Andy Worthington's Blog, page 170

My Photos on Flickr: San Francisco and Chicago, January 2012

San Francisco and Chicago, January 2012, a set on Flickr.

Earlier this week, I posted the first two sets of photos on my new Flickr account. The first set was of of my wanderings in New York in January, at the start of my two-week US tour to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, and the second was of the protests in Washington D.C. on the 10th anniversary, January 11, when it poured with rain, but our spirit was strong.

This third set concludes the photos of my trip, taken in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley during a one-day visit to the Bay Area, and in Chicago during another brief visit (my first ever to the Windy City), before flying back to New York, and 24 hours in Brooklyn preceding the long flight home.

Regular readers may well have seen my reports from my US trip, and perhaps even watched and listened to some of the many videos and audio files of the events, TV appearances and radio shows I took part in during what was a very intensive tour organised by my friend and colleague, the indefatigable Debra Sweet, the national director of The World Can’t Wait.

These photos occasionally cross over into that world, which, at its busiest, left me with barely a moment when I wasn’t either talking to someone in person, or on a cellphone, and they are sometimes just glimpses of what I could see during the journeys I undertook to take part in the various events, but they also chronicle a different journey I took across America, as a photographer reunited with a camera for the first time in many years, and I hope that they provide readers with a number of perspectives that might not always be apparent from my writing.

These are my observations, in which I use my eyes rather than my words, and frame what I see rather than what I think, although the same sensibility no doubt infuses both methods of communication. Both are probably an attempt to make sense of the world, or to capture it, to mark its passing, to commemorate it, although I haven’t analyzed it too deeply, as I’m rather enjoying letting the camera’s lens take me on a journey, accompanying me wherever I go these days, and providing a refreshing break from the words that otherwise possess me.

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

Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice: On the 28th Anniversary of the Last Free Festival, Check Out “Festivals Britannia”

So today, as 14,000 revellers at Stonehenge faced a rainy summer solstice morning, with some of them, at least, echoing the reverence that those who built this giant sun temple over 4,000 years ago had for the great axis of the solar year, many of those in attendance may not have known of the long struggles that enabled them to party in the world’s most famous stone circle, or of the free festival that sprawled across the fields opposite Stonehenge every June for 11 years from 1974 to 1984, or of the brutal suppression, in 1985, of the convoy of travellers, anarchists and environmental activists heading to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th Stonehenge Free Festival, who were violently set upon and “decommissioned” in what has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

Those who want to know more can check out my books Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, and can also find out more via my most recent article on the Beanfield, three weeks ago, and my recent radio interview, which I posted yesterday. However, I believe this is also an excellent opportunity for people to watch “Festivals Britannia,” a 90-minute long BBC4 documentary by Sam Bridger, first broadcast in December 2010, which I’m posting below in six parts, as available on YouTube.

This is an important programme, with excellent commentators and some astounding footage (including dreamlike Super-8 footage from the ’70s by Chris Waite, and equally dreamlike images from the last great gathering of the tribes, at Castlemorton in 1992), even though watching it was a rather surreal experience, as its narrative arc seemed to be drawn entirely — but without credit — from Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion.

As the BBC’s blurb stated:

[T]his documentary tells the story of the emergence and evolution of the British music festival through the mavericks, dreamers and dropouts who have produced, enjoyed and sometimes fought for them over the last 50 years.

The film traces the ebb and flow of British festival culture from jazz beginnings at Beaulieu in the late 50s through to the Isle of Wight festivals at the end of the 60s, early Glastonbury and one-off commercial festivals like 1972′s Bickershaw, the free festivals of the 70s and 80s and on through the extended rave at Castlemorton in 1992 to the contemporary resurgence in festivals like Glastonbury, Isle of Wight and Reading in the last decade.

Missing from that description of the counter-cultural forces that drove the various phases of the festival scene until its mushrooming as a mainstream phenomenon in the mid-1990s is the Battle of the Beanfield, which is the film’s dark heart. I was pleased that the film then proceeded to explain well the buoyancy of the rave scene that suddenly revived festivals and dissent in the late 80s when all could have been lost, and although I slightly drifted off towards the end, when festivals became thoroughly corporate and mainstream, I thoroughly enjoy, every year, attending WOMAD with my friends and family, where our kids have been growing up accustomed to five days of brilliant camping and communal existence every year, and, of course, it must never be forgotten that festivals are so successful not because of corporate involvement, but because the pioneers of the festival movement created something that was more successful than they could have dreamed — alternative social gatherings that provide escapism, but also provide hints of a utopian worldview that is sorely lacking from everyday life, and which, from their counter-cultural beginnings have ended up attracting 1 in 10 of us out into the fields to attend festivals every summer.

Now we just need a bit more politics involved — involving a sense of history, and an urgent engagement with the current problems we face, in which our savage and misguided government, fully committed to destroying the state in an orgy of malignant, ideologically-driven austerity, would like nothing more than for people to indulge in a long weekend — or a rainy night — of escapism, and not to suffuse their experiences with anything dangerous — like a burning desire to not let the UK slip back into the Dark Ages without a fight. I hope some of those at Stonehenge last night and this morning picked up on the temple’s long fascination for dreamers and dissenters, and caught something of the oppositional spirit that played such a major part in the Stonehenge Free Festival, and without which we are all merely the puppets of a savage, corporate, materialistic world.

“Festivals Britannia,” Part 1 of 6

“Festivals Britannia,” Part 2 of 6

“Festivals Britannia,” Part 3 of 6

“Festivals Britannia,” Part 4 of 6

“Festivals Britannia,” Part 5 of 6

“Festivals Britannia,” Part 6 of 6

Note: For reflections on Stonehenge and the summer solstice, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart and Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival? For more on the Beanfield, see my articles, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, which provides excerpts from my book The Battle of the Beanfield, and The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, a prominent traveller who died two years ago. For more on dissent from the anti-globalisation movement to the Arab Spring, see The Year of Revolution: The “War on Tyranny” Replaces the “War on Terror”, and for commentary on how gypsies and travellers still face persecution in the UK, see my articles about the disgraceful eviction last year of gypsies and travellers at Dale Farm, The Dale Farm Eviction: How Racism Against Gypsies and Travellers Grips Modern-Day Britain and The Dale Farm Eviction: Using Planning Laws to Justify Racism Towards Gypsies and Travellers. And if you have time to trawl some excellent archives about the entire festival and free festival scene, check out the astonishing Festival Zone archive.

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

Radio: On Eve of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, Andy Worthington Discusses the Battle of the Beanfield and Dissent in the UK

Listen to my interview here!

A month ago, I was delighted to meet up with — and be interviewed by — an old friend and colleague, Tony Gosling, a journalist and broadcaster, who also has a long-established mail order service, Culture Shop, making videos and books on important political topics available. For many years, Tony has sold videos and DVDs of “Operation Solstice,” the documentary about the showdown between new age travellers and Margaret Thatcher’s government that took place on June 1, 1985, in a field in Wiltshire, when police from six forces and the MoD savagely “decommissioned” a convoy of travellers, anarchists and environmental and anti-nuclear activists, assaulting men, women and children, and destroying vehicles.

The government succeeded in preventing the convoy from reaching their planned destination, Stonehenge, where they had intended to establish the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival — a huge free event that was a gigantic inspiration for all kinds of dissidents, but was, of course, feared and despised by the establishment.

After I published my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, in June 2004, a social history of Stonehenge that was, essentially, a wider British counter-cultural history, in which the Battle of the Beanfield was pivotal, I swiftly followed up with another book, focusing specifically on The Battle of the Beanfield, through original essays, transcripts of interviews with people involved on the day, and excerpts from the police log, which was published on the 21st anniversary of the Beanfield in 2005.

[image error]Tony then began selling my Beanfield book, and DVDs of “Operation Solstice,” and when I took a collection of photos of the Stonehenge Free Festival around the country, I stayed with him while showing the exhibition and doing a talk at a community social centre in Bristol.

When we met up recently, while Tony was on a visit to London, he interviewed me for his show for the Bristol Broadband Collective, a community radio station in Bristol. The 28-minute interview is here, and in it I discuss the historical resonance of the Stonehenge Free Festival and the Battle of the Beanfield, mentioning its inspirations (in the 17th century Diggers movement, for example, and the Diggers revival in San Francisco in the 1960s), and also discussing how, after the Beanfield, laws were introduced to suppress popular dissent, but also how, in spite of increased state suppression, popular movements continued to thrive — in the road protest movement of the 1990s, and, in particular, I believe, Reclaim the Streets, which influenced the anti-globalization movement that began in the late 1990s, but was largely sidelined by the “war on terror” and the increase in the paranoid police state that began after the 9/11 attacks.

In the last third of the interview (from around 19 minutes in), I particularly focused on how one important element of the free festival/convoy period — radical notions of land reform — which later reemerged in the road protest movement and Reclaim the Streets, has emerged once more in the Occupy movement. This part of the interview was partly a lament about the savage and unprecedented assault on the state by the Tory-led coalition government, and partly a call to arms, involving a discussion of how a new political movement is required, one that can foster the creativity of young people without filtering everything through the kind of greed that actually suppresses grass roots entrepreneurs — largely through the control of property, manifested in monstrously high rents and business charges.

On the eve of the summer solstice, as revellers gather at Stonehenge for the annual party that has been allowed since 2000, after the post-Beanfield exclusion zone was ruled illegal by the Law Lords, I hope that English Heritage’s “Managed Open Access” — allowing tens of thousands of revellers to gather freely amongst the stones from 7 pm today until 8 am tomorrow — is successful, but I also find myself reflecting that the motives that drove some of those who were violently suppressed at the Battle of the Beanfield en route to Stonehenge — those who were deeply politicised land reform activists — remain as relevant as they did 28 years ago, at the Beanfield, and 38 years ago, when the first Stonehenge Free Festival was established.

Here’s to the Diggers, the dreamers and the dissidents!

Note: For my recent reflections on the Battle of the Beanfield, see Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society, an article I published three weeks ago. For more information, see my articles, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, which provides excerpts from my book The Battle of the Beanfield, and The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, a prominent traveller who died two years ago. For more on dissent from the anti-globalisation movement to the Arab Spring, see The Year of Revolution: The “War on Tyranny” Replaces the “War on Terror”, and for commentary on how gypsies and travellers still face persecution in the UK, see my articles about the disgraceful eviction last year of gypsies and travellers at Dale Farm, The Dale Farm Eviction: How Racism Against Gypsies and Travellers Grips Modern-Day Britain and The Dale Farm Eviction: Using Planning Laws to Justify Racism Towards Gypsies and Travellers. For reflections on Stonehenge and the summer solstice, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart and Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?

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

Stop the Extradition to the US of Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon and Richard O’Dwyer

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 20, 2012, there is a meeting in the House of Commons to discuss the US-UK Extradition Treaty, a source of consternation since its establishment in 2003, as it allows British citizens to be extradited to the US for the flimsiest of reasons, where they will face a legal system that is, in many ways, out of control, in which cases that involve activities that can be described as providing material support for terrorism, for example, attract horrendously long sentences.

The meeting, in Committee Room 10, begins at 6 pm, and lasts until 8 pm, and features the following speakers:

Caroline Lucas MP

John Hemming MP

Sadiq Khan MP (Shadow Justice Secretary)

Gareth Peirce

Victoria Brittain

David Bermingham (Natwest Three)

Sir Iqbal Sacranie

Ashfaq Ahmad

Those facing extradition, whose cases will be discussed, are Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon and Richard O’Dwyer. I discussed their cases back in April, after Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad had their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights turned down, and I recommend that article for anyone who wants to know more. Briefly, however, none of the men have ever visited the US, and summaries of their cases are as follows: Talha Ahsan is a poet and writer with Asperger’s syndrome who has been detained for six years without charge or trial; Babar Ahmad has been detained without charge or trial for eight years, longer than any other British citizen in modern British history (and both men are accused of alleged crimes involving web-based militant activity); Gary McKinnon, who also has Asperger’s Syndrome, is accused of hacking into US agency websites ten years ago and has been fighting extradition ever since; and Richard O’Dwyer is accused of breaching US copyright laws, despite the fact that what he is accused of does not constitute a crime in the UK.

As Liberty has explained in its “Extradition Watch” campaign:

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

This is an important meeting, about a hugely important topic that needs addressing — and resolving with justice and fairness — and below, to provide further important information, I’m cross-posting two articles about Talha Ahsan’s case that help to shed light on the barbarity of the current extradition arrangements. The first is an editorial by Hicham Yezza in Ceasefire magazine, and the second is from the Guardian by the author AL Kennedy. Talha and Babar Ahmad are also featured in “Extradition,” a new documentary film directed by Turab Shah, which features interviews with Gareth Peirce, Talha’s Brother Hamja Ahsan, the playwright Avaes Mohammad and the fathers of Babar and Talha, all framed by Talha’s prison poetry.

Screenings of the film are currently taking place across the UK (In Birmingham and Manchester on June 21, in London on June 22, in Edinburgh on June 25 and Glasgow on June 27, with more dates to be added), and as the Free Talha Ahsan website notes, “The fate of these men is now in an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights, who will make the decision on the validity of their extradition by July 10, 2012.”

There is also a protest outside Downing Street from 1 pm to 3 pm on Saturday June 23, entitled, “British Justice for British Citizens,” and calling for the Prime Minister to halt the extraditions, at which speakers so far confirmed are Ashfaq Ahmad, Julia O’Dwyer, Bruce Kent, John McDonnell MP, David Bermingham, Kate Hudson, Louise Christian, Unjum Mirza, Victoria Brittain, Farooq Murad and Avaez Mohammed. Click on the image to enlarge the poster.

Beyond Kafka: this unjust detention and extradition of UK citizens must end

By Hicham Yezza, Ceasefire magazine, May 22, 2012

In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Joseph K, the central character, is driven to paranoia and despair after finding himself charged with an unnamed offence about which no evidence is ever presented. Kafka wrote what he thought was a grotesquely exaggerated parable to show us what can go wrong — and how easily so — when societies lose their power to hold rulers accountable. Yet little did he know that, barely half a century on, his attempt at far-fetched dystopia would be rendered not just a banal plausibility but a hardened, crude reality for countless innocents across the world.

The idea that anyone could be detained on suspicion of a crime of whose nature they cannot be told, the evidence for which they cannot see, would have seemed preposterous to the 13th century drafters of the Magna Carta let alone to a notionally “civilised” modern society such as 21st century Britain. And yet, this is precisely the sort of moral quagmire we have sleepwalked into.

Last week, I took part in a discussion programme (“The World This Week“, presented by Phil Rees) that touched upon the subject of the detention without charge of UK citizens. In particular, the programme focused on the fact that many of the people affected, such as Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, are facing the serious prospect of being extradited to the United States, all for alleged crimes taking place in the UK.

It’s important to note that we are not talking here about someone being detained for a few hours, or even days, while urgent investigations are being carried out — which would have had at least some semblance of logic. In fact, most of these men have been held for years: five years in the case of Talha Ahsan, eight in the case of Babar Ahmad, and twelve for two others — all of whom, let us remember, have not been charged with any crime whatsoever.

The case of Talha Ahsan, a poet and first class SOAS graduate, who suffers from Asperger’s, is worth highlighting for being both representative of the others and indicative of the sheer senselessness of what passes for due process in this country.

Despite having spent half a decade in prison, Talha has, to this day, seen no charges being levelled against him, nor has he ever been questioned by either UK or US police. Furthermore, his lawyers are yet to be granted the chance to see any evidence against their client, and have thus been left with the task of fighting shadows and spectres.

As if the Kafkaesque parallels couldn’t get any more poignant, fate has decreed that the last book Talha read before his arrest was … Franz Kafka’s The Trial. As his brother, Hamja, later pointed out, Talha “never finished it and I had to return the overdue copy to the Library”. (Poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad read a section to mark the 5th year of Talha’s detention without trial, available online here — from 5:57m in).

Predictably, Talha’s predicament, and that of the others, has met with almost total indifference by their own government. For all his rhetorical flexing of patriotic muscles, David Cameron (like Blair and Brown before him) has shown himself to be a meek and docile servant to US interests.

Instead, the coalition’s much vaunted civil liberties agenda — supposedly providing a corrective swerve to New Labour’s decade-long assault on our freedoms — has so far given us the brilliant prospect of seeing every text, email and phone-call we ever make being recorded and monitored by the State. In effect, we are being slowly eased into a world where we are all potentially guilty until we can prove otherwise.

These are not issues restricted to Muslim Britons either. Two prominent cases are those of Richard O’Dwyer and Gary McKinnon, whose planned extradition rests solely on the premise they represent a serious, existential threat to the United States. This is the same United States whose government (as I mention in the programme) was revealed as recently as two weeks ago to have been training, on US soil, members of the MEK, an Iranian opposition organisation which figures on its own list of terrorist groups.

I recommend that readers watch the contributions by my co-guests, Hamja Ahsan (brother of Talha) and Makbool Javauid (human rights lawyer), who both provide an excellent summary of the cases and a bleak glimpse into the threats facing civil liberties in this country. As prominent lawyers, legal experts and civil liberties campaigners have pointed out, UK citizens, whatever their colour, creed or political persuasion, should be tried in their own country, based on evidence they can see and challenge. Anything less is simply not good enough.

Indeed, had this been a story from China or Russia, the obviousness of such a straightforward demand would have made any further commentary redundant. And yet, we allow for this to happen on our shores, and in our name. We pretend that defending these men is not our responsibility, that their persecution is not a seal of shame on our justice system, that their tragedy is someone else’s problem.

Indeed, that these men — who remain innocent until further notice — have been allowed to languish in prison for years without a public outcry is a sad indictment of how far we’ve slumped towards accepting an official line that tells us we’re facing an overwhelming, imminent “security threat” about to engulf us all, and that we must sell our freedoms — hard-earned over centuries of struggle against the powerful — on the cheap to keep this threat at bay. Alas, it seems most of us have bought into the idea that destroying these and other people’s lives is a price worth paying for a false sense of “peace” and “security”.

As such, we ought to keep in mind another, less mentioned, aspect of Kafka’s famous novel: the tragic essence of Joseph K’s predicament is not that he is facing a faceless, sadistic bureaucratic monster, against whom all resistance seems utterly futile, but that he is facing it alone.

Still, whereas we aren’t able to do much about the fictional Joseph K, there remains a lot we can do to help the real-life Joseph Ks suffering in the here and now: Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Richard O’Dwyer, Gary McKinnon and others. For instance, we can support initiatives such as … Caroline Lucas MP’s Early Day Motion on the subject, or by simply getting informed, and helping inform others, about these issues.

This is possibly one of our very last opportunities to redress a colossal injustice and stand up for the civil liberties we claim as our own.  We shouldn’t waste it.

For more info on those facing detention without charge and extradition to the US, visit the campaign websites for Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon, Richard O’Dwyer and Friends Extradited. See Also: Politics When Innocence is Not Enough: Talha Ahsan and the Rise of the (In)Security State [a fascinating article from Ceasefire, last July, written by  Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed].

Solitary confinement is no place for a poet

By AL Kennedy, The Guardian, May 9, 2012

As you will know, I am not in any way a fan of arguments which claim that artists are more sensitive than others, or indeed liable to be more insane than others. I do agree — and find it reasonable to assert — that any profession, or longterm activity, can leave its mark on the practitioner, physically, mentally and emotionally. Forensic anthropologists can identify archers from wear patterns on their teeth; the interested disinterest with which doctors and surgeons can view their fellows is a recognisable trait; as are the impulses towards control and improvement which manifest themselves in educationalists.

The arts, if I can be brief with my definition, are about communication. We can argue later about pieces of art which try not to communicate and why I think they’re not really pieces of art at all and more like telegrams from people who have issues with commitment. Put simply, someone who works in the arts notices things: emotions, actions, remarkable and humdrum elements of their lives and the lives of others and — of course — the fruits of their imaginations. The artist generates and captures material, analyses it, crafts it and then presents it. An almost infinite variety of inspirations combine, distil, appear without warning, bubble up over years and generally bother the artist, delight the artist, scare the artist and become insistent that they should be expressed. And the artist expresses. Something only they know about and have come to understand is given to us — we are made richer by a stranger, who takes us into times, places, situations and personalities which we could not otherwise experience. This is a beautiful and generous phenomenon and I have been glad of it for all my conscious life.

And artists do, through time, become recognisably artists. They love what they do and love to do it. Their desire to communicate to strangers can override very reasonable demands from family and friends that they should be a little more domestically focused and expressive. And specialities begin to show: someone like me will notice when words are repeated in conversations, or have unusual lyricism, or when an advert pretends to imply positive qualities and happy lives while meaning very little. Painters will see and see and see: the fall of clothes, the combination of colours, the alteration of faces, the endless effects of light. Actors will pick up minute alterations and inaccuracies in inflection, will assess strangers with horrible rapidity and accuracy and, having spent years making themselves deeply accessible to their emotions in a way that allows them to pay their bills, will cry at the drop of a hat.

To repeat, the artist generates and captures material, analyses it, crafts it and then presents it. I mention this, because the poet Talha Ahsan has been much in my thoughts lately. I have never met Ahsan, but I have read his poems; been given his expressions of landscapes, the touch of loved skin and something of his experience of being imprisoned.

I have written about Ahsan here before and you may be aware that he is a British subject and resident who was arrested on 19 July 2006 and who has been held without trial ever since, awaiting extradition under the terms of the increasingly notorious Extradition Act 2003. The US requested his arrest and the UK authorities obliged, although he has no case to answer in the UK. The Extradition Act doesn’t require the provision of prima facie evidence. It seems that evidence gathered during Babar Ahmad‘s interrogation — an interrogation described in the high court as “grave abuse, tantamount to torture” — may have helped form the basis of the case against Ahsan. Ahmad was later awarded £60,000 compensation by the Metropolitan police and also has no case to answer in the UK. He also remains in custody awaiting extradition to the US.

The situation of these two men is mirrored in a number of other appalling cases, some of which affected white Christians and therefore received rather more media attention. I would hope that any reader would feel compassion for their position, which is something far closer to purgatory than anything I would wish on anyone.

For me, Babar Ahmad is someone I have read about in newspapers and on websites. Talha Ahsan is someone who has written me letters from his prison and who has written the letters to a wider world which are his poems. The insight into his predicament and his humanity which his writings offer remind me why so many politicians prefer that unsanctioned forms of expression — especially artistic expression — should be limited, or entirely curtailed. And they remind me of how human beings can make beauty flower, even in a wasteland of absurd and willful amorality.

If Ahsan is finally extradited to the US and found guilty, he will be detained in a supermax prison where he will remain in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. The vast majority of his interactions with prison authorities will be provided virtually, via a black and white TV. Human contact will be limited to occasional strip searches, medical interventions and the arrival of his meals. He will have a tiny window. Less technologically advanced forms of solitary confinement were used in Victorian prisons until it was found they tended to make inmates insane.

This is intolerable. The lack of justice, the lack of transparency, the stain of torture, the calculation of imprisonment amounting to torture — this is all intolerable. This should not happen to Babar Ahmad — because it is intolerable. This should not happen to anyone — because it is intolerable. This should not happen to my friend Talha Ahsan who writes poems about drinking turkish coffee and getting a haircut and kissing while mouths taste of peaches and prayers and compassion and love and wishing to have never been born and illuminates each line with himself and his voice and his music — because it is intolerable.

In prison Talha suffers, as we all do, idiosyncratically. Should he be confined to a supermax facilty, he will become a man who has almost nothing to notice every day and who has no one to share his life with, or to hear his voice. He will be denied the right to communicate — something enshrined by the UN as fundamental to our experience of being human. One of the parts of who he is, his occupation, will have been constricted to its vanishing point. He will rehearse his death, the last of his absolute removal, until it becomes reality. Although he is a man of immense personal strength and compassion, I feel there may be no onwards for Talha which is not very dark. I hope I’m wrong. Free and in my study and with all the wider world under my fingers, I hope I’m wrong.

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

My Photos on Flickr: Campaigning to Close Guantánamo, Washington D.C., January 2012

Close Guantanamo, Washington D.C., January 2012, a set on Flickr.

In the small hours of this morning, I posted the first set of photos on my new Flickr account, of my wanderings in New York in January, at the start of my two-week US tour to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison.

My tour — my fifth visit to the US to call for the closure of Guantánamo, and to publicize the stories of the men held there — was organized by the campaigning group The World Can’t Wait, and in New York and Washington D.C., I spent a lot of time with The World Can’t Wait’s National Director, Debra Sweet, a relentless  campaigner for justice, who, very deservedly, recently won an American Humanist Award as a “Humanist Heroine.”

I’m following up on yesterday’s photo set with a second set, featuring the protests in Washington D.C. on January 11, the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, which I discussed here, and for which videos of myself and others talking about the urgent need to close Guantánamo can be found here (at the New America Foundation), here (on RT), here and here (outside the Supreme Court), and here and here (at a screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film I co-directed with Polly Nash).

Preceded and followed by glorious weather, the actual anniversary, when around a thousand protestors — including many young people — gathered to protest outside the White House, the Justice Department and the Supreme Court, was horribly wet, although we refused to let it dampen our spirits, and we also seized the opportunity to push a message — that over half the 169 prisoners still held (87 in total) have been cleared for release — which has gradually been lodging itself in those parts of the national consciousness that are still open to the truth.

Personally, I have been persistently pushing this message on my website, and on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I established on the 10th anniversary with the attorney Tom Wilner, and it recently became particular prominent in the news with the publication of my report, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, and the Supreme Court’s refusal to accept appeals submitted by seven prisoners (which I wrote about here and here, and spoke about here and here). This has led to a situation in which all three branches of the US government have now abandoned the Guantánamo prisoners, including the 87 cleared for release, consigning them to indefinite detention — very probably for the rest of their lives.

This, of course, is a profoundly depressing situation, and one that cannot be tolerated by anyone who respects fairness and justice, and recognizes that the men held at Guantánamo are, for the most part, scapegoats in the Bush administration’s brutal and ill-conceived “war on terror,” who are now held hostage by President Obama — innocents framed by the false confessions of their fellow prisoners, or foot soldiers in the almost forgotten Afghan civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, but not — with a few exceptions — people involved in acts of international terrorism.

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

Andy Worthington’s Photos on Flickr: New York, January 2012

New York, January 2012, a set on Flickr.

Regular readers will be aware that, since the start of this year, some of my articles have featured photos I have taken (see Photos: The “Austerity Isn’t Working” Protest Outside Downing Street and Parliament, Photos: May Day Celebrations in London, Including Occupy London Protestors, Occupy London, May 12: Photos from St. Paul’s Cathedral Protest and Occupy London, May 12: Photos from the Bank of England Protest and a Call for Global Solidarity, for example).

Photography has been a love of mine since I was a teenager, but it is something that I largely let slip after Guantánamo took over my life six years ago, and my last analogue camera broke and I failed to buy a new digital replacement. Fortunately, my wife gave me a great digital camera at Christmas, which has now become my constant companion, and, as a result, I’ve now set up a Flickr account, and will regularly be uploading photos on Flickr and then providing notification here.

This first set of photos I’ve uploaded contains the photos I took in New York in January this year, during unseasonably good weather, at the start of my two-week visit to the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening, which also involved me visiting Washington D.C., San Francisco and the Bay Area, and Chicago. I wrote about my New York visit here. More photos of my US trip, and then of my other activities this year — which included a visit to Kuwait and some travels in the English countryside, and which have increasingly involved me travelling around London as a camera-wielding cyclist — will follow soon, and I hope also to add some archive albums of my earlier activities before I became a full-time chronicler of the US government’s crimes at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “war on terror.”

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

Meet the Seven Guantánamo Prisoners Whose Appeals Were Turned Down by the Supreme Court

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

This week, the Supreme Court took a decision not to accept appeals by seven Guantánamo prisoners who, over the last few years, either had their habeas petitions denied, or had their successful petitions overturned on appeal. The ruling came the day before the 4th anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 case in which the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

That led to a number of stunning court victories for the prisoners between 2008 and 2010, but in the last two years no prisoners have had their habeas petitions granted, because judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, a bastion of Bush-era paranoia about the “war on terror,” where the deeply Conservative Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph holds sway, have unfairly rewritten the rules in the government’s favor, so that it is now almost impossible for a habeas petition to be granted.

This is a particularly low point in Guantánamo’s bleak history, because, with the Supreme Court’s refusal to rescue habeas corpus, and its death as a remedy for the Guantánamo prisoners, the remaining 169 men — and especially the 87 already cleared for release but still held –  are now trapped, possibly forever, because all three branches of the US government have failed them.

In addition to the Supreme Court, the Obama administration has failed the remaining prisoners, not only through the President’s failure to close Guantánamo within a year, as he promised, but also through his refusal, ever since, to show any interest in belatedly fulfilling his promise. Blame also lies with Congress, where lawmakers have cynically imposed onerous restrictions on the ability of the administration to release or transfer any of the remaining prisoners, with the intention of making it impossible for the administration to close the prison — and almost impossible for anyone to be released.

As Tom Wilner (attorney and “Close Guantánamo” steering committee member) noted back in January, a waiver exists in the latest legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), allowing the President to bypass Congress when it comes to releasing prisoners, but President Obama has not yet chosen to use it.

Last week, we secured some good coverage for our exclusive report, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago,” with the report’s author, Andy Worthington, being interviewed on RT and Democracy Now! to discuss not only the report, revealing the identities of 40 prisoners cleared for release between 2004 and 2007, but also the Supreme Court’s shameful abdication of its responsibilities.

Some of the coverage focused on the story of one of the men whose appeals were turned down, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni. Noticeably, he is one of the prisoners featured in our report, and in fact he had his release approved on three separate occasions before the D.C. Circuit Court intervened to trap him at Guantánamo, possibly for the rest of his life.

Latif was cleared by a military review board under President Bush in December 2006, by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama in 2009, and by Judge Anthony Kennedy Jr., of the District Court in Washington D.C., who granted his habeas corpus petition in July 2010.

When the D.C. Circuit Court intervened to prevent his release, overturning his successful habeas petition in November last year, two of the three judges ordered that “a presumption of regularity” should be given to an intelligence report that was central to the government’s case against Latif, who has always maintained that he traveled to Pakistan to secure treatment for a head injury sustained in a car crash in Yemen, and was then advised to seek help in Afghanistan.

In a dissenting opinion, the third judge, David Tatel, took exception to his colleagues’s demands, noting that an intelligence report was “produced in the fog of war, by a clandestine method that we know almost nothing about,” and could not, therefore, be regarded as necessarily reliable. He also — unlike the Supreme Court — noted that it was “hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court’s command” that the habeas review process be “meaningful,” in light of his colleagues’ ruling, and warned that, in future, if the ruling stood, it would be impossible for any prisoner to have their habeas petition granted.

In reflecting on this dreadful state of affairs, it is impossible not to notice the gulf between the courage of Judge Tatel compared to the justices of the Supreme Court, who refused — unanimously, but without elaboration — to accept Latif’s appeal, even though Latif had a compelling case, in which, as Lyle Denniston noted for SCOTUSblog, he challenged “the presumption of accuracy of US intelligence reports,” challenged the Circuit Court’s “power to find facts on its own,” and also challenged the Circuit Court’s “refusal to uphold any release order.”

In considering Latif’s case, it occurred to me that the other six prisoners had also, to varying degrees, been failed disgracefully by the Supreme Court — and, in some cases at least, by the Obama administration, which had proceeded with cases through the Justice Department, even when there were sometimes clear reasons for officials not to do so.

Latif’s case — with his repeated history of being cleared — was one example, but another was that of Hussein Almerfedi, another Yemeni, who, as noted in the “Guantánamo Scandal” report, was approved for transfer, probably in 2008, by an unidentified “Designated Civilian Official,” and then had his habeas petition granted by Judge Paul Friedman in July 2010, only for that ruling to be reversed on appeal in July 2011.

Almerfedi, seized in Iran, and held in secret prisons in Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantánamo, had challenged the government’s detention authority if, as he claimed in his case, it was “based on non-incriminating facts.” He, like Latif, also challenged the Circuit Court’s “refusal to uphold any release order,” as well as asking about the validity of a detainee being required to “rebut government evidence found to be credible,” when he had — and has — no means of doing so.

The point about the inability to refute evidence, as with Latif’s challenge to the requirement that the government’s evidence should be automatically regarded as accurate, found an echo in a challenge by a third prisoner, Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti who lost his habeas petition in September 2010, after the Circuit Court rewrote the rules. Al-Kandari has always insisted that he traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid, and the case against him is desperately weak, as it relies almost entirely on statements made by unreliable witnesses. However, the Circuit Court’s rewriting of the rules trapped al-Kandari, who, as a result, was calling on the Supreme Court to to allow him the right to restrict the government’s use of hearsay evidence.

Despite the lack of evidence against him, al-Kandari has never been cleared for release — either by military officials, or by a judge — but another of the seven, Uthman Abdul Rahman Mohammed Uthman, another Yemeni, had. Uthman’s habeas corpus petition was granted in February 2010, but the government appealed, and his successful opinion was reversed on appeal in March 2011. He took a different approach, challenging the government’s right to detain someone who, as he claimed in his case, “did not actually fight against US or allied forces and provided no direct support to terrorists.” He also claimed that it was a “violation of the habeas Suspension Clause if habeas review is not meaningful.”

These, too, were valid points, which, like all the others, were turned down by the Supreme Court without explanation.

The last three men had less reason for hoping that the Supreme Court would look favorably on their cases, as they all had their habeas petitions denied by the District Court for low-level or peripheral involvement with the Taliban, and it is apparently outside anyone’s remit to ask why it is that the justification for all the prisoners’ detention — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks — fails to distinguish between those allegedly involved with the international terrorist activities of al-Qaeda, and those involved with the Taliban’s military conflict with the Northern Alliance, which had nothing to do with terrorism, and predated the 9/11 attacks.

Of these men, Musa’ab al-Madhwani, one of six men seized in house raids in Pakistan in September 2002, who lost his habeas petition in December 2009, when Judge Thomas Hogan made a point of stating that he did not consider him to be a threat to the US, challenged his detention “based on ‘guilt by association’ with suspected terrorists,” which was “based on visits to guesthouses and training facilities,” as SCOTUSblog described it, and also called for a “right to constitutional due process protection.”

Muaz al-Alawi (described as al-Alwi), who lost his habeas petition in January 2009 for being a lowly Taliban foot soldier, challenged his detention “based on ties to the Taliban after hostilities had ended,” and also claimed there was “inadequate time” for his attorney to prepare a defense.

The last of the seven, Tawfiq al-Bihani, who lost his habeas petition in October 2010 — also for being a lowly Taliban foot soldier, seized in Iran, like Hussein Almerfedi, and also held in secret prisons in Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantánamo — sought “a basic definition of detention power, limited by the laws of war,” but like all the other claims, it was apparently regarded as irrelevant by the Supreme Court.

I hope this provides some additional context for the Supreme Court’s decision, on Monday, to accept that Judge Randolph and his colleagues are now in charge of the legal legacy of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” detainee policy. If you wish to know more, SCOTUSblog has links to all the court submissions, by both the prisoners and the government.

From our point of view, here at “Close Guantánamo,” it only confirms our resolve to keep pushing for the closure of Guantánamo, and the release of the 87 men held hostage for political reasons, and we will be working hard to build our campaign in preparation for putting pressure on whoever will be inaugurated as the next President of the United States in January 2013. If you haven’t already signed up, please do so here (just an email address required), and please also ask your friends and family to join up as well. It is time to bring this monstrous miscarriage of justice to an end.

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

The Supreme Court Abandons the Guantánamo Prisoners

On Monday, when the Supreme Court decided to turn down seven appeals submitted by prisoners held at Guantánamo, without providing any explanation, a particularly low point was reached in the prison’s history.

The decision came just one day before the fourth anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, the hugely significant 2008 ruling granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

That ruling reaffirmed a previous Supreme Court ruling, Rasul v. Bush, in June 2004, granting the prisoners habeas rights, and involved the Court establishing that Congressional attempts to strip habeas rights from the prisoners — in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — had been unconstitutional.

Boumediene led to a flurry of activity, as long-frozen cases were revived. District Court judges in Washington D.C. then decided the evidentiary standards required, assessing that the government needed only to establish its case by a preponderance of the evidence, and not beyond a reasonable doubt, as is required in criminal cases.

Even so, the weaknesses in the government’s cases were such that, between October 2008 and July 2010, 38 of the prisoners had their habeas corpus petitions granted, and just 14 had their petitions denied. For reasons that have never been explained, prosecutors in the Justice Department continued to work on the Guantánamo cases as aggressively under Barack Obama as they had under George W. Bush, without either President Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder calling for a rethink in the way they were operating, even though the District Court judges repeatedly poured scorn on the government’s lawyers.

Vindicating the work of investigative journalists like myself and researchers at the Seton Hall Law School, who had produced a series of reports debunking exaggerated claims about the prisoners’ significance, the judges ascertained that many of the witnesses relied upon by the government had mental health issues, actually identified in reports by government officials, which made their statements untrustworthy, and they also took apart flimsy claims made by intelligence analysts, military officials and Justice Department prosecutors. Even so, they were careful to follow the rules, denying petitions when evidence of involvement with the Taliban was produced, even though, in most cases, that demonstrated only that they had been involved in the Taliban’s long-standing military campaign against the Northern Alliance, which pre-dated — and had nothing to do with — the 9/11 attacks.

28 of these prisoners were released — the only ones, out of 602 prisoners released in total, who were freed through legal means — but in 2010 the D.C. Circuit Court began dealing with appeals submitted by the government, and decided to rewrite the rules in the government’s favor. In successive rulings, the Circuit Court judges have insisted that the barest association with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban is sufficient to justify detention (whereas the lower court judges had determined that prisoners had to be demonstrably part of the command structure of either organization), and, most recently, have demanded that intelligence reports submitted by the government should be regarded as accurate, even though, objectively, there are perfectly sound reasons for believing that field reports, produced under pressure, should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. As a result, the last eleven habeas petitions, over the last two years, have all been denied, and other previously successful petitions have been reversed or vacated.

The most vociferous of the dissenting judges, Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph,  who is notorious for having endorsed every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation under President Bush that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, went so far as to show open contempt for the Court and its Boumediene ruling in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, in October 2010, which was entitled, “The Guantánamo Mess.” In that speech, he compared the justices to characters in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “They were careless people,” he read. “They smashed things up … and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Another judge, Senior Judge Laurence Silberman, indulged in a disturbing outburst while turning down an appeal by Yasein Esmail, a Yemeni, in April 2011. Noting that, in a “typical criminal case,” judges will “overturn a conviction if the prosecutor lacked sufficient evidence, even when the judge is virtually certain that the defendant committed the crime,” he added, “That can mean that a thoroughly bad person is released onto our streets, but I need not explain why our criminal justice system treats that risk as one we all believe, or should believe, is justified.” However, he claimed that, in the case of the Guantánamo prisoners, “candour obliges me to admit that one cannot help but be conscious of the infinitely greater downside risk to our country, and its people, of an order releasing a detainee who is likely to return to terrorism.”

As was noted in a report in January by the Center for Constitutional Rights (PDF), on which I worked:

This outburst was particularly troubling — but also revealing. First, Judge Silberman undermined the fundamental principle that the accused must be released if there is insufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Thus, for Judge Silberman, the men held at Guantánamo are somehow exempted from rights afforded to the rest of the human race. Second, Judge Silberman talked about detainees being “likely to return to terrorism,” when most were never involved in terrorism in the first place.

In refusing to accept any of the Guantánamo appeals, the justices of the Supreme Court have allowed Judge Randolph — on his fourth attempt — to dictate detainee policy, and have failed one particular prisoner, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni whose case is emblematic of the problems with the Supreme Court’s refusal to engage with the Circuit Court’s hijacking of Boumediene.

Latif, who has always maintained that he traveled to Pakistan for treatment on a severe head wound he received in a car crash in Yemen, and ended up being advised to seek help in Afghanistan, has had well-chronicled mental health problems in Guantánamo, including a number of suicide attempts, and, as a result, should have been freed after he was cleared for release in December 2006 by a military review board under President Bush. However, like dozens of other cleared prisoners, he was still held when Bush left office. He was then almost certainly cleared by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established to review all the prisoners’ cases in 2009, and he then had his habeas petition granted in July 2010.

When that successful appeal was overturned last November by the D.C. Circuit Court, the New York Times lamented, in an editorial, that the majority judges in the Circuit Court ruling, Judge Janice Rogers Brown and Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who had ordered that the government’s intelligence report be given “a presumption of regularity,” had “improperly replaced the trial court’s factual findings with [their] own factual judgments,” and that the court “unfairly placed the burden on Mr. Latif to rebut the presumption that the government’s main evidence was accurate,” because “the government should bear the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that his detention is warranted.”

In a dissenting opinion, Judge David Tatel, the third judge in the panel, noted that there was no reason whatsoever for his colleagues to give “a presumption of regularity” to an intelligence report, which was “produced in the fog of war, by a clandestine method that we know almost nothing about.”

Judge Tatel also noted that it was “hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court’s command” that the habeas review process be “meaningful,” in light of his colleagues’ ruling, and it is to the Supreme Court’s shame that the justices refused to follow Judge Tatel in recognizing that the Circuit Court has gutted habeas corpus of all meaning when it comes to the Guantánamo prisoners, and has rendered Boumediene meaningless.

This is disgraceful in and of itself, but with President Obama having failed to close Guantánamo as promised, and with Congress having imposed such severe restrictions on his ability to release prisoners that only two men — who had their habeas corpus petitions granted in October 2008 — have been freed in the last eighteen months, the bleak truth, in light of Monday’s decision by the Supreme Court, is that all three branches of the US government have now definitively acted to prevent the closure of Guantánamo, and to make the release of any of the remaining 169 prisoners almost impossible.

This is in spite of the fact over half of these men — 87 in total — were cleared for release in 2009 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. Moreover, as I demonstrated in a recent report, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago,” 40 of those men were previously cleared for release, between 2004 and 2007, by military review boards, and in other military assessments, under President Bush.

These statistics demonstrate that the last thing that should be happening now is for Guantánamo to be sealed shut except for those who accept plea deals in their trials by military commission, or those who die at the prison, but that is indeed what is happening. As a result, June 11, 2012 will go down in history as the day that the Supreme Court hurled the remaining Guantánamo prisoners back into the legal black hole from which they had first been given the hope of rescue in the habeas rulings in June 2004 and June 2008. It turns out, however, that those rulings were made by a Court that remembered that arbitrary and indefinite detention is a crime against decency, and against the ideals on which the United States was founded.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 5: $1000 Needed for My Campaigning Work to Close Guantánamo and Combat Injustice

Every three months, I ask you, my friends and supporters, to provide financial assistance to help me to continue working as a freelance investigative journalist, exposing the lies and distortions used to keep Guantánamo open, and telling the stories of the men held there, to humanize them, and to help people understand how important it is for that dreadful icon of US lawlessness is finally closed. Regular readers will also be aware that I have branched out into commenting on the ongoing global economic crisis, and, in particular, the age of austerity cynically imposed in the UK by the Tory-led government, which is both savage and deluded.

With the kind help of 17 friends and supporters, I have so far raised $1450 to support my work over the next three months, three-quarters of which is completely unfunded, and is only possible with your help.

I am enormously grateful to those who have donated, and, on this last day of fundraising, I can only reiterate that all contributions are welcome, whether it’s $25, $50, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

As has become apparent his week, with the US Supreme Court’s refusal to consider appeals submitted by seven Guantánamo prisoners, we have reached a low point in the story of Guantánamo, as all three branches of the US government have now failed the men still held there, and, in particular, the 87 men cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but still held. With the Supreme Court refusing to challenge the D.C. Circuit Court’s right-wing scaremongering, and its rewriting of the rules to prevent any prisoner from having their habeas corpus petitions granted, there is now no way that Guantánamo can be closed — or for the majority of the men still held to be released — without renewed pressure from people who care.

I pledge to remain at the forefront of those making the effort to secure the closure of Guantánamo, and to free the men cleared for release up to eight years ago, and I hope you’ll stay with me for the rest of this long and arduous journey. I also pledge to keep campaigning against corrupt or idiotic politicians who continue to shield criminal bankers from accountability for the global economic crash of 2008, and who are cynically using callous austerity programmes to make most people’s lives so financially precarious that they dare not complain, and to push the poor, the unemployed and the disabled into absolute poverty.

Andy Worthington

London

June 15, 2012

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

Video: Watch UK Uncut’s New Film, “The Missing Billions,” About Savage Austerity Cuts and Corporate Tax Avoidance

[image error]I hope you have 25 minutes to spare to watch a new film by UK Uncut, entitled, “The Missing Billions,” which I’ve posted below. Since emerging in October 2010, the UK Uncut campaigners have protested against tax avoidance in the UK and have worked to raise awareness about cuts to public services. They have also undertaken — and encouraged others to undertake, on a kind of free franchise basis — countless actions involving theatrical occupations of corporate outlets, and are now, as they put it, “extending their actions into the courts.” See here for their legal action page — and how to donate to support their legal cases.

This is an important documentary, and a perfect follow-up to my article yesterday, RIP Karen Sherlock, Another Victim of the Tories’ Brutal, Heartless Disability Reforms, in which I not only mourned the death of disability campaigner Karen Sherlock, who was herself severely disabled, but also reiterated my sustained attack on the government’s cruelty and incompetence, with particular reference to the government’s assault on education, on the NHS, and on the unemployed and disabled.

The film includes interviews with disabled people, with others opposing the artificial age of austerity imposed on us, and also with financial experts and lawyers explaining the colossal extent of tax avoidance, and how we do not need to accept that the cost of bailing out the banks who caused the global economic crash of 2008 is being paid for through cuts, when it should be tackled by clamping down on tax evasion and tax avoidance.

As is explained in the film, £850 billion was used to bail out the banks, even though, according to some estimates, $11 trillion is hidden in offshore accounts — enough to tackle deficits without the savage and self-defeating austerity measures that are steadily destroying the fabric of life in the UK.

The missing billions | UK Uncut from Small Axe Films on Vimeo.

When UK Uncut began, its young activists were inspired to campaign because of the realisation that the communications giant Vodafone had negotiated a deal with the UK government, whereby its tax bill of £7 billion was conveniently reduced to £1.25 billion. To coincide with the release of “The Missing Billions,” UK Uncut are pursuing Goldman Sachs in court. As the Guardian explained on Wednesday, they have “won permission from the high courts to have a ‘sweetheart’ deal between HMRC [Revenue and Customs] and the banking giant Goldman Sachs judicially reviewed for its legality.”

In court, “Justice Peregrine Simon said the matter was ‘plainly in the public interest’ and that any judicial review of the deal which saw Goldman Sachs let off a £10m interest bill, would be separate to an anticipated National Audit Office investigation on maladministration and bad practice.”

I hope you have time to watch “The Missing Billions,” and that it proves useful. I have been watching these issues closely, but I found new angles in the film that I had not considered before. In closing, I’m posting below UK Uncut’s analysis of the governments lies, which I have found useful since the group first established its website, for its simplicity and logic:

UK Uncut’s Opposition to the UK Government’s Austerity Cuts

“There is no alternative.”

We are told that the only way to reduce the deficit is to cut public services. This is certainly not the case. There are alternatives, but the government chooses to ignore them, highlighting the fact that the cuts are based on ideology, not necessity.

One alternative is to clamp down on tax avoidance by corporations and the rich and tax evasion, estimated to cost the state £95bn a year;
Another is to make the banks pay for free insurance provided to them by the taxpayer: a chief executive at the Bank of England put the cost of this subsidy at £100bn in a single year.

Either the tax avoided and evaded in a single year or the ongoing taxpayer subsidy to the banking industry could pay for all of the £81bn, four-year cuts programme.

“We are all in this together.”

Since the banking crisis:

average pay of FTSE 100 directors has risen 55%;
corporation tax has been cut;
the government have not delivered on a manifesto pledge to clamp down on tax avoidance, instead cutting staff at HMRC;
bank profits and bonuses are back in the many billions (last year banks paid out over £7bn in bonuses and just four banks made £24bn in profit);
there has been no reform of the banks.

David Cameron himself has said that the cuts will change Britain’s “whole way of life”. Every aspect of what was fought for by generations seems under threat — from selling off the forests, privatising health provision, closing the libraries and swimming pools, to scrapping rural bus routes. What Cameron doesn’t say is that the cuts will also disproportionately hit the poor and vulnerable, with cuts to housing benefit, disability living allowance, the childcare element of working tax credits, EMA, the Every Child a Reader programme, Sure Start and the Future Jobs Fund to name a few.

The facts speak for themselves; we are not all in this together, we are paying for the folly of reckless bankers whilst the rich profit.

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