Andy Worthington's Blog, page 18

Boris Johnson’s Election Victory: A Truly Depressing Day for Britain, But Now He ‘Owns’ the Toxic Brexit Nightmare

Boris Johnson in a bike helmet during his eight useless years as London’s Mayor. Now, absurdly, promoted to Prime Minister of the UK, he is intent on turning the British economy into a car crash via his enthusiasm for a no deal Brexit.


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

 

The only positive message that can be taken from the otherwise almost insanely depressing outcome of Thursday’s General Election — in which the Tories, under Boris Johnson, a lying and thoroughly untrustworthy philandering narcissist, secured an outright majority — is that Johnson now ‘owns’ Brexit, the toxic destroyer of the UK, and both he — and the fawning mainstream media that was so shockingly biased in his favour throughout the election campaign — will be unable to blame Britain’s slow, agonising and inevitable collapse on anyone other than themselves.

Elsewhere, there is no other good news to report about this election. The Tories won largely because traditional Labour strongholds in the north of England and in Wales swung their way, often for the first time in their history (although the results didn’t come out of nowhere). An additional factor that should be noted is the number of EU-supporting Tory voters who stayed faithful to the party brand, even though, under Johnson, the party has become unrecognisable, and is clearly fixated with inflicting a hugely damaging no deal Brexit on the country.  

And those swings occurred fundamentally not because of how credible or not Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party’s policies were, but because Johnson took one simple stupid message — ‘Get Brexit Done’ — and hammered it home relentlessly and successfully. While I and others groaned at its constant repetition, it did exactly what it was intended to do: to confirm to those who voted Leave in the EU referendum that all the faffing about was over, and that a strong leader would now deliver what they voted for. Further analysis will also show, I’m sure, that many who voted ‘Remain’ in 2016, also voted for Johnson and his sledgehammer message, because they too thought that it was long overdue that the “will of the people” needed to be respected.

To that extent, Johnson’s bludgeoning message was uncannily similar to the effect of Donald Trump’s simple and stupid ‘Make America Great Again’ message in 2016, and, of course, the similarities between Trump and Johnson, and their campaigning, are genuinely quite chilling, not least in their far-right leanings, and through the shared involvement of organisations engaged in massive voter manipulation online. 

But the bottom line of Johnson’s success is that he now has to deliver on his promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’, and that, of course, is a toxic time bomb. We know his intent — to flog us off to the US, making us a vassal state, with other cuts from the carcass of the UK distributed to China and the Gulf, and with Britain’s role as a global tax haven reinforced — a place where every super-rich scumbag from anywhere around the world is welcome to come and park their ill-gotten gains. 

Most of the above is, to be honest, business as usual for this shamefully corrupted nation of ours, but delivering Brexit is fraught with two particular problems for Johnson and Cummings and whoever else is on board with the Brexit project in his cabinet and his government of the deranged, the deluded, the obsequious and the cowardly: getting Brexit ‘done’ will take years, or, more probably, decades, and it will take some serious conjuring on the part of Johnson’s black propagandists to spin that one successfully. 

More significantly, however, the more we ‘leave’ the EU, the more fundamentally damaged our economy will become. There is, literally, no scenario in which the UK economy will perform better as we deliberately and pointlessly extricate ourselves from our intimate involvement with the largest trading bloc and most privileged club in the whole of world history, and it is impossible to imagine that Johnson’s Tory government will be able to paper over the effects of our certain economic collapse throughout the many years of certain decline to come — even given the traditional deference and newly-found stupidity of my fellow citizens who have been conditioned by almost the whole of the mainstream media and the British establishment to obey their masters’ dismal messaging in a largely unquestioning manner.

Johnson has more woes to come, of course — a war with Scotland, where he is instinctively more hated than any other English leader since Margaret Thatcher, and where his refusal to grant a second referendum is unlikely to proceed unchallenged, and the loss of Northern Ireland, which may well reunite with Ireland, fulfilling, via the insanity of Brexit, what the IRA were never able to achieve. 

And what of England? As I see it, unfortunately, England in particular is as deeply caught up in a civil war as it has been since that deluded referendum three and half years ago. This hasn’t, to date, led to inter-English fighting n the streets, but if Johnson’s delusional and insanely destructive Brexit is forced through, it would, I think, be foolish not to expect civil unrest to follow.

In conclusion, let’s also remember that what the lazy, complicit media are calling a “landslide victory” isn’t really any such thing. Johnson’s Tories gained 48 more seats than Theresa May secured in 2017, despite barely getting more votes than May did, and, although Johnson’s Tories have 365 seats, and all the other parties have only 285, they did this not by securing over 50% of the vote, but through just 43.6% of those who voted — and when non-voters are factored in, Johnson and his Tories have the support of just 29.3% of the total registered electorate. Most damningly of all, the participatory aspect of our so-called democratic system is so damaged that more people (32.7% of the total registered electorate) didn’t vote all all than voted for the Tories. 

Our political powerlessness in the face of complete indifference from the Tories will prevent it, but what we really need is proportional representation, so that fraudulent majorities, via our horribly biased first past the post ‘winner takes it all’ system, are no longer the political reality in the UK, and where no overall majorities for any party will mean that parties will have to learn to cooperate rather than endlessly being stupidly adversarial. As the Electoral Reform Society has been pointing out, it took just 38,300 votes for a Conservative MP to get elected on Thursday, while the Green Party, with 864,743 votes, secured just one MP as usual, the wonderful Caroline Lucas. How is that supposed to be fair?

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

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

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

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

After Nine Years of Austerity, and to Save the NHS, Please, Please, Please Vote the Tories Out!

The photo of four-year old Jack Williment-Barr, with suspected pneumonia, sleeping on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary, which has focused attention on Tory cuts to the NHS. The photo was featured in a Yorkshire Evening Post article, and was then included in a front-page article in the Daily Mirror.


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. I’m currently trying to raise £2,000 ($2,500) to enable me to continue working as a genuinely independent journalist and commentator over the next three months.

 

I haven’t, to date, waded into the fray regarding tomorrow’s General Election in the UK, in large part because I am so profoundly dismayed that we still have such an antiquated voting system — first past the post — that massively favours the Tories, and, to a lesser extent, Labour, at the expense of all the other parties, and in part because, in the echo chamber world created by the tech companies’ cynical and divisive algorithms, I’m bound to be preaching to the converted.

However, I don’t want tomorrow’s polling to take place without throwing a few thoughts your way, so here’s my gambit: if you live in a constituency where the race is tight, please vote wisely to get the Tories out. This means that, whoever is the closest challenger to the Tories should get your vote, whether that is Labour or the Liberal Democrats.

If our opposition politicians were truly grown-up, they would have stood aside for each other in closely-contested constituencies where a divided vote will do nothing except return the Tories to power, and they would have spelled out to voters how the main drive of this election needs to be to make sure that the Tories, led by the execrable Boris Johnson, are removed from power. However, a pact hasn’t materialised, because politicians tend to be idiotically tribal, and because far too many of them have been so conditioned by the inadequate first past the post system that they’d rather come third and allow a Tory to win than demonstrate the kind of responsibility that we, as a country, so desperately need at this perilous time.

Typically, since 2010, and with 2017 as the most recent example, first past the post has allowed the Tories, with around 24% of eligible voters, and around 42% of those who vote on the day, to take around 50% of the seats, skewering any notion that we live in a country with any kind of genuine representative democracy — and if the Tories don’t get a majority on Thursday, it really is time for a non-Tory government to change the voting system to one involving proportional representation, to make sure that they never get in power again, and also to make sure that every party is fairly represented.

In a fair electoral system, every party securing 50,0000 votes would get an MP, so that, for example, the Green Party could have dozens of MPs, instead of just one, putting their eminently sensible environmental commitments, and their concerns with social justice, into the deliberations of coalition governments that would be required to put aside their narrow tribalism for the common good.

Mainly, though, we need to get the Tories out because, after nearly ten years, they have bled the country dry with their austerity programme. cynically introduced in 2010 to destroy the state provision of services, which has ended up entrenching an ever-widening gap between the rich (who continue to be slavishly serviced by the Tories) and the ever-growing number of the poor, with poverty now, genuinely, returning to Victorian levels.

Austerity has not only been a colossal moral failure; it has also failed economically, with the deficit level much more severe now than it was when the Tories took power in 2010. A programme of Keynesian borrowing to invest is the only sensible way forward, putting the failed neo-liberal project — introduced by Margaret Thatcher and maintained ever since by the Tories, by New Labour and by the Lib Dems in their five-year coalition with the Tories from 2010-2015 — in its grave once and for all.

And yet the Tories — and far too much of our corporate-owned mainstream media, the mainstream establishment including, sadly, far too many of the BBC’s news teams, and our fellow citizens who are susceptible to their poisonous messages — cannot bear any notion of fairness and redistribution to be undertaken to halt the otherwise relentless widening of the chasm between rich and poor, and the manifestation of ever greater levels of deprivation for those most in need of support.

Although the Labour Party remains dangerously infected by neo-liberalism amongst many of its MPs — and particularly in its social cleansing councils, in thrall to big developers — Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their allies in the Party’s leadership have a genuine vision for a better Britain that should be taken seriously when people vote tomorrow. Without hope, what is there?

But as I say, if a Liberal Democrat can beat a Tory, they deserve your vote instead. Let’s please get the Tories out of power tomorrow!

The malignant ghost of a hard Brexit

In conclusion, another reason to get rid of the Tories is, of course, Brexit. While the Lib Dems have taken a position of scrapping the referendum result, which can only implacably alienate many of the people who voted to leave the EU in that colossally stupid referendum in June 2016, Labour has pledged to allow a vote on a final deal, which is almost certainly the only fair way forward.

The Tories, meanwhile, pushing for a hard, no deal Brexit under Boris Johnson, have been taken over by dangerous ideologues for isolation, for making the UK a vassal state of the US, and for selling off whatever hasn’t been sold off to whoever else wants a slice of the fifth largest economy in the world (China and the Gulf states, for example) — both via the Europe-hating isolationists of the European Research Group, typified so abysmally by the ludicrous Jacob Rees-Mogg, and since summer, by the rabidly pro-American drive of Boris Johnson and his puppet master Dominic Cummings, whose insatiable enthusiasm for a hard Brexit that will do more to destroy our economy and to entrench unthinkable levels of poverty remains firmly in place, despite the resistance of the 21 Tory rebels who were sacked for putting the country’s well-being above their leader’s narrow and suicidally stupid ideological obsessions.

Despite all Boris Johnson’s protestations, the Tories want to kill the NHS and hand it over to US healthcare companies to make huge profits at the expense of almost the entire population of the UK. Hopefully, Johnson’s callous disregard for a four-year old child with pneumonia forced to lie on a pile of coats in an A&E department in Leeds because of Tory cuts to the NHS will be something of a tipping point, because otherwise the future looks, genuinely, quite extraordinarily bleak.

So please — please, please, please — do whatever you can to vote the Tories out tomorrow. The health and future of our nation depends on it.

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

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

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

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

Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Ongoing Work on Guantánamo and Torture and My London Photo-Journalism Project

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House on January 11, 2019, the 17th anniversary of the opening of the prison, and photos from Andy’s photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’


Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration, and/or for my London photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year again when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo and the US torture program, and/or, if you wish, to support my ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’

As a completely independent journalist, activist and commentator, I have no institutional backing whatsoever, so I’m reliant on your support to help me to keep writing and campaigning about Guantánamo, and chronicling the ever-changing face of London.

If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to close Guantánamo, and/or ‘The State of London’, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and filling in the amount you wish to donate every month, and, if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of those interested in my Guantánamo work are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

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 (to 164A Tressillian Road, London SE4 1XY), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

14 years of researching and writing about Guantánamo – and torture

I’m finding it hard to comprehend right now, but 14 years ago I was poring over speculative lists of prisoners held at Guantánamo, created by the Washington Post and the British NGO Cageprisoners, trying to work out who was held in the prison, because the Bush administration was still maintaining, nearly four years after Guantánamo opened, that the world had no right to know who was held there. Just three months later, the Pentagon lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit, and was obliged to release the names of those held, along with supporting documentation, which was where my work began in earnest.

Analyzing this and other documentation over more than a year, I was able to work out and tell the stories of the majority of the prisoners, published as The Guantánamo Files in 2007. When I finished the manuscript, I began writing about Guantánamo on an almost daily basis here on this website, and have, to date, published 2,300 articles in total about Guantánamo.

Today is also another anniversary — of the publication, five years ago, of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, a five-year project that revealed, in shocking detail, the brutality and pointlessness of the program, and which confirmed what myself and other researchers had been piecing together via other means during this whole period — in 2009, for example, I was the lead author of a UN report into secret detention worldwide, in which, in an extensive section on US policy after 9/11, I profiled 94 “black site” prisoners.

Five years on, I’ve been promoting “The Report,” the compelling new docudrama about the Senate staffers, led by Daniel Jones, who compiled the torture report, and I’ll be writing more about it tomorrow, having watched it online last night. I recommend it wholeheartedly, and, as with my ongoing Guantánamo work, it beggars belief, nearly 18 years since Guantánamo opened — and since the torture program began — that no one has been held accountable for the torture and abuse at Guantánamo, in the “black sites” and elsewhere, while Guantánamo, of course, is still open and still holding 40 men, many of whom were victims of the torture program.

With your help, I will continue to write about Guantánamo and the torture program, and to call for Guantánamo to be closed and for those responsible for all the crimes committed by the US since 9/11 to be held accountable for their actions.

‘The State of London’

Another pursuit of mine for which I also have no institutional backing — and invite your support — is my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London,’ in which, every day, I post a photo and essay from seven years of cycling around London’s 120 postcodes, which I still do on a daily basis, taking photos of the changing face of the extraordinary city that has been my home for the last 34 years.

‘The State of London’ is a long-standing labour of love, which I’m hoping to take into new territory in 2020, setting up a website, expanding into print and organising some exhibitions. I’m hugely grateful to the thousands of people who follow ‘The State of London’ on Facebook and Twitter, and appreciate any financial support you can give to help to keep this project going.

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

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

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

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

Close Guantánamo’s Aims for 2020’s Presidential Election Year – and New Campaign Posters

Campaigners outside the White House calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on January 11, 2012, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison.


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

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

For those of us who care about the ever-pressing need for the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be shut down for good, the coming year is going to be challenging.

As long as Donald Trump remains president, and, frankly, as long as Republicans retain control of either the Senate or the House of Representatives, it is reasonable to assume that there will be no movement whatsoever towards the closure of Guantánamo.

Forgotten or ignored, Guantánamo may not even be mentioned at all on the presidential trail, but we’ll be doing our best to make America remember this stain on its national conscience, where 40 men are still held, for the most part without charge or trial, in defiance of all the legal and judicial values the US claims to hold dear.

We’ve just commissioned new campaign posters in connection with our ongoing photo project involving our initiative the Gitmo Clock, which we first launched in 2013 and revived last year, and which counts, in real time, how long Guantánamo has been open.

We’ve just updated the Gitmo Clock, and have five new posters for 2020 — the first marks the 18th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, when the prison will have been open for 6,575 days. For February 5, 2020 there is a poster marking 6,600 days, for May 16 there is a poster marking 6,700 days, for August 24 a poster marking 6,800 days, and for Dec. 2 a poster marking 6,900 days.

By 2021, and the 19th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2021, we hope that there will be new a Democratic president and that Democrats will be in the majority in the Senate and the House — not that we are expecting too much from them; after all, under President Obama, they had eight years, between 2009 and 2016, to close Guantánamo, but they failed to do so.

However, our ultimate aim — the closure of Guantánamo once and for all — can, at present, only be regarded as even conceivable if the prison is under Democratic control, and while we encourage you to campaign for Guantánamo’s closure throughout 2020, and to contact your Senators and Representatives (and/or their challengers) to ask them to remember why Guantánamo must be closed, we’re also happy to ask if anyone in the Washington, D.C. area would be interested in approaching Democrats in the House (where Democrats currently have a majority) to discuss movement towards Guantánamo’s closure. Please get in touch if you’re interested.

Meetings took place last January, which fed into passages aimed at moving towards the closure of Guantánamo in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which we wrote about in a recent article entitled, Closing Guantánamo, the Democrats and the NDAA. Significantly, as Just Security described it, the House draft, under the new chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash)., was noticeably progressive in seeking to ensure “maximum flexibility for the Commander in Chief by imposing no restrictions on transfers to the United States” from Guantánamo, and also in its proposal that the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, should “submit a disposition plan to the defense committees … identifying a disposition for each individual still detained at Guantánamo Bay … other than simply continuing to hold the individuals in continued law of war detention indefinitely.”

Smith also made a point of mentioning the five men approved for release by high-level government review processes — the Guantánamo Review Task Force and the ongoing, parole-style Periodic Review Boards — under Barack Obama, but who were not released by the time Obama left office, and are still held by Donald Trump, who has no interest in releasing any of the 40 men still held under any circumstances.

Smith’s draft bill called for “an unclassified report to explain why none of the cleared detainees have been transferred and why the process has stalled,” also noting that “the lack of transfers is not only problematic from a policy and human rights perspective,” but “is also having a negative effect on the functioning of the ongoing periodic review board (PRB) process” — which, as we discussed recently, is now being boycotted by the prisoners, who have correctly concluded that it is now an empty process.

These proposals didn’t make it into the House’s final version of the bill, and, in any case, would not have survived the consolidation process with the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is currently ongoing, as both committees try to thrash out a workable final bill. However, it is clear that Smith’s proposals can and should be revisited this coming year, with even more radical proposals if Democrats gain the upper hand politically next year.

These would include: reinstating the Office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, which Donald Trump scrapped; releasing prisoners who are not going be put on trial; finding a facility on the US mainland that can be used to hold prisoners moved from Guantánamo so that the facility in Cuba can finally be closed; and establishing plans for the men transferred to the mainland to be put on trial in federal court, scrapping the broken military commission system, which is not fit for purpose, as should have happened all along.

All of these moves are necessary if we are to succeed in closing Guantánamo before another anniversary that none of us want to see, but which is only just over two years away: the 20th anniversary of the opening of the prison, on January 11, 2022.

We trust that you’re with us, and, to help us to continue our work, please feel free to make a donation via the PayPal “Donate” button at the top of this article.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Standing the Test of Time: “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”

The poster for the documentary film “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, which recently marked the tenth anniversary of its release.


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

 

On Friday, I was delighted to take part in one of the few regular Guantánamo-related events that are left in my calendar, as the prison becomes something of a footnote in the history books.

This amnesia is, to be blunt, genuinely alarming, because the prison is as malignantly alive as ever, a pointless zombie facility still holding 40 men, mostly without charge or trial, for whom no legal mechanism to secure their release exists, and who will all die there unless there is a change of government, and an awakened sense of outrage in the three bodies that supposedly provide checks and balances to prevent any manifestation of executive overreach in the US — the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, all of whom have failed the men still held.

The event on Friday was a screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” — the documentary film I co-directed with Polly Nash, which was released ten years ago, in October 2009 — to second-year students at the University of Westminster, who are studying International Relations under Sam Raphael, followed by a lively discussion about Guantánamo past, present and future.

Sam is an esteemed colleague, who I have known for many years. Back in 2010, he and Ruth Blakeley secured funding for “The Rendition Project”, a huge project that involved profiling all the known prisoners of the CIA’s “black site” program of secret torture prisons, and attempting to work out their movements via extensive analysis of flight records. The project, unveiled in 2013, drew on and built on previous work on “black site” prisoners, including a UN report from 2010 about secret detention, on which I was the lead author.

Sam and Ruth and researcher Crofton Black followed up on “The Rendition Project” after the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA torture program was published in December 2014, and this research — “unredacting” censored details in the executive summary of the Senate report — led to the publication of “CIA Torture Unredacted” this summer, which I wrote about here.

Sam and I last showed “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo“ in November 2017, as, last year, technical gremlins defeated our best efforts to show it, and we engaged instead in a two-hour discussion of Guantánamo and of the “black sites” that was, despite the gremlins, very successful. This year, however, the gremlins were overcome, and as a result it was the first time I had seen the film in two years, and I was gratified to realize that it has stood the test of time rather well.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, and would like to do so, the production company, Spectacle, recently made it available anywhere in the world via “Vimeo on Demand,” and I’ve embedded it below. It costs £2.55 ($3.30) to rent for a 72-hour streaming period, and £9.46 ($12.20) to stream and download anytime. It is also still available on DVD — via Spectacle in the UK, and, in the US, via the World Can’t Wait.

Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo from Spectacle Media on Vimeo.

Watching it again, I was reminded of its origins, and struck by how well, on an almost non-existent budget, it defies the conventions of “objective” documentary film-making to tell the essential story of Guantánamo — its human cost, and the cost to the US of tearing up all of its commitments to domestic and international laws and treaties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Polly and I discussed making the film in the summer of 2007, when I had spent over a year working flat-out on Guantánamo, researching the stories of the prisoners, based largely on 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon under Freedom of Information legislation in 2006, which, I was surprised to discover, no one else attempted, and which led to the publication of my book The Guantánamo Files in September 2007.

We established a narrative based on the book, interspersed with accounts of the two British residents who remained in Guantánamo when we undertook most of our filming — Binyam Mohamed, who was sent to be tortured in Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo (and who was released in February 2009, while the film was still being made), and Shaker Aamer, a charismatic individual whose release didn’t happen until six years after the film was released, in October 2015, and we told the story through interviews with five people in particular — former prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, the lawyers Tom Wilner and Clive Stafford Smith, and myself.

The film’s power relates, I believe, to two things in particular: the presence of Omar Deghayes, who, in his first detailed interview since his release in December 2007, provides its emotional heart; and through its defiance of convention. There is no distracting soundtrack featuring low, moody synths, as is normal in films involving torture, there is no Sean Bean-like narrator providing distance while reading from a script as one of the interviewees walks on a beach, for example, and there is no “objective” involvement of any of the prison’s defenders, which would have fatally diluted its impact. On this point, the US government has attempted to control the narrative via black propaganda ever since the prison opened, and allowing any supporter of the prison to spout propaganda and lies would have been a dereliction of journalistic responsibility.

On this latter point, I remain passionate about the necessity for journalists and journalistic outlets to “tell the truth” — to paraphrase a key demand of Extinction Rebellion, the environmental direct action group that has been dominating headlines over the last year. When great crimes committed by governments are under the spotlight, the “liberal” media’s slavish obsession with presenting both sides of the story with allegedly equal weight, supposedly allowing viewers and readers to make up their own minds has, in so many areas of contemporary life, been a colossal failure — and Guantánamo and the “war on terror” are no exception.

I hope you have time to watch the film if you haven’t seen it, and if you work in education and would like to show the film and have me talk to students — or even to talk to students without seeing the film — do please get in touch.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Over 70 Doctors Write to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel Expressing Fears That Julian Assange May Die in Belmarsh Prison

Julian Assange photographed after his most recent extradition hearing in October 2019.


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

 

It’s three days now since over sixty medical professionals from around the world (now over seventy) published an open letter to the British home secretary Priti Patel (and shadow home secretary Diane Abbott) warning of their fears that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — who is being held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison as he fights plans to extradite him to the US to face espionage charges that carry a 175-year prison sentence — may die in British custody, and urging her to allow him to have “urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health”, and that, if any medical treatment is required, for it to be “administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital.”

I’m pleased to note that the letter was picked up on by a number of significant mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian.

However, because I think that, in particular, the detailed list of assessments of Assange’s condition, included in the letter, which have been made by numerous organizations and individuals between July 2015 and this month are worth reading in full, I’m cross-posting the letter below, as published on Medium, and credited to “Doctors for Assange,” and I’m hoping that, as a result, it will reach some new readers, and also that it will provide another reference point online for this comprehensive catalog of how, since he first sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012, Julian Assange has been deprived of proper medical and psychological treatment, leading to the terrible situation whereby now over seventy medical professionals fear for his life.

If you haven’t read the whole letter, I hope you will find it useful, and will share it if you do.

Concerns of medical doctors about the plight of Mr Julian Assange: Open letter to the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott
By Doctors for Assange, Medium, November 25, 2019

We write this open letter, as medical doctors, to express our serious concerns about the physical and mental health of Julian Assange. Our professional concerns follow publication recently of the harrowing eyewitness accounts of Craig Murray and John Pilger of the case management hearing on Monday 21 October 2019 at Westminster Magistrates Court. The hearing related to the upcoming February 2020 hearing of the request by the US government for Mr Assange’s extradition to the US in relation to his work as a publisher of information, including information about alleged crimes of the US government.

Our concerns were further heightened by the publication on 1 November 2019 of a further report of Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, in which he stated: ‘Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.’

Having entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on 19 June 2012, Mr Assange sought and was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian government. On 11 April 2019, he was removed from the Embassy and arrested by the Metropolitan Police. He was subsequently detained in Belmarsh maximum security prison, in what Mr Melzer described as ‘oppressive conditions of isolation and surveillance.’

During the seven years spent in the Embassy in confined living conditions, Mr Assange was visited and examined by a number of experts each of whom expressed alarm at the state of his health and requested that he be allowed access to a hospital. No such access was permitted. Mr Assange was unable to exercise his right to free and necessary expert medical assessment and treatment throughout the seven-year period.

A chronology, based on information available to the public, of relevant visits, events and reports from a medical perspective follows:

• On 31 July 2015, a dentist reported that Mr Assange’s ‘upper right first premolar (UR4) tooth had fractured along with the filling that was in it and the dental pulp of the tooth was exposed’ and ‘that failure to treat this promptly would lead to infection of the root leading to a dental abscess and pain.’ The dentist advised ‘saving this tooth would require root canal treatment’, however, ‘due to the specialised equipment and radiographic requirements this treatment could not be completed in the domiciliary setting.’ ‘Extraction of the tooth’ was identified as ‘another option but […] it may need a surgical extraction.’ This was ‘not recommended in a domiciliary setting especially as we would need preoperative radiographs to assess the root shape and the proximity of the root to the floor of the maxillary sinus. Extractions in this area carry a risk of creating a communication between the mouth and the sinus which could need surgical closure hence radiographs would be essential to assess this risk.’ The dentist ‘advised Mr Assange he should seek treatment in a clinical setting to prevent further progression of his symptoms as soon as possible.’ [1]

• On 4 December 2015, an opinion of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) was formally adopted and it was published on 5 February 2016. It concluded that Mr Assange was being arbitrarily detained by the governments of the UK and Sweden. Crucially, it was made clear at the time that any continued arbitrary detention of Mr Assange would constitute torture. The group concluded that ‘the Embassy of Ecuador in London is far less than a house or detention centre equipped for prolonged pretrial detention and lacks appropriate and necessary medical equipment or facilities — it is valid to assume, after five years of deprivation of liberty, that Mr Assange’s health could have deteriorated to such a level that anything more than a superficial illness would put his health at a serious risk, and he was denied access to a medical institution for a proper diagnosis, including a magnetic resonance imaging test.’ [2]

• On 8 December 2015, a doctor who saw Mr Assange reported: ‘progressive inflammation and stiffness affecting his right shoulder. This requires an MRI scan to determine the exact diagnosis in order to inform a suitably qualified physiotherapist as to how best to treat him in an appropriately equipped medical facility. His current circumstances significantly compromise the ability to satisfactorily investigate and treat him.’ [3] Mr Assange was refused access to a hospital by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. [4]

• On 11 December 2015, a further doctor, a trauma and psychosocial expert, reported: ‘Mr Assange scored 15 out of 20 on the Patient Health Questionnaire […] a multipurpose instrument for screening, diagnosing, monitoring and measuring the severity of depression. […] A score of 15 indicates that Mr Assange suffers from Major Depression (moderately severe)’; ‘At a minimum, it is recommended that his urgent medical complaints regarding the pain in his shoulder be investigated with appropriate equipment’; ‘The Embassy is not a medical setting. The only way Mr Assange can access either urgent medical care or investigations would be to place himself in the hands of the British authorities. Mr Assange is in an invidious position of having to decide between his physical health and the risk of being extradited to the United States. His inability to access proper medical care and assessment — without placing himself into the hands of the authorities — transforms each physical complaint no matter how simple into something that could have catastrophic consequences either for his health or his liberty. He lives in a state of chronic health insecurity’; and ‘The unusual circumstances place Mr Assange in a precarious situation. The effects of the situation on Mr Assange’s health and well-being are serious and the risks will most certainly escalate with the potential to becoming life threatening if current conditions persist.’ [5]

• In October 2017, Doctors Sondra S. Crosby, Brock Chisholm and Sean Love visited Mr Assange. [6] The group examined him for 20 hours over three days. [7] In an article for the Guardian published on 24 January 2018 they wrote: ‘We examined Julian Assange, and he badly needs care — but he can’t get it’; ‘We call on the British Medical Association and colleagues in the UK to demand safe access to medical care for Mr Assange and to oppose openly the ongoing violations of his human right to healthcare.’ [8]

• On 19 June 2018, Dinah PoKempner, General Counsel at Human Rights Watch, stated: ‘Concern is growing over his access to medical care. His asylum is growing more and more difficult to distinguish from detention. The UK has the power to resolve concerns over his isolation, health, and confinement by removing the threat of extradition for publishing newsworthy leaks.’ [9]

• On 22 June 2018, Dr Sean Love, who over the course of the previous year had visited Mr Assange several times at the embasy, reiterated his concerns regarding Mr Assange’s health and repeated his call for him to be given access to healthcare in the British Medical Journal. [10] Dr Love wrote that ‘Assange’s detention continues to cause a precipitous deterioration in his overall condition’ and that ‘Because of his health issues, in 2015, Ecuadorian authorities requested that he be permitted humanitarian safe passage to a hospital in London; however, this was denied by the UK.’ Dr Love stated that ‘To this day, Assange remains unable to access hospital based diagnostic testing and treatment — even for a medical emergency. In effect, he has gone without proper access to care for the duration of his six years in confinement.’

• On 21 December 2018, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) issued a further statement opposing the continued unlawful detention of Mr Assange: ‘States that are based upon and promote the rule of law do not like to be confronted with their own violations of the law, that is understandable. But when they honestly admit these violations, they do honour the very spirit of the rule of law, earn enhanced respect for doing so, and set worldwide commendable examples.’ It added: ‘The WGAD is further concerned that the modalities of the continued arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Mr Assange is undermining his health, and may possibly endanger his life given the disproportionate amount of anxiety and stress that such prolonged deprivation of liberty entails.’ [11]

• On 5 April 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, issued a statement following reports that Mr Assange may soon be expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy. He said, ‘According to information I have received, Mr Assange is at risk of extreme vulnerability, and his health is in serious decline. I therefore appeal to the Ecuadorian authorities to continue to provide him, to the fullest extent possible in the circumstances, with adequate living conditions and access to appropriate medical care.’ [12] On 11 April 2019, Mr Assange was expelled from the Embassy and arrested by the Metropolitan Police.

• On 1 May 2019, Mr Assange was described as suffering from ‘moderate to severe depression’ at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court at which he was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment for a bail infringement dating back to 2012. [13]

• On 3 May 2019, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a statement noting it was ‘deeply concerned’ over Assange’s 50 weeks imprisonment. ‘The Working Group regrets that the Government has not complied with its Opinion and has now furthered the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Mr Assange. [14]

• On 9 May 2019, Mr Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, visited Belmarsh prison accompanied by two medical experts, with special expertise in assessing victims of torture. This involved a 60-minute conversation with Mr Assange, an hour-long physical examination and a two-hour psychiatric examination.

• On 23 May 2019, the US government brought charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 against Mr Assange for his publishing activities on behalf of WikiLeaks. On 29 May 2019, Mr Assange was moved to the ‘hospital wing’ at Belmarsh prison following a reported significant deterioration in his health. On 30 May 2019, Mr Assange was too unwell to appear in court, even via video link, for a preliminary extradition hearing. [15] It should be noted that the medical facilities and staffing at Belmarsh prison ‘hospital wing’ have never been divulged to the public.

• On 31 May 2019, Mr Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, reported on his 9 May 2019 visit to Mr Assange, ‘we all came to the conclusion that he showed all the symptoms that are typical for a person that has been exposed to psychological torture over an extended period of time.’ [16]

• On 22 October 2019, Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador, published a detailed and shocking eye witness account of Mr Assange’s hearing the previous day, stating that he ‘exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim.’ [17] His report was corroborated by the eyewitness account of John Pilger, the renowned investigative journalist and filmmaker. [18]

• On 1 November 2019, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer reiterated his alarm at the continued deterioration of Julian Assange’s health since his arrest and detention earlier this year, saying his life was now at risk. Mr Melzer said, ‘What we have seen from the UK Government is outright contempt for Mr Assange’s rights and integrity,’ and ‘Despite the medical urgency of my appeal, and the seriousness of the alleged violations, the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.’ Mr Melzer concluded: ‘Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.’ [19]

Medical doctors have a professional duty to report suspected torture of which they become aware, wherever it may be occurring. That professional duty is absolute and must be carried out regardless of risk to reporting doctors. We wish to put on record, as medical doctors, our collective serious concerns and to draw the attention of the public and the world to this grave situation.

The World Health Organisation Constitution of 1946 envisages ‘the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being.’ [20] We are indebted to those who have sought to uphold this right in the case of Mr Assange.

From a medical point of view, on the evidence currently available, we have serious concerns about Mr Assange’s fitness to stand trial in February 2020.

It is our opinion that Mr Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health. Any medical treatment indicated should be administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital (tertiary care). Were such urgent assessment and treatment not to take place, we have real concerns, on the evidence currently available, that Mr Assange could die in prison. The medical situation is thereby urgent. There is no time to lose.

APPENDIX

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Nils Melzer, visited Mr Assange in Belmarsh Prison on 9 May 2019, over six months ago. Mr Melzer was accompanied by two medical experts specialised in examining victims of torture and other ill-treatment. The team was able to speak with Mr Assange in confidence and to conduct a thorough medical assessment.

Mr Melzer’s report was published on 31 May 2019:

‘It was obvious that Mr Assange’s health has been seriously affected by the extremely hostile and arbitrary environment he has been exposed to for many years,’ the expert said. ‘Most importantly, in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.

‘The evidence is overwhelming and clear,’ the expert said. ‘Mr Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.

‘In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law,’ Mr Melzer said. ‘The collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!’

In his annual report on 14 October 2019 to the Seventy-fourth session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Mr Melzer stated: ‘Further, I would like to thank the Government of the United Kingdom for having facilitated my visit to Mr Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in London in May 2019, including his examination by two experienced medical experts. Although Mr Assange showed a pattern of symptoms typical for long-term exposure to psychological torture, I regret to report that none of the concerned States have agreed to investigate or redress their alleged involvement in his abuse as required of them under human rights law.’

Eyewitness account of Craig Murray (former British Ambassador) of events at Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday 21 October 2019.

Eyewitness account of John Pilger (investigative journalist) of events at Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday 21 October 2019.

Report of Nils Melzer, dated 5 April 2019.

Report of Nils Melzer, dated 1 November 2019.

ADDENDUM

It is noteworthy that three of the medical practitioners, from whose reports we have drawn, are unidentified, their names having been redacted. In this context, a telling passage from the 26 page report of the psychological expert dated 11 December 2015 offers an insight into the climate of fear and intimidation surrounding the provision of medical care to Mr Assange. On page 20 of the report, under the heading ‘Medical Practitioners’ Concerns regarding examining and treating Mr Assange at the Embassy’, the unnamed psychological expert noted:

‘One of Mr Assange’s colleagues commented that there had been many difficulties in finding medical practitioners who were willing to examine Mr Assange in the Embassy. The reasons given were uncertainty over whether medical insurance would cover the Embassy (a foreign jurisdiction); whether the association with Mr Assange could harm their livelihood or draw unwanted attention to them and their families; and discomfort regarding exposing this association when entering the Embassy. One medical practitioner expressed concern to one of the interviewees after the police taking notes of his name and the fact that he was visiting Mr Assange. One medical practitioner wrote that he agreed to produce a medical report only on condition that his name not be made available to the wider public, fearing repercussions.’[21]

It is likely that the aforementioned climate of fear and intimidation severely compromised the medical care available to Mr Assange, even within the Embassy, and given all the other concerns surrounding the extraordinary treatment of Mr Assange it is difficult to conclude other than that the creation of that climate of fear and intimidation was deliberate. If it was deliberate, we as medical doctors condemn such behaviour as reckless, dangerous and cruel. That all this has been played out in the heart of London for many years is a source of great sadness and shame to many of us.

SIGNED:

Dr Mariagiulia Agnoletto MD Specialist in Psychiatry ASST Monza San Gerardo Hospital, Monza (Italy)

Dr Vittorio Agnoletto MD Università degli Studi di Milano Statale, Milano (Italy)

Dr Sonia Allam MBChB FRCA Consultant in Anaesthesia and Pre-operative Assessment, Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Scotland (UK)

Dr Norbert Andersch MD MRCPsych Consultant Neurologist and Psychiatrist, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (retired); Lecturer in Psychopathology at Sigmund Freud Private University, Vienna-Berlin-Paris (Germany and UK)

Dr Marianne Beaucamp MD Fachärztin (Specialist) in Neurology & Psychiatry Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist (retired), Munich (Germany)

Dr Thed Beaucamp MD Fachärztin (Specialist) in Neurology, Psychiatry & Psychosomatic Medicine Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist (retired), Munich (Germany)

Dr Margaret Beavis MBBS FRACGP MPH General Medical Practitioner (Australia)

Dr David Bell Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, London (UK)

Mr Patrick John Ramsay Boyd (signed John Boyd) MRCS LRCP MBBS FRCS FEBU Consultant Urologist (retired) (UK)

Dr Hannah Caller MBBS DCH Paediatrician, Homerton University Hospital, London (UK)

Dr Franco Camandona MD Specialist in Obstetrics & Gynaecology E.O. Ospedali Galliera, Genova (Italy)

Dr Sylvia Chandler MBChB MRCGP BA MA General Medical Practitioner (retired) (UK)

Dr Marco Chiesa MD FRCPsych Consultant Psychiatrist and Visiting Professor, University College London (UK)

Dr Carla Eleonora Ciccone MD Specialist in Obstetrics & Gynaecology AORN MOSCATI, Avellino (Italy)

Dr Owen Dempsey MBBS BSc MSc PhD General Medical Practitioner (retired) (UK)

Dr H R Dhammika MBBS Medical Officer, Dehiattakandiya Base Hospital, Dehiattakandiya (Sri Lanka)

Dr Tim Dowson MBChB MRCGP MSc MPhil Specialised General Medical Practitioner in Substance Misuse, Leeds (UK)

Miss Kamilia El-Farra MBChB FRCOG MPhil (Medical Law and Ethics) Consultant Gynaecologist, Essex (UK)

Dr Beata Farmanbar MD General Medical Practitioner (Sweden)

Dr Tomasz Fortuna MD RCPsych (affiliated) Forensic Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Adult Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytical Society and Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, London (UK)

Dr C Stephen Frost BSc MBChB Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (Stockholm, Sweden) (UK and Sweden)

Dr Peter Garrett MA MD FRCP Independent writer and humanitarian physician; Visiting Lecturer in Nephrology at the University of Ulster (UK)

Dr Rachel Gibbons MBBS BSc MRCPsych. M.Inst.Psychoanal. Mem.Inst.G.A Consultant Psychiatrist (UK)

Dr Bob Gill MBChB MRCGP General Medical Practitioner (UK)

Elizabeth Gordon MS FRCS Consultant Surgeon (retired); Co-founder of Freedom from Torture (UK)

Professor Derek A. Gould MBChB MRCP DMRD FRCR Consultant Interventional Radiologist (retired): BSIR Gold Medal, 2010; over 110 peer-reviewed publications in journals and chapters (UK)

Dr Jenny Grounds MD General Medical Practitioner, Riddells Creek, Victoria; Treasurer, Medical Association for Prevention of War, Australia (Australia)

Dr Paul Hobday MBBS FRCGP DRCOG DFSRH DPM General Medical Practitioner (retired) (UK)

Mr David Jameson-Evans MBBS FRCS Consultant Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgeon (retired) (UK)

Dr Bob Johnson MRCPsych MRCGP Diploma in Psychotherapy Neurology & Psychiatry (Psychiatric Institute New York) MA (Psychol) PhD (Med Computing) MBCS DPM MRCS Consultant Psychiatrist (retired); Formerly Head of Therapy, Ashworth Maximum Security Hospital, Liverpool; Formally Consultant Psychiatrist, Special Unit, C-Wing, Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight (UK)

Dr Lissa Johnson BA BSc(Hons, Psych) MPsych(Clin) PhD Clinical Psychologist (Australia)

Dr Anna Kacperek MRCPsych Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, London (UK)

Dr Jessica Kirker MBChB DipPsychiat MRCPsych FRANZCP MemberBPAS Psychoanalyst and Consultant Medical Psychotherapist (retired) (UK)

Dr Willi Mast MD Facharzt für Allgemeinmedizin, Gelsenkirchen (Germany)

Dr Janet Menage MA MBChB General Medical Practitioner (retired); qualified Psychological Counsellor; author of published research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (UK)

Professor Alan Meyers MD MPH Emeritus Professor of Paediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts (USA)

Dr Salique Miah BSc MBChB FRCEM DTM&H ARCS Consultant in Emergency Medicine, Manchester (UK)

Dr David Morgan DClinPsych MSc Fellow of British Psychoanalytic Society Psychoanalyst, Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Consultant Psychotherapist (UK)

Dr Helen Murrell MBChB MRCGP General Medical Practitioner, Gateshead (UK)

Dr Alison Anne Noonan MBBS (Sydney) MD (Rome) MA (Sydney) ANZSJA IAAP AAGP IAP Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, Specialist Outreach Northern Territory, Executive Medical Association for Prevention of War (NSW) (Australia)

Dr Alison Payne BSc MBChB DRCOG MRCGP prev FRNZGP General Medical Practitioner, Coventry; special interest in mental health/trauma and refugee health (UK)

Dr Peter Pech MD Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (sub-specialty Paediatric Radiology), Akademiska Sjukhuset (Uppsala University Hospital), Uppsala (Sweden)

Dr Tomasz Pierscionek MRes MBBS MRCPsych PGDip (UK)

Professor Allyson M Pollock MBChB MSc FFPH FRCGP FRCP (Ed) Professor of Public Health, Newcastle University (UK)

Dr Abdulsatar Ravalia FRCA Consultant Anaesthetist (UK)

Dr. med. Ullrich Raupp MD Specialist in Psychotherapy, Child Psychiatry and Child Neurology; Psychodynamic Supervisor (DGSv) Wesel, Germany (Germany)

Professor Andrew Samuels Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex (recently retired); Honorary/Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths and Roehampton (both London), New York and Macau City Universities; Former Chair, UK Council for Psychotherapy (2009–2012); Founder Board Member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Founder of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility (UK)

Mr John H Scurr BSc MBBS FRCS Consultant General and Vascular Surgeon, University College Hospital, London (UK)

Dr Peter Shannon MBBS (UWA) DPM (Melb) FRANZCP Adult Psychiatrist (retired) (Australia)

Dr Gustaw Sikora MD PhD F Inst Psychoanalysis Fellow of British Psychoanalytic Society Specialist Psychiatrist (diploids obtained in Poland and registered in the UK); Psychoanalyst; currently in private practice (UK and Poland)

Dr Wilhelm Skogstad MRCPsych BPAS IPA Psychiatrist & Psychoanalyst, London, United Kingdom (UK and Germany)

Dr John Stace MBBS (UNSW) FRACGP FACRRM FRACMA MHA (UNSW) Country Doctor (retired), Perth (Australia)

Dr Derek Summerfield BSc (Hons) MBBS MRCPsych Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London (UK)

Dr Rob Tandy MBBS MRCPsych Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalyst; Unit Head, Psychoanalytic Treatment Unit, Tavistock and Portman, London; City & Hackney Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service, St Leonard’s Hospital, London (UK)

Dr Noel Thomas MA MBChB DCH DobsRCOG DTM&H MFHom General Medical Practitioner; homeopath; has assisted on health/education projects in six developing countries Maesteg, Wales (UK)

Dr Philip Thomas MBChB DPM MPhil MD Formerly Professor of Philosophy Diversity & Mental Health, University of Central Lancashire; Formally Consultant Psychiatrist (UK)

Dr Gianni Tognoni MD Istituto Mario Negri, Milano (Italy)

Dr Sebastião Viola Lic Med MRCPsych Consultant Psychiatrist, Cardiff (UK)

Dr Peter Walger MD Consultant, Infectious Disease Specialist, Bonn-Duesseldorf-Berlin (Germany)

Dr Sue Wareham OAM MBBS General Medical Practitioner (retired) (Australia)

Dr Elizabeth Waterston MD General Medical Practitioner (retired), Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)

Dr Eric Windgassen MRCPsych PGDipMBA Consultant Psychiatrist (retired) (UK)

Dr Pam Wortley MBBS MRCGP General Medical Practitioner (retired), Sunderland (UK)

Dr Matthew Yakimoff BOralH (DSc) GDipDent General Dental Practitioner (Australia)

Dr Rosemary Yuille BSc (Hons Anatomy) MBBS (Hons) General Medical Practitioner (retired), Canberra (Australia)

Dr Felicity de Zulueta Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust; Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer in Traumatic Studies, King’s College London (UK)

Dr Paquita de Zulueta MBBChir MA (Cantab) MA (Medical Law & Ethics) MRCP FRCGP PGDipCBT CBT Therapist and Coach; Senior Tutor Medical Ethics; Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, Dept of Primary Care & Population Health, Imperial College London (UK)

New signatories added:

Dr Talal Alrubaie Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist MBChB MSc MD (Austria)

Dr Stephen Caswell Clinical Psychologist BSc (Hons) MSc PGDip DClinPsych (UK)

Dr Chrissa Deligianni MD Pediatrician (Greece)

Flavia Donati MD Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalyst (Rome, Italy)

Dr Richard House Psychotherapist (retired), Chartered Psychologist, AFBPsS Cert.Couns (UK)

Dr Vivek Jain Primary Care Physician, Clinical Instructor, (Psychiatry residency training graduate) (United States)

Dr Cath Keaney BSc MBBS DCH FRACGP (Australia)

Dr Maria Ntasiou MD Pulmonologist, director in primary health (Greece)

Dr Efstratios Prousalis General Dental Practitioner, DDS 2008, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece)

To add your signature to the open letter, please email Doctors for Assange. Please include your position title, medical qualifications and expertise.

ENDNOTES

[1] Dr [Redacted], BChD MFGDP(UK) MSc, Dental Surgeon, carried out an emergency dental appointment at the Embassy on 8 May 2015.

[2] Opinions adopted by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention at its seventy-fourth session, 30 November-4 December 2015, Opinion №54/2015 concerning Julian Assange (Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).

[3] Dr [Redacted] MA MB BChir DCH MRCGP assessed Mr Assange on 12 August 2015 and 2 December 2015.

[4] See the Guardian — and here — and the Daily Telegraph. 

[5] Dr [Redacted], Trauma and Psychosocial Expert, interviewed Mr Assange on five occasions between June 2014 and June 2015, and interviewed Mr Assange on two further occasions to validate previous findings.

[6] Dr Sean Love is a Resident Physician in Anaesthesiology and an Adult Critical Care Medicine Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr Sondra S Crosby is a medical doctor and Professor of Medicine at Boston University, specialising in internal medicine. She is also a faculty member of the Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights department at the Boston University School of Public Health. Dr Brock Chisholm is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with a degree in Psychology, a Masters in Psychological Research Methods and a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and extensive experience in working with victims of trauma.

[7] See the Guardian — and here — and the British Medical Journal. 

[8] See the Guardian. 

[9] See Human Rights Watch.

[10] See the British Medical Journal.

[11] See the UN news release. 

[12] See the UN news release. 

[13] See the Daily Express. 

[14] See the UN news release. 

[15] See the Metro, the Guardian and Sky News. 

[16] See the UN news release. 

[17] See Craig Murray. 

[18] See YouTube. 

[19] See the UN news release. 

[20] See the WHO news release. 

[21] Dr [Redacted], Trauma and Psychosocial Expert, interviewed Mr Assange on five occasions between June 2014 and June 2015, and interviewed Mr Assange on two further occasions to validate previous findings.

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

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

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

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

As “The Report,” About the CIA Torture Program, Is Released Online, Guantánamo Prisoner Ahmed Rabbani Urges People to Watch It

The poster for “The Report,” about the CIA torture program, and Guantánamo prisoner and former CIA “black site” prisoner Ahmed Rabbani.


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

 

Two weeks ago I published an article about the new movie “The Report” — which looks at the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program — entitled, CIA Torture Report Author Says More Than 119 Prisoners Were Held in “Black Sites” and More Than Three Were Waterboarded, in which I drew on a Vice News interview with former Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, the lead author of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the torture program, on which the film is based.

Jones — and his team — are true American heroes, having, despite considerable opposition, trawled through six million CIA documents to produce a 6,700-page report that, via its 500-page executive summary, which is all that has been publicly released, is unstinting in its denunciation of the brutality and pointlessness of the torture program. I made his comments available — and focused in particular on the troubling statistics in the article’s title — because I thought it was extremely significant that Jones concluded that there were clearly more than the 119 prisoners included in the report, because the CIA “had no idea how many people they detained,” and that more than three prisoners were subjected to waterboarding, because, as he says, “We found a picture of a waterboard at a detention site where there were no records of any waterboarding taking place, but it had clearly been used.”

“The Report” had its theatrical release on November 15, to generally enthusiastic reviews — an 83% approval rating on the movie aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes,  based on 178 reviews, with 83% approval from audiences too. Last week, I spoke about it on a US radio show, and in just three days’ time, on November 29, it will be released on Amazon Prime.

To take advantage of the increased interest in the torture program because of the film’s release, the lawyers for one of the acknowledged 119 torture victims — Ahmed Rabbani, one of around 40 “black site” prisoners to end up at Guantánamo, where he has now been held for 15 years — secured an op-ed for Rabbani in USA Today, which I’m cross-posting below, because of the uniqueness of having a “black site” prisoner’s response to the film. 

Rabbani, of course, doesn’t expect to be allowed to see it, but he urges all US citizens to do so, to help to understand what happened to him and all the other men held in the US’s disgraceful global network of torture prisons in the years after 9/11. 

With reference to his own case, I knew that he was seized in Karachi on September 10, 2002, and that he has always claimed that he was a case of mistaken identity — a taxi driver rather than who the US authorities thought he was: the Al-Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul. What I had missed in my reading of the unclassified summary, however, is that, just the day after his capture, the authorities realized their mistake. As a footnote in the report explained, by Sept. 11, 2002, “it was determined that an individual named Muhammad Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, aka Abu Badr, and his driver were arrested, not Hassan Ghul.”

What I also hadn’t realized is that Rabbani knew this because, as he describes it, he “was one of the few detainees allowed to receive a copy of the heavily redacted executive summary of the report, under the rule that says a prisoner can see such unclassified material if it pertains to him.”

The US authorities later captured the real Hassan Ghul, only to spare him the kinds of torture visited on Rabbani because he was “cooperative,” and he was later released, eventually to be killed in a drone attack. Reflecting on how an Al-Qaeda operative could be released after being “cooperative,” while Rabbani himself, a nobody, is still held, he was able only to conclude, with some justification, “This is not ineptitude — it is insanity.”

Rabbani also explained how the unclassified summary revealed to him that, of the 119 men acknowledged to have been held in “black sites,” he was “one of 17 prisoners whose torture happened ‘without the approval’ of the CIA,” an admission that led him to ask, “Is it a better, or uglier, reflection on the CIA if torture was authorized? And was the CIA officer who tortured me without permission punished for it, or was he possibly promoted for his patriotic labors?”

The only point at which I think Rabbani’s criticism is misguided is when he chastises Jones and his team for not having spoken to him and other “black site” prisoners. “There is no explanation why Daniel Jones only reviewed CIA documents and never spoke to us, the victims of torture,” Rabbani states, but the truth is that the report’s remit only involved CIA documents, and, in any case, even if Jones had tried to interview Rabbani, he would have been forbidden to do so. In the nearly 18 years of Guantánamo’s existence, access to the prisoners has been so severely restricted that, outside of the ICRC, the men’s lawyers and, on a handful of occasions, independent US mental health and medical experts, no one has been allowed to talk to them except the US military and representatives of the intelligence services. Several United Nations Rapporteurs on Torture, for example, have persistently asked to be allowed to visit the prison and to talk to prisoners in an unsupervised manner, but these requests have always been turned down. 

Ahmed Rabbani’s article is below. I hope you have time to read it, and that you’ll share via if you find it useful. And don’t forget to watch “The Report”!

Guantánamo Bay detainee: I lived through CIA torture. Everyone else can catch the movie.

By Ahmed Rabbani, USA Today, November 19, 2019

I will likely never be allowed to see “The Report.” In the movie, Adam Driver plays Daniel J. Jones, the staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein who spent several years putting together a 6,700 page Senate committee report on the CIA’s use of torture in the wake of 9/11. 

The censors will not likely let the movie reach my detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

My lawyers have told me about it. As it happens, I was one of the few detainees allowed to receive a copy of the heavily redacted executive summary of the report, under the rule that says a prisoner can see such unclassified material if it pertains to him. My name appears multiple times in the report. For a nobody taxi driver from Karachi, Pakistan, that is a regrettable claim to fame.

It is interesting to hear about the film, and I am glad Amazon had the courage to make it [actually, Amazon is the distributor; the film was made by VICE Studios and three partners]. On the other hand, there are some omissions that make me sad. There is no explanation why Daniel Jones only reviewed CIA documents and never spoke to us, the victims of torture. I cannot think of another inquiry like it. Imagine that inquests into genocide in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia took place hearing only from the murderers but not from those who suffered, or their families?

Enhanced interrogation is torture

If Jones had asked, I would have told him that his footnote 595 — where the CIA asserts that I only suffered “forced standing, attention grasps and cold temperatures” in the dark prison in Afghanistan — was a cruel joke.

I would have described the week I spent in a dark pit hanging by my wrists, forever on tiptoes, while my shoulders gradually dislocated — what the Spanish Inquisition used to call “strappado.” I would have mentioned the ear-splitting noise blasted at me round the clock and the beatings every time I began to sleep.

My name appears in a table of 119 people subjected to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Does anyone believe that these “EITs” were not torture? If so, they should try it sometime.

I am also one of 17 prisoners whose torture happened “without the approval” of the CIA. Is it a better, or uglier, reflection on the CIA if torture was authorized? And was the CIA officer who tortured me without permission punished for it, or was he possibly promoted for his patriotic labors?

Some elements of my torture I have long known — I was there — but I did learn some important facts from the executive summary. The Pakistani authorities arrested me and turned me over to the United States, saying I was terrorist Hassan Ghul. I denied this from day one of my detention, Sept. 10, 2002.

At the time, the CIA officers seemed sure I was Ghul — they interrogated me about it endlessly. Apparently, they were less credulous than I thought. On page 325, I read that by Sept. 11, 2002, “it was determined that an individual named Muhammad Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, aka Abu Badr, and his driver were arrested, not Hassan Ghul.”

In other words, they knew they had made a mistake within a day. More than 6,200 days later, they still keep me detained. 

Showing a taste of the truth

At one point, they actually captured Hassan Ghul. In January 2004, after I had spent over a year in detention, he was brought to the dark prison called Detention Site Cobalt, but he was found to be “cooperative” and so was there for only two days and was initially not subjected to any EITs. 

Ghul was later released back to Pakistan, free to resume his wicked ways, but a U.S. drone finally killed him in 2012. 

I, meanwhile, was sent to Guantánamo Bay in September 2004 to become a forever prisoner — held without trial for 17 years and counting.

The cynic in me wonders how Ghul could be seen as “cooperative” while I was not. This is not ineptitude — it is insanity.

My lawyers tell me that I only appear in the film as a picture on the wall of the secure facility in the CIA basement where Jones toiled for so long. I am sorry that I am unlikely to see it for myself, but I would like to thank those who made it, as well as the real Daniel Jones.

Nothing can change what happened to me, as that is in the past. I do want the world to know about the torture we suffered at the hands of CIA officers, though, because if we do not learn from history we will be doomed to repeat our mistakes — and I would hate for anyone else to endure what I have had to endure. For now, I encourage everyone to watch “The Report,” to get just a taste of the truth.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo and Julian Assange on the Peace and Justice Report on Sarasota Community Radio

Guantánamo prisoners, on the day the prison opened, January 11, 2002, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.


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

 

On Wednesday, I was delighted to talk for 30 minutes to Bob Connors and Tom Walker of the Peace and Justice Report on Sarasota Community Radio on WSLR 96.5 FM, which describes itself as “cover[ing] local, state, national and international social justice issues.” featuring “a wide variety of guests whose views are underrepresented in the mainstream media.”

We spoke about Guantánamo, past, present and future, and also about the US torture program and the plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, imprisoned in the UK and fighting his proposed extradition to the US to face espionage charges.

The show is embedded below:

Andy Worthington on the Peace and Justice Report on Sarasota Community Radio, November 20, 2019.

My interview started six minutes in and ended at 34:40, and in it I ran through Guantánamo’s history, and my involvement with it, and expressed my sorrow about how most people nowadays have completely forgotten about the prison, even though it continues to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial, which ought to be a source of profound shame to US citizens who respect the rule of law.

In the course of the show, I discussed how disgraceful it is that the men held at Guantánamo are not held according to any acceptable standards of detention, and cannot be released unless the president — and to some extent Congress — wants them to be. And, of course, with Donald Trump as president — who tweeted that “there must be no more releases from Gitmo,” even before he became president — it is clear that they have no prospect of ever being released.

This would be completely unacceptable even if the 40 men still held were all “the worst of the worst,” as the Bush administration claimed about all the men held (most of whom of course, have been released), but as it is — and as I explained in my most recent article — five of those 40 were approved for release by high-level review processes under President Obama, but are still held because Trump doesn’t want to release them, and there is no mechanism to force him to do so.

Only nine men — some accused of serious acts of terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks — are facing or have faced trials, in a broken system, the military commissions, that seems incapable of delivering justice, while the 26 others are “forever prisoners”, regarded as “too dangerous to release” by a high-level government review process established by President Obama. That process — the Periodic Review Boards — approved another 38 men for release, and is ongoing under Donald Trump, but not a single prisoner has been approved for release since Trump took office, and, over the last year, the prisoners have given up on PRBs, as I most recently explained in an article, No Escape from Guantánamo: Former Child Prisoner Boycotts Broken Review Process, Calls It “Hopeless”, which we discussed on the show, with reference to the subject of the article, Hassan bin Attash.

At one point, I was asked why I had embarked on this project of trying to get Guantánamo closed, pointing out that there are, for example, many miscarriages of justice in the US’s domestic judicial system. I didn’t disagree, of course, although I pointed out that, on the US mainland, “there is an existing judicial system that’s being abused, whereas at Guantánamo there’s no system at all.” As I also pointed out, “the behavior of the US at Guantánamo is exactly what we would expect from a brutal, lawless dictatorship, and yet the US claims to be a country founded on the rule of law, and which respects the rule of law.”

Towards the end of the show, we also discussed “The Report,” the new movie about the extraordinary creation of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s torture program, and the small group of American heroes, led by Pentagon staffer Daniel Jones, who researched and wrote it, which I wrote about recently in an article entitled, CIA Torture Report Author Says More Than 119 Prisoners Were Held in “Black Sites” and More Than Three Were Waterboarded

At the end of the show I was also asked to talk about Julian Assange, who I wrote about most recently in an article entitled, As a Frail and Confused Julian Assange Appears in Court, It’s Time For the UK to Stop His Proposed Extradition to the US, and Chelsea Manning, and I was pleased to close my interview by stressing to listeners that Assange is a publisher, and that the proposal to charge him with espionage for revealing embarrassing US government secrets is truly alarming, because there is, very fundamentally, no difference between WikiLeaks’ work and that of, for example, the New York Times or the Washington Post, and if Assange was to be successfully prosecuted, it could well spell the end of press freedom in the US.

It was a pleasure to talk to Bob and Tom, and I hope you have time to listen to the show.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Trump’s Personal Prisoners at Guantánamo: The Five Men Cleared for Release But Still Held

Guantánamo prisoners Abdul Latif Nasir, Sufyian Barhoumi and Tawfiq al-Bihani, three of the five men still held under Donald Trump who were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama.


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

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

The nearly three-year long presidency of Donald Trump is so strewn with scandals and cruel policies that some lingering injustices are being forgotten. A case in point is the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which is rarely reported in the mainstream media, with the valiant exception of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who continues to visit the prison regularly, often being the only reporter in the whole of the US to subject the working of the facility to outside scrutiny.

And yet the longer Guantánamo remains open, the more cruel and unacceptable is its fundamentally unjust premise: that men seized nearly two decades ago can be held indefinitely without charge or trial. This was grotesque under George W. Bush, who responded by releasing nearly two-thirds of the 779 men held since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, and it remained so under Barack Obama, who, shamefully, promised to close it but never did, although he did release nearly 200 more men, via two review processes that he established.

However, a new low point has been reached under Donald Trump, who has no interest in releasing any prisoners under any circumstances, and, with one exception, has been true to his word. For the 40 men still held, the prison has become a tomb.

For nine of the 40 men still held, there is, allegedly, some semblance of justice, because they are facing or have faced military commission trials, but the truth is that the commissions are a broken system, incapable of delivering justice. 

For the 31 other men, however, their abandonment is almost complete.

26 were judged to be “too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution” by the first high-level government review process established by Obama, the Guantánamo Review Task Force — or they were recommended for prosecution, until some of the few convictions secured in the military commissions were overturned on appeal, further discrediting the process.

64 men in total, from both these categories, ended up being put through a second high-level government review process, the Periodic Review Boards (PRBs), a parole-type process that led to recommendations that 38 of them should be released. 

However, for the 26 other men not recommended for release, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, with his enthusiasm for keeping Guantánamo open, and not releasing any prisoners, has, not uncoincidentally, led to the Periodic Review Board process, which is ongoing, becoming completely discredited, because not a single prisoner has been recommended for release since Trump took office. I examined the failures of the PRBs most recently in an article entitled, No Escape from Guantánamo: Former Child Prisoner Boycotts Broken Review Process, Calls It “Hopeless”.

This is a scandal that ought to be much better known, and complained about, but for five other men, Trump’s disgraceful enthusiasm for not releasing any prisoners under any circumstances means that I feel justified in describing them, very bluntly, as his personal prisoners. 

Three of them were recommended for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009, but were not released under Obama, while two others were recommended for release by the Periodic Review Boards in 2016, but didn’t manage to be freed before Obama left office.

I have written about these men regularly since Trump took office (for Al-Jazeera in June 2017, and for Close Guantánamo in August 2018 and August this year), but it is always good for there to be reminders of these men’s plight, and most recently this came about via an article in Britain’s newspaper the Independent, written by Andrew Buncombe. 

To be fair to Donald Trump, Buncombe recognized that two of the five men — Ridah Bin Saleh Al-Yazidi, a Tunisian, and Muieen Adeen Al-Sattar, who has Rohingya ancestry, and who were both approved for release in 2010 — are in a plight that is not of Trump’s making, although he could, and should address it. As Buncombe described it, “Neither Sattar or Yazidi currently have legal representation. Within the legal community that has dealt with Guantánamo, there are concerns about the mental health of all the detainees, but particularly in regard to these two, who have both been detained for more than 17 years.”

While this, in itself, is an extraordinarily depressing predicament for any Guantánamo prisoner to be in, and is, in particular, an indictment of the indifference of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the plight of the other three men now rests squarely on Donald Trump’s shoulders.

The most well-known of the three is Abdul Latif Nasir, a Moroccan, whose release was recommended by his Periodic Review Board in 2016. As Buncombe described it, “In Morocco, his family prepared for him to start a new life. A brother in Casablanca, who owned a pool-cleaning and water purification company, lined up a job. Someone arranged a place for him to live. His family even found him a bride.” Nasir himself packed his few possessions: “his reading glasses and a 2,000 word English-Arabic dictionary he himself had created.”

“But,” as Buncombe proceeded to explain, “it was not to be.” For two reasons, “There was to be no homecoming celebration, no job cleaning the swimming pools of upper-class Casablancans. No wedding ceremony. No chance for Latif to pursue his dream of becoming a mathematics teacher.”

The first of these reasons was “a bureaucratic delay between him being cleared for release by the US, and the formal agreement to accept him by the government in Rabat,” as Obama’s presidency neared its end, while the second was a tweet, posted on January 3, 2017 — two weeks before his inauguration — by Donald Trump. “There should be no further releases from Gitmo,” Trump wrote, adding, “These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back on to the battlefield.”

In a comment made recently to one of his lawyers, Latif wrote about the crushing disappointment of being recommended for release, but not being freed. “To prevent someone from his freedom after he’s been cleared is a very painful thing,” Latif said, adding, “No one can understand this kind of disappointment — to be cleared by six high American agencies and after that someone comes and says ‘no you have to stay here.’ I have no words to describe it.”

Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of the legal rights group Reprieve, which has represented numerous Guantánamo prisoners, recently visited Latif, and said, “This has been one of the most catastrophic episodes in the history of criminal law. Abdul Latif’s situation is worse than anyone’s. It’s worse than a prisoner on death row, because at least the death row prisoner can appeal.” 

He added, “Abdul Latif is in the worst position. He was told he was free, and now he has been told he has to stay there forever.”

Latif’s family includes five sisters and two brothers, and when family members spoke to him earlier in the year, they said that he was “stressed, angry and lost hope about having a life outside Gitmo.” They say that he told them, “So many years were lost of my life, even three years after the clearance have passed, I could have returned to my country and to my homeland and could have lived freely. Now I don’t have any hope any more.” 

As Buncombe explained, “They spoke with him recently and assured him they are still working for his release,” which, they said, was “something that made him sound better.” His brother Mustafa said, “We want people to know that Latif is a person. Just by looking at his face you’d see his innocence, [that he] loves nature and has a good character. He is someone who wishes good upon everyone, everyone testifies to this, neighbors and family, people know him by name due to his personality, his truthfulness, character, devotion. He is loved by many.”

The other man approved for release by a PRB but not freed is Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian, represented by Shayana Kadidal of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who told the Independent that he met recently with Barhoumi. “He was surprisingly well,” he said, adding, “One of the things about these guys is their relentless optimism.” 

As Andrew Buncombe described it, Kadidal said that, “while many consider keeping Guantánamo open an insanity, there are considerable interests in doing so. For Trump, the interest may be political, for the military, it may be strategic, for the numerous military-appointed lawyers defending the 9/11 accused, it may be professional and financial.” As Kadidal said, “The military wants to keep running a prison, so that it can have a place to send people in the future.” 

The other man approved for release but still held is Tawfiq Al-Bihani, a Yemeni approved for release in 2010. Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who represents a number of Guantánamo prisoners, including Abdul Latif Nasir and Tawfiq Al-Bihani, told Buncombe that the men had “asked different questions of her.” Bihani, she said, wants to know “what the government has to say about him,” and she explained that it was “hard to provide an answer; the habeas petition filed in 2017 has still not yet answered.” As she said, “He reads and understands the litigation. We don’t know the reason he is being held. He was due to be transferred to Saudi Arabia. We don’t know why he was not put on the plane.” 

Latif, meanwhile, “is concerned about whether he should prepare to spend the rest of his life at Guantánamo.” As Buncombe described it, “He says lessons and programmes once provided by the authorities have been reduced. He says the library now receives no new books. The only English news channel is Russia Today. The Arabic channel is the Lebanese Al Mayadeen.”

As Sullivan-Bennis put it, “His main concern is living a life that constitutes a life. He feels like they are only being kept alive.” She added that, nowadays, the prisoners “had limited interest in spending time together” because, as they describe it, “what are we talking about? Something that happened in 2006? Nothing.” 

However, she said of Latif that “if you create an atmosphere of education, he will immerse himself in what he is interested in. For example, if he is interested in English, he will all the time be talking about English. If he is interested in art, he will be talking about art. The problem is that detainees have nothing to do.” 

Nearly 18 years after Guantánamo opened, it is surely unacceptable that these men are still entombed in the prison, apparently with no prospect of release — and with a total lack of interest from Donald Trump.

The US desperately needs to relocate its conscience.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

“First They Came for the Travellers”: Priti Patel’s Chilling Attack on Britain’s Travelling Communities

A composite image of the home secretary Priti Patel and a Gypsy caravan.


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I’ve chosen my headline with care, in response to the news that the home secretary, Priti Patel, has launched a horrible attack on Britain’s travelling community, suggesting that the police should be able to immediately confiscate the vehicle of “anyone whom they suspect to be trespassing on land with the purpose of residing on it”, and announcing her intention to “test the appetite to go further” than any previous proposals for dealing with Gypsies and travellers.

As George Monbiot explained in an article for the Guardian on Wednesday, “Until successive Conservative governments began working on it, trespass was a civil and trivial matter. Now it is treated as a crime so serious that on mere suspicion you can lose your home.” Monbiot added, “The government’s proposal, criminalising the use of any place without planning permission for Roma and Travellers to stop, would extinguish the travelling life.” 

“First they came for the travellers” alludes to the famous poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller with reference to the Nazis, which begins, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist”, and continues with reference to trade unionists and Jews, and ending, “Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

I hope you don’t think that allusion sounds like an exaggeration. This, after all, is a government that has made a point of demonising immigrants, not just under Priti Patel, but also, shockingly, under Theresa May, in her six dreadful years as home secretary, as I explained in an article in 2016, when she became Prime Minister, entitled, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration — a sordid history that was then magnified when the true scale of May’s “hostile environment” became apparent via the Windrush scandal. And since the EU referendum, of course, the Tories — and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media — have not missed any opportunities to continue to stir up anti-immigrant hatred.

Nor are immigrants and travellers the only victims of the Tories’ drift into dangerously divisive territory. Since 2010, as I have written about repeatedly, the Tories have also persistently demonised the unemployed and those with disabilities.

The Beanfield, Castlemorton, the Public Order Act and the Criminal Justice Act

In addition, when it comes to travellers, the Tories have a long history of authoritarianism and oppression. It took until 1968, and the Caravan Sites Act, introduced by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, for travellers to get legislation providing them with sites — 400 around the country — where none had existed before.

Gypsy and traveller groups weren’t entirely happy with the Caravan Sites Act, for a variety of reasons, but it was an effort — however compromised — to deal with the problems that arose through nomadic people not having dedicated sites for their use.

By the 1980s, however, under Margaret Thatcher, a growing backlash against Gypsies and travellers was prompted by a growing New Traveller movement, whereby thousands of young people — unable to find a job in a Britain wracked by the mass unemployment that Thatcher was deliberately creating as she sought to crush Britain’s traditional manufacturing base, and to turn the UK into a banking- and services-led economy — took to the road in old vehicles, joining and adding to a free festival circuit of travellers that had been growing throughout the 70s. The free festival circuit’s central event was the Stonehenge Free Festival, which occupied the fields opposite Britain’s most famous ancient monument, and which, by the early 80s, lasted for the whole of the month of June and drew in tens of thousands of people.

The New Traveller culture — and the free festival circuit — was dealt a major blow on June 1, 1985, when a group of travellers — some of whom had been harried by police since the summer of 1984, and some of whom had been evicted in February from a protest camp at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire — were assaulted with genuinely shocking violence by 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD, in what has become known as The Battle of the Beanfield. For anyone interested to know more, my book, The Battle of the Beanfield, tells the whole disgraceful story, and my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion, a counter-cultural history of Stonehenge, is also still available.

Afterwards the government passed the Public Order Act of 1986, which contained specific passages introduced in response to the New Traveller, free festival and protest culture, including Section 39, which was specifically included as a response to the harrying of travellers the year after the battle of the Beanfield.

As Earl Ferrers, Minister of State for Home Affairs, stated in Parliament in October 1989, “Section 39 of the Public Order Act 1986 was introduced into the Public Order Bill as it was going through Parliament in response to the depredations suffered by landlowners by members of the so-called peace convoy during the summer of 1986.” As he further explained, “The section provides the police with a power to direct trespassers to leave land in certain circumstances. Only if the trespassers knowingly fail to obey such a direction do they commit a criminal offence. Section 39 put in place entirely new powers for the police and introduced an accompanying criminal sanction.”

And there was worse to come. Although parts of the traveller movement were broken by the extraordinary violence of the Beanfield, the survivors were reinvigorated when an unexpected new movement — the rave scene — manifested itself, with illegal parties taking place across the country, leading to new alliances of ravers and travellers, and culminating, over the Bank Holiday weekend in May 1992, with what became known as the Castlemorton Free Festival, the first truly huge anarchic gathering since the last Stonehenge festival in 1984, which promoted another legislative clampdown.

As the Friends, Families and Travellers website explains, the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 “greatly increased the powers of police and local authorities to evict Gypsies and Travellers camping illegally and removed the duty on local authorities, under the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, to provide sites.”

FFT further explained that the Act specifically includes the following sections:

The repeal of Part II of the 1968 Act, removing the duty on local authorities to provide sites, and abolishing the government grant for constructing gypsy caravan sites.



An extended power for local authorities to direct unauthorised campers to leave land, including any land forming part of a highway, any other unoccupied land, or any land occupied without the owner’s consent. It would become a criminal offence for anyone so directed to refuse to leave, or to return to it within three months.



An extended power to Magistrate’s Courts to make orders authorising local authorities to enter land and remove vehicles and property, if persons are present in contravention of a direction to leave.



A strengthening of the powers contained in the Public Order Act 1986 (Section 39), giving the police power to direct trespassers to leave if they have damaged the land itself (as distinct from property on it), or if they have six vehicles. It also extends the application of this section to common land, highway verges, byways, green lanes and other minor highways, and includes new police powers to remove vehicles.

As FFT also explained, “The Government’s response to critics of the 1994 Act was that Gypsies and Travellers should buy their own land and set up sites. However, the reality is that the current planning system makes this virtually impossible. Although nomadism and unauthorised camping are not, in themselves, illegal, the effect of the legislation has been to criminalise a way of life.”

The result, as George Monbiot explained, in what he described as “the Conservative purge in the late 1980s and early 1990s”, was that “two thirds of traditional, informal stopping sites for travellers, some of which had been in use for thousands of years, were sealed off”, sowing the seeds of today’s crisis. As Monbiot also explained, the current consultation “acknowledges that there is nowhere else for these communities to go, other than the council house waiting list, which means abandoning the key elements of their culture.” No wonder he concluded that Priti Patel’s proposal “amounts to legislative cleansing.”

Opposition to Priti Patel’s proposals from the police

The good news, comparatively speaking, is that the police are overwhelmingly opposed to the plans. Submissions from the police, for a consultation launched last year, which were obtained by Friends, Families and Travellers under freedom of information legislation, “showed”, as the Guardian described it, “that 75% of police responses indicated that their current powers were sufficient and/or proportionate. Additionally, 84% did not support the criminalisation of unauthorised encampments and 65% said lack of site provision was the real problem.”

Abbie Kirkby, advice and policy manager at FFT, said, as the Guardian described it, that “the proposed laws would make the lives of Gypsies and Travellers a misery.” She said, “The evidence we have collected shows that the Home Office are deliberately ignoring police views on unauthorised encampments. The timing of the consultation announcement makes it clear that the government’s motive is to use Gypsies and Travellers to gather votes at election time.” She added, “There is no point in bringing in more laws which tell Travellers where they can’t go when you aren’t telling them where they can go.”

As the Guardian explained, FFT was obliged to make “FOI requests to individual forces, police and crime commissioners and three police bodies”, after the Home Office “refused to tell it how many constabularies supported criminalisation of trespass in their submissions to last year’s consultation.”

They discovered that the National Police Chiefs Council, and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners has stated, in their submission to the compilation, “The lack of sufficient and appropriate accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers remains the main cause of incidents of unauthorised encampment and unauthorised development by these groups”, adding that “criminalisation of trespass would likely breach the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010.”

The Cambridgeshire police force agreed, saying it “would be criminalising a culture and lifestyle”, while West Yorkshire police “said existing powers enabled a swift and effective response where necessary”, and Surrey police said, “Revised powers does not tackle the root cause of site provision.”

Charities, including FFT, have “warned that nomadic societies are in the midst of of a housing crisis because of a shortage of authorised sites for Gypsies and Travellers to set up on”, as the Guardian put it, leading to the establishment of increasing numbers of unauthorised encampments. FFT’s position is that the government “should be moving from an enforcement approach to one of provision”, and its recommendations “include reintroducing the statutory duty – repealed in 1994 – on local authorities to provide official sites for Gypsies and Travellers.”

The Guardian cited the experience of one particular traveller, Terry, who said, “The evictions are ridiculous. You’ve got children crying, women crying … There’s no time to do anything, you throw everything on to the back of your van and you’ve got to go. They escort you down the road, then after a while they leave you, and then you’ve got to pitch up somewhere else. Then you go through it all over again. It’s a never ending, vicious circle of hatred and racism.”

Beware the normalisation of a far-right drift

Unfortunately, however, the police will do what they’re told if the government changes the legislation regarding illegal encampments, and in the meantime, of course, the immediate effect of Priti Patel’s obnoxious announcement is to stir up additional hatred against Gypsies and travellers, who, lest we forget, have been the victims of hatred from settled people throughout history.

As George Monbiot explained in his article, “Over the past few weeks in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, local people have been debating the merits of the council’s proposal for an official transit site for travelling people. According to one councillor, there have been threats to stone, bottle and petrol bomb anyone who uses it, if planning permission is granted.” Monbiot also explained that, just last week, three travellers’ caravans in Somerset were torched by suspected arsonists.”

Monbiot also explained how “[t]ravelling peoples have been attacked like this for centuries, and sometimes murdered”, and cited the death, in 2003, of 15-year-old Johnny Delaney, who was “kicked to death by a gang of teenagers in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire”, with one of the killers reportedly telling a passer-by, “He was only a fucking Gypsy.”

With Gypsies and travellers under attack, to add to long-standing, government-fuelled hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, the unemployed and the disabled, is it any wonder that the worlds of Pastor Niemöller are on my mind?

We need to stand up and be counted, in support of those subjected to dangerously inflammatory rhetoric from a government that has been remorselessly sliding further to the right since taking office in 2010, since the EU referendum, and. most recently, since the election by Tory Party members of Boris Johnson, who has brought dangerously judgmental figures like Priti Patel — who seems to have contempt for everyone except the rich — into the heart of government, where she most emphatically does not belong.

And if we’re looking at the bigger picture, it is time for the Tories to be removed from power, and for the toxic dream of a no deal Brexit — with the attendant collapse of the economy, civil unrest, and, very possibly, some sort of martial law — to also be done away with once and for all. History shows us not that certain groups of people, or certain nations are “evil”, as our nationalists would like to pretend, but that tyranny can become normalised by degrees, so that, often within a shockingly short amount of time, the unthinkable becomes normalised.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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