Andy Worthington's Blog, page 17

Video: “Guantánamo in 2020: What is the Future of the Prison Camp after Eighteen Years?” at New America, Jan. 13, 2020

A screenshot of New America’s page for the “Guantánamo in 2020” event that took place on January 13, 2020.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Today I’m delighted to be posting, via YouTube, the hour-long video of a panel discussion and Q&A session about the prison at Guantánamo Bay — and the need to close it — which I took part in at the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C. on January 13, two days after the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison.

Also taking part was the attorney Tom Wilner, with whom I co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in 2012. Tom was Counsel of Record for the Guantánamo prisoners as they successfully sought habeas corpus rights before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008 — although those rights have since been gutted by ideologically malignant appeals court rulings — and we are grateful to New America for hosting a panel discussion about Guantánamo with us every year on or around the anniversary. The moderator for this year’s anniversary event was Melissa Salyk-Virk, Senior Policy Analyst in New America’s International Security Program.

As I hope readers have realized via my various articles about the anniversary, and my ten-day US visit to call for the prison’s closure — this year there was a real urgency, indignation and passion to the calls for the prison’s closure and of the need for urgent change in the political leadership in the US expressed by myself and other campaigners.

The video is below, and I hope you have time to watch it, and will share it if you find it useful.

As I explained when I posted a link to the video on Facebook, “Tom and I were resolute in our anger and disappointment that this monstrous failure of justice is still open, and scathing about Donald Trump’s refusal to consider the need for it to be closed, or even to consider releasing any of the 40 men still held under any circumstances, even though five of them were unanimously approved for release by high-level review processes under Barack Obama, and even though only nine of them are facing or have faced trials.”

I added, “When it comes to Guantánamo, sadly, the men held, for the most part indefinitely without charge of trial in defiance of what the US claims to be its own values and its respect for the law, have not only been failed by the president, but also by Congress and also by the courts.”

I believe that Tom and I made clear the failures of all three branches of the US government to deal properly with Guantánamo, as well as the failures of the US media, and, sadly, the American people themselves, in general, to appreciate what Guantánamo is and why its continued existence is so unacceptable.

We also, I hope, managed to convey the human reality of what it means to have a prison that will stay open forever if there is no significant political change: a reality of men never charged with a crime, never — in many cases — even accused of anything more than having fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago, getting older, getting ill, and being consigned to death in Guantánamo, ten, 20, 30, even 40 years from now, unless there is significant political change.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Radio: Unauthorized Disclosure – I Discuss Guantánamo and Julian Assange with Kevin Gosztola and Rania Khalek

Andy Worthington and a quote from the “Unauthorized Disclosure” show he featured on in January 2020, speaking about Guantánamo and Julian Assange.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

My thanks to Kevin Gosztola and Rania Khalek for interviewing me for 40 minutes on Friday for their “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast, which was made available on Sunday. As the dust settled on my return to the UK from a ten-day trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, it was a good opportunity to reflect on what I had done and what I had learned during my trip, as well as providing enough time for me to explain some crucial aspects of the prison’s long and unjust history in depth.

As I explained when I posted a link to the show on Facebook, it is crucially important for people to remember that “the remaining 40 prisoners — and especially the three-quarters of them who are held indefinitely without charge or trial — are ‘entombed’ in the prison by Donald Trump, who has no intention of releasing any of them under any circumstances, and against whom no mechanism exists to oblige him to do anything that he doesn’t want.”

As I explained during the show, “Whoever has control of Guantánamo can do what they want with it,” and as I also explained, under Trump “the prison is sealed shut, entombing the men remaining in this pointless and cruel facility which defies American values, where the prisoners for the most part are held without charge or trial, and where they’re warehoused awaiting death, whenever that may come — 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.”

Describing the particular lawlessness of a facility where no one can be released except at the whim of the president, I pointed out that “we’re dealing with the kind of facility that we should recognize as being akin to a facility that would be run by a dictatorship, and if the United States would like to admit that, then maybe we could start dealing with it, but they don’t.”

Elsewhere in the show, in which I explained my involvement in writing about Guantánamo and working to get it closed from 2006 to today, including a fascinating discussion of the few threads of tortuous legal developments involving the prison, I also made a point of calling the men still held “the personal prisoners of Donald Trump,” also explaining that “we could call them political prisoners,” and stressing the need, in this election year, to get rid of Trump and Republican control of the Senate if there is to be any positive movement on Guantánamo, as there so desperately needs to be.

We also spoke about a development that took place as I was flying back from the US — the questioning, at Guantánamo, of James Mitchell, one of the architects of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, by attorneys representing the five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks. This may prove to be a defining time for the commissions, which have been going round and round in a perpetual Groundhog Day for years, as the government’s strenuous efforts to hide the horrendous use of torture on the men in CIA “black sites” seem, finally, to be coming undone.

However, as I explained to Kevin and Rania, I also hope that the reporters will pay attention to all the men still held, including the 20 or so “low-value detainees” in Camp 6, all held without charge or triail, and the “high-value detainees” in Camp 7 who are also not being tried, and not just the five involved in the 9/11 trial.

As I described it, “It’s so infrequent to have a massive media focus on Guantánamo that if the people who are there are failing to make the connection that there is something very fundamentally wrong with the entire existence of the prison at Guantánamo and the men who are held there, and if they don’t focus on these lower value detainees who didn’t go through the [CIA] torture program but have been tortured and abused in their own way, then I think yet again that we’re seeing the failure of the mainstream media to do what it is required to do, which is to report on terrible things that are being done by their governments, and to shine a light on that to try and get the world to pay attention.”

Finally, we spoke about the shameful imprisonment in the UK of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition to the US on espionage charges, even though what he did, fundamentally, was to be the publisher of classified material leaked by a third party (Chelsea Manning) that, fundamentally, revealed wrongdoing on the part of the US government that it is in the public interest to have exposed.

I expressed my contempt for the British government, for not blocking the extradition, and contempt for the Trump administration, and drew an analogy between Daniel Ellsberg’s “Pentagon Papers” and the Washington Post, and Chelsea Manning’s revelations and WikiLeaks, with both the Post and WikiLeaks serving as publishers of important, otherwise hidden information that the public needed to know about.

Julian Assange’s full extradition hearings begins on February 24, and yesterday, his case was given a boost when the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe issued a report, produced by the Labour peer Lord Foulkes, which stated that his imprisonment “sets a dangerous precedent for journalists.”

As the Guardian explained, “Foulkes had drafted an initial report — Threats to Media Freedom and Journalists’ Security in Europe — that will now contain amendments referring to Assange tabled by a number of European parliamentarians. One of the amendments backs the recommendation of the UN special rapporteur on torture who called last year for Assange’s release and for extradition to the United States to be blocked. The other states that his possible extradition to the US ‘would set a precedent and threaten journalists’ freedoms in all member states.’”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo on the Project Censored Show with Mickey Huff, on WBAI in New York, and with Michael Slate in L.A.

Andy Worthington discussing Guantánamo on RT on January 15, 2020, in the only news feature marking the 18th anniversary of the prison’s opening in the whole of the US broadcast media.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I’m now back in the UK after an inspiring ten-day visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the 18th anniversary of its opening, when I took part in a prominent rally in Washington, D.C. on the actual anniversary (January 11), two subsequent speaking events with lawyers representing prisoners, one TV interview (the sole TV feature marking the anniversary in the whole of the US broadcast media) and six radio interviews.

My visit was important, I think, because, although Guantánamo ought to be a source of permanent shame for all decent Americans, it has fallen so far off the radar under Donald Trump that many people don’t even know that it exists, and many of those who do don’t care, even though the continued existence of the prison, where the US government holds foreign Muslims without charge or trial, and, in many cases, with no genuine effort made over 18 years to establish who they are, is like a virus infecting America’s soul.

Although few people care, my efforts to remind people of the prison’s existence, and my shared events with lawyers who still visit prisoners (and particularly Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who carries the weight of their horrendous isolation and despair under Donald Trump), was easily enough to persuade me that, despite America’s amnesia, this work is still of extraordinary importance.

Below are links to the radio shows I undertook during my visit, beginning with my half-hour interview with Mickey Huff for “Project Censored” (available here as an MP3), which I recorded last week from New York, and which was made available online a few days ago. Mickey and I spoke many years ago about Guantánamo, and it was great to be back on the show, and to have the time to discuss the shame and disgrace of Guantánamo in depth.

Mickey and I also discussed the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, imprisoned in the UK as he challenges an outrageous extradition request by the Trump administration, which the British government approved, under former home secretary (and now Chancellor) Sajid Javid, with the full support of ex-Prime Minister Theresa May, and current PM Boris Johnson, despite it being a chilling and unprecedented assault on the necessary freedom of the press to expose government wrongdoing — unless, that is, we want to live in dictatorships.

Mickey and I also briefly discussed Chelsea Manning, to whom we all owe a debt for leaking the documents that WikiLeaks then released, and who, at the time of my interview, had just racked up $200,000 in outrageous, judge-levied costs relating to her imprisonment for refusing to take part of in a Grand Jury investigation into Assange.

Also, in the second half of the show, journalist and film-maker Kristina Borjesson discussed her new project, a whistleblower podcast called “The Whistleblower Newsroom.”

I recorded the show with Mickey on January 16, when I also spoke with Paul DeRienzo for the evening news on WBAI in New York, That show can be found here, and I’ve also embedded it below, and my interview with Paul, who I’ve spoken to before, took place from 13:00 to 19:35.

WBAI evening news on January 16, 2020, in which Paul DeRienzo interviewed Andy Worthington.

On January 17, I also spoke on the Michael Slate Show, which is available here. Michael and I have also spoken many times before, and I spoke to him, appropriately, from the office in New York of the World Can’t Wait, whose national director, Debra Sweet, has been instrumental in facilitating my visits every January since 2011.

I had made my way to the World Can’t Wait office from another radio station, WNYC, New York Public Radio, where I had been speaking to Latif Nasser, of Radiolab, for a  series of shows — hopefully to be broadcast soon — focusing on Abdul Latif Nasser, a Moroccan citizen who is still held at Guantánamo, despite having been unanimously approved for release by a high-level US government review process in 2016, who Radiolab’s Nasser was drawn to because of their shared name. In a detailed interview, I particularly had the opportunity to spell out the inadequacy of every review process undertaken at Guantánamo — because, as I explained, they all involved a kind of institutional over-cautiousness — and also to talk in depth about the unreliability of the witnesses in the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011, on which I worked as a media partner.

Note: I previously posted links to the Scott Horton Show, for which I was interviewed shortly after my arrival in the uS, on January 10, and my short interview with Sunsara Taylor, on the day of the anniversary, just after I arrived in Washington, D.C. from New York, for her show “We Only Want the World” on WBAI in New York. I also recorded an interview with Linda Olson-Osterlund on KBOO FM, a community station in Portland, Oregon, the day before my departure, and that interview can be found here.

I also note that Scott has made his show into a YouTube video, so I’m also posting that below as well:

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: Attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis and I Bring the Sorrow, Injustice and Cruelty of Guantánamo to Life at Revolution Books in New York

Andy Worthington and Guantánamo attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis discussing Guantánamo at Revolution Books in New York on January 16, 2020, five days after the 18th anniversary of the prison’s opening.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I’m just back in the UK after a ten-day trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that has, I think, been as constructive as anyone could have expected. I took part in a prominent rally in Washington, D.C., two speaking events with lawyers representing prisoners, one TV interview and six radio interviews.

The rally (video here) was outside the White House on January 11, the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison, where I spoke as a representative of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I established with the attorney Tom Wilner eight years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison. The rally also involved representatives of numerous other groups that remain concerned about the existence of Guantánamo, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Witness Against Torture, whose members fast and stage actions in the run-up to the anniversary, and who, in their orange jumpsuits and hoods, provide a suitably grim theatrical backdrop to the occasion.

On Monday January 13, Tom Wilner and I spoke at the New America think-tank, a well-attended event for which, I hope, a video will be available soon. I then returned to New York, where I was interviewed by RT in a seven-minute feature that, shockingly, constituted the sole focus on the Guantánamo anniversary in the whole of the US broadcast media, and I then took part in my second speaking event, at Revolution Books in Harlem, which I’m posting below.

“Close Guantanamo” with Andy Worthington from Revolution Books on Vimeo.

This was an extraordinarily powerful event, largely because I was joined by Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who represents a number of the men still held at Guantánamo, and who vividly brought to life the full horrors of being held in the prison three years after Donald Trump took charge of it, and essentially sealed it shut, having promised — by tweet — even before he took office that “there must be no more releases from Gitmo,” and having fundamentally been true to his words, only releasing one man who had agreed to being repatriated to further imprisonment in Saudi Arabia in exchange for a plea deal in his military commission proceedings in 2014.

As I explained when I posted the video on Facebook, Shelby “brought us the most chilling and poignant account of the circumstances in which her clients remain imprisoned — getting older and more ill in a prison from which there is no escape, because of the disgraceful position taken by Donald Trump, who simply doesn’t care that there is no practical reason for their ongoing imprisonment,” while “I delivered a passionate and indignant account of the prison past, present and future.”

In particular, I summarized the various, shifting and largely lawless permutations of the prison’s history over the last 18 years, and the blame for its continued existence that rests with all three presidents who have had control of it — and expressed, as I have throughout my visit, my anger that, despite the injustice of Trump shutting the door on Guantánamo, and depriving the “low-level detainees” still held (who make up over half of the 40 men still held) of any hope of release, almost no one in the US — in Congress, in the mainstream media, or amongst the American people — seems to care. or, in many cases, even to know that the prison still exists.

What made the event all the more poignant — and that contributed to the indignation of my message — was that I had spent the afternoon with Shelby at CUNY School of Law in Long Island City in Queens, whose Sorensen Center is currently hosting an immensely powerful exhibition of artwork by Khaled Qasim (aka Qassim), one of the men still held for whom no good reason exists for his ongoing imprisonment.

I’ll be publishing an article about that exhibition very soon — and I note in passing that the law school is planning a rotating exhibition throughout the year, featuring work by many other Guantánamo prisoners past and present — but for now I wanted to specifically mention how the emotionally charged atmosphere of the Revolution Books event came about because, that afternoon, I had visited the exhibition, and both Shelby and I had been talking in detail about Guantánamo, dwelling on Khaled’s creativity, and the despair he and other prisoners feel at being entombed in the prison under Donald Trump, with no prospect of release — all of which fed powerfully into the event that followed.

I very much hope that you have time to watch the video, and that you’ll share it with anyone that you think might be interested — or that you think should know about the continuing, and profound shame of Guantánamo.

I can genuinely think of few aspects of US policy that are more disappointing than the cruelty of holding men forever without charge or trial, up to 18 years after they were first seized, when — as with many of the men still held — they genuinely don’t constitute a threat to the US, a situation that, in many cases, has also been confirmed by high-level US government review processes.

For those wanting to check out specific aspects of the event, Raymond Lotta of Revolution Books started the proceedings, then I spoke from six minutes in until 31:40, then Raymond spoke some more, and then Shelby spoke from 43:45 to 1:13:30, followed by a Q&A session.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Reporting from the US, Including My Photos of the Close Guantánamo Rally Outside the White House, Jan. 11, 2020

Photos from the rally calling for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House on January 11, 2020, the 18th anniversary of the prison’s opening. Photos by Andy Worthington, except the photo of Andy, which is by Witness Against Torture.


See my photos of the rally on Flickr here.
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

It’s now five days since a sad occasion that I traveled to the US from the UK to mark — and to rail against: the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, on January 11, when I took part in a rally outside the White House organized by numerous rights groups, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Witness Against Torture.

This was the tenth year in a row that I’ve traveled to the US to mark the anniversary, and I’m still here, about to take part in a speaking event at Revolution Books in Harlem this evening, and also taking part in numerous media interviews — for the Scott Horton Show, and with Sunsara Taylor on her show “We Only Want the World” on WBAI in New York. Yesterday, I was interviewed on RT America (video posted below), today I’m speaking with Paul DiRienzo on WBAI and with Mickey Duff for “Project Censored” on KPFA, Pacifica Radio in Berkeley — and tomorrow I’ll be speaking with Latif Nasser on WNYC, New York Public Radio, and on the Michael Slate Show in Los Angeles. Do get in touch if you’d like to be added to this list!

Here’s that RT America video, which represents, I believe, the sole focus on Guantánamo, on the 18th anniversary of its opening, in the whole of the US-based broadcast media:

I wrote about Saturday’s rally a few days ago, and also posted a video of all the speeches and performances on the day, courtesy of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which had previous livestreamed it, and I’ve also posted photos I took on the day of campaigners holding up posters showing how many days the prison had been open on the anniversary — 6.575 days — via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I set up in 2012 with the attorney Tom Wilner, and our initiative the Gitmo Clock, which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open.

So I hope you have time to check out the photos — and that you’ll reflect on what it means that the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay went unremarked by the US mainstream media, which seems, long ago, to have abdicated its responsibility to pay attention to crimes committed in the name of the American people by its leaders. No excuse for the presence of Guantánamo exists, and it is a stunning failure of the mainstream media to have not noticed as the 18th anniversary came and went, and Guantánamo is close to having been in the control of Donald Trump for three almost unbearably long and bleak years.

Lest we forget, Trump has only released one man from the 41 men he inherited from Barack Obama, and he only did that because the man in question had reached a plea deal in his military commission trial in 2014, which stipulated that he had to be released; or, rather, transferred to his home country, Saudi Arabia, for continued detention. Trump doesn’t care that, of the other 40, only nine are facing, or have faced trials, and that the military commission system, although a facsimile of a valid judicial process, is a poor and broken thing, incapable of delivering justice.

Nor, moreover, does Trump care that the 31 other men do not even have the illusion of justice — five unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes under Obama, but still held because Obama didn’t get them out, and no mechanism exists to compel Trump to release them, and 26 others eligible for the parole-type Periodic Review Boards established by Obama, which led to 38 men being approved for release between 2014 and 2016, but which, since Trump took office, have delivered no recommendations for any prisoners to be released, gutting the entire process of legitimacy to such an extent that the prisoners are all boycotting the proceedings, having concluded that they are a sham, and that no relief exists to shine a light through the lawless and hopeless darkness in which they are all, sadly and intolerably, enveloped.

Thank you, dear readers, for caring, and I’ll be back soon with further reports about Guantánamo, and from my US trip to try to keep its horrors alive in the hearts of all decent Americans.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Video: Calling for the Closure of Guantánamo Outside the White House on the 18th Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison

Andy Worthington outside the White House on January 11, 2020, calling for the closure of the prison on the 18th anniversary of its opening (Photo: Witness Against Torture).


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration, including my current visit to the US to call for the prison’s closure. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, for the tenth year running, I was in Washington, D.C., calling for its closure.

I was there as a representative of Close Guantánamo, an organization I established eight years ago — on the tenth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo — with the attorney Tom Wilner, and I was delighted to be part of a line-up of speakers that included representatives of numerous other campaigning groups and lawyers’ organizations — Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Justice for Muslims Collective, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and Witness Against Torture, to name just a few, as well as some other individuals playing music and performing spoken word pieces.

The video is posted below, via the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Facebook page, and I hope that you have time to watch it in its entirety. If you want to see what happened when I distilled a year’s worth of rage and indignation at Guantánamo’s continued existence into four minutes, my speech begins around 55 minutes in.

As in most years, we were allowed to congregate outside the White House, and, on an alarmingly warm afternoon (hello, climate change), we were joined by a committed crowd of supporters, as well as drawing in passers-by, attracted by the theatrical presence of many dozens of campaigners — from Witness Against Torture, whose supporters had been fasting and holding actions across the capital all week — and who, as usual, were hooded, and wearing orange jumpsuits to remember the men still held at Guantánamo, and to recall those released, as well as those who have died at the prison over the last nine years.

In ten years, there has never been a surfeit of hope regarding Guantánamo. Even in that first year, at the start of Barack Obama’s third year as president, robust hope for the prison’s closure — which, I imagine, must have been readily apparent in 2009, just before Obama’s inauguration — had been dashed, because Obama, despite openly campaigning to close Guantánamo, and promising to close it within a year on his second day in office, had failed to do so.

One of our lowest ebbs was in 2013, just before the start of President Obama’s second term in office, when he had, for over two years, almost entirely stopped releasing any prisoners because of obstruction by Republicans in Congress, even though, at the time, 86 of the 166 men still held had been approved for release by a high-level government review process — the Guantánamo Review Task Force — that he himself had established when he first took office. The prisoners themselves eventually forced him to resume releasing them, by embarking on a prison-wide hunger strike in February 2013, which reminded the world of the shameful ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and led to widespread international criticism of Obama’s inaction.

The second low ebb was, unsurprisingly, three years ago, on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration. The year, we were caught in a limbo between presidents. President Obama was releasing prisoners until his last day in office to try, belatedly, to redeem himself, but his failure to close Guantánamo made the grim truth ever more apparent with every passing moment: that he was now handing it on to Donald Trump, a known racist and Islamophobe, who had already tweeted his first order about the prison — “There must be no more releases from Gitmo” — the week before our rally.

2018 was also a bad year, as Trump was true to his word, and released no one in his first 12 months, for the first time in Guantánamo’s history. By 2019, however, there was a glimmer of hope, as Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections in November 2018, and campaigners began scheduling meetings with key representatives on House committees, to get Guantánamo back on the radar.

And this year that glimmer of hope continued to flicker, despite Trump’s outrageous assassination of Passim Suleimani, which threatened to precipitate World War 3, and for no discernible reason except his efforts to provide a distraction from his impeachment.

Perhaps partly because it’s an election year, perhaps partly because the only way to avoid despair under Donald Trump is through relentless resistance, there was a real energy to this year’s rally — and a commitment, of course, to finding a way to keep that energy alive through this election year, to try and ensure that Donald Trump is not re-elected as president, and to try and make sure that Republicans lose their majority in the Senate, so that the closure of Guantánamo can once more be up for discussion. After eight years of Obama, and his failure to close Guantánamo, I have no illusions that the Democrats, in general, have any particular enthusiasm for closing Guantánamo, but the blunt truth right now is that, under Trump and this particular manifestation of the Republican Party, absolutely no progress is possible — and that therefore, for this reason alone (although there are, of course, very many others), the Republicans must be removed from power in November.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

My US Visit to Call for the Closure of Guantánamo on the 18th Anniversary of Its Opening, Jan. 10-20, 2020

The flier for the rally calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the 18th anniversary of its opening, taking place outside the White House on January 11, 2020. The flier was designed for the campaigning group Witness Against Torture.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration, including my imminent visit to the US. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Friday I fly into New York’s JFK Airport from London for what will be my tenth successive January visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the anniversary of its opening.

The main focus of my visits, from that first year onwards, has been a rally outside the White House of groups calling for the prison’s closure, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Witness Against Torture, and the World Can’t Wait. and. most years, I have also taken part in a panel discussion about the future of Guantánamo at New America, a D.C.-based think-tank. For more, check out the archive for my visits in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Even that first year (2011), the rally was an example of tenacity over hope, and it remains so today, something that has to be done, because the existence of Guantánamo is an abomination, but, sadly, with no expectation that it will fundamentally change anything.

In 2011, there was disappointment because President Obama had failed to close Guantánamo within a year, despite promising to do so when he took office in January 2009, and 2012 marked ten years since the opening of the prison, which I marked by co-founding the Close Guantánamo campaign with my friend, the attorney Tom Wilner, who was Counsel of Record for the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008 that established their right to habeas corpus.

By 2012, however, habeas corpus had been gutted of all meaning for the prisoners after a number of ideologically malignant rulings by the D.C. Circuit Court (the court of appeals in Washington, D.C.), and, in addition, President Obama had almost entirely stopped releasing prisoners, because of his unwillingness to overcome cynical obstructions raised by the Republican majority in Congress. The situation was even more depressing in January 2013, but in February that year, the prisoners themselves hauled Guantánamo back into the spotlight, by embarking on a prison-wide hunger strike to highlight their plight.

In response to international criticism provoked by the hunger strike, Obama finally began releasing prisoners again, in August 2013, making 2014’s rally slightly less depressing, as, for almost three years, from September 2010 to August 2013, only five prisoners had been released. Following this, on the last two anniversaries of Obama’s presidency, in 2015 and 2016, there was enthusiasm for a push to get the prison closed, as Obama’s parole-type review process, the Periodic Review Boards, had kicked in, leading to the release of 36 men in addition to many dozens more who had been approved for release by his first high-level government review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which had reviewed all the prisoners’ cases in 2009, and had recommended that two-thirds of them be released.

In 2017, we were all in a horrible limbo, as we awaited the arrival in the White House of Donald Trump. Pressure from those seeking Guantánamo’s closure had ensured that Obama undertook a flurry of releases before he left office, leaving just 41 men still held when Trump took over. It was 41 men too many, of course, and Obama would forever be tainted by — after eight years — failing to close the prison within a year as he had promised on his second day in office, but at least the prison’s population had been reduced by nearly 200 men since he took office.

However, over the last three years, the situation at Guantánamo has been as bleak as many of us feared when Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Only one prisoner has been released (a Saudi sent for continued imprisonment in his homeland, who was only released, in May 2018, because of a plea deal he had agreed to in his military commission trial in 2014), and Trump has no intention of releasing anyone else under any circumstances.

Moreover, although only nine of the 40 men still held are facing or have faced trials, Guantánamo remains, fundamentally, as lawless as it was at the time of its creation, because the military commissions are a broken system incapable of delivering justice, and no law or treaty exists that can compel the president to release anyone else from the prison, even though five of the men still held were unanimously approved for release by Obama’s high-level government review processes, and even though the 26 others have never been charged with a crime, and, most likely, never will be, having been consigned, instead, to imprisonment without charge or trial until their death, whenever that may be — ten, 20, 30, maybe even 40 years from now, in some cases.

It must be noted that Obama’s PRB process still exists, allowing Trump to, if he wishes, pretend that a credible and fair review process still exists, but the sad reality is that no one has been approved for release since Trump became president, and the prisoners themselves, correctly concluding that it has become a sham process, have responded by boycotting proceedings.

Last year, there was a flurry of hope at the anniversary rally marking 17 years of Guantánamo’s existence, because Democrats had secured a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 2008. However, although this means that some House Democrats — including the chairs of influential committees like the House Armed Services Committee — have been amenable to renewed discussions about the need for Guantánamo to be closed, no meaningful progress has been possible while Republicans still control the Senate.

This year, with impeachment proceedings swirling around Trump at the start of an election year, in which, with breathtaking cynicism, he has responded by ordering the assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassem Suleimani, threatening a horrendous escalation of violence in the Middle East, we will continue to talk to House Democrats, and also, I’m pretty certain, to point out that, although it is unwise to trust Democrats too much (as Obama’s eight years in charge of Guantánamo showed), there can be absolutely no progress towards the eventual closure of Guantánamo while Trump is president, and while Republicans control the Senate.

Please see below for details of the two events in Washington, D.C. that I’m taking part in. I will be returning to New York after Monday’s panel discussion, and hope that a speaking event there will be confirmed soon.

Saturday January 11, 1-3pm: Justice Now: Close Guantánamo & End Torture Rally

Lafayette Square, outside the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. 20500

I will be speaking at this rally calling for the closure of Guantánamo. Those organising the event and taking part in it include Amnesty International USA, CAIR, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Close Guantanamo, CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Defending Rights & Dissent, Justice for Muslims Collective, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Tsuru for Solidarity, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

See the Facebook page here.

Monday January 13, 1.30-2.30pm: Guantánamo in 2020 – What is the future of the prison camp after eighteen years?

New America, 740 15th Street NW, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20005

Tom Wilner and I, as the co-founders of the Close Guantánamo campaign, will be speaking at this panel discussion, moderated by Melissa Salyk-Virk, Senior Policy Analyst, New America International Security program.

An event page will be set up soon.

I am also, of course, available for interviews — in person or by phone — and for any other events that people may want to organise throughout the whole of my stay. make a donation.

As $738 Billion Defense Bill Is Passed, Guantánamo Prisoners Are Ignored by Congress

A collaged image of the US Congress, and a prisoner at Guantánamo.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the 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.

Two months ago, I reviewed the situation at Guantánamo as it relates to Congress, providing a succinct summary of the extent to which Congress has — and hasn’t — been involved in establishing and maintaining the prison since it first opened nearly 18 years ago, and establishing that Congress has largely been complicit in the existence of Guantánamo.

Lawmakers facilitated its creation under George W. Bush, and, when both the Senate and the House were controlled by Republicans under Barack Obama, imposed restrictions on Obama’s efforts to close the prison, in the annual National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA), that largely remain in place today.

These restrictions — on the countries to which prisoners can be released, on the transfer of any prisoner to the US mainland for any reason, and on spending any money to create a replacement for Guantánamo on the US mainland, or to close the facility in Cuba — largely make no difference under Donald Trump, because Trump has no interest in releasing prisoners, or in closing Guantánamo under any circumstances. As Military.com explained, the requirements regarding Guantánamo in the NDAA “fall in line with Trump’s Jan. 2018 executive order to keep Guantánamo open indefinitely.”

However, it is dispiriting that all of these restrictions remain in place in the NDAA for 2020 that was signed into law just before Christmas, because it is, frankly, unforgivable for either the president or Congress to behave as though there is any justification for Guantánamo’s continued existence, when that is simply not the case.

Sadly, however, most of the mainstream media reports about the NDAA have failed to adequately address how dispiriting it is that Republicans continue to defend the apparently never-ending existence of Guantánamo, instead being distracted by Trump’s introduction, via the NDAA, of ‘Space Force,’ “the first new military service in more than 70 years,” as the Associated Press explained, and, generally, behaving as though it is somehow normal for any country on earth to have a military bill of $738 billion.

As I explained in my article two months ago, there was hope earlier this year for positive movement on Guantánamo in the 2020 NDAA, because Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, and the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, had attempted to put Guantánamo back on the table in the House version of the bill.

As Just Security explained in June, Smith’s version of the bill “rescind[ed] in part restrictions on the president’s authority to transfer prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, ban[ned] bringing new detainees to Guantánamo for detention or trial by military commission, require[d] the Attorney General to submit a plan — other than continued law of war detention — for the remaining detainees, and expresse[d] concern about the ability of the United States Government to provide adequate medical care for the aging detainee population.”

By September, unfortunately, everything progressive had disappeared from the House Armed Services Committee’s final version of the bill — with the exception of a passage banning the use of funds to transfer any additional prisoners — including US citizens — to Guantánamo.

However, that passage too was removed when the House and Senate versions of the bill were consolidated, as, irritatingly, did a proposal by both the House and the Senate committees to allow seriously ill prisoners to be temporarily brought to the US mainland for urgent medical treatment that is either difficult or impossible to provide at Guantánamo. Not for nothing did Roll Call note, in an article published on December 10, that “the word from a large number of angry Democrats in Congress, their supporters and, more discreetly, from many Republicans” was that the Democrats “got completely rolled” in the NDAA negotiations.

The only additional passage to add to the bans mentioned above that survived into the final version was a requirement for there to be a Chief Medical Officer appointed to oversee the health of the Guantánamo prisoners, who “shall be an officer of the Armed Forces who holds a grade not below the grade of colonel, or captain in the Navy,” and who “shall be assigned [by] and report to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.”

This, presumably, was a small measure to try and guarantee that the increasing incidents of serious illness amongst the inevitably aging population of Guantánamo will be properly monitored, but it is a tiny gesture of responsibility in what is otherwise a bleak continuation of Guantánamo as a facility that is sealed shut, with no one leaving under any circumstances, and with Congress content for that to be the case, even though only nine of the 40 men still held are going through or have gone through any kind of trial process, and even though five of the 40 were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes under President Obama, but were not released before he left office.

As for the 26 others, although they are supposed to have their cases reviewed regularly by Periodic Review Boards (a parole-type process established under Obama), they have all been boycotting that process, as no one has been approved for release since Trump took office, and the prisoners have correctly concluded that it is a sham.

Back in June, when a Guantánamo case was turned down by the Supreme Court (as has happened without exception since the Court last intervened on behalf of the prisoners in 2008’s Boumediene v. Bush, granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights), Justice Stephen Breyer attached a statement expressing concern that the Court’s ruling in 2004’s Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, allowing detention for the “duration of the relevant conflict,” had, because of the long passage of time, become a ruling that “could amount to ‘perpetual detention.’”

It remains to be seen whether Justice Breyer’s concerns are shared by his fellow Justices, but it is at least a hint on the part of the Supreme Court that there is something wrong with indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, even though both the president and Congress seem to be entirely happy with holding men forever without the kind of due process that the rest of us take for granted.

As we approach 2020 — an election year — we can only hope that, this time next year, we will have a new president and a new configuration of Congress, and that both understand that “business as usual” at Guantánamo is completely unacceptable, and that rigorous steps must be taken to lead to the prison’s closure once and for all.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Radio: I Discuss Boris Johnson’s Alarming Election Victory – and Guantánamo – with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

Boris Johnson promising to ‘Get Brexit Done’ and Donald Trump and Guantánamo.


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Thursday, I was delighted to be interviewed by Chris Cook, in Victoria, Canada, about the parlous state of British politics, and the ongoing and outrageous injustice of Guantánamo, on his weekly show, Gorilla Radio, which is “dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”

The show is here (and here as an MP3), and I’m also pleased to be able to embed it below. My interview is in the first half of the one-hour show:

Here’s how Chris introduced the show on his website, accurately capturing the madness of the UK right now:

Last week, Britain followed America’s lead in electing an ultra-conservative, faux populist based on the single premise of, if not making Britain Great again, at least carrying through with the years-old promise to take the country out of the European Union. The great mystery to those looking from outside the country is why?

Why, following the divisive and ill-defined scheme dreamt up by the David Cameron Tories of yore, did the people of that green and pleasant land, rather than punishing the authors, and bungling executors of the disastrous Brexit debacle, decide instead to reward them with massive electoral success? And for Britons, the greater question now is, what’s going to happen next?

I’m honoured that Chris has had me on his show numerous times over the last ten years — almost always to discuss Guantánamo, but occasionally to discuss other topics — and it was a pleasure on Thursday to be able to provide some analysis of the disaster area that is Britain today, following last week’s General Election.

Chris and I spoke about how Boris Johnson’s “landslide” victory was, in fact, achieved with only a slight increase of Tory voters from 2017, when Theresa May actually lost her majority, although, typically, after an election that was fought against a backdrop of horrendous bias against Jeremy Corbyn (particularly via an entirely made-up anti-semitism scandal) and open support for Johnson, that isn’t the narrative the British people are now being presented with, as Johnson prepares to ‘Get Brexit Done.’

Following on from my election post-mortem article, Boris Johnson’s Election Victory: A Truly Depressing Day for Britain, But Now He ‘Owns’ the Toxic Brexit Nightmare, Chris and I spoke about my belief that Johnson won by relentlessly repeating his promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’, to secure the support of all those who voted to leave the EU and have become increasingly frustrated that their insane obsession hasn’t been fulfilled, as well as others who supported remaining in the EU, but think the “will of the people” should be obeyed.

Primarily, however, Chris and I spoke about the reasons to be fearful of Johnson’s majority, as it endorses his drive for a hard Brexit — either via no deal with the EU at all, or a bad one, which is clearly intended to make the UK into a vassal state of the US. This will enable a small number of people — including Johnson and his chums — to make a fortune while profoundly betraying the entire population of the UK, and, as Chris and I discussed, it is also part of a dangerous alliance of anti-democratic and far-right opportunists, involving Johnson, his chief advisor Dominic Cummings, dangerously unsavoury individuals like Steve Bannon and organisations like Cambridge Analytica, and its current mutations, which are deeply involved in the ongoing online manipulation of millions of individuals assessed to be susceptible to right-wing and far-right messages. For a particular focus on Boris Johnson, check out these two recent Byline Times articles.

We also spoke about the depressing increase in racism and xenophobia that has been taking place since the election last week, as white British racists are empowered by Johnson’s victory, and dangerously influential racist individuals like Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins are now joining the Conservative Party, with the white supremacist thugs of Britain First also urging its supporters to become Tory Party members.

Chris and I also spoke about the crucial divide in the UK between the old and the young, which constitutes a civil war, although not one that has yet spilled into violence in the streets. Nevertheless, it is clear that almost all young people want to stay in the EU, and voted Labour last week, while almost all old people voted Tory and want to leave the EU, and it is impossible to see how these fundamental differences can be reconciled in any way.

20 minutes in, Chris and I also discussed Guantánamo, which gave me an opportunity to provide a brief analysis of who is still held and why, and also to follow up on my most recent article, Horribly Repressive: The Truth About Donald Trump’s Guantánamo, in which I followed up on a recent ABC News article about medical neglect and culturally inappropriate behaviour by medical personnel at the prison, a shocking story that emerged primarily via reports by Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, the attorney for a number of the 40 men still held.

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and that you’ll share it if you like it, and I’m also delighted that, at the end of our interview, rounding off our discussions about Boris Johnson and Brexit, Chris played I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back), the anti-Brexit anthem by my band The Four Fathers.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Horribly Repressive: The Truth About Donald Trump’s Guantánamo

Khaled Qassim, Abdul Latif Nasser and Saifullah Paracha, three of the Guantánamo prisoners who told their lawyers that, this summer, they were subjected to repressive and culturally inadequate treatment by medical personnel at the prison.


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In a recent article about Guantánamo — a rarity in the US mainstream media — ABC News picked up on a sad story of medical neglect and culturally inappropriate behavior by medical personnel at the prison, as conveyed to the broadcaster by Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, an attorney who represents some of the 40 men still held.

In “‘Degrading’: Aging detainees describe health care woes at Guantánamo 18 years after 9/11,” ABC News’ Guy Davies described how a “breakdown in trust between detainees and doctors” had “reached breaking point” at the prison.

The ailments of Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner

Davies’ article began by looking at the case of 72-year old Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, who suffers from “debilitating chest pains,” an “overactive bladder and enlarged prostate,” as well as “diabetes, coronary artery disease, diverticulosis, gout, psoriasis and arthritis,” as Sullivan-Bennis told ABC News, adding that he “has also suffered two heart attacks, one of which occurred when he was held in Bagram, in Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo” in September 2004.

Paracha, a Pakistani national, was initially seized by the CIA while he was on a business trip to Thailand in July 2003, and, as Davies described it, “is alleged by the US government to have been a ‘significant member of the international al-Qaida support network through his business associations in Pakistan,’” although he has always denied these allegations.

In assessing Saifullah’s case, it is surely significant that, although he was seized because of statements made by his son Uzair, who, at the time, was being held in New York by the FBI, a federal court judge ruled in July 2018 that Uzair’s 2006 conviction for supporting Al-Qaeda “should be thrown out,” and he should be granted “a new trial based on evidence that has emerged since he was convicted,” including statements from “high value detainees” Ammar al-Baluchi, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Majid Khan, also held at Guantánamo, which “throw doubt on the claim, made by the prosecution in the original case, that Uzair knew he was helping an al-Qaida member,” a doubt that also extends to his father’s alleged involvement.

Despite the US military’s discredited allegations against him, Saifullah continues to be regarded as a threat by the US authorities, although attorneys and journalists describe him and 23 other men still held as “low-value detainees,” because “they live in more communal cell blocks, where they are able to take part in group activities,” and, moreover, none of them have ever been charged with a crime.

Most pertinently, as Shelby Sullivan-Bennis explained to ABC News, it was these men who, this summer, “participated in a boycott of medical services” as a protest against what they called “inadequate and culturally insensitive treatment” at the prison.

Given Saifullah Paracha’s “complex medical needs,” Sullivan-Bennis added that, in his case, she was “fearful for his life.”

As Davies described it, “The subject of detainee care has been an issue of increasing debate in recent years, with the facility now reportedly considering end of life care services for the remaining detainees, according to the New York Times,” in an article in April that I wrote about here.

As Davies proceeded to explain, “Historically at Guantánamo, detainees had been restrained during medical check-ups with a single ankle restraint to the ground, according to detainees’ statements provided to Sullivan-Bennis and shared with ABC News. But prisoner advocates say a new policy, which allegedly began in late 2017, involved detainees being brought to medical examinations being placed in handcuffs which are attached to a leather brace fitted around their stomach, prohibiting their ability, in one detainee’s words, to even ‘lift their arms to hold onto a medical record.’”

Davies added that that particular policy “was partially overturned after the boycott, with the leather brace now removed for these medical visits,” although prisoners “remain handcuffed during the medical visits,” according to Sullivan-Bennis.

Khaled Qassim and Abdul Latif Nasser

One of her clients, Khaled Qassim (aka Khalid Qassim), another “low-value detainee,” who is held for no discernibly good reason, described the new shackling policy in a June 2019 letter to Reprieve, the human rights charity whose lawyers also represent him.

Qassim, a Yemeni, wrote, “In the worst days in GITMO, when the number of detainees was in [the] hundreds, doctors used to have the authority to ask the guard force to take some of the restraints off the patient detainee while treating him in the medical space. Recently, after seventeen years, with the number of detainees far less than before, just in tens, and easier to control, the restraining rules have changed unnecessarily to something much worse.”

Under the new rules, Qassim said, “hand shackles, belly chain and the leg shackles are all on” for prisoners undergoing medical examinations, which he vividly described as “a scene that would always remind you about the tragedy of the slavery time.”

Qassim also made a point of noting, that, “Unlike any other meetings,” where these kinds of restraints would be administered by the military, ”This time, unfortunately, it happens before a doctor.” He added that this was “[t]he last thing a person expects.”

Another prisoner, Abdul Latif Nasser (aka Abdul Latif Nasir), a Moroccan national who “remains detained more than three years after being cleared for release,” and who was profiled by ABC News in June (in an article I wrote about here), corroborated these claims in a recent meeting with Sullivan-Bennis, stating that, “at routine monthly medical appointments, he had to wear ankle restraints, a stomach brace with handcuffs attached to a leather brace around his waist, with extremely tight restraints.”

As was revealed in in declassified notes from the meeting, Nasser added that “[a]ll this took place” in “the presence of two guards at all times,” with the result being that, as Nasser described it, “nothing is private,” and, because of the lack of confidentiality, prisoners “cannot discuss private topics.”

Nasser also explained that prisoners “don’t know who their doctors will be because of rotating staff,” and added that they “feel uncomfortable discussing personal medical matters and undergoing certain procedures, such as prostate exams, with female doctors, for religious reasons.”

Sullivan-Bennis added that, “when she asked Nasser how inmates would respond to a colonoscopy being performed on them by a female doctor,” he said that “some detainees would prefer to die” instead. She said that he told her, “Access to a private doctor is more important to my religion than allowing me to pray.”

Recalling how the medical treatment story unfolded, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis said that it was when she received Khaled Qassim’s letter in June that she thought to herself, “Oh my god, that’s new.”

On her next visit to Guantánamo to visit Qassim and her other clients, she found that, “although they did not expressly use the term ‘boycott,’” all 24 “low-value detainees” were “not attending their medical appointments.”

She explained that her immediate fear was that medical harm would befall Saifullah Paracha, but that she was also alarmed that all 24 of the men were engaged in a struggle with the authorities. As she described it, “You’ve got 24 people going to the same doctor and all refusing to go and my fear was that it wouldn’t move the administration to engage in a conversation.”

She added that she feared that “the result that would come would be the death of one of my clients. I mean it sounds extreme but it’s actually not very extreme.”

Sullivan-Bennis described it as “a surprise” when she learned that the boycott had, to some extent, been successful. She explained how, a month after it began, “a doctor entered the detainees’ living quarters to find out why they weren’t attending their appointments,” and was told that they were “upset with the treatment they had been receiving.”

As Sullivan-Bennis described it, “shortly thereafter things changed.“ Although prisoners “still have to wear handcuffs during medical visits,” what has changed, crucially, is that “the leather brace fitted around the stomach is no longer required.”

However, not everything has improved. Sullivan-Bennis also explained that “there used to be two doctors for low-value detainees,” but “[t]hat has now dropped to one provider, whom none of the detainees trust to give advice or care.”

In response to ABC News’ request for a comment by the Department of Defense, a spokesperson gave them some bland and generic PR talk about how they are continuing to “explore ways to provide adequate care for an aging population, with varying levels of mobility, by making appropriate modifications to existing facilities,” and claiming that prisoners “are continually assessed, as medically indicated, for signs and symptoms of any number of conditions and are treated at a dedicated medical facility by a medical staff of about 100 personnel.”

“Deprivation and Despair”

However, as was explained in “Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo,” a report published this summer by the Center for Victims of Torture and Physicians for Human Rights,” which I wrote about here, “the central problems with medical care at Guantánamo were a ‘distrust of military medical providers’ and the subordination of patient needs to ‘security functions,’” as ABC News described it, quoting from the report.

ABC News contacted prisoners’ rights advocates to ascertain what they thought of shackling, and reported that they “emphasized that shackling a patient should only take place as a last resort,” because, they said, it “fundamentally undermines the trust that serves as the foundation of any successful doctor-patient relationship.”

Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist who has been visiting Guantánamo since 2009, providing independent assessments of the prisoners’ mental and physical health, told ABC News that “he ‘does not recall’ a time when patients weren’t shackled during his psychiatric evaluations, a practice that he said impedes the work of counseling.”

He further explained that “he does not have one-on-one access” with prisoners, because their attorneys are always present, but even this is disruptive when it comes to developing a necessary relationship with prisoners. As he explained, “there are some relationships that in order for them to be effective and for the person to be helped there has to be absolute confidentiality. And to have a third party in the room completely disrupts that confidentiality.”

He contrasted the situation at Guantánamo with that on the US mainland, telling ABC News that, “When evaluating individuals who have been convicted of capital offences and terrorism in the United States, there is never a third party present, [and] nor does he himself require them to be shackled.” As he further explained, “Not only does it undermine trust, but interferes with the psychiatric evaluation, which could prove critical if the men are ever brought to trial.”

He added, ”If you take the issue of what these people have disclosed after they’ve been tortured, my ability to be able to explore that with them in confidentiality means that I can accordingly advise the attorneys better about the validity of what they’ve said or not.”

Xenakis also explained that, at Guantánamo, any alleged threat that the authorities claimed was posed by prisoners — if it existed at all — was “significantly diminishing” because of their age. As he put it, “I don’t feel like I need to fear for my personal safety. I don’t think any of us feel that we’re particularly threatened.”

When ABC News “asked if he had seen or heard of any security incident that could justify shackling based on his experiences at Guantánamo over the past 10 years,” his answer was blunt: “No, not that I know of.”

“My life has no meaning”

Despite the slight improvement in the treatment of prisoners, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis was warned about the prisoners’ existential fears by Abdul Latif Nasser at a meeting on September 23, when he said, “So that’s the problem, to be honest with you, is just to stay alive, not to enjoy our life. I have no objective in my life. My life has no meaning. That is the problem that detainees suffer.”

Khaled Qassim also told her about issues relating to long-term health problems that were not being adequately addressed, claiming that the “fluctuating treatment” he was receiving “has had an impact on his mental health.” Now 41 years old, he told her that “his legs began to swell around May this year,” and were eventually “drawn to twice their size from [his] ankle all the way up to his knees.”

As ABC News explained, “Despite this obvious physical symptom, and the potential for such a swelling to be caused by cancer, or a blood clot, he was not treated for ‘several months,’” according to Sullivan-Bennis’s account of what he told her. He also stated that, although he was given a blood test, the medical authorities have not made the outcome of that test clear to him, “meaning he is still unsure of whether the situation has worsened — which can happen if swelling of this kind is left untreated — nearly five months after the appearance of swelling.” Sullivan-Bennis told ABC News that she had not seen the result son the test, but confirmed that his legs are “failing to this day.”

In a letter to another of his attorneys, Mark Maher, Qassim described his treatment as “degrading” and “fluctuating,” and stated that it had left him with “cognitive disturbance” and “concentration problems.”

Maher told ABC News, “Guantánamo is gradually becoming the world’s most unjust, most brutal, most expensive nursing home because the Trump administration has decided that none of these men held without charge for decades — many of whom have been cleared for release — should be allowed to rebuild their lives. It is hard to conceive of a more cruel, more counter-productive policy.”

As ABC News pointed out, another prisoner, the “high-value detainee” Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, has sued the government, claiming that his medical care amounted to “deliberate indifference” with regard to a “serious condition,” and that it violated his constitutional rights. Al-Iraqi “has a long history of back problems,” and in January 2017 a CAT scan showed evidence of “severe neural encroachment” that, it was assessed, could “easily progress to spinal stenosis.” If left untreated, this could result in “spinal cord compression and permanent neurologic[al] disabilities,” according to court filings submitted by Physicians for Human Rights.

However, al-Iraqi did not receive surgery until eight months later, in September 2017. Reflecting on this dangerously long wait, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis said, “They waited until the absolute last minute right before a hurricane [to perform the surgery]. He’s since, I think, had seven or eight back surgeries because they’d let it get to such a terrible point, essentially.”

Nevertheless, al-Iraqi’s constitutional claim, and his request for an independent medical evaluation, was turned down by District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in October 2019, with Sullivan ruling that “assertions that his care was negligent do not amount to a constitutional violation.” Despite his chronic back problems, al-Iraqi’s military commission trial is supposed to begin next year.

Another prisoner, Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, “has also challenged his care on constitutional grounds.” In September 2017, Guantánamo’s Senior Medical Officer determined that Rabbani, a long-term hunger striker, who had been on a hunger strike for the previous four years, “no longer needed to be force fed,” according to court filings. His attorneys argued that this constituted “deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs in violation of his Eighth Amendment Rights.”

In court filings, Rabbani said that, even if he wanted to end his hunger strike, he could not do so, because he was “entirely unable to eat normal food,” and because he ”suffered from bleeding, indigestion, colon problems [and] ulcers.”

In an emergency federal court motion, as ABC News explained, “his attorneys requested access to all his physical and psychiatric records since July 2017.” They also “wanted to appoint a medical practitioner to evaluate Rabbani, and compel GITMO staff to ‘facilitate that treatment’ deemed necessary and appropriate.” However, the court denied the motion after assessing that “the government was addressing his needs, and had ultimately provided the enteral feedings briefly before Rabbani opted to consume a liquid diet on his own.”

As lifelong imprisonment without charge or trial is, shamefully, spelled out by those running Guantánamo, with government lawyers telling a federal judge last year that prisoners could remain in Guantánamo for the next 100 years, those dealing with the repercussions include the prison’s former commander, Rear Adm. John C. Ring, who, in 2018, suggested that “the authorities were in ‘the early stages of feeling this out,’ when asked about handling end-of-life care — in other words a hospice — for US prisoners.” As ABC News explained, “The comments were widely interpreted as being critical of GITMO’s medical care,” and Ring was fired shortly after due to “a loss of confidence in his ability to command,” according to US Southern Command.

Nevertheless, Guantánamo’s Senior Medical Officer told reporters at the time that the prison “was built as sort of a stop-gap measure,” and that the authorities were ”going to have to look at a more permanent solution.”

According to Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, the idea of a hospice at Guantánamo is “perfectly realistic,” as the authorities focus on “extending [the prisoners’] lives and essentially just providing care to avoid death.” It is, she stressed, “[s]imply an avoidance of death.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.