is explicit about how the fund sought to avoid UK tax. At the time more than half of the fund’s 11 directors were UK nationals.

Under Panamanian law the fund was excluded from taxation derived from other parts of the world.

“The fund is not liable to taxation on its income or capital gains as long as such income or capital gains are not derived from sources allocated within the territory of the Republic of Panama,” the 2006 prospectus reads.

“The Directors intend that the affairs on the Fund should be managed and conducted so that it does not become resident in the United Kingdom for UK taxation purposes. Accordingly … the Fund will not be subject to United Kingdom corporation tax or income tax on its profits,” the prospectus continues.

Excellent. A Prime Minister whose father was a pioneer in establishing offshore tax havens criticises a comedian for using an offshore tax haven. Hilarious. Unfortunately, the joke is on us. As Jimmy Carr and David Cameron have shown, the normal rules only apply to us. The more you have, apparently, the more you feel entitled to keep it all. So we pay one pound in every four to the Exchequer, while the rich pay just 1p in every pound.

Now, where are those pitchforks? And they need sharpening, don’t they?

Note: For more on corporate tax evasion, I recommend these two reports fro the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that I came across while researching this article today — one on Vodafone’s offshore operations in Switzerland, and the other on widespread tax avoidance in Luxembourg.

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.