Andy Worthington's Blog, page 171

June 14, 2012

RIP Karen Sherlock, Another Victim of the Tories’ Brutal, Heartless Disability Reforms

Since coming to power in May 2010, through a Frankenstein’s Monster coalition with the Lib Dems, the Tories have embarked on the most sustained and unprecedented assault on the British state in history, and seem determined to turn back the clock to a time before notions of universal suffrage, of education and healthcare for all, and a welfare state that would look after the most vulnerable and unfortunate members of society took effect.

In this savage world, in which, for ideological reasons — and using the global economic crash of 2008 as an excuse for punishing those who had nothing to do with it, and allowing the rich crooks to escape scot-free — the Tories and their Lib Dem stooges have been pushing a criminally deceptive message: that everything that has not yet been privatised must be privatised, and that the state provision of services is unaffordable, and must must be brought to an end.

Amazingly, the government has largely been getting away with its lies, shielding irresponsible and almost unthinkably greedy bankers and corporate tax avoiders from scrutiny, and these 21st century neo-liberal butchers, whose policy decisions are all filtered through an un-Christian, cruel, myopic and destructive worldview, have even succeeded in making people believe that, although we, the taxpayers, pay over £500 billion to the government in tax and national insurance every year, we no longer have any right to demand that any of that money — any of it — is used for the state provision of services like health, education, or welfare.

In the field of healthcare, the government has succeeded in passing legislation aimed at introducing such relentless competition into the NHS that it will gradually cease to be a universal provider of healthcare for everyone, and when it comes to education, Michael Gove has been busy privatising state schools through the academies programme, and was recently crowing about how taxpayer-funded state schools will be able to become profit-making businesses in a second Tory term in office — one which, hopefully, exists only in his dreams.

The government has already done away with the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), which helped poorer children stay in education for their A levels, and at university level the transformation has been even more savage. In the fields of the arts, humanities and social sciences, the government has completely transferred the financial burden of university education onto the individual, removing direct state support, and, instead, tripling tuition fees and loaning students the money to pay for their courses.

This is ferociously expensive, and no one in government has a clue how much will actually be repaid, as ministers cannot possibly know how many students will earn the £21,000 minimum that triggers repayments. In the meantime, however, ministers are happy to gamble with the future of Britain’s universities, as potential students wonder if, for example, Germany’s universities, which are largely free, might be a better bet than paying £50,000 in the UK, and to destroy the last vestiges of social mobility that were so prevalent when they were young, but that are now being exterminated.

Most damaging of all, however, are the effects of the Tories’ callous cuts to welfare provisions for the most vulnerable members of society, and their drive towards forced, unpaid labour. I will never forgive the Tories for deciding, as soon as they took power, to punish the unemployed for having no work, and for selling the idea that they were all feckless scroungers, when there was only one job for every five jobseekers, as I regard that kind of lying and punishment as despicable.

Nevertheless, through various workfare programmes, unemployed people are being made to perform unpaid work for well-known corporations and companies that could easily afford to pay them, on the basis that they will otherwise lose their benefits and be hurled into absolute poverty.

In other cruel measures, the government has capped overall welfare payments at £500 a week, which sounds like a lot, but almost all of that is paid to landlords, who are evading any kind of scrutiny about how much they are exploiting their tenants, in a rental market that is out of control, and in which tenants have no rights at all, and landlords have no rules set about how they must behave. In the renting world, it seems, greed is unfettered.

This is bad enough, but the real evil — and I use the word evil advisedly — is to be found in the government’s treatment of the long-term disabled, which particular came to the fore earlier this year with the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill, with its planned axing of £18 billion in benefits. Like the unemployed in general, severely disabled people — the most vulnerable members of society — have also been cynically portrayed as scroungers, and the government has been subjecting them to tests designed to establish that almost everyone who is severely mentally and/or physically disabled is, in fact, fit for work.

The tests are cynically administered by Atos Healthcare, a division of the giant French IT firm, which, even more cynically, is sponsoring the Paralympic Games, and the misery that is being inflicted on the disabled is deeply shocking, as people who cannot work are being declared fit for work, and are then losing the state benefit of £96 a week (in other words, slightly less than £5,000 a year) that, to date, have enabled them to live with some measure of dignity. As I noted in an article six weeks ago, entitled Today the Tories Took £100 A Week from Some of the UK’s Most Disabled People: How Can This Be Right?, the government has decided to cut the £96 a week paid to disabled people in Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) after a year, which is a savage and unjustifiable policy, and I was also appalled to discover that, if a disabled person has a partner earning just £7,500 a year — yes, you read that right — they will now receive no benefits whatsoever.

Last year, I wrote an article entitled, Brutal Benefit Cuts for the Disabled Are Leading to Suicides in the UK, describing how some disabled people simply cannot cope with the effects of the government’s savage cuts. And while these stories are at the sharpest end of the impact of the cuts, people should be aware that, across the country, disabled people are now living in poverty, largely hidden and largely housebound, although it also remains true that some disabled people are still dying as a direct effect of the cuts.

One of these people, I learned this week, was a brave campaigner against the cuts, a severely disabled woman named Karen Sherlock, who died of a heart attack on June 8, most probably because of the stress of the constant struggle against the government’s malevolent policies.

Below I’m cross-posting her friend Sue Marsh’s article for the New Statesman and for her own blog, Diary of a Benefit Scrounger, as well as an article that Karen herself wrote in April. I never met her, but I understood her struggle, and that of all the other disabled people who are being ignored by society as a whole — or, even worse, being reviled as scroungers — and I hope that, if this scandal is news to you, you will become engaged to bring this disgrace to an end. For more information, check out The Spartacus Report, and please, if you’re in the UK, sign the e-petition entitled, “Stop and review the cuts to benefits and services which are falling disproportionately on disabled people, their carers and families.”

How many more disabled people will die frightened that their benefits will be taken away?

By Sue Marsh, New Statesman, June 11, 2012

Karen Sherlock faced endless pressure, the judgement of society, the fear of destitution, the exhaustion of constant assessments and endless forms — all as she battled to survive

I’m a disability campaigner. I’m not sure I ever set out to be — indeed that anyone does — but that is what I became.

You may have read some of the reasons here. Perhaps you’ve skimmed a few articles on ESA — the Employment & Support Allowance — tutted a shocked tut at cancer patients on chemotherapy sent to the job centre to find work. Perhaps you’ve sat open mouthed at the idea of one of the richest nations on earth arguing over just how terminally ill you need to be to get the gracious sum of £96 per week to survive with at least some dignity.

Maybe you heard that this government believes that for almost all conditions, one year is now considered enough to find work. You may have heard Chris Grayling, the Work and Pensions minister, tell you that it doesn’t matter whether people are better, or if they have found work, we simply can’t afford them any more. Their benefits will be stopped if they have a partner who earns just £7,500 a year or more.

You may have heard of this blind, deaf, tube-fed, non verbal, disabled man deemed fit for work by the DWP, or Jan Morgan, unable to look after herself after a severe stroke yet also told she must seek work. You may have heard of very many others. You may even have found these stories hard to believe. I’m not sure that I would blame you. For if we believe these stories, where do they leave us? Where do they leave claims that we are “protecting the most vulnerable”?

But today, I want to tell you about Karen Sherlock, because she was my friend.

Karen was extremely unwell. Here, in Karen’s own words are her medical conditions:

DIABETIC AUTONOMIC NEUROPATHY (GASTRIC, CAUSING UNPREDICTABLE AND SEVERE DIARRHOEA)
GASTROPAERESIS (CAUSING UNPREDICTABLE AND SEVERE BOUTS OF VOMITING)
DIABETIC RETINOPATHY, PARTIALLY SIGHTED (LOSS OF PERIPHERAL VISION IN BOTH EYES AND SOME CENTRAL VISION IN LEFT EYE)
HEART CONDITION, CHRONIC KIDNEY DISEASE, VITAMIN B12 DEFICIENCY, ANAEMIA, HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE, HIGH CHOLESTEROL, UNDERACTIVE THYROID, CHRONIC TIREDNESS DUE TO COMBINATION OF MULTIPLE MEDICAL CONDITIONS, ASTHMA

I urge you all to read this post, written by Karen just two months ago. It details a process many of us who are sick or disabled know all too well. Apply for ESA, get “assessed” by Atos, the private company charged with making these life or death decisions, get turned down for ESA, found “fit for work” or put in the wrong group, appeal decision, win tribunal, get a new letter demanding you attend another assessment, repeat the entire process until you despair, ground down by the misery.

My ESA is being stopped……………

Now, I have turned over in my mind how they can do this to me.

Where it is going to leave us money-wise and what we can do about it? The answer is; I don’t know.

I am not entitled to a penny more due to having a husband that works too many hours and brings in too much money. I am worried and frightened, I do not see how they can just snatch this away from me. I am chronically ill and I am never going to get better, not even with the transplant will I feel better, all my conditions cannot be magically cured.

Karen faced all of this as she battled just to survive. Endless pressure, the judgement of society, the fear of destitution, the exhaustion of constant assessments and endless forms. She was one of those whose ESA was time-limited — and what’s more, it was limited retrospectively, leaving her with just a few months to appeal for long term support.

What I want to tell you today is that she was frightened. Terrified in fact. She was terrified of the DWP, almost paralysed by a fear that if she spoke out, they would treat her even more harshly. But she spoke out regardless.

She was scared for her future, scared for her family. She had no idea how they would survive when she lost the little support they relied on. Her husband works, cares for a sick wife and they had “done the right thing”. Do you hear me Iain Duncan Smith? David Cameron? Nick Clegg? Ed Miliband? Her family had done the “right thing”, at least in your narrow world of workers and shirkers.

Despite her own terror, she tried to tell her country, her peers, her friends — even journalists — what was happening to her and thousands like her, but shocked tuts didn’t save her. Open mouths and disgust didn’t save Karen; they didn’t save my friend. Perhaps no one could have, but those who hold and abuse power could have eased her fear or reassured her that they would act.

Karen died on June 8 from a suspected heart attack. I’ll leave you with her own words, from the end of her final post on April 29:

We need to be passionate about standing up for our rights, and if we can make enough noise, and get enough people to listen then we can overturn the inhumane changes this parasitic government have made. If nothing else, we do still have hope and our rights on our side.

Will we listen? Will Karen’s story be the one to convince us that enough is enough? Or will we turn a blind eye, continue to look away?

I hope not. There are dangerous historical precedents.

When winning isn’t enough

By Sue Marsh, Diary of a Benefit Scrounger, June 12, 2012

As many of you know, I spent yesterday making sure that as many people as possible heard about the death of Karen Sherlock and the fear and exhaustion of her final months.

I did what a writer does. I wrote. Then I wrote again. I tweeted the great and the good, charities and politicians and I made them hear her story. But all through the madness of a story spreading around the world, I don’t need to think. It’s only when the messages slow down and the journalists stop calling that I face what the fury of writing tried so hard to soothe. Karen had died and I couldn’t save her.

In the epic fight against the Welfare Reform Bill, we campaigners chose our weapons. Some polished the sword of truth to use against large corporations like Atos, responsible for so many of these terrible decisions that ruin lives. Some concentrated on the shields to protect the Independent Living Fund, others on exposing the lies of our politicians in parliament. Yet more dug up news stories and challenged social care cuts.

But I focused on Employment & Support Allowance and most specifically, Government plans to time limit sickness benefits for all but the most desperately ill or disabled to just one year. It’s ironic that I came to be known for the Spartacus Report, exposing the myths behind Disability Living Allowance, because actually, it was not my greatest battle.

So, last night, exhausted and horribly deflated at the news that had had hovered over us all for so long, finally a reality — the death of one of our warriors — I suddenly felt enormously and helplessly angry.

I’d worked with Liberal Democrats for months to persuade them, oh so carefully to first hold a vote at their annual conference, and then to support it. I’d put aside my own politics at a time when few others would. Finally after months of planning, they pledged for “Liberal Democrats in Government to oppose an arbitrary time limit on how long claimants can claim contributory ESA.”

I won! Of course, others were involved, but this was my very specific battle. I persuaded the Liberal Democrats to oppose a policy that I knew would be dangerous, I knew would cost lives like Karen’s.

I can’t tell you the excitement of that day. We won!! It was the first big breakthrough of our campaigning, the first time anyone stood with us, heard us, defended us. You can read about it here.

For months and months and months, I ran a campaign to lobby peers about the time limiting of contributory ESA. I don’t know if anyone ever campaigned to peers in that way before. We emailed, we prepared briefings, we built relationships with individual peers we respected, we wrote endless articles and sent them in to parliament. We built spreadsheets to make it easier to contact peers when a particular issue cropped up. We pored over debates, we live tweeted every session of the Lords stages of the bill to make sure as many sick and disabled people saw democracy in action as possible, to hold peers to account.

And we won! We did it, we achieved what the media and the opposition failed to do or in most cases even tried to do. We won!!! We won every ESA vote in the Lords in a flurry of glory that left the mainstream media playing catch up. Do you remember Spartacii? Do you remember how it felt that day? We’d stayed calm and reasonable and intelligent. We’d put our case forensically, we’d pleaded and cajoled — some even begged. We’d built a database of last minute waverers and focused our efforts in the last few days on convincing them we fought for justice not special treatment. Do you remember? We did it.

And we won!!! We won for Karen and the 700,000 like her who would eventually lose all of their ESA under this most arbitrary of cruelties.

But I sat with my glass of wine last night and I wanted to scream out loud, to howl like a wounded animal, “But we won!!“ We beat you fair and square and you cheated.”

Most of you reading will know that despite all of our work, our endless endurance, our David and Goliath resilience and belief, this Government cheated us. They cheated people like Karen.

They used the archaic convention of financial privilege to simply overrule the will of the Lords; they used their party whips to ignore the grassroots of the Liberal Democrat party, supposedly their coalition partners; they ignored every main charity and Disabled Persons Organisation and campaigner. They ignored their own Conservative peers who expressed doubts and concerns.

With arrogance and ignorance they simply abused their power and swept us aside.

Daily, Karen asked me, “Will we win, Sue?” “Will we stop the time limit?” Frightened for her family and how they would survive. And I couldn’t answer. I knew we should, that if there was even a scrap of justice left in our democracy we should be able to stop this nightmare, but I knew too, that a government that had lied and cheated their way through welfare reform were unlikely to ever back down.

Daily, with a terrible, fragile hope in her tweets or emails, an urgency and a fear, Karen asked me, “Will we win, Sue?”

And days, even weeks after the bill had passed, she was still asking me, “Surely we can still do something, Sue? We won??” And I had to tell her gently, over and over that we’d won the battle but lost the war. We’d won the hearts of minds of those who mattered, but someone else had won their souls.

So Karen spent her last months fighting to escape the terror of the time limit, appealing, gathering “evidence” to prove what should have been as plain as day — she was ill and she needed our support.

And she won too. Just two weeks before her death she heard that she had appealed successfully. She had finally been put in the Support Group of ESA, meaning she would not be subjected to the time limit or forced to seek work she patently could not do.

Then she died. Again, it was too late. Again, the system had failed her. Again she was cheated. Cheated of the security she had fought so hard to win.

AND I DIDN’T WANT TO BE RIGHT.

When I warned and urged and pleaded, I didn’t want to be right. I knew this would cost lives, or at the very least make them miserable and barely worth living.

When the welfare reform bill passed I warned politicians that time limiting ESA would be the single biggest issue come election time. It would haunt them, possibly haunt the Conservatives forever. An emblem of cruelty that really did cross the line of decency. I promised them that I would make sure of it.

And I will.

Get up, Stand up ………………

By Karen Sherlock, April 29, 2012

“Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up. Don’t give up the fight”…… Bob Marley

Right, where are we now and what is happening to me?

Well, let’s start with the health side of things, as they have moved along since last time. Here’s a quick reminder of my medical conditions;

DIABETIC AUTONOMIC NEUROPATHY (GASTRIC, CAUSING UNPREDICTABLE AND SEVERE DIARRHOEA), GASTROPAERESIS (CAUSING UNPREDICTABLE AND SEVERE BOUTS OF VOMITING), DIABETIC RETINOPATHY, PARTIALLY SIGHTED (LOSS OF PERIPHERAL VISION IN BOTH EYES AND SOME CENTRAL VISION IN LEFT EYE), HEART CONDITION, CHRONIC KIDNEY DISEASE, VITAMIN B12 DEFICIENCY, ANAEMIA, HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE, HIGH CHOLESTEROL, UNDERACTIVE THYROID, CHRONIC TIREDNESS DUE TO COMBINATION OF MULTIPLE MEDICAL CONDITIONS, ASTHMA

I don’t do this for any other reason other than to just jog memories, although the more astute will see there are a couple of bits of info missing from the list, that is because there have been some changes.

Firstly, there has been an awful lot going on with my kidneys. I have a fantastic renal nurse who has been helping me with lots of things. What I am moving closer to saying is that I am going to be starting dialysis soon. I first have to have an operation to raise the vein in my arm. I could not have the “normal” operation as my veins in the lower half of my arm are useless, and there are none suitable for doing this with, so I have to have a more complicated operation, but it means I will have to start dialysis 6 weeks after this has been done, and another vein may not be available. As my renal nurse said, “You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t”. How did it make me feel? Daunted and shocked. Like a rollercoaster ride, full of ups and downs, hurtling towards the inevitable. It had been sat in the back of my mind for a while that I would need dialysis, I just didn’t expect it to be at the front of it so quickly. I am preparing myself for it, and I will cope with it, because I have to.

Also I have to have an angiogram as I have a heart problem. All I know at the moment is that my heart is not being supplied with enough blood, so I cannot undergo an operation that requires deep anaesthesia. My renal nurse (there she is again) has said she wants me on dialysis before the angiogram as it is 90% certain it will make my kidneys worse as the dye that is used damages them further, and she wants the function that I have left protected before that happens. I don’t like the thought of it, but unless my heart gets sorted out, I can’t have the transplant operation and that’s what it’s all about, after all. But in the meantime I still have poorly kidneys. I was supposed to be having a double kidney/pancreas transplant, but it has now been decided to try for the kidney transplant first and do the pancreas one later. This came as a bolt out of the blue, so going to see the surgeon for an explanation of this, waiting for an appointment for this. So, currently the health road is still very much uphill, but it looks like there is a light at the end of it.

Now as for the benefits side of things. That’s become a thorn in my side.

My ESA is being stopped ……………

Now, I have turned over in my mind how they can do this to me. Where it is going to leave us money-wise and what we can do about it?

The answer is; I don’t know.

I am not entitled to a penny more due to having a husband that works too many hours and brings in too much money.

I am worried and frightened, I do not see how they can just snatch this away from me. I am chronically ill and I am never going to get better, not even with the transplant will I feel better, all my conditions cannot be magically cured.

Also, I sent an ESA off a little while ago (February) and I have just forwarded lots more information that my doctor has compiled including some of my medical records and details about me going on dialysis and my other debilitating conditions. I sent this Special Delivery, I have tracked it and it has been received.

I fail to see how they can place someone who will be on dialysis, and in hospital 3 days a week with recovery days in-between in any group other than the Support Group. After all, where can I possibly work or even get involved in “work related activity”, anybody? No I thought not ……

That’s because what the government are doing is totally unbelievable. Stripping the most vulnerable of the essential benefits they need. No thought for the effect it will have. Just throw them on the scrapheap. Don’t worry if they can’t feed themselves or heat their homes, or pay for taxis to take them places because they cannot walk anywhere. No, that doesn’t matter, they are leeches on society.

The thing is, we are not. We need this money to have some quality of life, not scrimping and scraping to get through one month to the next, not being punished for something we have not done.

Nobody wants to be disabled or chronically-ill, it is horrible. So ill that you cannot even manage to make a drink, or get out of bed in the morning or even to enjoy what’s going on around you.

After 22 years of work, up to a stage where I was so ill I was away from my job more than I was at it, my company had to let me go. I was costing them more money to pay me for being away from work than at work and I was only working 2 days in the end. I paid my NI for all those years, and yet the DWP suddenly have the right to call you and tell you that your money is being stopped because your year is up and you haven’t paid enough NI contributions. I’m sorry, but I have.

They can’t give you any advice on what to do next apart from “apply for income related benefits or go on jobseekers allowance.” Okay then, show me where the jobs are and which employer will take me on then? They can’t, and so we are back to square one again. How do we cope with this loss of money? They can’t answer that, apart from giving their very basic, useless and empty words of advice.

Read the words from the Bob Marley song I shared at the top of this article. And remember them.

We need to be passionate about standing up for our rights, and if we can make enough noise, and get enough people to listen then we can overturn the inhumane changes this parasitic government have made. If nothing else, we do still have hope and our rights on our sides ……………

Note: For more on Karen Sherlock, see this article put together from her writings on the excellent Benefit Scrounging Scum website.

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.

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Published on June 14, 2012 13:53

June 13, 2012

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: $2000 Needed to Support My Work on Guantánamo

Please support my work!

As my quarterly fundraising drive continues, I’d like to thank the ten friends and supporters who have so far donated $500 towards the $2500 that I am hoping to raise to supplement the money I am paid for running the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and for writing a weekly column for the Future of Freedom Foundation. As I explained at the start of the week, three-quarters of my work — around 75 articles over the last three months — is unfunded, and my only source of income to support it comes from you.

All contributions are welcome, whether it’s $25, $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 regular readers are aware, the need for my continued focus on Guantánamo is as necessary as ever, as all three branches of the US government have failed to close the prison. However, I’ve also been branching out whenever possible, dealing not only with Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” but also with the ongoing economic meltdown of the global economy, and the artificial age of austerity imposed in the UK and elsewhere, including Greece.

As my fundraising appeal proceeds, I’d like to thank you all for your support, and to share with you my recent realization that this, my 1655th article, comes just two weeks after the fifth anniversary of the start of my career as a relentlessly busy freelance investigative journalist. That first post (dated May 31, 2007, and covering the death — allegedly by suicide — of a Saudi prisoner, Abdul Rahman al-Amri) is here — and all my articles, written on an almost daily basis over the last five years — can be found here, in chronological order.

Thank you again for your support — whether you’re new to my work, or have been with me for the last five years. If you can help me financially, that will be greatly appreciated, but please don’t worry if you can’t. My work means nothing without you, my readers and supporters, and what is most important, as ever, is education, engagement and activism.

To that end, I hope, with your help, to keep working on my million-word project, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” drawing on the military files released last year by WikiLeaks (on which I worked as a media partner), and also to keep so that, as I did in April, I have the material to keep regularly updating my four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list — the main resource anywhere for information that humanizes the prisoners, and helps to shatter the enduring lies about them that were propagated by the Bush administration, and that have not been repudiated under Barack Obama.

Andy Worthington

London

June 13, 2012

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Published on June 13, 2012 11:57

Video: On Democracy Now! Andy Worthington Discusses the Failure of Every Branch of the US Government to Deliver Justice to the Prisoners at Guantánamo

Yesterday, I made my way to a TV studio opposite the Houses of Parliament to take part in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! — my first since last April, when the classified military files released by WikiLeaks, on which I worked as a media partner, were first published.

I was joined by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and I was delighted that the story was the main feature on yesterday’s show, and that so much time was devoted to it, and to analyzing the sweeping failures, across the entire US administration, that have led to a situation in which, although 87 of the remaining 169 prisoners have been cleared for release, only two prisoners have been freed in the last 18 months, and there are no signs of when — if ever — any of these 87 men will be released.

The interview, like my interview with RT on Monday, was scheduled last week, following the publication of my report, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, but it assumed alarming new significance on Monday, when the Supreme Court refused to consider any of the appeals that had been submitted over the last year by seven of the 169 remaining prisoners in Guantánamo. It’s posted below, via YouTube:

My report highlighted the failures of the administration and Congress, pointing out that, of the 87 prisoners cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but still held, shamefully, 40 were cleared at least five years ago, and some as long ago as 2004.

However, the Supreme Court’s failure to take up the Guantánamo prisoners’ appeals, which were dismissed without any further explanation, added to the prisoners’ woes, confirming that they have been abandoned by every branch of the US government.

Ironically, the Supreme Court’s decision to ignore the prisoners’ pleas came the day before the 4th anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, when the Supreme Court — with the important contributions provided by Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired two years ago — granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, paving the way for a number of successful hearings between October 2008 and July 2010 that led to the release of 28 prisoners.

For the last two years, however, no prisoners have had their habeas petitions granted, as the right-wing judges of the D.C. Circuit Court have intervened to prevent any prisoners from being released by demanding that the shockingly unreliable evidence put forward by the government — which the District Court judges had been challenging in an appropriate manner — should be regarded as accurate.

In discussing the distressing situation at Guantánamo — and in the corridors of power in the US — I was pleased to be asked by Amy about the case of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, cleared by a military review board under President Bush in December 2006, and almost certainly cleared by Obama’s Task Force, who was also, effectively, cleared for release for a third time by the US courts when his habeas corpus petition was granted in July 2010. That ruling, however, was overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court last October, in a ruling in which two of the three judges demanded that intelligence reports produced in the field — in haste and under pressure, and never intended to be sober and considered assessments — should be given the presumption of accuracy, prompting serious dissent from the third judge, David Tatel. Of all the appeals turned down by the Supreme Court, this is the one that most alarmingly demonstrates the Supreme Court’s abdication of its responsibilities.

Allowing these rulings to stand puts the Supreme Court in the disturbing position of disowning Boumediene, and handing victory to the D.C. Circuit Court, led by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who has been openly scornful of Boumediene and of the Supreme Court, and who, under George W. Bush, endorsed every outrageous stance on Guantánamo that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

That is self-evidently regressive — and, added to President Obama’s complete paralysis regarding the need to close Guantánamo, as he promised, and the cynical, fearmongering obstruction erected by Congress, which has acted to block every effort to release prisoners and to close the prison — it leaves us in a bleak place indeed.

I can only hope that the recognition of how terrible the current situation is will grow as the months pass and we approach the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, in January 2013, so that the pressure will build to get the prison closed, rather than allowing this disgrace to continue indefinitely.

Note: Click on the photo at the top of the article, which I took on January 11 this year, to enlarge it, and please feel free to use it, although if you do so, please credit me and provide a link to this website.

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Published on June 13, 2012 03:50

June 12, 2012

Video: On RT, Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo, Obama’s Refusal to Release Cleared Prisoners and the Supreme Court’s Failure to Act

Yesterday evening in London (and at 4pm Eastern time), I was delighted to be interviewed by Kristine Frazao, via Skype, for the news on RT (Russia Today) from Washington D.C., and specifically for an eight-minute feature entitled, “In Limbo at Gitmo,” which is available below. (Click to enlarge the photo on the left, showing me addressing campaigners for the closure of Guantánamo outside the Supreme Court, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, on January 11 this year, and see here for a video of my talk).

I was invited to appear on the show because of my report last week, Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, which was published exclusively on my website and on the website of “Close Guantánamo,” the campaign that I established in January with the attorney Tom Wilner. This report, establishing that at least 40 of the 87 prisoners cleared for release, but still held at Guantánamo, were cleared between 2004 and 2007, was discussed on RT last week, and my scheduled appearance also coincided with the depressing news that the Supreme Court had refused to accept any of the seven appeals submitted by various Guantánamo prisoners, on the eve of the fourth anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, when a more principled Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights.

As I was able to explain, this led to the release of a few dozen prisoners between December 2008 and July 2010, after their habeas corpus petitions were granted by District Court judges in Washington D.C., who correctly perceived that the government’s evidence was, in many cases, risibly weak, consisting of dubious intelligence reports and the testimony of other prisoners — either in Guantánamo or in secret CIA torture prisons — whose statements were fundamentally unreliable, and whose unreliability had, in many case, been noted by US officials, even though that was ignored by prosecutors in the Justice Department and by advisors in the Pentagon.

However, since summer 2010, right-wing judges in the D.C. Circuit Court have been rewriting the rules governing the habeas petitions, gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners, so that none of the prisoners have had their habeas petitions granted in the last two years. The Supreme Court had the opportunity to redress this shameful distortion of its 2008 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush, and their failure, as I also explained to Kristine, means that the Guantánamo prisoners have now been abandoned by every branch of the US government, as President Obama has backed away from his promise to close the prison, and has shown a persistent lack of political courage on issues relating to Guantánamo, and lawmakers in Congress have also indulged in disgraceful fearmongering, passing legislation that, like the D.C. Circuit’s decisions, is also designed to prevent any prisoners from being released.

On the fourth anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, this is a truly depressing state of affairs, and one made all the more depressing because of the general indifference of the US media and the American people, and I hope my contribution, and RT’s interest in the story, will help people to understand how depressing it is that the men in Guantánamo have been so shamefully failed by all three branches of the US government.

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Published on June 12, 2012 09:46

June 11, 2012

Quarterly Fundraiser: Please Help Me Raise $2500 to Support My Work on Guantánamo, Injustice and Austerity

Please support my work!

It’s that time of the year again. Every three months, I ask you, my friends, readers and supporters, to help to support my independent, freelance investigative journalism — as the foremost journalist on Guantánamo, the 169 men still held there, and the lies and distortions that are still used to hold them, and as a commentator diversifying into other topics, especially economic issues, and particularly with regard to the savage austerity being implemented in the UK and in other countries in Europe.

Since my last fundraiser, in March, when 32 of you donated nearly $2000, I have written a hundred articles, in which I have, of course, continued to focus on Guantánamo, as it is the core of my work, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This is because the promised closure of Guantánamo has shamefully slipped off the Obama administration’s agenda, and neither the media nor the American people care sufficiently that the prison’s continued existence is both a disgrace and a rallying point for those — including members of Congress — who are entranced by the notion of indefinite arbitrary detention. Some US citizens have campaigned against the dreadful provisions inserted into last year’s reviled National Defense Authorization Act, demanding the indefinite arbitrary detention of those regarded as terrorists — including US citizens — but far too few have realized that these provisions would have been unfeasible if a precedent had not been established at Guantánamo, where foreigners have been subjected to indefinite arbitrary detention for the last ten and a half years.

In the last three months, only around two dozen of my articles have been commissioned — as part of my regular work for Close Guantánamo, the campaigning website I established in January with my colleague Tom Wilner, and also for the Future of Freedom Foundation, for whom I have been writing a weekly column since October 2008. In other words, around 75 of the articles I have written in this period were supported only through your donations, as I do not receive any financial support from any other source.

So if you would like to see more of “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” my million-word series telling all the Guantánamo prisoners’ stories in unprecedented detail, which I began last year after working with WikiLeaks on the release of previously classified US military documents relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, and if you want to help support exclusive articles like my report last week, EXCLUSIVE: Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, then please support my work.

Your donations will also help me to keep exposing the harsh austerity measures that are being used in the UK, in Greece and elsewhere for ideological reasons, to destroy the state provision and ownership of services as part of an ongoing obsession with privatization, cynically using the financial crisis caused by the banks in 2008 as an excuse for unprecedented austerity measures, which, as well as wreaking social havoc, are also economically disastrous. In the UK, this involves the NHS, whose planned privatization I campaigned against extensively, the withdrawal of the provision of financial support for the disabled, and the exploitation of the unemployed in workfare schemes, and in Greece, of course, it appears to involve nothing less than the annihilation of the entire state.

Andy Worthington

London

June 11, 2012

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Published on June 11, 2012 11:34

June 10, 2012

“Pragmatism Over Ideology”: Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo, and His Love of Drones

Last week, a major article in the New York Times painted a grim portrait of how President Obama has taken over from George W. Bush as the “commander in chief” of a “war on terror” that seems to have no end, and that not only appears to be counter-productive, but also, at heart, illegal.

Understandably, critics have been alarmed by the article’s revelations about a President who holds regular meetings to decide who should be on a “kill list” for drone strikes — in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — and who insists on approving the targets of drone raids, which is his primary method of dealing with the perceived terrorist threat, by “poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.”

As well as claiming the right to kill people (including US citizens) in drone attacks that seem very clearly to do away with notions of national sovereignty — and which therefore play into George W. Bush’s dreadful notion of the entire world as an endless battlefield — the Times article also noted that President Obama has also “embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties,” which “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Although both the drone attacks and the massaged figures can clearly be regarded as illegal, the only voices raised in protest in the Times article were those of Dennis C. Blair, the Director of National Intelligence (until he was fired in May 2010), Cameron P. Munter, the US ambassador to Pakistan, and, to a lesser degree, Hillary Clinton.

Dennis Blair complained that “discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al-Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes,” and told the Times, “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.” A colleague of Cameron Munter said that the ambassador “has complained to colleagues that the CIA’s strikes drive American policy there, saying ‘he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.’” Hillary Clinton, apparently, “strongly supported the strikes,” but “complained to colleagues about the drones-only approach at Situation Room meetings, in which discussion would focus exclusively on the pros, cons and timing of particular strikes.” She also told the President at their weekly lunch meetings that “there should be more attention paid to the root causes of radicalization,” to which the President apparently agreed, although he has done little to show it.

I also noted that, although much was made in the article of how the failed attack by the would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had marked a turning point for Obama — so that Michael E. Leiter, who was then the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said, “After that, as president, it seemed like he felt in his gut the threat to the United States” — Obama had actually undertaken his first drone strike in Yemen on December 17, 2009, eight days before Abdulmutallab’s failed bombing, which, as the Times noted, “killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents.” Afterwards, “Videos of children’s bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al-Qaeda.”

That, it seems to me, demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt that the conflict between the US and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula began not with the Abdulmutallab attack, but with Obama’s own disastrous attack on Yemen the week before.

As the article also revealed, however, even before he became President, Barack Obama had already opened up a gap between the rhetoric that he offered to would-be voters and his own beliefs. According to the Times, as early as March 2008, the national security team on his campaign had advised “Pragmatism over ideology” in a memo, and this was described as advice that “only reinforced the president’s instincts.”

When it came to Guantánamo, this gulf was pronounced from the very beginning, according to the Times article, in which it was noted that, before his inauguration, Obama’s advisers “had warned him against taking a categorical position on what would be done with Guantánamo detainees.” Conflict behind the scenes has previously been acknowledged regarding the decision to issue executive orders promising to close Guantánamo within a year, banning torture, and closing all CIA “black sites,” which Obama issued on his second day on office. However, the Times article suggested that, from the beginning, the President had been playing with the Guantánamo issue — or, as it was described in the Times, “The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice [against taking a categorical position on the disposition of the Guantánamo prisoners] was followed.”

In an analysis of the “wiggle words,” the Times noted that, although the executive order relating to Guantánamo stated that some of the prisoners “would be transferred to prisons in other countries, or released,” another statement, that some “would be prosecuted — if ‘feasible’ — in criminal courts,” did not specifically mention the military commission trial system, which, therefore, was “not ruled out,” even though Obama had criticized the military commissions for many years.

Also troubling was the mention of prisoners “who could not be transferred or tried but were judged too dangerous for release.” As the Times noted, the executive order stated that their “disposition” would be handled by “lawful means, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice,” but did not explicitly mention that this was actually an endorsement of indefinite detention.

Also still on board was “extraordinary rendition” — disappearing suspects to other countries, as had happened early in Bush’s “war on terror,” before the CIA became mired in its own messy business of running its own secret prisons. As the Times explained, the day before the executive orders were issued, John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s acting General Counsel, “called the White House in a panic,” because the order prohibiting the use of “black sites” would take the CIA “out of the rendition business.” Rizzo told White House Counsel Greg Craig that the CIA “sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting a flight,” and that the order “appeared to outlaw that.”

Craig reportedly “assured him that the new president had no intention of ending rendition — only its abuse, which could lead to American complicity in torture abroad.” As a result, “a new definition of ‘detention facility’ was inserted” into the executive order, “excluding places used to hold people ‘on a short-term, transitory basis.’”

As the Times concluded, echoing the administration’s way of thinking, “Problem solved — and no messy public explanation damped Mr. Obama’s celebration.” A similar tone — one that suggested that the administration had outsmarted its critics — permeated the claim that, although “[a] few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not,” the President had somehow won some sort of significant victory, even though what he had done was to make his promise to close Guantánamo unfulfillable, and had also cleared the way for the reintroduction of military commissions, as well as also endorsing the continued use of “extraordinary rendition” and indefinite detention at Guantánamo. The latter course of action was eventually codified in another executive order issued in March 2011, authorizing the indefinite detention of 48 of the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo.

As the Times article put it, “Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

This phrasing was insulting to those “human rights groups” and other concerned parties who have been campaigning against indefinite detention, “extraordinary rendition,” and military commissions not for soft reasons, but because domestic and international laws and treaties — including the Great Writ of habeas corpus, the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Convention Against Torture — are not options to be cast aside, but rules and laws designed to prevent barbarism and tyranny, whether presided over by George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

The inclusion of the “wiggle words” in the executive orders appears to provide a previously unknown explanation for why President Obama failed to close Guantánamo, but in fact is does not tell the whole story, which involves incompetence and cowardice as much as cynicism.

As the Times article also explained, in May 2009, in a major speech about national security at the National Archives, President Obama “mentioned Guantánamo 28 times, repeating his campaign pledge to close the prison.” However, the article claimed that “it was too late, and his defensive tone suggested that Mr. Obama knew it.” Although President Bush had ended up supporting the closure of Guantánamo, as had John McCain as the Republican Presidential candidate, “Republicans in Congress had reversed course and discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terrorism.”

According to the Times, while he was leaving the National Archives, President Obama turned to his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, and “admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison,” adding, “We’re never going to make that mistake again.” This demonstrates incompetence rather than cynicism, reinforced in Gen. Jones’s comments that the President and his team had “assumed that closing the prison was ‘a no-brainer — the United States will look good around the world,’” although “nobody asked, ‘OK, let’s assume it’s a good idea, how are you going to do this?’”

Another administration official, who had “watched him closely,” complained that the President gave the impression of having “a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen — without his really having thought through the mechanism by which it will happen,” an observation that takes incompetence to a mystical level.

Obama also demonstrated cowardice — what the Times called a “distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting,” and, as an example, it was noted that, although both Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder “had warned that the plan to close the Guantánamo prison was in peril,” and had “volunteered to fight for it on Capitol Hill,” officials confirmed that, “with Mr. Obama’s backing, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked them, saying health care reform had to go first.” In addition, when Greg Craig was close to finalizing a plan to bring two cleared prisoners who could not be repatriated to live in the US (the Uighurs, oppressed Muslims from China), Obama dropped the plan when Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolf found out about it, and started complaining.

The administration official who was the most critical of Obama delivered an especially savage denunciation of the President’s failures, when he said that this particular show of weakness “doomed the effort to close Guantánamo,” adding, “Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the guy.”

In conclusion, I remain as shocked as many other commentators that the Times article revealed so explicitly Obama’s willingness to discuss his passion for extrajudicial drone assassinations, but I also believe that the revelations about his cynicism, incompetence and weakness when it comes to Guantánamo deserve further scrutiny and outrage.

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

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Published on June 10, 2012 05:15

June 6, 2012

EXCLUSIVE: Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago

[image error] This investigative report is published simultaneously here, and on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, 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.

One of the greatest injustices at Guantánamo is that, of the 169 prisoners still held, over half — 87 in total — were cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. The Task Force involved around 60 career officials from various government departments and the intelligence agencies, who spent the first year of the Obama Presidency reviewing the cases of all the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo, to decide whether they should be tried, released, or, in some cases, held indefinitely without charge or trial. The Task Force’s final report is here (PDF).

Exactly who these 87 men are is a closely held secret on the part of the administration, which is unfortunate for those of us working towards the closure of Guantánamo, as it prevents us from campaigning as effectively as we would like for the majority of these men, given that we are not entirely sure of their status. Attorneys for the prisoners have been told about their clients’ status, but that information — as with so much involving Guantánamo — is classified.

However, through recent research — into the classified military files about the Guantánamo prisoners, compiled by the Joint Task Force at the prison, which were released last year by WikiLeaks, as well as documents made available by the Bush administration, along with some additional information from the years of the Obama administration — I have been able to establish the identities of 40 men — 23 Yemenis, and 17 from other countries — who, between 2004 and 2009, were cleared for release by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo, by military review boards under the Bush administration, or by President Obama’s Task Force, and to identify the official documents in which these decisions were noted.

The Task Force recommended 126 prisoners for release, including 29 Yemenis, and created a category of “conditional detention” for 30 more Yemenis, claiming that they could be held until the security situation in Yemen improved. However, as a result of the hysteria that greeted the news that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen who tried and failed to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a flight into the US on Christmas Day 2009, had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo in January 2010. This is still in place nearly two and a half years later, even though no connection has been made between the Yemenis cleared for release from Guantánamo, and the al-Qaeda offshoot in Yemen — al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — that apparently recruited Abdulmutallab.

Of the 156 prisoners cleared for release by President Obama’s Task Force, 69 have been released since President Obama took office. The majority of the 40 men identified through my research were cleared during the Bush administration, between 2004 and 2008, but although it is possible that some of them subsequently had the recommendations for their release withdrawn, it is, I believe, fair to assume that the majority did not, and that the Task Force largely concurred with the decisions made by military review boards under the Bush administration.

As a result, I believe it is fair to say that the 40 names that I have identified clarify who has been cleared for release to a greater extent than has previously been revealed.

Please also note that 35 Yemenis and 12 others remain to be identified, to make the figure of 87 identified in the Guantánamo Review Task Force’s report in January 2010.

What this analysis makes clear is that almost a quarter of the prisoners still held at Guantánamo — men that the US government acknowledges it does not want to continue holding, or to put on trial — have been waiting for their freedom for between four and eight years, a statistic that ought to shock anyone concerned with fairness and justice. It is a profound disgrace that these men are still held, and three courses of action need to be implemented as soon as possible:

Dropping the moratorium of January 2010 and releasing the 28 Yemenis cleared for immediate release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009;
Urgently resuming the search for new homes in other countries for other cleared prisoners who cannot be safely repatriated; and
If this is not feasible, releasing those who cannot be repatriated into the United States, to resume their lives in the country that has been responsible for continuing to hold them, even when cleared for release.

Below are the prisoners whose approval for release I identified during intensive searches of publicly available documents:

40 prisoners still at Guantánamo who have been cleared for release (out of 87 in total) — 23 Yemenis and 17 others

1. ISN 026 Fahed Ghazi (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Ghazi’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated July 28, 2006. A transfer recommendation was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on October 30, 2007 (PDF, p. 44).

2. ISN 034 Abdullah Al Yafi (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Yafi’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated April 5, 2007. A transfer recommendation was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on October 30, 2007 (PDF, p. 121).

3. ISN 038 Ridah Al Yazidi (Tunisia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Yazidi’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated June 6, 2007, which repeated a similar recommendation issued on July 1, 2006. However, a transfer recommendation was made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on November 19, 2007 (PDF, p. 160). In addition, on September 28, 2009, Reuters reported that a list posted in Guantánamo “to let the prisoners know how many from each nation have been judged free to go” included nine Tunisians, and with four subsequently released or transferred to Italian custody, that means that the list must have included the five Tunisians who remain.

4. ISN 115 Abdul Rahman Naser (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Naser’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 1, 2007, in which it was also noted, “Detainee is on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective but is in overall fair health. Detainee has a history of Major Depressive Disorder which is controlled with frequent follow up to mental health services but he refuses antidepressant treatment.”

5. ISN 152 Asim Al Khalaqi (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Khalaqi’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 1, 2007. A transfer recommendation (for “transfer with conditions”) was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on August 20, 2007 (PDF, p. 159).

6. ISN 156 Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Latif’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated December 18, 2006. Latif subsequently had his habeas corpus petition granted, in July 2010, but that ruling was overturned on appeal in October 2011. He has since appealed to the Supreme Court. Also see his letters from Guantánamo, here, here and here.

7. ISN 163 Khalid Al Qadasi (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Qadasi’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 22, 2007.

8. ISN 165 Said Al Busayss (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Busayss’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention(TRCD),” dated September 3, 2004. He was also approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantánamo in 2005 (see PDF).

9. ISN 167 Ali Yahya Al Raimi (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Raimi’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 29, 2004. He was also approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantánamo in 2005 (see PDF).

10. ISN 168 Adel Hakeemy (Tunisia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Hakeemy’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated November 4, 2007, which repeated a similar recommendation issued on August 11, 2006. However, a transfer recommendation was made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on March 17, 2007 (see PDF, p. 194). In addition, on September 28, 2009, Reuters reported that a list posted in Guantánamo “to let the prisoners know how many from each nation have been judged free to go” included nine Tunisians, and with four subsequently released or transferred to Italian custody, that means that the list must have included the five Tunisians who remain.

11. ISN 174 Hisham Sliti (Tunisia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Sliti’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated October 1, 2008, which repeated a similar recommendation issued on May 22, 2007. In December 2008, he had his habeas corpus petition denied, but on September 28, 2009, Reuters reported that a list posted in Guantánamo “to let the prisoners know how many from each nation have been judged free to go” included nine Tunisians, and with four subsequently released or transferred to Italian custody, that means that the list must have included the five Tunisians who remain.

12. ISN 200 Said Al Qahtani (Saudi Arabia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, it was noted that, sometime before January 5, 2009, there was a “Designated Civilian Official (DCO) Decision to Transfer” al-Qahtani, although the Joint Task Force issued a response on that date, which “reaffirm[ed] the 17-May-2008 recommendation for the continued detention of SA-200,” based on a determination that he posed a high risk.

13. ISN 202 Mahmoud Bin Atef (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, bin Atef’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated December 28, 2007, which repeated a similar recommendation issued on December 16, 2006. However, he was approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantanamo in 2005 (see PDF).

14. ISN 224 Abdul Rahman Muhammad (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Muhammad’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 14, 2007.

15. ISN 238 Nabil Hadjarab (Algeria) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Hadjarab’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 22, 2007, and he was told that he had been cleared for release in April 2007. A transfer recommendation was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on September 18, 2007 (PDF, p. 386). His lawyers, at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, have worked hard to secure his release in France, where his extended family lives, and where he spent much of his youth, but to no avail, as I explained in a recent article.

16. ISN 239 Shaker Aamer (UK-Saudi Arabia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Aamer’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated November 1, 2007. However, he was told he was approved for transfer in March 2007, and it is believed that he has been approved for transfer under President Obama, as three British MPs explained in a letter to Congress on December 1, 2011. Since August 2007, successive British governments have also claimed that they have tried to secure his release, but that the the ultimate decision rests with the US, an argument that his lawyers, and campaigners for his release, do not find credible.

17. ISN 249 Mohammed Al Hamiri (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Hamiri’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated April 1, 2007.

18. ISN 251 Mohammed Bin Salem (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, bin Salem’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated April 14, 2004. He was also approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantánamo in 2005 (see PDF).

19. ISN 255 Saeed Hatim (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Hatim’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 9, 2007. He subsequently had his habeas corpus petition granted, in December 2009, when Judge Ricardo Urbina found that the government’s allegations against him were, as Amnesty International noted, based “almost entirely upon admissions made by the petitioner himself — admissions that the petitioner contends he made only because he had previously been tortured while in US custody.” Amnesty added, “Significantly, the government does not contest the petitioner’s claims of torture.” However, that ruling was vacated on appeal in February 2011, and sent back to the District Court to reconsider.

20. ISN 257 Umar Abdulayev (Tajikistan) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Abdulayev’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated February 27, 2008, which repeated a similar recommendation issued on August 1, 2007. However, he was approved for transfer by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force in July 2009.

21. ISN 259 Fadil Hintif (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Hintif’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 9, 2007. A transfer recommendation was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on August 29, 2007 (PDF, p. 490).

22. ISN 275 Yusef Abbas (China) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Abbas’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated February 14, 2004. Abbas had his habeas corpus petition granted in October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered his release into the US along with 16 other Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), but the D.C. Circuit reversed this ruling under President Obama, in February 2009, deciding that matters of immigration are for the executive branch, and not the courts to decide. 14 of the 17 Uighurs have now been freed in other countries (Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland and El Salvador), but three — including Yusef Abbas — remain.

23. ISN 280 Saidullah Khalik (China) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Khalik’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated February 21, 2004. Khalik had his habeas corpus petition granted in October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered his release into the US along with 16 other Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), but the D.C. Circuit reversed this ruling under President Obama, in February 2009, deciding that matters of immigration are for the executive branch, and not the courts to decide. 14 of the 17 Uighurs have now been freed in other countries (Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland and El Salvador), but three — including Saidullah Khalik — remain.

24. ISN 282 Hajiakbar Abdulghupur (China) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Abdulghupur’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated February 21, 2004. Abdulghupur had his habeas corpus petition granted in October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered his release into the US along with 16 other Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), but the D.C. Circuit reversed this ruling under President Obama, in February 2009, deciding that matters of immigration are for the executive branch, and not the courts to decide. 14 of the 17 Uighurs have now been freed in other countries (Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland and El Salvador), but three — including Hajiakbar Abdulghupur — remain.

25. ISN 288 Motai Saib (Algeria) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Saib’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 9, 2007. A transfer recommendation was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on June 4, 2007 (PDF, p. 526).

26. ISN 290 Ahmed Belbacha (Algeria) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Belbacha’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated January 15, 2006, although it was also noted, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, detainee can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” Belbacha was then approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round Two, which was held at Guantánamo in 2006 (see PDF), and was told that he had been cleared for release in February 2007. He has since been fighting to prevent his return to Algeria, where he was tried in absentia in 2010 and given a 20-year sentence in a show trial, and awaits a country that will take him. Residents in Amherst, Massachusetts, and in Bournemouth in the UK, where he lived and worked from 1999 to 2001, have offered to take him in, but the US and UK governments are opposed to the proposals.

27. ISN 310 Djamel Ameziane (Algeria) No recommendation was listed in his military file on August 21, 2008, although he was assessed as a high risk. However, his lawyers have been actively seeking a new home for him in a third country, and it is clear that he is one of the six Algerians referred to in the Washington Post article, “Six detainees would rather stay at Guantánamo Bay than be returned to Algeria,” published on July 10, 2010. On March 30, 2012, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), accepted jurisdiction over his case. Announcing the decision, his lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights stated, “The IACHR will now move to gather more information on the substantive human rights law violations suffered by Djamel Ameziane — including the harsh conditions of confinement he has endured, the abuses inflicted on him, and the illegality of his detention.”

28. ISN 440 Mohammed Bawazir (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Bawazir’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated May 30, 2007.

29. ISN 461 Abdul Rahman Al Qyati (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Qyati’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated September 10, 2004. He was also approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantanamo in 2005 (see PDF).

30. ISN 502 Abdul Ourgy (Tunisia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Ourgy’s file was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated June 22, 2007, which repeated a similar recommendation issued on June 15, 2006. However, a transfer recommendation was made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on December 20, 2007 (PDF, p. 185). In addition, on September 28, 2009, Reuters reported that a list posted in Guantánamo “to let the prisoners know how many from each nation have been judged free to go” included nine Tunisians, and with four subsequently released or transferred to Italian custody, that means that the list must have included the five Tunisians who remain.

31. ISN 506 Khalid Al Dhuby (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Dhuby’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated December 25, 2006. A transfer recommendation was also made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on May 22, 2007 (PDF, p. 195).

32. ISN 511 Sulaiman Al Nahdi (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Nahdi’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated August 13, 2007. Al-Nahdi subsequently had his habeas corpus petition denied, in February 2010.

33. ISN 535 Tariq El Sawah (Egypt) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, El-Sawah’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated September 30, 2008, in which it was also noted, “Detainee is on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective.” However, on December 16, 2008, he was put forward for a trial by military commission. He is not currently charged, and, as the Washington Post explained in March 2010, he is regarded as one of “the most significant informants ever to be held at Guantánamo,” and, with another informant, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, is housed separately from the other prisoners, with extra privileges. As the Post also noted:

Some military officials believe the United States should let them go — and put them into a witness protection program, in conjunction with allies, in a bid to cultivate more informants. “I don’t see why they aren’t given asylum,” said W. Patrick Lang, a retired senior military intelligence officer. “If we don’t do this right, it will be that much harder to get other people to cooperate with us. And if I was still in the business, I’d want it known we protected them. It’s good advertising.” A current military official at Guantánamo suggested that that argument was fair. Still, he said, it’s “a hard-sell argument around here.”

34. ISN 553 Abdul Khaliq Al Baidhani (Yemen, but listed as Saudi Arabia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Baidhani’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated December 16, 2006.

35. ISN 554 Fehmi Al Assani (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Assani’s file was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control (DoD),” dated October 22, 2004. However, a transfer recommendation was made after his Administrative Review Board Round Three, on July 30, 2007 (PDF, p. 338), although he then had his habeas corpus petition denied, in February 2010.

36. ISN 566 Mansoor Qattaa (Yemen, but listed as Saudi Arabia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Qattaa’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated June 9, 2007.

37. ISN 572 Salah Al Zabe (Yemen, but listed as Saudi Arabia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, al-Zabe’s file was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated September 3, 2004. He was also approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantánamo in 2005 (see PDF).

38. ISN 684 Mohammed Tahamuttan (Palestine)In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Tahamuttan’s file was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated October 9, 2007. In August 2009, he was one of three prisoners considered for resettlement in Germany, but only the other two were accepted, largely, it seems, for political reasons. In July 2010, Der Spiegel noted that Tahamuttan had “made a good impression on the Germans,” but that his rejection was a move that was “probably intended primarily to send a political message at home in Germany,” where it was thought that Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière “felt that he had to show the many members of his party who had opposed reaching an agreement with the United States on Guantánamo that he was not blindly obeying the Americans.”

39. ISN 894 Mohammed Abdul Rahman (Tunisia) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Abdul Rahman’s file was a “Recommendation to Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TR),” dated June 27, 2004, in which it was also noted that he “had a mechanical heart valve placed in 1999,” and “has chronic problems with his heart rhythm (atrial fibrillation),” and also “has a history of kidney stones, latent tuberculosis, depression and high blood pressure. He is also on chronic anticoagulation (blood thinners).” Abdul Rahman (also known as Lotfi bin Ali) was also approved for transfer/release after Administrative Review Board Round One, which was held at Guantánamo in 2005 (see PDF). In addition, on September 28, 2009, Reuters reported that a list posted in Guantánamo “to let the prisoners know how many from each nation have been judged free to go” included nine Tunisians, and with four subsequently released or transferred to Italian custody, that means that the list must have included the five Tunisians who remain.

40. ISN 1015 Hussein Almerfedi (Yemen) In the classified US military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, it was noted that, sometime before January 14, 2009, there was a “Designated Civilian Official (DCO) Decision to Transfer” Almerfedi, although the Joint Task Force issued a response on that date, which “reaffirm[ed] the 28 April 2008 recommendation for the continued detention of YM-1015,” based on a determination that he posed a high risk. He subsequently had his habeas corpus petition granted, in July 2010, but that ruling was reversed on appeal in July 2011.

To demand the release of these prisoners, and the 47 others cleared for release who have not been identified, please write to: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, US Department of State, 2201 C Street NW, Washington D.C. 20520.

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Published on June 06, 2012 12:01

June 5, 2012

Slave Labour During the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee

Congratulations to the Guardian for exposing the workfare scandal that took place during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Celebrations — and, specifically, the £12m river pageant that took place on Sunday, when, in torrential rain, a flotilla of boats, including one carrying the Queen and other members of the Royal Family, travelled along the River Thames from Hammersmith to Tower Bridge. For my previous take on workfare, see The Tories’ Vile Workfare Project, and How It Has Now Infiltrated the NHS.

I was alerted to the Guardian‘s article yesterday evening, by a friend on Facebook, and, before I report on it and analyse it, I’m posting below the first three paragraphs of the article, as they perfectly capture the spirit of self-righteous exploitation that typifies the current government, and that stands in such stark contrast to the supposed celebration of the Jubilee, in which — as with the artificial age of austerity implemented by the Tories for ideological reasons, to destroy the state and privatise the whole of the UK — we are all supposed to be in it together:

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government’s Work Programme.

Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

A private security firm, Close Protection UK, was responsible for stewarding at the Jubilee events, and a spokesman told the Guardian that they were “using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London,” and that “[u]npaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.” The spokesman added that “the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff.”

Close Protection UK is part of Colossus Security, who describe themselves as “Security in London specialists in all disciplines of security sector services, from manned guarding and door supervision, to close protection UK, Event Security service and residential security services.” They add, “We provide security operatives across a variety of industries, ranging from corporate, commercial and residential security guarding, to executive protection, event security management, construction site security and show security services.”

A woman who was one of the unpaid workers for the river pageant,told the Guardian that “people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday,” as the Guardian put it. She explained, “We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them. We followed them under London Bridge and that’s where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing.”

Another worker, described by the Guardian as a “30-year-old steward,” said that the conditions under the bridge were “cold and wet and we were told to get our head down [to sleep],” and added that it was “impossible to pitch a tent because of the concrete floor.”

The woman also explained that all the workers “were woken at 5.30am and supplied with boots, combat trousers and polo shirts.” She said, “They had told the ladies we were getting ready in a minibus around the corner and I went to the minibus and they had failed to open it so it was locked. I waited around to find someone to unlock it, and all of the other girls were coming down trying to get ready and no one was bothering to come down to unlock [it], so some of us, including me, were getting undressed in public in the freezing cold and rain.” The male workers, the Guardian noted, “are understood to have changed under the bridge.”

The female steward also said that, after the pageant was over, the workers took the Tube to a campsite in Theydon Bois, in Essex, where some of them “had to pitch their tents in the dark.” As she explained, “London was supposed to be a nice experience, but they left us in the rain. They couldn’t give a crap … No one is supposed to be treated like that, [working] for free. I don’t want to be treated where I have to sleep under a bridge and wait for food.” The other steward — a man — added, “It was the worst experience I’ve ever had. I’ve had many a job, and many a bad job, but this one was the worst.”

The Guardian also noted that both of the stewards “said they were originally told they would be paid,” but that, when they got to the coach on Saturday night, before the journey to London, they “were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.”

When the Guardian asked Close Protection UK for a comment, the company claimed to have “spent considerable resources on training and equipment that stewards could keep” (also claiming that they had spent “up to £220 on sponsoring security training licences for each participant and that boots and combat trousers cost more than £100″), and added that “the experience was voluntary and did not affect jobseekers keeping their benefits.” Molly Prince, CPUK’s managing director, issued a statement, in which she claimed, “We take the welfare of our staff and apprentices very seriously indeed.” She also claimed that the work was part of the training of many of those involved, and pointed out that “festival and event work” was “hard work and not for the faint-hearted.”

Also involved in the work programme was the charity Tomorrow’s People, which set up the placements at Close Protection UK. Although the charity was one of eight youth charities supported in the Guardian and Observer‘s Christmas appeal last year, and describes itself as “an innovative national employment charity that is changing the lives of some of society’s most excluded and marginalised people through work,” it was officially censured in August 2010 by the Charity Commission after its chief executive Debbie Scott appeared in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto, in a full-page picture. The Commission noted that this “amounted to giving the charity’s support to the Tories,” even though “charities must not support or oppose political parties or candidates, but can campaign on a policy that coincides with that of a political party.

The Guardian noted that Abi Levitt, the director of development services at Tomorrow’s People, promised to “undertake a review of the situation as a matter of urgency,” but made a point of stating that “Tomorrow’s People believes strongly in the value of work experience in helping people to build the skills, confidence and CV they need to get and keep a job and we have an exemplary record going back nearly 30 years for our work with the long-term unemployed.”

Today, responding swiftly to the outrage that greeted the story, with over 37,000 people having shared the Guardian‘s story on Facebook, the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott wrote to Theresa May, the home secretary, stating that he was “deeply concerned” by the Guardian‘s revelations, and noting that the situation raised “very serious questions” about the “suitability of using private security contractors to do frontline policing instead of trained police officers.” He added that CPUK had shown a “blatant disregard for the care of its workers.”

“It is totally unacceptable that young unemployed people were bussed in to London from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth and forced to sleep out in the cold overnight before stewarding a major event with no payment,” he wrote. “I am deeply concerned that a private security firm is not only providing policing on the cheap but failing to show a duty of care to its staff and threatening to withdraw an opportunity to work at the Olympics as a means to coerce them to work unpaid.”

He added, “I call on you to immediately investigate this matter and alert the Security Industry Authority to see if CPUK has breached its SIA approved contractor status. I believe that this could be a breach of 2.3.1(f) of the SIA approved contractor status terms and conditions of approval, which states a contractor can have approved status removed if it is ‘found no longer to meet the fit and proper person criteria applied by the SIA.’”

As the Guardian put it, he “ended the letter by calling for an investigation into the matter and calling for CPUK’s contract for the Olympics to be urgently reviewed.”

The Guardian also explained that CPUK has now issued “sincere apologies” for what it is calling the “London Bridge incident.” In a statement, Molly Prince claimed, “The London Bridge incident should never have happened but was to some extent outside our control, the coach drivers insisted on leaving. For this we sincerely apologise, on investigation this morning the majority of the team were happy, fed and looked after as best possible under the circumstances.” The statement added, “We are not in the business of exploiting anyone.”

Mentioning the unpaid workers, Prince’s statement claimed, “The only ones that won’t be paid are because they don’t want to be paid. They want to do this voluntarily, [to] get the work experience.” She added, as the Guardian put it, “This was because they would no longer be able to claim jobseeker benefits if they accepted a wage for the work.”

Molly Prince’s Twitter and Facebook accounts have been disabled since the story broke, presumably because of the volume of complaints she received from those who had read the Guardian‘s article, and who were unimpressed that people were working for no money — whether treated abusively or not — at a £12m event that was designed not only to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, but also to celebrate the UK.

In Britain today, there are those — in the government, and in parasitical companies that have arisen to take taxpayers’ money in exchange for providing training for jobs that don’t exist — who believe that it is appropriate that people were working for nothing at the Jubilee, just as they are enthusiastic that similar schemes will facilitate the deployment of slave labour at the Olympics as well.

I dislike intently having to share my country with these devious and unprincipled opportunists, who are diverting attention from the real problems — that there are five times as many unemployed people as there are jobs, and that the government has no credible plans for job creation — by blaming the unemployed (and, it should be noted, the disabled) for being unemployed in the first place.

This is immoral, unethical and thoroughly disgraceful, although it is clearly part of the government’s “survival of the fittest” plan to dissolve the state, to destroy the public sector, and to make everyone totally self-sufficient — consigning them to squalor and misery if they are unemployed or disabled, or if they have made it to old age without being rich. I cannot accept that the staging of the Jubilee events — like the imminent staging of the insanely expensive Olympics — can legitimately involve any unpaid work whatsoever, given the amount of money swilling around at a corporate level — most of which is coming straight out of taxpayers’ wallets.

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Published on June 05, 2012 14:01

June 4, 2012

Video: “Songs of War,” an Al-Jazeera Film About Music Torture in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq

In a new film for Al-Jazeera, “Songs of War: Music as a Weapon,” the filmmaker Tristan Chytroschek follows “Sesame Street” composer Christopher Cerf on a journey to discover how his music came to be used as a weapon in the Bush administration’s “war on terror” — and also to investigate the history of music as torture.

As the production company, Java Films, explained:

[Christopher Cerf] always wanted his music to be fun and entertaining. But then he learned that his songs had been used to torture prisoners in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. He is stunned by this abuse of his work and wants to find out how this could happen. Cerf embarks on a journey to learn what makes music such a powerful stimulant. In the process, he speaks to soldiers, psychologists and prisoners tortured with his music at Guantánamo and find out how the military has been employing music as a potent weapon for hundreds of years.

The film is available below, via YouTube:

The story of how music by US military personnel was used to torture prisoners in the “war on terror” first emerged in Newsweek in May 2003, when, in a brief and slightly flippant article, Adam Piore noted, “Some US military units have taken to exposing uncooperative Iraqis to long doses of heavy-metal music or even popular children’s songs in an effort to convince them not to resist Coalition forces.” One soldier said, “Trust me, it works. In training, they forced me to listen to the Barney ‘I Love You’ song for 45 minutes. I never want to go through that again.”

Another soldier, Sgt. Mark Hadsell, said the intention was “to break down a subject’s resistance through sleep deprivation and annoyance with music that is as culturally offensive and terrifying as possible.” Mentioning “Bodies” by Drowning Pool (from the soundtrack of the 2002 film, “XXX”) and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” he said, “These people haven’t heard heavy metal before. They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them.”

The BBC followed up on Newsweek‘s story, but the story then dropped out of sight, only reemerging in 2006, when Spin magazine’s David Peisner wrote an article entitled, “Music As Torture: War Is Loud,” in which he spoke to the former Guantánamo prisoner Shafiq Rasul (one of the “Tipton Three,” from the UK), and also ran through the recent history of music as torture, as used by US forces, the UK and Israel:

US psychological operations (PsyOp) units began experimenting with blasting music at enemies in Vietnam and infamously rocked a 1989 standoff with Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega … But it’s only been in the past few decades that music and other sounds began turning up during interrogations. The British blared white noise at Irish Republican Army suspects in the ’70s but swore off the practice after the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1977 that it was “degrading and inhuman.” Israel’s military employed loud music until 1999, when an Israeli Supreme Court judged that this exposure “causes the suspect suffering. It does not fall within the scope of … a fair and effective interrogation.”

In searching for articles about music torture, I also stumbled across a fascinating article, “Sonic Torture at Dachau,” which provided another important — and chilling — precedent.

Peisner was unable to ascertain who had actually authorized the use of music as torture in the “war on terror” — and it remains unknown if anyone did actually authorize it, or if, as seems more likely, it arose out of decisions taken by interrogators, who had been freed from the strict limitations on interrogations in the Geneva Conventions. This change had taken place in a notorious memo issued by President Bush on February 7, 2002, in which the President decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban prisoners, who were to be held not as prisoners of war (or as criminals, if they had allegedly been involved in terrorism), but as “enemy combatants” without rights. Peisner also spoke to a former interrogator named Tom, who provided some fascinating insights into how the use of music as torture developed during the “war on terror”:

Tom makes an ethical distinction between blasting music for the purposes of interrogation and using it to disorient a recent capture. “If [the detainee] is accustomed to his surroundings and you force him to listen to Limp Bizkit, that’s clearly an interrogation tactic,” he says. “That would only be used in very rare situations, to annoy someone to the point where their only way out is you. To me, the only purpose of that is to drive somebody nuts, and that constitutes torture.

“When we use it at remote facilities, it’s to maintain what we call ‘the shock of capture,’” Tom continues. “The hardest cases to break are those guys that sit there and smugly smile because they know we’re not going to beat them up or rip their fingernails out. So we use music to keep them from knowing what time it is, from communicating with others or hearing sounds that would help orient them.”

For better or worse, these were distinctions Tom and others made on the fly. The agency had trained him in the use of white noise on prisoners. Switching to music was simply an innovation made on the ground.

Reisner’s excellent article was followed, in the March/April 2008 issue of Mother Jones by another excellent article, by Justine Sharrock, who later wrote a book entitled, Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things. In her article, “Am I a Torturer?” Justine spoke at length to Ben Allbright, who had been required to torture prisoners — including by using music — at a prison in Iraq. Those rounded up as prisoners were initially held in containers, despite the blazing heat, and, as Justine explained:

Ben kept them blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs with plastic zip ties, without food or sleep, for up to 48 hours at a time. He made them stand in awkward positions, so that they could not rest their heads against the wall. Sometimes he blared loud music, such as Ozzy or AC/DC, blew air horns, banged on the container, or shouted. “Whatever it took to make sure they’d stay awake,” he explains.

Ben was not a “bad apple,” and he didn’t make up these treatments. He was following standard operating procedure as ordered by military-intelligence officers. The MI guys didn’t make up the techniques either; they have a long international history as effective torture methods.

By June 2008, the Guardian had picked up on the story, via Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, who wrote an article entitled, “Welcome to the ‘Disco.’” I was working for Reprieve at the time, and we were pushing the music torture issue via an initiative we called “Pull the Plug on Torture Music,” in which we encouraged artists to sign up to prevent the use of their music as part of the US military’s torture techniques, to insert a clause in their contracts preventing the misuse of their music, and, in general, to raise awareness of the issue by spreading the word and playing anti-torture gigs.

Initially, there was little interest from musicians, sadly. David Gray, whose song “Babylon,” was used, spoke out in July 2008, and his complaints were covered by the BBC (and on my website here). In December 2008, Reprieve relaunched the initiative as Zero dB, and I got a lot of attention for my article, “A History of Music Torture in the ‘War on Terror,’” in which I looked, in particular, at the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident whose extensive torture in Morocco, and in the “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan, included the use of music, and also at the case of Donald Vance, a US contractor imprisoned in Iraq after exposing illegal arms sales.

Vance, who has spent many years pursuing former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld through the US courts, explained that the music used on him, at Camp Cropper in Iraq, “was almost constant, mostly hard rock. There was a lot of Nine Inch Nails, including ‘March of the Pigs.’ I couldn’t tell you how many times I heard Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You.’” He added that the experience “sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you’re in an environment like that.”

Binyam Mohamed described his experiences in the CIA-run “Dark Prison” as follows:

It was pitch black, and no lights on in the rooms for most of the time … They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb … There was loud music, Slim Shady and Dr. Dre for 20 days. I heard this non-stop over and over, I memorized the music, all of it, when they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. It got really spooky in this black hole … Interrogation was right from the start, and went on until the day I left there. The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off … Throughout my time I had all kinds of music, and irritating sounds, mentally disturbing. I call it brainwashing.

In October 2009, in an article entitled, “Musicians (Finally) Say No To Music Torture,” I was delighted to note that — eventually — groups and artists including Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and (who both were shocked to discover that their music was widely used for torture), as well as other artists including REM, Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne, Billy Bragg, Michelle Branch, T-Bone Burnett, David Byrne, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Steve Earle, the Entrance Band, Joe Henry, Bonnie Raitt, Rise Against and The Roots, “launched a formal protest against the use of music as torture.” As I also explained in my article:

In a statement, Tom Morello said, “Guantánamo is known around the world as one of the places where human beings have been tortured — from water boarding, to stripping, hooding and forcing detainees into humiliating sexual acts — playing music for 72 hours in a row at volumes just below that to shatter the eardrums. Guantánamo may be Dick Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine. The fact that music I helped create was used as a tactic against humanity sickens me — we need to end torture and close Guantánamo now.”

REM added, “We signed onto the campaign in complete support of President Obama and the military leaders who have called for an end to torture and to close Guantánamo. As long as Guantánamo stays open, America’s legacy around the world will continue to be the torture that went on there. We have spent the past 30 years supporting causes related to peace and justice — to now learn that some of our friends’ music may have been used as part of the torture tactics without their consent or knowledge, is horrific. It’s anti-American, period.”

In a phone call, Rosanne Cash told the Washington Post, “I think every musician should be involved. It seems so obvious. Music should never be used as torture.” Cash said she reacted with “absolute disgust” when she heard about it, adding, “It’s beyond the pale. It’s hard to even think about.”

The protest was timed to coincide with a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute in Washington D.C., which is seeking the declassification of all records related to the use of music in interrogation practices. It also coincided with a recent call by veterans and retired Army generals to shut Guantánamo, and TV and radio ads, which were launched this week by the National Campaign to Close Guantánamo, led by Tom Andrews, a former congressman from Maine.

Nevertheless, with the exception of Tom Morello (of Rage Against The Machine), whose music was used for torture, and who has been complaining about it since 2004, and Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), whose music was also used, and who expressed his outrage last year when he first heard about it, few musicians have taken the issue on board before now.

Last July, when David Gray spoke out about his disgust that his music was used for torture, and the British-based legal charity Reprieve began campaigning about it, there was little interest. Christopher Cerf, who wrote the music for Sesame Street, (a music torture favorite) complained, but last December, when I wrote a detailed article about it, “A History of Music Torture in the ‘War on Terror,’” I surveyed a generally indifferent industry, in which some of those whose music had been used were indifferent (Bob Singleton, for example, who wrote the theme tune to Barney the Purple Dinosaur, another music torture favorite), others (Metallica) were ambivalent, and others (Drowning Pool, for example) were positively gleeful about it.

Unfortunately, nothing more was heard about this initiative, and the topic largely disappeared off the media’s radar again, with the exception of an article in Der Spiegel in January 2010, and it was not until March this year that it resurfaced on the BBC, in a 25-minute World Service broadcast.

Tristan Chytroschek’s film will help to keep this unresolved issue alive, which is very important even if most of the mainstream media behaved as though they had never been informed before that the music from “Sesame Street” was used to torture prisoners in the “war on terror.”

Asked to comment, Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby said, as Politico put it, that “[m]usic has been used as a ‘disincentive’ in handling prisoners” at Guantánamo. He explained, “Music is used both in a positive way and as a disincentive,” but added that it was not a form of torture. “We don’t torture,” he said.

While I can only wonder if that use of the present tense was an oversight, or if Capt. Kirby was really insinuating that music is still used as a weapon, I will leave you with a list of some of the artists whose songs were used to torture prisoners, and, where identified, the songs that were used:

AC/DC (Hell’s Bells and Shoot to Thrill)

Aerosmith

Captain & Tennille (Muskrat Love)

Christina Aguilera (Dirrty)

The Bee Gees (Stayin’ Alive)

Deicide (Fuck Your God)

Neil Diamond (America)

Dope (Die MF Die and Take Your Best Shot)

Dr. Dre

Drowning Pool (Bodies)

Eminem (The Real Slim Shady, White America and Kim)

David Gray (Babylon)

Hed PE (Swan Dive)

Lil Kim

Limp Bizkit

Barry Manilow (Mandy)

Marilyn Manson

Matchbox Twenty (Cold)

Meat Loaf (Paradise by the Dashboard Light)

Metallica (Enter Sandman)

Don McLean (American Pie)

Nine Inch Nails (March of the Pigs, Mr. Self-Destruct and Somewhat Damaged)

Pearl Jam (Don’t Gimme No Lip)

Pink

Prince (Raspberry Beret)

Queen (We Are The Champions)

Rage Against the Machine (Killing In The Name and Bulls On Parade)

The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Redman

Saliva (Click Click Boom)

Tupac Shakur (All Eyez On Me)

Britney Spears (… Baby One More Time)

Bruce Springsteen (Born in the USA)

The Stanley Brothers

James Taylor

Twisted Sister (We’re Not Gonna Take It)

Plus, of course, “I Love You” from “Barney & Friends,” the theme song to “Sesame Street,” and the Meow Mix TV commercial.

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Published on June 04, 2012 12:07

June 2, 2012

A Powerful Interview with Former Guantánamo Prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene

Last Saturday, the New York Times published an article based on an interview with former Guantánamo prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian whose case, Boumediene v. Bush, was regarded at the time as one of the most significant legal victories in the whole of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” reversing Congressional attempts to strip the prisoners of the habeas rights that the Supreme Court had first granted them in June 2004.

Lakhdar Boumediene went on to become one of 28 prisoners freed as a result of winning their habeas corpus petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C., although that impressive run of victories for the prisoners from October 2008 to July 2010 was abruptly stopped in the summer of 2010 by right-wing judges in the D.C. Circuit Court — the court of appeals — who have insisted, for nakedly political reasons, in rewriting the rules of detention to ensure that no prisoner can now secure a victory in court and be released through legal means.

As well as being a well-known name in legal circles, Lakhdar Boumediene was also noteworthy in Guantánamo, as one of six unfortunate Algerian men seized nowhere near the battlefields of Afghanistan, but kidnapped by US agents in Bosnia-Herzegovina and flown to Guantánamo in January 2002. The kidnapping took place after a disgraceful episode of US paranoia, in which he and the other men — who had all settled in Bosnia-Herzegovina after traveling there during the Bosnian War of 1992-95 — were imprisoned for three months by the Bosnian authorities at the request of the Bush administration. They were then kidnapped on Bosnian soil after their release had been ordered by a Bosnian court, because there was no evidence whatsoever that they were involved in terrorism, or had, as the US initially alleged, been involved in plotting to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo.

Despite there being no reason for the men’s detention, they were treated brutally in Guantánamo, and although three of them were released in Bosnia-Herzegovina shortly after their court victory (in which five of the six had their habeas petitions granted), Boumediene and another man, Saber Lahmar, had to wait until 2009 to be offered a new home in a third country, France, where Boumediene lives with his family. The sixth man, Belkacem Bensayah, had his habeas corpus petition denied, although that ruling was reversed and sent back to the District Court to reconsider back in June 2010, although no new opinion has been issued, and he remains held.

Below, I’m cross-posting the New York Times article by Scott Sayare based on his interview with Lakhdar Boumediene, and below that I’m also cross-posting the article that Boumediene himself wrote for the New York Times, back in January, for the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo. This is another powerful indictment of the prison, and another compelling reason why it must be closed down, and why any excuses made by the Obama administration are unacceptable, and are, instead, nothing more than a demonstration that justice and principles can be ignored when they are politically inconvenient.

After Guantánamo, Starting Anew, in Quiet Anger

By Scott Sayare, New York Times, May 25, 2012

It was James, a thickset American interrogator nicknamed “the Elephant,” who first told Lakhdar Boumediene that investigators were certain of his innocence, that two years of questioning had shown he was no terrorist, but that it did not matter, Mr. Boumediene says.

The interrogations would continue through what ended up being seven years, three months, three weeks and four days at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

An aid worker handling orphans in Sarajevo, Mr. Boumediene (pronounced boom-eh-DIEN) found himself swept up in the panic that followed Sept. 11, 2001. He likens himself to a caged cat, toyed with and tormented by fate and circumstance.

“I learned patience,” Mr. Boumediene, 46, said. He is a private man, trim and square-jawed and meticulously kempt, his eyes set in deep gray hollows. “There is no other choice but patience.”

The United States government has never acknowledged any error in detaining Mr. Boumediene, though a federal judge ordered his release, for lack of evidence, in 2008. The government did not appeal, a Defense Department spokesman noted, though he declined to answer further questions about Mr. Boumediene’s case. A State Department representative declined to discuss the case as well, except to point to a Justice Department statement announcing Mr. Boumediene’s transfer to France, in 2009.

More than a decade has passed since his arrest in Bosnia, since American operatives shackled his feet and hands, dropped a black bag over his head and flew him to Guantánamo. Since his release three years ago, Mr. Boumediene, an Algerian by birth, has lived anonymously in the south of France, quietly enraged but determined to start anew and to resist the pull of that anger.

He calls Guantánamo a “black hole.” Islam carried him through, he says. In truth, though, he still cannot escape it, and is still racked by questions. “I think back over everything in my life, all the stages, who my friends were, who I did this or that with, who I had a simple coffee with,” Mr. Boumediene said. “I do not know, even now, why I was at Guantánamo.”

There were early accusations of a plot to bomb the American Embassy in Sarajevo; he lived in that city with his family, working for the Red Crescent, the Muslim branch of the Red Cross. President George W. Bush hailed his arrest in a State of the Union address on Jan. 29, 2002.

In time, those accusations disappeared, Mr. Boumediene says, replaced by questions about his work with Muslim aid groups and suggestions that those groups financed Islamic terrorism. According to a classified detainee assessment from April 2008, published by WikiLeaks, investigators believed that he was a member of Al Qaeda and the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria. Those charges, too, later vanished.

In a landmark case that bears Mr. Boumediene’s name, the Supreme Court in 2008 affirmed the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their imprisonment in court. Mr. Boumediene petitioned for his release.

In court, the government’s sole claim was that Mr. Boumediene had intended to travel to Afghanistan to take up arms against the United States. A federal judge rejected that charge as unsubstantiated, noting that it had come from a single unnamed informer. Mr. Boumediene arrived in France on May 15, 2009, the first of two non-French former detainees to settle here.

Mr. Boumediene retreated into himself at Guantánamo, he says. He speaks little of his past now; with few exceptions, his neighbors know him only as a husband and a father. He lives with the wife and two daughters from whom he was once taken, and a son born here two years ago. More than vengeance, or even justice, he wants a return to normalcy.

He lives at the whim of the French state, though. France has permitted Mr. Boumediene to settle in public housing in Nice, where his wife has family, but he is not a French citizen, nor has he been granted asylum or permanent residence. His Algerian and Bosnian passports, misplaced by the American authorities, have not been reissued, leaving him effectively stateless.

Money comes in a monthly transfer to his French bank account. He does not know who, exactly, pays it. (The terms of his release have not been made public or revealed even to him.) He has been seeking work for years.

Recruiters typically scan his résumé with an air of approval, he said, until noting that it ends in 2001. He tells them that his is a “particular case,” that he spent time in prison. He avoids the word “Guantánamo,” he said, as it often stirs more fear than sympathy.

Mr. Boumediene arrived at Guantánamo on Jan. 20, 2002, nine days after the camp began operations. He was beaten on arrival, he said. Refusing food for the final 28 months of his detention, he was force-fed through a tube inserted up a nostril and down his throat, he said. There was a hole in the seat of the chair to which he was chained, sometimes clothed, sometimes not; as the liquid streamed into his stomach, his bowels often released.

He emerged gaunt, with wrists scarred from seven years of handcuffs, almost unable to walk without the shackles to which he had grown accustomed, he said. Crowds terrified him, as did rooms with closed doors, said Nathalie Berger, a doctor who worked with Mr. Boumediene shortly after his release.

Dr. Berger was moved, she said, by his equanimity and his “strength to live.”

“He has no hate for the American people,” she said, though Mr. Bush is another matter. Mr. Boumediene has been disappointed too by President Obama, who pledged to close Guantánamo but has not done so.

Born in the hills of northwestern Algeria, Mr. Boumediene served for two years in the Algerian military before following a friend to Pakistan in 1990, to aid refugees of the Afghan civil war.

He found work as a proctor at an orphanage and school operated by a Kuwaiti aid organization, a post that investigators later seized on as evidence of ties to terrorism.

A man identified as a director of the group, Zahid al-Shaikh, is the brother of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2006 and is now to be tried before a military court. Mr. Shaikh’s signature appeared on Mr. Boumediene’s contract, but the two had little interaction, Mr. Boumediene said.

He moved to Yemen, studying at the French cultural center in Sana; fighting there drove him to Albania, where he worked for the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. Deadly riots erupted in 1997, and he received a transfer to Bosnia.

Violence seemed to trail him, his interrogators noted. He has come to understand their suspicions, he said.

In Nice, Mr. Boumediene has grown friendly with a neighbor, Babette. She brings him coffee, he said, and gifts for his young son. They share meals at Christmas and on Muslim holy days.

He feared she might no longer come if she knew his past. In January, though, it was the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and there was media coverage. Babette asked if it was true.

“I told her, ‘It’s fate, and it’s life,’” Mr. Boumediene said. She still comes to call, he said, and still calls him “my brother.”

“Little by little, now, there are people who know who I am,” he said. Some offer cautious words of encouragement, others their apologies.

“I do not know what the right reaction is,” he said, but he does like a reaction, just the same.

My Guantánamo Nightmare

By Lakhdar Boumediene, New York Times, January 7, 2012

On Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.

When I arrived at work on the morning of Oct. 19, 2001, an intelligence officer was waiting for me. He asked me to accompany him to answer questions. I did so, voluntarily — but afterward I was told that I could not go home. The United States had demanded that local authorities arrest me and five other men. News reports at the time said the United States believed that I was plotting to blow up its embassy in Sarajevo. I had never — for a second — considered this.

The fact that the United States had made a mistake was clear from the beginning. Bosnia’s highest court investigated the American claim, found that there was no evidence against me and ordered my release. But instead, the moment I was released American agents seized me and the five others. We were tied up like animals and flown to Guantánamo, the American naval base in Cuba. I arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

I still had faith in American justice. I believed my captors would quickly realize their mistake and let me go. But when I would not give the interrogators the answers they wanted — how could I, when I had done nothing wrong? — they became more and more brutal. I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget.

I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

In 2008, my demand for a fair legal process went all the way to America’s highest court. In a decision that bears my name, the Supreme Court declared that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” It ruled that prisoners like me, no matter how serious the accusations, have a right to a day in court. The Supreme Court recognized a basic truth: the government makes mistakes. And the court said that because “the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore.”

Five months later, Judge Richard J. Leon, of the Federal District Court in Washington, reviewed all of the reasons offered to justify my imprisonment, including secret information I never saw or heard. The government abandoned its claim of an embassy bomb plot just before the judge could hear it. After the hearing, he ordered the government to free me and four other men who had been arrested in Bosnia.

I will never forget sitting with the four other men in a squalid room at Guantánamo, listening over a fuzzy speaker as Judge Leon read his decision in a Washington courtroom. He implored the government not to appeal his ruling, because “seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty.” I was freed, at last, on May 15, 2009.

Today, I live in Provence with my wife and children. France has given us a home, and a new start. I have experienced the pleasure of reacquainting myself with my daughters and, in August 2010, the joy of welcoming a new son, Yousef. I am learning to drive, attending vocational training and rebuilding my life. I hope to work again serving others, but so far the fact that I spent seven and a half years as a Guantánamo prisoner has meant that only a few human rights organizations have seriously considered hiring me. I do not like to think of Guantánamo. The memories are filled with pain. But I share my story because 171 men [now 169] remain there. Among them is Belkacem Bensayah, who was seized in Bosnia and sent to Guantánamo with me.

About 90 prisoners have been cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo. Some of them are from countries like Syria or China — where they would face torture if sent home — or Yemen, which the United States considers unstable. And so they sit as captives, with no end in sight — not because they are dangerous, not because they attacked America, but because the stigma of Guantánamo means they have no place to go, and America will not give a home to even one of them.

I’m told that my Supreme Court case is now read in law schools. Perhaps one day that will give me satisfaction, but so long as Guantánamo stays open and innocent men remain there, my thoughts will be with those left behind in that place of suffering and injustice.

Note: This essay was translated by Felice Bezri from the Arabic.