Andy Worthington's Blog, page 172

Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society

[image error]27 years ago, a convoy of vehicles driven by refugees from the chronic unemployment of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain — commonly described as new age travellers, but also including environmental and anti-nuclear activists and land reformers — was set upon by police from six counties and the MoD, en route to Stonehenge, to establish what would have been the 12th Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic annual event that drew tens of thousands of visitors every June.

Cornered in a field by the A303, the convoy members — including women and children — were eventually set upon by the police in a distressingly violent manner, albeit one that was typical of life under Thatcher, bearing remarkable similarities to the violence meted out to the miners at Orgreave, in South Yorkshire, the year before.

I was one of those visitors to the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983 and 1984, and the freedom and anarchy I experienced there helped to shape my belief that there are many different ways to live, and that dissent is a vital part of any functioning democracy. However, in the year that followed the Battle of the Beanfield, laws were implemented to try to make sure that the right to gather freely — and in huge numbers — would never be able to happen again, although they were not immediately successful. The new age traveller culture was severely damaged, but dissent reemerged unexpectedly in the form of the acid house movement , or rave culture, and was followed by the road protest movement, and groups like Reclaim the Streets, which helped to fuel a worldwide anti-globalization movement by the late 1990s.

Along the way, however, the British government succeeded in banning large unauthorized gatherings of those with a dissenting worldview, through the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which followed the last great illegal gathering — at Castlemorton, in Gloucestershire — on the May Bank Holiday weekend in 1992, exactly 20 years ago, when tens of thousands of people revived the spirit of the Stonehenge festivals at the foot of the Malvern Hills.

In 1999, the exclusion zone that had turned Stonehenge into a war zone every summer was ruled illegal by the Law Lords, once more opening up access to the stones for revellers, who gather every summer solstice in huge numbers, for one day only — an irony, given that, during the festival years, only a small number of people gathered at the stones, while the majority stayed across the road at the main festival site.

In all other respects, however, the assault on our liberties that began under Margaret Thatcher only became worse under Tony Blair and New Labour, whose authoritarian impulses were given free rein through the excuses for repression offered by the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” a brutal, excessive and ill-conceived response to the 9/11 attacks, which has impacted most fundamentally on Muslims, who can be held under house arrest without charge or trial, and on the basis of evidence that is not disclosed to them.

The biggest protest in British history — against the Iraq war in February 2003 — was brushed aside by Blair as though two million people were nothing, and although that decision to stand shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush eventually led to Blair’s fall, the repression that began under Thatcher and continued under John Major has proven to be unstoppable.

The UK now has more surveillance equipment watching its people than any other country on earth, and the all-encompassing materialism and the commodification of everything that has typified the last 15 years still dominates mainstream discourse, even though it led directly to the global economic crash of 2008, and is now manifesting itself in an ideologically motivated age of austerity, imposed on the majority of us, while the bankers and politicians who caused the crash continue to enrich themselves. Last summer’s response by those who are most excluded — the supposed “riots” — led to a savage and disgraceful response by the government, describing them as “feral,” by the courts, handing down draconian sentences for minor acts of looting, or the establishment of Facebook pages, and by a disturbingly large number of supposed intelligent middle class people who seem unable to understand that their relative wealth and contort is only possible through the exploitation of others.

With the forthcoming Olympics demonstrating everything that is wrong with the aggressive, corporate, militarised states in which we live — and this damned government bent on reducing everyone who is not rich into abject poverty or financial servitude, and, it seems, bent on the complete annihilation of the state, and the transfer of everything into private hands (except Parliament, the MoD and the judiciary) — the need for rebellion is greater than it has been for 30 years.

As I wait for people to wake up and understand that a war is going on between the 1 percent — who are turning their self-inflicted disaster into an opportunity to suppress us more than at any time in living memory — and the rest of us, I’d like to celebrate the spirit of those who were crushed at the Beanfield, but whose dissent could not be eliminated.

My book, The Battle of the Beanfield, published on the 20th anniversary of the Beanfield, is still available (as is my wider survey of the British counter-culture, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion), and I also recommend the documentary film, “Operation Solstice,” which can be bought here (although I do realize that it’s also available online).

Below, I’m cross-posting an article I wrote for the Guardian three years ago, which, I believe, remains relevant. I’m also posting ITN’s footage from the Battle of the Beanfield, following a two-minute introduction by someone identifying himself as RubbishMan1940. The eight and  half minutes of footage includes ITN’s brief but disturbingly biased news broadcast from the day of the Beanfield, but also raw footage of the police’s assault on travellers, interviews with convoy members, and footage of ITN reporter Kim Sabido, visibly shocked by what he had seen.

I’m also posting “New Age Travellers,” a BBC Timeshift documentary from 2004, and a one-hour documentary about Reclaim the Streets. For more, see my articles, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, which provides excerpts from my book The Battle of the Beanfield, and The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, a prominent traveller who died two years ago. For more on dissent from the anti-globalisation movement to the Arab Spring, see The Year of Revolution: The “War on Tyranny” Replaces the “War on Terror”, and for article on how gypsies and travellers still face persecution in the UK, see my articles about the disgraceful eviction last year of gypsies and travellers at Dale Farm, The Dale Farm Eviction: How Racism Against Gypsies and Travellers Grips Modern-Day Britain and The Dale Farm Eviction: Using Planning Laws to Justify Racism Towards Gypsies and Travellers.

Remember the Battle of the Beanfield

By Andy Worthington, The Guardian, June 1, 2009

Exactly 24 years ago, in a field beside the A303 in Wiltshire, the might of Margaret Thatcher‘s militarised police descended on a convoy of new age travellers, green activists, anti-nuclear protestors and free festival-goers, who were en route to Stonehenge in an attempt to establish the 12th annual Stonehenge free festival in fields across the road from Britain’s most famous ancient monument. That event has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

In many ways the epitome of the free festival movement of the 1970s, the Stonehenge free festival – an annual anarchic jamboree that, in 1984, had attracted tens of thousands of visitors – had been an embarrassment to the authorities for many years, but its violent suppression, when police from six counties and the Ministry of Defence cornered the convoy of vehicles in a field and, after an uneasy stand-off, invaded the field on foot and in vehicles, subjecting men, women and children to a distressing show of physical force, was, like the Miners’ strike the year before, and the suppression of the printers at Wapping the year after, a brutal display of state violence that signaled a major curtailment of civil liberties.

In the context of political dissent at the time, the Stonehenge festival was a mere sideshow, but the government knew that its suppression would not cause offence to the general public, especially as most media outlets were prevailed upon to refrain from reporting on it (valiant exceptions were the Observer’s Nick Davies and Kim Sabido for ITN). As a result, the government knew that it could disguise its other motives: the curtailment in general of the British public’s right to gather freely without prior permission, and the suppression of a grassroots movement opposed to the installation of US cruise missiles on UK soil.

The most celebrated opponents of nuclear weapons in the UK were the women of Greenham Common, but as it would have been a PR disaster to have had police truncheoning a group of women, the new age travellers, who had set up a peace camp at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire (the proposed second base for cruise missiles) were a more obvious target, and the Battle of the Beanfield took place just four months after 1,500 soldiers and police – in the largest peacetime mobilisation of its kind – were used to evict the camp.

Above all, though, the major fallout from the Battle of the Beanfield was the government’s manipulation of the manufactured hysteria about the travellers and protestors to introduce the 1986 Public Order Act, which enabled the police to evict two or more people for trespass, providing that “reasonable steps have been taken by or on behalf of the occupier to ask them to leave.” The act also stipulated that six days’ written notice had to be given to the police before most public processions, and allowed the police to impose unspecified “conditions” if they feared that a procession “may result in serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community.”

The Battle of the Beanfield was not the end of grassroots dissent in the UK – although it gutted the travellers’ movement – as a new “threat” emerged just a few years later, when the acid house scene, with its giant warehouse raves and outdoor parties, once more threw the government – and the tabloids – into an authoritarian frenzy. As with Stonehenge, the catalyst for a further assault on civil liberties was another large free festival, at Castlemorton common in Gloucestershire, on the May bank holiday weekend in 1992.

The legislation that followed – the 1994 Criminal Justice Act – not only repealed the 1968 Caravans Sites Act, criminalising the entire way of life of gypsies and travellers by removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for gypsies, but also amended the Public Order Act by introducing the concept of “trespassory assembly.” This enabled the police to ban groups of 20 or more people meeting in a particular area if they feared “serious disruption to the life of the community,” even if the meeting was non-obstructive and non-violent, and the act also introduced “aggravated trespass,” which finally transformed trespass from a civil to a criminal concern.

Both had disturbing ramifications for almost all kinds of protests and alternative gatherings, and were clearly ramped up after the government failed to secure convictions after the Battle of the Beanfield using an ancient charge of “unlawful assembly.” Moreover, as protestors have been discovering in the years since the passing of the Criminal Justice Act, the groundwork laid by the Public Order Act and the Criminal Justice Act provided the Labour government, which has passed more legislation directed at civil liberties than any previous government, to start from a presumption that there were few, if any instances when a peaceful protest by just two people could not be suppressed.

Back in 1997, some of us had a quaint notion that the government would repeal the excesses of the Criminal Justice Act; instead, we are living with three other changes enacted by the Act that still have resonance today: the police’s right to take DNA samples from those arrested, increased “stop and search” powers, and amendments to the right to silence of an accused person, allowing inferences to be drawn from their silence. We have an exclusion zone around parliament, in which a single non-violent protestor can be arrested, anti-terror legislation used to stifle dissent, and, as we saw at the G20 protests in April, policemen once more hiding their identification numbers – as they did at the Battle of the Beanfield – to enable them to assault civilians (or worse) with impunity.

Footage from the Battle of the Beanfield.

“New Age Travellers,” a BBC Timeshift documentary from 2004.

“Reclaim the Streets,” an independent documentary from 2000.

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.

How A Comment on My Website Led Jason Leopold to Discover the Story of Abu Zubaydah’s Brother, Living in the US

On Christmas Day 2008, a comment by someone identifying themselves as Hesham Abu Zubaydah was submitted on an article I had written many months earlier, entitled, The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts. This was the first of many articles I have written explaining how Abu Zubaydah, the “high-value detainee” for whom the Bush administration’s torture program was specifically developed, was not a senior al-Qaeda operative, as the administration claimed, but was instead the mentally damaged gatekeeper of a training camp, Khaldan, that was independent of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

The comment read, “Yes that is my brother and I live in Oregon. Do you think I should have been locked away for 2 years with no charges for a act of a sibling? I am the younger brother of Zayn [Abu Zubydah's real name, Zayn al-Abidin Mohamed Husayn] and I live in the USA. Tell me what you think.”

In response, from what I recall, I responded to the comment, but did not hear anything back. With hindsight, I should have pursued it further, but I’m glad to note that, eventually, my friend and colleague Jason Leopold stumbled across the comment, tracked down Hesham in Florida, where he lives with his wife Jody, and began a 14-month investigation that resulted in the publication, yesterday, of EXCLUSIVE: From Hopeful Immigrant to FBI Informant – the Inside Story of the Other Abu Zubaidah, a 15,000-word article by Jason that was published by Truthout, where he is the lead investigative reporter, and where I am an occasional contributor.

This excellent article, accompanied by a video interview of Jason talking to Hesham and Jody, and an additional article about how a Freedom of Information request submitted by Jason attracted the attention of the FBI, reveals most of all how, because of his blood relationship with Abu Zubaydah — who is known to his family as Hani — Hesham has been imprisoned in America, threatened with deportation and made to work for nearly three years as an FBI informant, even though he himself has done nothing wrong, and has no involvement with or sympathies for anything to do with violent jihad.

One of ten children born to Palestinian parents in Saudi Arabia, Hesham is five years younger than Hani, and was only 11 or 12 years old when his brother left home for good, and he recalls him only as a happy-go-lucky guy, and something of a womanizer. At that time, he insists, there was no hint of religious extremism. As a result, it should have been obvious that he was of little use to law enforcement officials or the intelligence agencies, but instead he has been hounded, persecuted and treated abominably, primarily by the FBI.

Hesham arrived in the US in July 1998, when he was 22 years old, and, a year later, moved to Portland, Oregon, where he was living when the 9/11 attacks occurred. It was only afterwards that the FBI paid him a visit. As Jason explains (using the spelling “Zubaidah,” which I have maintained in the quotes from the article):

Hesham said the first time he learned that his brother had been involved in any alleged terrorist activities was immediately after 9/11, when FBI agents showed up at his apartment in Portland with a set of photographs they asked him to identify.

“I didn’t believe it,” Hesham said when he first learned of the allegations that his brother was involved in the planning of the 9/11. “I did not recognize the person in the pictures the FBI showed me. The person in the photographs had a beard and a mustache. My brother used to shave his mustache all the time. They had pictures where he had blue eyes, blond hair and green hair. The person just didn’t look anything like the person I grew up with. I told the FBI, ‘The guy you’re talking about, I don’t know that guy.’”

Hesham says he has been paying a price ever since for having the same name as the suspect in the pictures.

Crucially, Jason continues:

Why didn’t the FBI speak to Hesham before 9/11? It would seem a simple visit to the sibling of the person designated as a notorious al-Qaeda terrorist would be standard law enforcement procedure. But it wasn’t. Rather than interview Hesham, the FBI instead secretly spoke to his wife, about three weeks before 9/11.

John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who helped lead the operation that resulted in Zubaidah’s capture on March 28, 2002, said he could not believe Zubaidah had a brother living in the United States at a time when the intelligence community was trying to track down and capture Zubaidah.

“That’s just stunning to me,” Kiriakou said in an interview last summer. “Before the raid, our team was trying to find people who knew Zubaidah. We heard he had a brother or a relative in Paris and tried to track him down, but that didn’t pan out. Had I known Zubaidah had a brother in the US, I would have demanded headquarters get the FBI to make immediate contact with him and squeeze as much info out of him as we could about his brother.”

No answer has been forthcoming, although the word that springs most obviously to my mind is incompetence.

As another example of the incompetence that runs through the whole of America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, and which I have been consistently exposing with relation to the supposed intelligence gathered at Guantánamo, Jason also details a phone conversation that Hesham had with his brother, in April 2000, when Hani rang him — probably from Pakistan.

Hesham was at work at the Fast Trip gas station one afternoon in April 2000 when the phone rang.

“Hello,” a voice said when Hesham picked up the phone.

“Who’s this?” Hesham responded.

“It’s Hani.”

Hesham had not spoken with his brother for nearly a decade. By then, Hani had been on the radar of US intelligence for years. Hesham was oblivious to the news reports that started to appear in December 1999 linking his brother to Millennium terrorist plots in Jordan and to an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam, who was planning to blow up Los Angeles International Airport and was caught trying to smuggle bomb-making materials into the United States from Canada. Ressam told federal prosecutors and the FBI that Hani was a top al-Qaeda lieutenant, close confidant of Bin Laden and “facilitator” of terrorist attack operations.

Hani was thought to be living in Pakistan at this time, and President Bill Clinton had reportedly asked government officials there to assist in capturing him. The FBI started to step up its surveillance of Hani, monitoring his cellular phone and other communications immediately following the failed plots in Jordan, according to two former FBI counterterrorism agents.

“Hani? Oh my God! I haven’t heard from you for a long time. How ya doin’, buddy?”

“I’m good, I’m good,” Hani said. “I heard you’re not doing good. What’s the matter, buddy?”

“I explained to him what I’m going through,” Hesham said. “I told him I have a girlfriend and a baby on the way but I am pretty stressed out. I have money issues. I don’t have enough money to pay the bills. I missed some car payments.”

“Do you need some help?” Hani asked.

“I don’t need help,” Hesham responded. “I don’t want to ask the family for help. You know how dad is and how he will throw it in my face and say, ‘See? I knew you would fail and come crying to me for help.’”

“It’s OK,” Hani said. “It doesn’t make you less of a man if you ask for help.”

“I really don’t want to do that,” Hesham said.

“You know what, listen, I am going to talk to your sister, and they’re going to try and help you out,” Hani said. “Just take it.”

Hesham said Hani asked him how America was treating him and if he enjoyed living in the United States.

“I love this country,” Hesham told Hani.

During their approximately 15-minute conversation, Hani also asked Hesham about his plan to obtain citizenship.

“Hani said to me, ‘You know, as a Palestinian, you can get refugee status,’” Hesham said. “He stressed that point.”

Hesham said Hani’s voice sounded like he was “happy,” like “what I remember. A fun, good guy.”

“I kind of think he’s away from dad, he moved on with his life and he made his life,” Hesham said.

A few days later, Hesham said Hani called him at his apartment and told him that a sister was going to wire about $1,800 into his bank account. They spoke for another 15 minutes. Hani said he hoped he would have an opportunity to see Hesham. Then they said their goodbyes.

Hesham never spoke with Hani again.

Curiously, Hesham said he never asked Hani what he was up to. He never asked where he was living, where he was calling from, what his phone number was, whether he was married, had kids, or even how he got his phone number.

Hesham’s explanation is that he simply didn’t care.

“I assumed he got my phone number from my parents,” Hesham said. “They called me regularly and I told my mother how stressed out I was.”

Still, considering that Hani initiated the phone call and that his every move at that time was supposedly being monitored by the CIA and FBI, did the National Security Agency (NSA), which at the time was headed by Gen. Michael Hayden, track it and pass the intelligence along to those agencies?

Jason followed up with a Freedom on Information request, as he explains:

I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last year with the NSA to find out. On February 28, the NSA responded, issuing what is known as a Glomar response to the FOIA.  (The term “Glomar response” came into use after the CIA in 1969 denied a reporter’s request for information about the CIA-built ship the Glomar Explorer; the CIA refused to either confirm or deny the ship’s existence.)

“We have determined that the fact of the existence of non-existence of the materials you request is a currently and properly classified matter in accordance with Executive Order 13526, as set forth in Subparagraph c) of Section 1.4. Thus, your request is denied pursuant to the first exemption of the FOIA which provides that the FOIA does not apply to matters that are specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign relations and are, in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive Order.”

Five special agents assigned to the FBI’s I-49 squad, which focused on Bin Laden and international terrorism out of the bureau’s New York Field Office, reacted with surprise when told that Hani called the United States in April 2000; the agents said they had no idea the calls had been made. Four officers assigned to the CIA’s Alec Station, which also focused on Bin Laden, said they, too, were unaware Hani made the calls.

Hani’s telephone calls, which the FBI’s Portland field office learned about immediately after 9/11 when Hesham was arrested, was not shared with the so-called “independent” 9/11 Commission or the Congressional 9/11 panel.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Florida), who co-chaired the joint Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, said it is “news to him” that Zubaidah not only has a brother who lives in the United States, but that Zubaidah called the United States three times in April 2000 and spoke to his brother twice.

“The 9/11 Commission and our Congressional inquiry would have been very interested in this information,” Graham said. “We should have been told about it so we could evaluate the relative significance of the information, because it could have further contributed to our understanding of what happened before 9/11.”

The phone calls add yet another wrinkle to the official narrative of pre-9/11 intelligence and who knew what and when. The New York Times reported in June 2008 that Hani “was careful about security: he turned his phone on only briefly to collect messages, not long enough for his trackers to get a fix on his whereabouts.”

Before 9/11, Hesham was involved in a disastrous, tempestuous relationship, which ended badly. The woman, Rosalee, his first wife, “sent a letter to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on May 31, 2001, stating that she wanted to withdraw her petition sponsoring Hesham for citizenship,” and, as Jason notes, that letter was sent the day before White House Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told then-CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that “a notorious al Qa’ida operative named Abu Zubaidah was working on attack plans,” according to Tenet’s memoir, At the Center of the Storm.” As Jason added, however, “no one from the FBI visited Hesham to discuss his brother.”

In August 2001, after further marital problems, Hesham was arrested, and on August 22, 2001, FBI agents interviewed Rasalee, who, as Jason put it, told.”some wild stories about Hesham, according to a copy of the FBI’s interview report. She claimed that Hesham murdered someone at the behest of the Chicago mob, that he brought home crack cocaine and other drugs, and that he was going to return to Saudi Arabia with their daughter. She also provided agents with details about their violent altercation.”

She also talked about Hani. “Per Hesham, his brother Hani Mohamed Abu-Zubaidah is a bomb terrorist,” the FBI report says. “Hani has no contact with his family and his family has no way to contact him unless he wants to talk to them … For this reason, the father wants nothing more to do with Hani.”

Rosalee later confessed that she had lied to the FBI, and said that when she spoke to one of the agents who interviewed her, and said that the allegations she leveled against Hesham “weren’t really true,” the agent replied, “I could kind of tell that.”

Nevertheless, Hesham had finally ended up on the FBI’s radar. A week after the 9/11 attacks, two agents came to visit him, and he was arrested a day later, “charged with violating the conditions of his student visa,” and “placed into removal proceedings and held in solitary confinement.” He “maintained that the FBI and INS wanted to deport him because he was the brother of an alleged al-Qaeda operative. He said about ten different FBI agents interrogated him about his brother ‘a few times a week’ while he was in custody.”

And so Hesham’s nightmare began in earnest. A court case, in which he was poorly advised, led to him spending over two years in prison. On the day his brother was captured (March 28, 2002), a judge ordered him to be deported to Saudi Arabia, but that plan never materialized, as he is not a Saudi citizen. The FBI also turned up to harangue him in prison after his capture, but finally, in April 2003, he was released on probation.

As Jason notes, “Hesham developed a deep hatred for his brother, Hani. He blamed Hani for destroying his life.” As Hesham explained, “Let’s face it, if my last name was not Abu Zubaidah, I wouldn’t be in this position. The FBI wouldn’t be coming to see me all the time. I would probably be a US citizen by now. It’s all because of that guy that my life is fucked up. If he did what the FBI tells me he did, then he should pay. If he is the mastermind terrorist they say, he should be brought to justice. But don’t penalize me for his crimes. I’m a good guy. Screw him, and if my life is fucked up because of him, then fuck him!”

Please see Jason’s article for the rest of Hesham’s story — the positive side, involving him meeting and marrying Jody, his second wife, and the rather darker time when, for nearly three years, he was obliged to work as an informant for the FBI. I hope, for Hesham’s sake, that the publicity generated by this story will prove helpful to him, and I’m glad that my website proved to be the starting point for Jason’s extraordinary investigation.

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.

How Guantánamo Is the Basis for the Mandatory Military Detention Provisions in the NDAA

[image error]Yesterday, I was rung by a journalist from Press TV, asking me to discuss my recent article, US Judge Rules Against Military Detention of US Terror Suspects – But What About the Foreigners in Guantánamo?

My three and a half minute commentary is available here, and in it I reiterated that, while I fully understand the outrage in the United States about the provisions demanding the mandatory military of alleged terror suspects — including US citizens — that were included by dangerously deluded or cynical lawmakers in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), what has been largely missing from the conversation is a recognition that this assault on the rights of American not to be arbitrarily imprisoned by their own government would not have been possible without the existence of Guantánamo.

At Guantánamo, foreigners — but not Americans — have been arbitrarily detained for ten years, and opponents of the NDAA also need to recognize that the legislation that underpins al of these outrageous detention provisions (both at Guantánamo and in the NDAA) is the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which urgently needs repealing, as I explained in an article last year, After Ten Years of the “War on Terror,” It’s Time to Scrap the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

This is how Press TV described my commentary:

“The interesting thing about the National Defense Authorization Act’s (NDAA) mandatory military provisions for the custody of people who [are] allegedly terrorist suspects is that it caused a huge amount of uproar in the United States, which I obviously find very understandable. It was interesting that people on the left, libertarians, even some Republicans took exception to the right of, or the perceived right of lawmakers to demand that anyone, including US citizens, could be put in military custody for life without charge or trial on the basis of an allegation of involvement with terrorism,” Worthington said.

He continued that what many people missed out on their reflection on feeling that their own lawmakers were targeting them, was that the lawmakers wouldn’t have been able to come up with these notions of mandatory military detention for terror suspects, including American citizens, if it wasn’t for the fact that that’s what they have actually been doing at Guantánamo for the last ten years.

Worthington added that a lot of American citizens who are opposed to the provisions in the NDAA haven’t realized that “the problem is Guantánamo, and that without Guantánamo and the law that was passed straight after the 9/11 attacks to authorize the detention of prisoners, which is called the Authorization For Use of Military Force [AUMF] which is still in power and actually underpins the whole of the war on terror detention provisions, without the AUMF and Guantánamo, these awful provisions in the NDAA would not have been possible.”

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.