Andy Worthington's Blog, page 19

The Significance of the High Court Ruling That the Police’s London-Wide Ban on Extinction Rebellion Was “Unlawful”

Metropolitan Police officers and the Extinction Rebellion camp at Trafalgar Square, October 11, 2019 (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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The news cycle seems so frenetic right now that stories barely get noticed before the media spotlight promiscuously turns to some other topic. A case in point, to my mind, is an important High Court ruling last week — that a decision taken by the Metropolitan Police last month, to impose a blanket ban across the whole of London prohibiting any assembly of more than two people linked to Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Autumn Uprising’, under section 14 of the Public Order Act of 1986, was “unlawful.”

The two High Court judges who issued the ruling — Mr. Justice Dingemans and Mr. Justice Chamberlain — said, as the Guardian described it, that “the Met had been wrong to define Extinction Rebellion’s two-week long ‘autumn uprising’ as a single public assembly on which it could impose the order.”

As Mr. Justice Dingemans stated in the ruling, “Separate gatherings, separated both in time and by many miles, even if coordinated under the umbrella of one body, are not a public assembly under the meaning of section 14(1) of the 1986 act.” He added, “The XR autumn uprising intended to be held from 14 to 19 October was not therefore a public assembly … therefore the decision to impose the condition was unlawful because there was no power to impose it.”

Jules Carey, a partner at human rights law firm Bindmans, who was part of the team that brought the judicial review claim on behalf of Jenny Jones, Caroline Lucas and Ellie Chowns of the Green Party, Labour MPs Clive Lewis and David Drew, Labour activist Adam Allnutt and the journalist and activist George Monbiot, called the ban “hastily imposed” and” erratically applied”, and said, “This judgment is a timely reminder to those in authority facing a climate of dissent: the right to protest is a longstanding fundamental right in a democratic society that should be guarded and not prohibited by overzealous policing.”

As the Guardian explained, the judgment was “a huge embarrassment for the Met, which had insisted in the face of criticism that it was lawful”, and which “now faces potential claims from hundreds of protesters arrested for breaching the order, which ran across London from 9pm on Monday 14 October until 6pm the following Friday.”

Jules Carey said, “It’s a very expensive mistake for the Metropolitan Police. Anyone arrested under the order could now have a claim against the Met for false imprisonment. If force was used against them, they could have a further claim for assault. I’m sure most of them would want to start off with an apology for the ordeal that they experienced, but all of them could potentially be awarded several thousands of pounds depending on how long they were arrested for and whether force was used against them.”

George Monbiot, who was arrested during XR’s ‘Autumn Uprising’, said that he was considering taking legal action. “The important thing is that the attempt by the police to quash our democratic right to dissent has been overturned”, he said, adding, “Non-violent civil disobedience is essential to the health of our democracy, in fact, there would be no democracy without it. What the police were doing is draconian and over the top, and they were directly infringing our democratic right to protest.”

As Monbiot also pointed out, “The Public Order Act itself is highly illiberal legislation which has a major chilling effect on protest, as do several of its successor acts.” He further explained that the police “have this wide range of tools for shutting down protest and one thing I would like to see coming out of this is much more discussion about those tools, the wide range of powers police have to shut down democracy.”

However, it would be unwise to expect that the police will simply back down. As I stated at the time the section 14 order was imposed, “it seems to me that they [the Met] took the only course of action they could envisage that would allow them to non-violently shut down the protests, with senior officers evidently having decided that, after eight days, they had had enough of policing a protest movement that had set up camp in Trafalgar Square and on the edges of St. James’s Park, disrupting ‘business as usual’, and that had also engaged in freewheeling marches and gatherings up and down Whitehall and in Parliament Square.”

As I see it, the Met knew that the ‘Autumn Uprising’ did not fulfil the requirements of section 14 of the Public Order Act, which requires a senior officer to believe that “serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community” will result if a ban is not imposed, or if it is believed that the organisers of the assembly “will intimidate or compel others to do unlawful acts.”

Now, however, it is reasonable to expect that the police will use the thwarting of their section 14 ban to insist that what they actually need are new powers. Ever since Extinction Rebellion started their protests almost exactly a year ago, the Met have been under pressure from the right-wing media, in particular, and also, we can infer, from the government, to respond more robustly to XR’s disruption, and they will now be able to claim more effectively than before that only new powers will enable them to do so.

As the Guardian described it, the Met have “lobbied the government for law changes to make it easier to curtail disruptive protests”, and a “senior police source” told the newspaper that “changes could include lowering the threshold at which police can place restrictions.” As the Guardian put it, “Such a change could mean that the prospect of ‘disruption’ is enough to impose conditions, not ‘serious disruption’ as the law currently requires.”

It would, unfortunately, not be the first time that laws have been changed when the establishment regards itself as under equipped to deal with dissent. The Public Order Act itself arose out of the unrest of the early 80s — in particular, contempt from the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher for the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp that started in 1981, for the Molesworth Rainbow Village that emerged in the summer of 1984 at the second proposed base for US cruise missiles, and, most explicitly, as a result of the Battle of the Beanfield on June 1, 1985, when 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD violently attacked and decommissioned a group of travellers — including the Molesworth refugees, evicted from their camp in February 1985 in the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history — who were trying to make their way to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic jamboree that had long been a thorn in Thatcher’s side. For more on both, see my books The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion.

Although the UK has no written constitution, before the Public Order Act there had been no precedent via active legislation for the police to shut down assemblies they disagreed with — as was demonstrated at the Stonehenge Free Festival, where, at any one time throughout the whole of the month of June, tens of thousands of people gathered in the fields across the road from the country’s most famous ancient monument.

And then in 1994, after the government had been unexpectedly assailed by fresh waves of dissent, via illegal raves, the astonishing road protest movement and offshoots like Reclaim the Streets, the sudden emergence of another mega-gathering — the Castlemorton Free Festival, at which the many tribes of the UK’s still-vibrant counter-culture collided — led to the passage of the Criminal Justice Act, which, as I explained in an article for the Guardian about the Battle of the Beanfield in June 2009, introduced the concept of “trespassory assembly”, which “enabled the police to ban groups of 20 or more people meeting in a particular area if they feared ‘serious disruption to the life of the community’, even if the meeting was non-obstructive and non-violent. The Criminal Justice Act also introduced “aggravated trespass,” which finally transformed trespass from a civil to a criminal concern.

And so, as the Beanfield led to the Public Order Act, and Castlemorton led to the Criminal Justice Act, are we to conclude that Extinction Rebellion’s disruptions will lead to a new clampdown on civil liberties? I hope not, as judges in particular have  tendency to provide a bulwark against politicians’ authoritarian impulses when it comes to non-violent protest, but as Mike Schwarz, a solicitor who has spent 30 years defending political activists, explained in an article for openDemocracy last month, we should not ignore the fact that, “in response to XR’s successes, police and politicians are media-testing increases in police powers, the creation of new criminal laws, [and] toughening sentences.”

And with the horrendously authoritarian Priti Patel as Home Secretary, there is clearly no room for complacency. Everyone who cares about the right to protest needs to keep a close eye on the government, and to be prepared to fight back if a new Public Order Act or Criminal Justice Act looks like emerging, as both have done significant damage to our ability to gather freely — whether in open dissent or otherwise — over the last 33 years.

* * * * *

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.

CIA Torture Report Author Says More Than 119 Prisoners Were Held in “Black Sites” and More Than Three Were Waterboarded

Daniel J. Jones, in a screenshot from Vice News’ recent interview with him about the Senate Torture Report, prior to the release of the feature-length docudrama “The Report,” about the creation of the report.


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.

 

This week sees the release of “The Report,” an important new feature-length film about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.

The “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program — more generally known as ‘The Torture Report” — involved a team of five people reading and analyzing over six million CIA documents over the course of five years, and Committee members voted, by nine votes to six, to approve it as an official committee report on December 13, 2012, although the full report has never been publicly released.

Instead, a 500-page executive summary was released in December 2014, in which, as I wrote at the time for Al-Jazeera, the Committee “conclude[d] that torture was ‘not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees,’ that the CIA made ‘inaccurate claims’ about the ‘effectiveness’ of the program in an attempt to justify it and that it led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases.”

Although subject to redactions, the report’s findings were stark about the brutality of the program: ”At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal rehydration’ or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity. The CIA placed detainees in ice water ‘baths.’ The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to one detainee that he would only leave in a coffin-shaped box. One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because ‘we can never let the world know what I have done to you.’ CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families — to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to ‘cut [a detainee’s] mother’s throat.’”

The committee also concluded that the CIA’s interrogations “were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others,” and, in its analysis of waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning, the report stated, ”The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example [the first victim of the torture program], became ‘completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.’ Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad [the alleged mastermind of 9/11] as evolving into a ‘series of near drownings.’”

The film, released on November 15, was written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, and stars Annette Bening as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate intelligence Committee, and Adam Driver as Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, who led the investigation.

To coincide with the release, Vice News interviewed Jones. The interview is available on YouTube here, and Vice News also published a transcript of highlights, which I’m cross-posting below, because it quite powerfully captures how, when it comes to the crimes committed by the Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Daniel Jones is one of the most significant people in the whole of the United States, having been in charge of a team of just four people who read all of the six million CIA documents relating to the torture program and then produced the report.

Amongst Jones’ revelations, in this brief interview, are 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.”

Jones also assesses that no more than ten people have read the full classified report, and he says that, even when it comes to the executive summary, which was turned into a book, “My bet is, globally, under 1,000 people have read the whole thing.” I am one of those people — an admission that therefore contributes to Jones’ assessment that “academics or researchers or journalists overseas are far more familiar with it than the same kinds of people in the U.S.”

The video is below, followed by the transcript, and I hope you have time to watch the video or read Daniel Jones’ words, and that you’ll share them if, like me, you think he should be listened to!

Vice News interviews Daniel J. Jones

Vice News: Why did Sen. Dianne Feinstein, at the time the Democratic chair of the Intelligence Committee, choose you to head up the investigation?

Jones: I was viewed as a bipartisan staffer. I came from the FBI, where I’d been doing counterterrorism investigations. I was a data nerd, an investigations nerd — I was a safe choice. I think senators had an idea that I was less political than most; I briefed both Republican and Democratic members of the committee. Republicans were like, “Oh, yeah, we can work with him.”

Vice News: And how many other people worked with you on the report?

Jones: I’d say there were four core people.

Vice News: So four people read more than 6 million documents to write a 6,700-page report that had 38,000 footnotes?

Jones: It is kind of crazy when you think back on it, but that’s why it became an obsessive nonstop endeavor. I do remember being frustrated that I didn’t have a larger staff. But you work with what you have.

Vice News: You’re tasked with a sweeping investigation of a notoriously secretive agency doing something that was especially secretive even for them. Where the hell do you start?

Jones: With the detainees. It’s not like we got 6.3 million pages of documents the first day; it happened over many years. We asked for detainee records first. So we’d get them for a detainee, dump them into a folder, and go through them. And then the next detainee, and then the next.

Vice News: The report provides details about the torture of 119 detainees in all. Do you think there were more?

Jones: Oh, yes. Without a doubt. We made an early request that the CIA provide us with a list of all of their detainees, but the agency never could because they had no idea how many people they detained. One thing that haunts me is the stuff that didn’t make it into the report — all kinds of allegations that we just couldn’t corroborate. And those things are lost to history. Nobody’s going through those 6.3 million pages again.

Vice News: You think there were also more abuses?

Jones: The CIA maintains to this day that there are records of only three detainees being waterboarded, but there were clearly more than three people who were waterboarded. 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: There were buckets around it, it was old and rusted. When we asked the agency about it, they simply said they could not explain the presence of the waterboard. It just tells you how little we know, even with 6.3 million pages of documents.

Vice News: The full report will first be eligible for declassification in nine years — though it may take much longer than that. What do you think the public’s reaction to it will be?

Jones: I think people will be overwhelmed with the amount of detail. Things that are covered in a few pages in the executive summary are given hundreds of pages in the full report.

Vice News: How many people do you think have read the entire executive summary?

Jones: A lot of people bought the book version of it, which was on the bestseller list. But someone told me at the time, “You know, people aren’t reading it. It just looks cool to have on your bookshelf.” And man, I gotta tell you, it’s a huge disappointment to me that when I talk to people, even in the communities who you think would have spent a lot of time with it, they just haven’t. My bet is, globally, under 1,000 people have read the whole thing. I actually find academics or researchers or journalists overseas are far more familiar with it than the same kinds of people in the U.S.

Vice News: And how many have read the full classified report?

Jones: Jesus, I think it would be 10, maybe. Maybe.

Vice News: President Donald Trump presumably isn’t one of those people. He’s actually expressed enthusiasm for torture. Do you think he could lead the U.S. to use torture again?

Jones: I think it’s unlikely, though some people say I’m naive about that. I think that if you read the report, [the ineffectiveness and immorality of torture] is an open-and-shut case. But if not many people have read it and learned the lessons from it, then maybe I’m totally off base.

Vice News: Trump ignores or even ridicules the U.S. intelligence community when they present him with information he doesn’t like. What kinds of risks does that create?

Jones: I think the real risk is the numerous times he has unnecessarily released classified national security information to parties which he should not. Foreign governments may see this and become unwilling to share intelligence with us because they can’t trust the U.S.

Vice News: The current CIA director, Gina Haspel, ordered the torture of at least one detainee and later participated in the unauthorized and arguably unlawful destruction of videotapes of interrogations, thereby preventing them from being seen by congressional oversight committees. What does it mean that she could do all of that and still be nominated and confirmed as director?

Jones: It sends a message that you can violate your own director’s orders and not be held accountable for it, and then in fact be rewarded for it. Why? Because you’re not listening to your director’s orders if you think they run contrary to protecting the agency.

If you protect the agency among all else — and that means not listening to the president, not listening to the director of the CIA, not listening to agency lawyers — it’s OK if your intention was to protect the agency’s reputation.

Vice News: Do you think Haspel has changed? She vowed never to begin another “enhanced interrogation” program in her confirmation testimony.

Jones: I mean, color me unimpressed. “We won’t do this again.” Well, no shit. Your own agency says it was a complete clusterfuck. And you had the largest report in Senate history about it. And you broke international and domestic law. So what a major leap for you to say you won’t do it again.

Vice News: What did you expect the public’s reaction would be when the report came out in 2014?

Jones: I knew that people would respond to the program being brutal, terrible, wrong, ineffective. But I always thought people would be shocked on a bipartisan basis about the lies the CIA told the Department of Justice and two presidents from two different parties. In other words, holy shit, what else are they lying about? How do we know that whatever the CIA is doing on nuclear proliferation or drone programs or other counterterrorism or whatever it is, that they’re providing accurate information to the president of the United States? How can we trust this organization to act in a responsible and ethical manner in terms of providing accurate information to those who need to know it? The CIA essentially cannot submit to civilian oversight, because it treats civilian oversight with disdain.

Vice News: The CIA does a pretty good job of using the media to make itself look good.

Jones: They did a major press job when the report was released. They had people on every television channel saying the report was wrong, even though they couldn’t identify any factual errors. They’d say, “Well, they’re errors of context — it was a tough time after 9/11.” As if it’s OK to do really shitty, ridiculous things just because you’re scared. You want an agency that responds soberly and effectively after a national security crisis, not one that does massively ineffective shit outside the boundaries of law.

Vice News: Why didn’t anyone at the CIA stop the torture program when it was clear it wasn’t yielding any results?

Jones: The agency itself, decades before, had determined torture was ineffective. And then throughout the program after 9/11, there were people at the agency who were like, “This ain’t working.” But remember, the legality of the entire program relied on the techniques working. If they didn’t lead to captures, if they didn’t stop terrorist plots, then by the Department of Justice’s own legal opinions, the techniques weren’t legal.

Vice News: The 2012 movie “Zero Dark Thirty” sold itself as the true story of how the U.S. found and killed Osama bin Laden — and it showed the CIA finding him thanks to information gathered by torturing detainees. You were… not a fan?

Jones: I actually saw it with Sen. Feinstein at a screening before it was released, and she got up and stormed out halfway through. Outside she happened to run into the president of Sony Pictures, and she told him the movie was totally false. The info the CIA gave the filmmakers while they were making the movie was not too far off from the lies the agency was telling President Obama and Congress at the time.

Vice News: How did [“The Report” writer and director Scott Z. Burns] make a movie about writing a report? There must be some liberties taken to make it seem more dramatic than it was.

Jones: Things had to be condensed, and there are composite characters, but the movie didn’t need to be Hollywood-ized or dramatized. At one point Adam Driver asked if we were overplaying a certain scene, and I was like, “Well, what happened was actually far worse.”

We only have two hours for the film, so one small scene may have to be representative of, like, 20 terrible things that occurred. So Scott was actually underplaying this. We’re not taking any liberties here.

Vice News: Why is it such an uphill battle to convince people that torture is bad?

Jones: It’s maddening. Torture is like a plague that has always followed humanity. The idea that torture works has been Hollywood-ized, from “24” to “Zero Dark Thirty,” because it’s really helpful if you have only an hour to tell a story to put a knife in someone and then they give up information. But as Adam says in the film, you get false information. We’ve known for thousands of years that torture actually does not work. And yet it sticks with us, we can’t dislodge it.

Vice News: Do you expect that longtime conception of torture to change now?

Jones: We did very well in the media when the report came out. We had front-page coverage literally all over the world, but it lasted for 24 or 48 hours — and then poof, it was gone. That’s the news cycle. If you want to penetrate society, culturally, you need storytelling and narrative, so this film will reach way more people than the 500-page declassified summary of the report. And hopefully the film will make the impact that I thought the report was going to make.

* * * * *

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.

Closing Guantánamo, the Democrats and the NDAA

Campaigners calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay walk past Congress 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.

In the long and dispiriting story of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, in defiance of its purported values, the US is holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, the role of Congress is not always well understood.

Under George W. Bush, lawmakers were largely compliant with the shameful innovations introduced after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the week after the attacks, which allowed the president to pursue anyone that he felt was associated with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces, and to imprison them at the Guantánamo prison, which was deliberately established on the US naval base in Cuba to be beyond the reach of the US courts.

From the beginning, the men — and boys — held there were held without rights, and although long legal struggles led to them eventually securing habeas corpus rights, Congress fought back. However, when their habeas rights were eventually gutted of all meaning, the responsibility lay with ideologically malignant appeals court judges rather than Congress.

The gutting of habeas corpus largely returned the prisoners’ fate to the whim of the president — in this case, Barack Obama — but Republican lawmakers imposed a number of restrictions on his ability to release or transfer prisoners, or, indeed, to shut the prison, as he had promised to do on his second day in office.

In successive versions of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Obama was prohibited from moving prisoners to a facility on the US mainland, so that Guantánamo could be closed, and he was also prohibited from bringing any prisoner to the US mainland for any reason — not only for continued imprisonment, but also for release, or to be put on trial, or even for medical treatment that was difficult or impossible to undertake at Guantánamo.

Lawmakers also imposed restrictions on his ability to release or transfer prisoners to other countries, introducing an onerous requirement on the Secretary of Defense to certify that any prisoner release or transfer would be safe, requiring a 30-day review process by lawmakers before any prisoner could be released or transferred, and blocking the release of prisoners to an ever-expanding list of countries regarded as posing a threat to the security of the United States.

This was the situation inherited by Donald Trump, who was largely unaffected by lawmakers’ interference, because he had no intention of closing Guantánamo, or, indeed, of releasing any prisoners. However, when Trump lost control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections in November 2018, campaigners calling  for the release of prisoners and the closure of Guantánamo were, for the first time since Trump’s election two years earlier, able to locate Democrats who might not only be willing to listen to their concerns, but might also act on it; most noticeably, in the House Armed Services Committee, whose incoming Democratic chair was Adam Smith (D-Wash).

Aspirations in the House draft bill

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

As Just Security proceeded to explain, Section 1032 of the draft bill, also known as the Chairman’s Mark, “revert[ed] to the Bush-era policy of leaving maximum flexibility for the Commander in Chief by imposing no restrictions on transfers to the United States,” although it left intact “the onerous certification process for foreign transfers,” and also “retain[ed] a ban on the transfer of detainees to Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.”

In addition, Section 1033, “[r]eflecting the strong consensus among national security leaders that Guantánamo is harmful to US national security interests,” prohibited the transfer of “any additional detainees to Guantanamo for law of war detention or military commission proceedings who were not already detained at Guantanamo in law of war detention or military commission proceedings on or after May 2, 2018.”

This section also “require[d] the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, to submit a disposition plan to the defense committees within 60 days of enactment identifying a disposition for each individual still detained at Guantánamo Bay as of the date of enactment other than simply continuing to hold the individuals in continued law of war detention indefinitely.”

Section 1034 “contain[ed] a set of findings and a Sense of Congress concerning the ability of the U.S. government to meet its obligation to provide adequate medical care to detainees at Guantánamo given the limited medical facilities at the isolated military base, the logistical challenges of providing care on base, and the increased costs of providing care there—all of which will be exacerbated as the detainee population ages.”

The Chairman’s Mark also “expresse[d] concern over the stalled repatriation process for detainees who have been cleared for transfer by either the Periodic Review Board or the Guantánamo Review Task Force” (the two review processes set up under Obama), noting that “no detainees have been transferred since January 20, 2017, despite at least five detainees having previously been approved for transfer.” The draft bill “order[ed] 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.”

In July, the House approved the draft bill by 220 votes to 197. No Republicans supported it, and one of their complaints, as Roll Call described it, was that it included “a ban on sending new prisoners to the Guantánamo Bay detention center.”

However, in a statement, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-MD) congratulated the House on passing a bill that “includes Democratic priorities aimed at hastening the safe closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.”

The Senate bill and the start of the consolidation process

As was to be expected, however, when the Senate version of the bill was passed, at the end of June, its sections dealing with Guantánamo (pp. 435-446) largely extended the bans in previous versions of the NDAA — on using funds to bring prisoners to the US mainland, to “construct or modify” facilities on the US mainland to hold them, to transfer or release prisoners to “certain countries,” or to “close or relinquish control” of the Guantánamo naval base.

The Senate draft bill did, however, authorize the temporary transfer of prisoners to the US mainland “for emergency or critical medical treatment,” and also authorized the appointment of a chief medical officer at the naval base.

In September, when Congress reconvened after its five-week summer recess, Defense News reported that, over the summer, “staff members of each chamber’s Armed Services committees were working to resolve noncontroversial issues on the massive, annual defense policy measure, clearing the way for conferees to focus on more problematic policy differences when they return” — including, of course, the differences of opinion regarding Guantánamo.

As Defense News explained, “House Democrats, many of whom have long objected to continuing operations” at Guantánamo, “added language to their draft bill that bans new detainees to the facility. The bill would also remove restrictions on transferring prisoners from the facility to mainland US prisons and requires a plan to deal with ongoing legal questions surrounding the inmates there.”

Defense News added that “Republicans in both chambers argue the base remains a critical tool in the fight against terrorism, and inserted those restrictions in recent years to block President Barack Obama from attempting to shut down the detention center,” but “[n]ow, with Congress divided, the question becomes which side is more resolute in its stance on the future of the base, and whether the impasse will undermine the entire policy bill.”

On September 11, as Defense News reported, there was a meeting of the “big four” leaders of the Armed Services committees — Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.), House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith, and House Armed Services Committee ranking member Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) —and shortly after, the Grand Forks Herald reported that Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) had been appointed to “a committee aiming to iron out differences in military spending,” which partly included differences of opinion about “the future of prisoners” at Guantánamo. As the newspaper explained, “The House version would ban new prisoners [being sent] there and make it easier to transfer them to the US proper. The Senate version would not.”

Highlighting Republican intransigence, Sen. Cramer was quoted as saying, “We would resist any language like that, at least I would resist language like that, in the reconciled bill. I think Guantánamo has proven to be important. I don’t like putting terrorists on US soil in our mainland, where they can then demand rights that a US citizen would have to jurisprudence and whatnot.”

The House’s watered-down final bill

Around the same time, the House passed its final version of the bill, with, in the sections relating to Guantánamo (pp. 939-943), most of the innovations in the Chairman’s Mark removed, with the exception of Section 1033, with its ban on the use of funds to transfer any additional prisoners — including US citizens — to Guantánamo.

The only other sections to survive the initial markup were, presumably, uncontentious to Senate Republicans — Section 1032 reiterated the long-standing ban on funds to transfer or release prisoners to other countries, and included an expansive list of “enemies”: (1) Libya (2) Somalia (3) Syria (4) Yemen (5) Mexico (6) Guatemala (7) Honduras (8) El Salvador (9) Venezuela (10) Cuba (11) Iran (12) Russia, and (13) North Korea.

Section 1034, meanwhile, was a “Sense of Congress” regarding the provision of medical care, in which the following findings were made:

(1) The individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are aging, and such individuals are increasingly subject to a number of health conditions exacerbated by age and the circumstances of their cases.

(2) Expeditionary medical treatment of individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is logistically challenging and increasingly costly, especially treatment related to complex ailments that may become exacerbated with age.

(3) Medical care at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is likely to become an increasing challenge for the United States Government.

(4) Medical challenges at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, also cause difficulties affecting the functions and processes of the military commissions and periodic review boards.

As a result, “the sense of Congress” was that:

(1) the United States has an ongoing obligation to provide medical care to individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, meeting appropriate standards of care; and

(2) the Secretary of Defense should take into account the standards of care provided at other relevant facilities, including those administered by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, in determining the policies of the Department of Defense regarding the provision of medical care to individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

It may well be that the final, consolidated version of the bill will include a provision for prisoners to receive urgent medical care on the US mainland, although whether or not the House’s demand for no new prisoners to be brought to Guantánamo will survive is impossible to forecast. However, it should be noted that, although Donald Trump has previously expressed his enthusiasm for bringing new prisoners to Guantánamo, there is a widespread understanding, within political bureaucratic circles, that Guantánamo is an unsuitable alternative to federal court for anyone the US wants to prosecute, whether for terrorism or any other crime, and that its only enduring legacy is as a place to contentiously hold prisoners without charge or trial on a seemingly unending basis, a situation that is considered appalling and unacceptable to all but the most fanatically right-wing enthusiasts for arbitrary imprisonment.

The White House’s comments

It’s also worth noting what Russell T. Vought, the Acting Director of the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, wrote to Jim Inhofe in a letter about the NDAA on September 4. In specific sections relating to Guantánamo, Vought noted that, although the Trump administration “fully intends to keep open the detention facility at GTMO and to use it for detention operations,” it “strongly objects to any restriction on the transfer of Law of War detainees.” As Vought explained, “In certain circumstances, restrictions on the President’s authority to transfer detainees would violate constitutional separation of powers principles, including the President’s authority as Commander in Chief.”

We found this complaint genuinely surprising, and can’t help but wonder if the objection is because some ally of the US is seeking the return of one or more of their citizens, or, indeed, if Trump intends to send someone for a trial in another country.

Vought also expressed disappointment about the lack of authorization for funds to build a new prisoner block for the “high-value detainees,” to replace the secretive Camp 7, which “is experiencing structural and foundational challenges that, if unaddressed, could pose life and safety risks to guard forces and detainees.”

Vought also objected to the provision of medical treatment on the US mainland, arguing that US forces have a history of “quickly deploying specialized personnel and equipment to respond to emergent healthcare issues,” at Guantánamo — a claim that is patently not true — and that, moreover, “The provision is potentially counterproductive because it could undermine government efforts to defend against legal challenges to the adequacy of healthcare provided at GTMO and could ultimately result in judicial orders compelling the government to transfer detainees to the United States for treatment.”

Vought also objected to the Senate’s “requirement of designating a Chief Medical Officer, outside the chain of command,” at Guantánamo, and, as The Hill reported, opposed a prohibition on new transfers to Guantánamo, because it would oblige the Pentagon to “conduct long-term detention of such detainees in-theater or in the continental United States, repatriate them to third countries, or release [them].”

In conclusion, as we wait to see what the final, consolidated version of the bill contains, it’s worth bearing in mind that House Democrats should continue to be approached regarding the more aspirational aspects of their draft bill — the desire to bring prisoners to the US mainland for trial, or for ongoing imprisonment, and the intention to close Guantánamo — with a clear recognition that, notwithstanding the Democrats’ failure to close the prison under Obama, there can, at present, with the next presidential election just a year away, be no progress towards the closure of Guantánamo while Donald Trump remains president, or, in all probability, if  any other Republican becomes president, and if Republicans continue to control the Senate.

* * * * *

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.

Photos of the Two-Month Occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden Prior to its Violent Eviction

The Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford on the eve of its occupation, August 28, 2018 (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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.

 

One year ago yesterday, the two-month occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a community garden in Deptford, in south east London, came to a violent end when bailiffs hired by Lewisham Council evicted the occupiers in a dawn raid.

It was a disturbing end to a long-running effort on the part of the local community to save the garden — and Reginald House, a block of structurally sound council flats next door — from destruction as part of a plan to re-develop the site of the old Tidemill primary school. The garden — a magical design of concentric circles — had been created by pupils, teachers and parents 20 years before, and the community had been given use of it after the school moved to a new site in 2012, while efforts to finalise the plans proceeded, with the housing association Family Mosaic (which later merged with Peabody) and the private developer Sherrygreen Homes.

The garden was not only a magical green space; it also helped to mitigate the worst effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street, but the council weren’t interested in considering alternative plans that would have spared the garden and Reginald House, and terminated the lease on the garden on August 28 last year. However, instead of giving the keys back, the community occupied the garden instead, embarking on a two-month experiment in community resistance that resonated around the world.

A year ago yesterday, after the eviction, whose intended swift conclusion was delayed as one brave activist, high in a tree, survived efforts to bring her down that were patently dangerous and in contravention of health and safety protocols, there was a stand-off, and numerous skirmishes, between the bailiffs — 130 of them in total —- and many dozens of police officers brought in to “protect” them, and the local community and activists and campaigners who had been part of the occupation, or had been part of the longer struggle to save the garden from destruction, or who, in some cases, only got involved when the eviction took place, and were instantly radicalised by the violence on show.

The eviction cost over £100,000, and the council subsequently spent over a million pounds paying the bailiffs to guard the garden 24 hours a day, causing serious distress in the immediate neighbourhood, as the bailiffs were not always friendly, the garden was floodlit at night, and guard dogs in the garden barked all night. Eventually, after campaigners persuaded a tree services company hired to cut down the trees to withdraw from their contract, the council found a more pliable company, and that destruction took place on February 27 this year, on the same day that, with breathtaking hypocrisy, the council declared a “climate emergency.”

The campaigners, however, continued their resistance, symbolically occupying the green next to the garden and causing the council further headaches, but in May they withdrew, fearing crippling legal costs in a court case. However, although the green was soon boarded up, building works have not begun.

Instead, Sherrygreen Homes and Peabody have begun work on a second site, Amersham Vale, which was stealthily twinned with Tidemill at the planning stage, where 120 new properties are to be built, 81 of which will be for private sale, in a development marketed, without a trace of irony, as ‘The Muse.’ Once this cash cow is underway, the development of the Tidemill site — where only 51 of the proposed 209 properties are for private sale — will presumably begin, and it will be interesting to see, when this does eventually happen, what resistance there will be, as campaigners have not given up on the residents of Reginald House, whose homes shouldn’t be destroyed, and who have never been given a ballot to ask what they want, and campaigners also continue to insist that the garden should be re-planted and retained, which would actually be a significant gesture on the council’s part towards tackling the “climate emergency” that they so hollowly declared back in February.

Keep watching for updates — and do check out what’s happening at Amersham Vale — but in the meantime enjoy my photos below, of the beauty of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, and its exhilarating two-month occupation last year.

We all still miss it every day.

Tents in the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford on the eve of its occupation, August 28, 2018.



A treehouse erected for the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, and a wonderful shed made by campaigners from found materials, August 28, 2018.



Campaigners outside the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford at the start of its two-month occupation, August 29, 2018.



A treehouse made out of found materials by the entrance to the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, August 30, 2018.



Posters on the front gates of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, August 30, 2018.



Campaigners arriving at Fordham Park in New Cross for the Party in the Park community festival, September 1, 2018, whose theme, coincidentally, was housing; and, specifically, the threat to social housing. The campaigners had marched to the park in a samba parade from the occupied Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford.



One of many placards and banners made by the Tidemill campaigners, this one supporting the right of the residents of Reginald House, next to the garden, to have a ballot regarding Lewisham Council’s proposals to demolish their homes for the Tidemill development, September 2, 2018.



A banner criticising Peabody, the housing association behind the plans for the Tidemill development, working with Lewisham Council and the private developer Sherrygreen Homes, September 7, 2018.



‘Green home not gold’, made by one of the occupiers of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, September 16, 2018.



A beautiful day in the occupied Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, September 16, 2018, The photo features the children’s tree house and leaves of one of the two wonderful Indian bean trees that were at the heart of the garden.



Campaign badges, September 21, 2018. Campaigners held several fundraising gigs – mostly at the Birds Nest, just across Deptford Church Street from the garden – to raise money for printing posters and fliers, and to make badges.



Recycling, September 25, 2018.



A banner – one of many on the external perimeter fence of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden – showing solidarity with campaigners fighting to save the ancient Hambacher Forest in Germany from destruction by a mining company, September 26, 2018. Campaigners have been fighting to save the forest since 2012.



The view from inside the beautiful shed made by campaigners from found materials in the Old Tidemill Garden, September 29, 2018, when the garden featured several artworks as part of the internationally acclaimed Deptford X arts festival.



A Lewisham Council sign, on the external perimeter fence of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, modified by campaigners, September 30, 2018.



The view from the garden of the former playground of the Tidemill primary school, which was also part of the occupation site, October 2, 2018. Behind is the former school, guarded at great expense by Lewisham Council, where the intention is for the development’s flats for private sale to be built.



Accordions in the greenhouse, October 2, 2018.



Campaigners wearing gas masks as part of a photo shoot for the Mail on Sunday, which included the garden in a campaign to save Britain’s threatened parks, October 4, 2018.



The glory of the Indian bean trees, October 11, 2018.



Artist and local resident Glenn ‘Fitzy’ Fitzpatrick left numerous masks made from found nitrous oxide canisters in the garden, as protection, October 15, 2018.



A salvaged promotional board from some other housing development found its way to the garden, where it served as an ironic commentary on the plans of Lewisham Council and Peabody, October 24, 2018.



The Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden on the last day of the occupation, October 28, 2018. Bailiffs arrived at dawn on October 29.



A last comment to Lewisham Council as we took some personal belongings from the garden – and some of Fitzy’s sculptures – on the last day of the occupation, October 28, 2018.

* * * * *

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.

Celebrating 900 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project, ‘The State of London’

The most recent photos posted on the Facebook page for Andy Worthington’s photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’


Check out all the photos to date here!
Please feel free to support ‘The State of London’ with a donation. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday marked 900 days since I began posting a photo a day on Facebook — with accompanying essays — taken from the daily photographic journeys by bike around London’s 120 postcodes that I started five years before — on May 11, 2012, an ongoing photo-journalistic project that I call ‘The State of London.’ For anyone obsessed with stats, I think this means that I’ve been out in all weathers photographing the capital for 2,726 days; or seven years, five months and 16 days. 

Before I create the inadvertent illusion that I’m the Bear Grylls of urban cycling, I should point out that, nine days out of ten, I haven’t strayed far beyond the radius of postcodes emanating from my home, in Brockley, London SE4; that is to say, Deptford (SE8), Greenwich (SE10), Lewisham (SE13), New Cross (SE14), Peckham and Nunhead (SE15), Rotherhithe and South Bermondsey (SE16), and the whole of the sprawling SE1 postcode.

However, I have been to each of the 120 postcodes that make up the ‘London postal area’ at least once (a milestone I reached in September 2014), and I have also got to know, extremely well, almost the whole of south east London, most of east London (which I generally access via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, the Regent’s Canal and the Limehouse Cut), much of south west London, the whole of the City and the West End, and the central components of the N, NW and W postcodes, and I feel that I now “know” the city — and, intellectually, “own” it — in a way that was unimaginable to me seven years ago, and that its streets and its shape and much of its history is now embedded in me like an organic GPS system.

As I’ve cycled around for the last seven years, I’ve seen huge changes — primarily via the epidemic of tall tower blocks approved by Boris Johnson during his eight dreadful years as London’s Mayor — although there is no sign of the contagion being controlled under his replacement, Sadiq Khan.

Most of London’s 32 boroughs now have inappropriate collections of tall residential towers, while overweening skyscrapers continue to rise up in the City and Canary Wharf. In addition, Kings Cross has been re-developed with what the architectural critic Oliver Wainwright has called “dictator chic and pie-in-the-sky penthouses”, poor Stratford became a developers’ free-for-all after it was chosen to host the 2012 Olympics, and some areas, like Nine Elms in Vauxhall, stretching all the way to the bleak reimagining of Battersea Power Station, and now Greenwich peninsula, are facing wholesale reinvention as soulless futuristic cities.

Another particular concern of mine is the cynical destruction of council estates for new housing developments, a policy that began under Tony Blair, and that has aggressively continued under the Tories, as cash-strapped councils — victims of the Tories’ mania for austerity policies designed to wither the state — have been entering into unholy alliances with private developers, or with housing associations that have, fundamentally, also been encouraged to become private developers, with their traditional social housing role relegated to a secondary position.

From Hackney and Poplar to West Hendon, in Southwark, Lambeth, Lewisham and Greenwich, and at the giant Thamesmead estate on the south eastern edge of the capital, I have been chronicling the sad demise of social housing as the visionary force for social good that it was from the 1860s, when the first housing associations began, to 1979, when Margaret Thatcher first took office, and set about selling off council homes, and prohibiting councils from building any new homes or replacements for those that were sold.

Not all is desolation and greed, however. I also have an eye out for lovely surviving buildings (like Charles Holden’s great tube stations of the 20s and 30s, for example), for lively areas off the beaten path, hidden corners, secret places and remnants of glorious dereliction, as well as London’s wealth of parks and commons (many of the latter only saved through inspiring protest movements in the late 19th century), its wonderful trees, its cemeteries, the perennially magnificent River Thames, and the capital’s canals and tributary rivers, as well as more transient joys— the sun, the rain, the changing seasons. And I also devote some time to following significant protest movements when they arise, like the occupations undertaken in the last year by Extinction Rebellion. 

I’m also inching closer towards expanding ‘The State of London’ beyond social media — getting a website up and running, publishing a book, and getting some exhibitions organised in some of my favourite parts of the city. If you can help with any of this, do please get in touch, but in the meantime, thanks for your interest in this project. As one of the page’s followers, Julian Grand, recently stated, “This work is a powerful testament to the quiet violence of spatial and social transformation … I find a lot of resonance in your images and accounts of people and places under pressure. It is hard to find hope amid all the breathtaking and destructive banality of greed, but there are little glimmers of resilience, imagination, grace in this story too. Many thanks and keep on truckin!”

* * * * *

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 a Frail and Confused Julian Assange Appears in Court, It’s Time For the UK to Stop His Proposed Extradition to the US

A WikiLeaks image calling for Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to the US from the UK to be stopped, and for Assange to be freed.


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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.

On Monday, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, looked frail and, at times, appeared confused as his lawyers sought a delay to a hearing regarding his proposed extradition to the US to face dubious — and potentially punitive — espionage charges relating to WikiLeaks’ work as a publisher of classified US government information; in particular, “Collateral Murder,” a “classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff,” war logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars, a vast number of US diplomatic cables from around the world, and, in 2011, classified military files relating to Guantánamo, on which I worked as media partner, along with the Washington Post, McClatchy, the Daily Telegraph and others.

Assange has been imprisoned in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison in south east London since April, when the government of Ecuador, in whose embassy he had been living for nearly seven years, revoked the political asylum granted to him by the country’s former president, the democratic socialist Rafael Correa, who called his replacement, the right-winger Lenin Moreno, “[t]he greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” for his betrayal of Assange, declaring, “Moreno is a corrupt man, but what he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget.”

In May, a British court sought to justify Assange’s imprisonment with a 50-week sentence for having broken his bail conditions back in 2012, when he first sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, fearing that he would be extradited to Sweden to face unsubstantiated sexual assault allegations, and would then be handed over to the US.

In September, at a hearing regarding the end of his sentence for breaching his bail conditions, District Judge Vanessa Baraltser noted that, as the BBC described it, “his lawyer had declined to make an application for bail on his behalf,” with the judge explaining that this was “perhaps not surprising in light of your history of absconding in these proceedings,” and adding, “In my view I have substantial grounds for believing if I release you, you will abscond again.”

It was at this point that some of Assange’s supporters claimed that he was being imprisoned “indefinitely,” despite the end of his prison sentence, but in fact, as Judge Baraltser also explained, at the end of the 50-week sentence Assange’s remand status changed from that of “a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.”

The extradition request from the US, under the terms of the much-criticised 2003 US-UK Extradition Treaty, was revealed on June 13, when the home secretary, Sajid Javid, told the ‘Today’ programme on BBC Radio 4, “There’s an extradition request from the US that is before the courts tomorrow but yesterday I signed the extradition order and certified it and that will be going in front of the courts tomorrow.” He added, “It is a decision ultimately for the courts, but there is a very important part of it for the home secretary and I want to see justice done at all times and we’ve got a legitimate extradition request, so I’ve signed it, but the final decision is now with the courts.”

A troubling hearing

The hearing on Monday was a case management hearing as part of the extradition process, with another scheduled to take place on December 19, prior to a full extradition hearing on February 25, 2020, but the whole process may well drag on for several years. In previous cases — those of Babar Ahmed and Syed Talha Ahsan, for example, accused of running a pro-jihadi website — legal challenges to their proposed extradition involved them being held in UK custody for eight years and six years respectively before their eventual extradition to the US.

One question raised by Monday’s hearing is whether Assange is robust enough to survive a long legal challenge. The Independent noted that he “mumbled, paused and stuttered as he confirmed his name and date of birth,” and the Guardian explained that, when the judge asked him if he had understood events in court, he said, “Not really. I can’t think properly.” At this point, according to the Independent, he “appeared to fight back tears,” although he subsequently rallied sufficiently to state, “I don’t understand how this is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t access my writings” — a reference to how, in Belmarsh, he has only just been given limited access to a computer. “It’s very difficult where I am to do anything but these people have unlimited resources,” he added.

When it comes to his case, however, it remains abundantly clear that the US has entered profoundly dangerous territory regarding free speech and press freedoms, and, most crucially for Assange, that the UK government should not be going along with it.

Moves to prosecute Assange were made under President Obama, but it was rightly concluded that it was not possible to prosecute him without damaging the right of the media, in countries that claim to respect democracy and the rule of law, to publish classified material that they regard as being in the public interest.

Donald Trump, however, has no such compunctions. Persistently hostile towards media he doesn’t like, which he regularly damns as “fake news,” Trump, on one occasion, asked former FBI director James Comey if he could put journalists he didn’t like in jail. Overall, his approach to the media ought to alert everyone paying attention to the fact that, if he can, he will suppress any media outlet he regards as dissenting from his version of the truth as ruthlessly as any totalitarian regime.

I have my doubts that a case against Assange in the US would be successful, but at this point the main focus of attention for everyone who genuinely cares about free speech and press freedoms must be to oppose Assange’s extradition, and to target Sajid Javid and the British government for their dangerous and unacceptable commitment to the proposed prosecution of a publisher.

This is particularly important after revelations about Monday’s hearing, made by the former British diplomat Craig Murray, who noted that the British government’s lawyers were actually taking instruction directly from the “five representatives of the US government present (initially three, and two more arrived in the course of the hearing),” who were “seated at desks behind the lawyers in court.” At one point, James Lewis QC, for the government, told the judge he was “taking instructions from those behind.” As Murray stressed, “it was not the UK Attorney-General’s office who were being consulted but the US Embassy.”

In light of this complete lack of independence on the part of the British government, which, to be blunt, shouldn’t be taking instructions from the US regarding an extradition request, when the UK’s role ought to be strictly procedural, it was also unsurprising that Assange’s lawyers made no headway with their call for more time to prepare their evidence, and also for consideration to be given to their argument that “political offences” are “specifically excluded from the extradition treaty,” as Murray accurately described it, adding that “[t]here should, they argued, therefore be a preliminary hearing to determine whether the extradition treaty applied at all.”

This, clearly, wasn’t a fair hearing; it was, instead, one dictated by the US, in which not only British government officials, but also the judge were complicit.

WikiLeaks is a publisher; this is not espionage

Nevertheless, once the distractions regarding Julian Assange’s alleged character and allegedly intentions are stripped away — which have been deliberately used by his opponents to cloud the most important issues involved — the prevailing truth is that WikiLeaks is a genuine media outlet, equivalent to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and any other established newspaper readers care to think of, and its freedom to publish must be robustly and rigorously defended.

Assange was never the leaker of classified material — that crucial role fell to Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced and imprisoned as a result, before having her sentence commuted by President Obama, and then, shockingly, being imprisoned again, earlier this year, for refusing to cooperate with a Grand Jury investigation into Assange, for which she is now also being fined, on what appears to be a completely arbitrary basis, at a rate of $1,000 a day.

And if we’re looking for a historical analogy, the best example for what Assange has done through WikiLeaks is that of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Vietnam-era “Pentagon Papers” to the Washington Post. In the 21st century example for which the Trump administration seeks to punish Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning is Daniel Ellsberg, and WikiLeaks is the Washington Post.

In challenging the British government, it is also surely worthwhile for Assange’s defenders to look at what has happened with other proposed extraditions that were subsequently dropped — of Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love, for example, both hackers with Asperger’s Syndrome, whose extraditions were turned down because of fears about them killing themselves.

What no one seems to want to talk about is the extent to which Julian Assange may also share similarities with Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love. In the Independent, in 2011, with reference to his early forays into hacking in Australia, he stated, “when I became well known, people would enjoy pointing out that I had Asperger’s or else that I was dangling somewhere on the autistic spectrum.” Dismissing it as joke, he added, “I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, so let’s just say I am — all hackers are, and I would argue all men are a little bit autistic,” but it seems to me that his obsessive behavior is indeed a reflection of someone with Asperger’s — and, as we’re seeing from his weak and confused state on Monday, he, like Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love, may well also not to be able to cope with sustained solitary confinement in a US prison.

The Australian comic writer Kathy Lette has no doubt about Assange’s state of mind. She met him when he stayed at her house — via her husband, a human rights lawyer — and on Tuesday, on Australian TV, she said, “Julian I got to know very well. And I know he’s a controversial character, but I actually think he’s on the autistic spectrum, undiagnosed. My son’s autistic, so I can spot the signs.”

I’m sure Assange’s lawyers are looking at all avenues to prevent his extradition, and will be aware of whether or not this is a fruitful route to pursue, but I hope so, as I fear that, otherwise, his notoriety is as damaging to the mitigating factors regarding his mental health as it is to his role as a controversial publisher. To reiterate, however, the bottom line remains that, if for no other reason, anyone who cares about press freedoms and freedom of speech must stand up and be counted, and oppose the intended extradition of Assange to the US.

The security of all genuine, politically serious journalists depends on it.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

My New Article for Novara Media: The Achilles Street Estate in New Cross Needs Refurbishment Not A Ballot for Demolition

Posters on the Achilles Street estate in New Cross urging residents to vote no in the ballot regarding the proposed demolition of their homes by Lewisham Council (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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Many thanks to Novara Media for publishing my article Refurbishment Is the Dirty Word We Should Be Using, Just Look at the Achilles Street Estate, about the contentious — and, to date, little-discussed — system of ballots for council estates facing destruction, with specific reference to the ballot that has just started on the Achilles Street estate in New Cross and that runs through to November 11. 

I hope you have time to read it, and that you’ll share it if you find it informative.

Ballots preceding any proposed estate demolition were introduced by Jeremy Corbyn, as the Labour Party leader, two years ago, and were made part of GLA policy by London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, last summer. Corbyn’s intention was clearly to allow residents the opportunity to challenge otherwise high-handed decisions taken by councils with only the most cursory nods to ‘consultation.’

In reality, however, because the ballots take place at the very start of the process, councils are free to make all manner of grand-sounding promises that they won’t necessarily be able to keep, and are also able to fund expensive campaigns, involving consultations, door-knocking and the production of lavish booklets laying out their promises, so that the entire process is a distinctly un-level playing field, with residents opposed to the plans having little or no resources of their own, with no funding provided for them, and with no objective outside advice provided by the council.

Achilles Street contains 87 homes, and associated shops and businesses, and the council in question — Lewisham Council — wants to replace them with around 450 new properties, of which half (225) will be for private sale. As noted above, the council is making all kinds of lavish promises to residents about the deals they will get in the new development, but crucially none of these promises are legally binding. 

As I explained when I posted a link to the article on Facebook last night, “The ballot also excludes the shops and businesses on New Cross Road, and both non-resident landlords and their tenants, and it also doesn’t include an option for the refurbishment of the estate, even though that is what many residents would like. In addition, it’s important also to consider that demolition — as opposed to refurbishment — is environmentally ruinous, something that councils like Lewisham, which declared a climate emergency earlier this year, shouldn’t even be contemplating.”

I added, “The council insists that there is no money for refurbishment, and they have a point to the extent that neither central government nor the GLA has made any funding available for the refurbishment of estates rather than their demolition. This is an oversight that urgently needs addressing, but, looked at another way, residents have paid millions in rent to the council, which has spent very little in return on repairs and maintenance, and is now using its neglect of the estate as a reason for its destruction, even though it is their own fault.”

I’m hoping that my article will contribute to a debate on the ballot system, and will also help to exert pressure for necessary changes in policy — finding ways to fund refurbishment rather than demolition and ‘regeneration’, which Architects for Social Housing have been advocating for many years, and which architects finally seem to be waking up, at least nominally, as part of the current trend for environmental awakening, and, if ballots are to go ahead, for steps to be taken to make them more balanced. 

Ballot votes to date

Since the ballots were introduced, there have been six votes, all of which have ended up with residents voting for regeneration, but all have, in general, received very little media scrutiny. To the best of my knowledge, only Dave Hill, formerly of the Guardian, has kept track of them all on the OnLondon website — and they are also listed on the GLA’s website. As with Achilles Street, none of them involved an option for refurbishment.

The first decision, announced last November, involved Westhorpe Gardens and Mills Grove Estate in Hendon, where the council is Barnet, but the landlord is the housing association Metropolitan Thames Valley. There are 102 homes on the estate, with proposals for 250 new homes, including replacement homes for all existing tenants and leaseholders. As Metropolitan explained, “66% of residents voted, with 75% voting in favour.” I was also interested to discover that not a single property on the estate is owned by a leaseholder, which no doubt made it an attractive option for re-development.

The local newspaper reported that the main dissent came from neighbours, who complained that “the new buildings would be too tall and warned of the potential for traffic problems.” The newspaper further pointed out that “the current blocks of flats on the estate are only three storeys high, and most of the surrounding buildings are low-rise, suburban homes.”

Emily Benedek, a neighbour, told the council’s planning committee: “In my opinion, granting permission for seven-storey blocks will open a Pandora’s Box that will provide justification for other residential blocks, with a significant increase in height, regardless of their location. The size and siting of the proposed buildings would result in a loss of privacy, loss of outlook and have an overbearing impact on neighbouring occupiers. We are not opposed to redevelopment on the site per se, but the scale, height, mass, bulk and over-intensive use of the site is inappropriate.”

In December, it was announced that residents of Ealing Council’s 264-home High Lane estate in Hanwell had voted for ’regeneration’, with 57% of residents taking part, and 90% of those voting yes to the demolition of their homes, which strikes me as a shockingly low turnout, and certainly not sufficient to justify the council’s claim that residents had “overwhelmingly backed council plans to rebuild their neighbourhood.”

I was also interested to note that negotiations regarding the compulsory purchase of leaseholders’ homes are currently ongoing. Sawyer Fielding, Compulsory Purchase Surveyors, note on their website that the flats on the estate were built using a “large concrete panel system in the 1970s”, and that, as a result, “the value of many properties on the estate [is] restricted”, with values that “are lower than more traditionally built properties in the area.”

They add, “Unfortunately for our clients, this means finding alternative suitable accommodation will prove to be more difficult, due to the affordability gap. The importance of our being able to negotiate well to protect homeowners is therefore particularly important. Some of the settlements we’ve heard about have been worryingly low and below our opinions of Market Value. We are now representing several leaseholders on the Estate and would be happy to represent more.”

In February, the residents of Brookhill Close, a small estate in Greenwich, run by Hyde Housing Association, also voted in favour of re-development. The Housing Association Magazine noted that, “Of the 99 eligible voters, 87% voted, with 86% in favour of regeneration.” As the magazine also explained, “Hyde is planning to demolish 80 homes, replacing them with 272 new flats and houses, as well as improving the layout of the estate. There will be 76 social rented homes for existing residents and London Affordable Rent homes for new tenants. There will also be 64 homes for shared ownership and a further 132 for private sale, which will help fund regeneration.”

The results of two more ballots, at Geoffrey Close, York Close and Canterbury Close, on Lilford Road in Lambeth, and at Pike Close in Bromley, were announced in December 2018, and in April this year. Both are run by the housing association Riverside. 

In Lambeth, on a turnout of 87%, 67% of voters said they supported Riverside’s proposals for the re-development of 135 homes. I pass these blocks on my bike regularly, and I cannot understand any practical rationale for their destruction. They are solid, post-war blocks, and they appear also to have been adequately maintained, but Riverside claim that they have “become increasingly expensive to maintain”, although it strikes me that a more compelling reason may be that the proposed replacement “will include around 260 homes for sale.”

In Bromley, where there are 92 homes (all rented), the Bromley Times noted that there was a “turnout of just under 90 per cent with 82pc voting in favour of Riverside’s proposals” — for a new development of 218 homes “with a target of 50pc classed as affordable.”

All is well, you might think, but in fact I have been contacted by a tenant with a long history of dealing with Riverside, who has told me that they think that residents “were the victims of confusing or wrong information beforehand”, and that. on both estates, “some of those who balloted ‘yes’ are now beginning to realise that all was not as it was presented beforehand.”

In May the last of the six ballots took place at Douglas Bader Park estate in Colindale, where the council is Brent, and the landlord is the Home Group, who explain on their website how the estate comprises mass-produced “‘Wimpey No-Fines’ constructions built by Pellings Property in the 1970s”, which, they claim, are “severely outdated”, and involve “poor stock condition.” Turnout was “over 90%, with over 75% voting in favour of the proposals” to provide “over 650 new homes”, to replace the estate’s 271 existing homes.

Time will tell if Lewisham Council’s plans for Achilles Street are also successful, but what a review of the other ballots reveals to me is that what they all have is common is they are all relatively small estates, making resident management easier, and they all —predictably — involve a noticeable increase in the density of homes in the proposed new developments, which will not necessarily make life any better for residents, as well as containing ample provision for private homes for sale, which seems, in every case, to be the driver of re-development rather than primary concern for the existing residents.

What also seems clear, sometimes reading between the lines, is that not all the promises made to residents will necessarily come true, just as campaigners are warning with Achilles Street, where residents at least still have the opportunity to say no to the council’s plans.

* * * * *

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.

Reprieve and MPs Dan Jarvis and David Davis Challenge Government’s Refusal to Launch Official Inquiry Into British Complicity in Torture

Protestor – and US veteran – Bob Meddaugh with a powerful universal message at a protest vigil in Des Moines, Iowa, in December 2010 (Photo: Justin Norman).


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 and the government of Boris Johnson. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Last week, largely lost in the Brexit fog that engulfs almost all other political activity in the UK these days, the NGO Reprieve, and two principled MPs — Labour’s Dan Jarvis and the Conservative David Davis — launched a legal challenge against the government in connection with a recent ministerial decision to “abandon a promise to hold a judge-led inquiry into torture and rendition involving British intelligence agencies after 9/11,” as the Guardian described it.

Jarvis, Davis and Reprieve have submitted an application for a judicial review in the High Court as the latest step in a decade-long struggle to secure transparency about the UK’s involvement in the Bush administration’s CIA-led program of rendition and torture.

Back in July 2010, shortly after taking office in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, David Cameron — pushed by the foreign secretary William Hague — announced a judge-led inquiry, as I reported here, telling the House of Commons that he had asked Sir Peter Gibson, a retired judge, to “look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees held by other countries that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11,” and noting that, although there was no evidence that any British officer was “directly engaged in torture,” there were “questions over the degree to which British officers were working with foreign security services who were treating detainees in ways they should not have done.”

As the Guardian reminded us last week, he also told the House of Commons, “The longer these questions remain unanswered, the bigger the stain on our reputation as a country that believes in freedom, fairness and human rights grows.”

A judge-led inquiry was clearly necessary, because, since the first British prisoners were released from Guantánamo in 2004 and 2005, there had been persistent and disturbing claims that the British intelligence services had been complicit in their mistreatment, claims that were amplified from 2008-09, as Reprieve and the solicitors Leigh Day sought to expose the extent of British collusion in the mistreatment of the British resident Binyam Mohamed (finally released from Guantánamo in February 2009), who had been rendered by the US to Morocco, with specific knowledge that he would be tortured.

The announcement of the Gibson inquiry was almost immediately overshadowed by the public release of some truly damning government documents — as part of a civil case for damages brought by a number of former prisoners — including, as I described it at the time, revelations that Tony Blair’s government “was happy for British nationals and residents seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan to be rendered to Guantánamo by the Bush administration, and how, in one case — that of Martin Mubanga, seized in Zambia — Tony Blair’s office intervened to prevent attempts by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to have him returned to the UK, leading to his imprisonment in Guantánamo for two years and nine months.”

To stop the further release of a tsunami of embarrassing documents, Cameron’s government soon reached a financial settlement with the former prisoners (as well as with Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was not finally released until October 2015), and, with the prisoners effectively silenced, the intelligence services and the government clearly thought that they would be able to get away with a cursory inquiry. However, a number of NGOs and lawyers’ groups disagreed, first proposing some crucial guidelines for the inquiry, in September 2010, and then, in July 2011, when it became apparent that rigorousness and transparency were not in the inquiry’s remit, boycotting it and describing it as a whitewash.

As I explained in an article in November 2014, “Shorn of NGO involvement — and any credibility — Gibson’s inquiry limped on until January 2012, when it was cut short amid what the Guardian described as ‘dramatic, first-hand evidence of MI6 involvement in another rendition, that of two prominent Libyan dissidents, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi,’” who were kidnapped and rendered to the custody of Col. Gaddafi. Belhaj, at the time, was suing the British government, eventually (in May 2018) securing the apology that he and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, who was pregnant when she was rendered with her husband, had long been seeking, while al-Saadi and his family accepted a settlement of £2.23m from the British government in December 2012.

As I also explained, “Gibson managed to issue an interim report in December 2013, after examining around 20,000 confidential documents,” and, as the Guardian described it, he “questioned whether the UK had ‘a deliberate or agreed policy’ of turning a blind eye to the mistreatment of prisoners, and whether the two intelligence agencies were willing to ‘condone, encourage or take advantage of rendition operations’ mounted by others.”

At the same time that Gibson delivered his interim report, it was announced that the full inquiry would be handed over to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), and my article in November 2014 dealt primarily with a second boycott by NGOs — this time of the ISC’s inquiry. In a letter to the ISC, the NGOs stated, “We remain unpersuaded that the decision to cut short the work of the flawed Gibson inquiry and to pass the baton on to the ISC is an adequate substitute for the establishment of an independent judicial inquiry.”

In fact, however, under the diligent chairmanship of the Conservative MP and former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, an evident opponent of torture, the ISC report, Detainee Mistreatment and Rendition: 2001–2010, which was published in June 2018, was refreshingly robust (also see the accompanying report, Detainee Mistreatment and Rendition: Current Issues, and the government’s response).

In an article I wrote following the report’s publication, I commended Grieve for his “determination to go beyond previous whitewashes,” but added that “what is clearly needed now is an official judge-led inquiry which will leave no stone unturned — and no senior ex-officials (up to and including Tony Blair and Jack Straw) unquestioned.” Grieve himself noted that the committee was “denied access to key intelligence individuals by the prime minister” (at the time, Theresa May) and so “reluctantly decided to bring the inquiry to a premature end,” very evidently indicating that a full judge-led inquiry is still needed.

Reflecting on what the ISC report had unearthed, the Guardian noted last week that the ISC found that “British intelligence agencies were involved in dozens of episodes of torture and rendition, mainly in partnership with the US” and that “the UK planned, agreed to or financed 31 rendition operations, British intelligence officers consented to or witnessed the use of torture on 15 occasions, and on 232 occasions agencies supplied questions to be put to detainees whom they knew or suspected were being mistreated.”

After Theresa May issued a public apology to Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar, ministers “invited submissions on what do next,” as the Guardian described it, “with a judge-led inquiry remaining an option, until it was suddenly ruled out by David Lidington, May’s de facto deputy, in one of the last acts of May’s premiership.”

It is that decision that Dan Jarvis, David Davis and Reprieve are seeking to overturn, and, as the Guardian added, “those involved in the case suggest that a lacklustre initial legal defence from the government suggests ministers may not mind being defeated in court.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Jarvis, a former officer in the Paratroop regiment, gave his reasons for seeking the judicial review, starting that it was because he wanted the UK to show that “we respect international law, that we are honest and learn from our mistakes, that we are better than this.”

As the Guardian described it, “Jarvis argued that current events in Syria — [where] some Isis prisoners have been taken by the US from Syria to Iraq, while the fate of others remains uncertain as Turkey invades north-east Syria — highlighted the need to act with legitimacy.” As he put it, “Our responses to terrorism must be clear and must be legal.”

Jarvis served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he told the Guardian that, “in his experience soldiers behaved within the law, but there was evidence other agencies may have behaved differently.” As he explained, “Our standing in the world is not as it should be. Some people don’t care about that, but I do.”

David Davis didn’t comment, but it is good to see his return to human rights, after his ill-advised interlude as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (from July 2016 to July 2018). Prior to that — and now, it seems, again — he was prominent as the conscience of the Tory Party regarding the “war on terror,” and also played a key role in securing the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer as a member the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, visiting the US in April 2015 to meet members of Congress and to call for his release — with Jeremy Corbyn (before he became the leader of the Labour Party), his fellow Tory MP Andrew Mitchell and Labour’s Andy Slaughter.

In conclusion, I can only hope that the application for a judicial review is successful, and that the government is — eventually — compelled to conduct a full judge-led inquiry into the UK’s complicity in torture, because at present, sadly, when comparing the UK with the US, the former has an accountability deficit.

Whilst it is true that, in the US as in the UK, no senior figures have been held accountable for the horrendous rendition and torture program that followed the 9/11 attacks, the US’s system of check and balances at least led to the creation of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report into the CIA’s torture program, which took five years and cost $40m, and while it is shameful that the full report hasn’t been made publicly available, the 500-page executive summary, released in December 2014, went far further than the UK government, obsessed with secrecy, has in exposing how far we all strayed from the values we claim to uphold in the aftermath of 9/11.

* * * * *

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 on Portland’s KBOO FM with Linda Olson-Osterlund

A composite image of KBOO FM’s logo, and the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the day it opened.


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.

 

The prison at Guantánamo Bay —- and the plight of the 40 men still held there — has, in general, fallen so far off America’s radar that it is unsurprising that many in the US think that it has closed down.

So little interest is there in Guantánamo that the days when I was regularly asked to discuss it on US radio stations are, sadly, long gone, and so I was delighted last week to be asked to discuss it with Linda Olsen-Osterlund, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. 

The one-hour show is here as an MP3, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful.

Linda and I have spoken many times before — since 2008, I was shocked to learn on going through my archives — and it’s always a pleasure to talk to her. 

On Wednesday, on the Radiozine program that runs from 9-10am on weekdays, I brought Linda and her listeners up to date on Guantánamo, pointing out, in particular, how scandalous it is that the men still held there are, fundamentally, the personal prisoners of Donald Trump, and, to a lesser extent, the US Congress, unable to be freed unless Trump desires it — which, of course, he doesn’t, as he has persistently made clear.

In the hope of illuminating quite how disgraceful this situation is, I ran through the categories of the 40 men still held — including the nine men facing, or having faced a broken trial system, the military commissions, that is incapable of delivering injustice; and the five men approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, but still held because no legal mechanism exists to compel their release, and also because, in any case, Trump has shut down the office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, established under Obama, which not only arranged prisoner releases and re-settlements, but also — for those interested in America’s national security — kept tabs on former prisoners to make sure there was no possibility of them engaging in hostilities against the US.

The other 26 men are the “forever prisoners,” men deliberately held without charge or trial, but given reviews, under Obama, called the Periodic Review Boards (PRBs), a parole-type process whereby the prisoners, in order to secure a recommendation for release, were required to show contrition for their actions and affiliations they were accused of (regardless of whether or not those claims were accurate), and to establish viable plans for a peaceful and constructive post-Guantánamo life. 

Under Obama, 64 men had their cases reviewed, and 38 were recommended for release, with all but two of these men freed before he left office. Under Trump, however, although the PRB process continues, it has become a zombie process, with absolutely no one recommended for release since Trump took office, so that, as I explained in a recent article, No Escape from Guantánamo: Former Child Prisoner Boycotts Broken Review Process, Calls It “Hopeless”, the prisoners are all now boycotting their PRBs, having rightly concluded that they have become meaningless.

Amongst other topics, Linda and I also discussed her valid contention that the treatment of the men at Guantánamo, which the US government has largely got away with for nearly 18 years, has led directly to a situation whereby Donald Trump thinks it is acceptable to hold asylum seekers, including children, in brutal and lawless conditions on the Mexican border — another reason, if any more were needed, why Guantánamo must be closed once and for all.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), 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.

Extinction Rebellion Challenges and Defies Outrageous London-Wide Ban on Public Assemblies

Extinction Rebellion supporters defy the Metropolitan Police’s outrageous London-wide ban on XR protests, congregating in significant numbers in Trafalgar Square, October 16, 2019 (Photo: Ben Gillespie).


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

 

On Monday evening, in response to the start of the second week of actions in London by the environmental campaigning group Extinction Rebellion, as part of their International Rebellion in at least 60 cities worldwide, the Metropolitan Police issued an unprecedented order, under Section 14 of the 1986 Public Order Act, which allows them to impose restrictions on any “public assembly” (an assembly of two or more people in a public place), if they claim that it poses “serious disruption to the life of the community.”

The order on Monday night stated that “any assembly linked to the Extinction Rebellion ‘Autumn Uprising’ … must now cease their protests within London (MPS and City of London Police Areas)” by 9pm, and even before it was issued police began clearing protestors out of their camp in Trafalgar Square.

Lawyers, civil liberties groups and some MPs immediately responded with understandable outrage. Jolyon Maugham QC tweeted, “We believe the section 14 Order is invalid — that it amounts to a huge overreach of the statutory power — and likely reflects the enormous political pressure the Met is under”, adding, “It exposes the Met to all sorts of risks — of legal challenges to validity, of civil claims for wrongful arrest with aggravated damages and so on — merely because this Government cannot tolerate peaceful protest.”

Professor David Mead, who specialises in UK Human Rights Law at the University of East Anglia, told the Metro that he thought the ban “could contradict both European and British law.” He said, “I think there is a very good chance that a court would conclude that the Met’s decision to impose a condition bringing to an end the XR protests in London would be unlawful. If it were seen as one bringing to an end all XR protests, then I think it would be unlawful as European human rights law, and our own Human Rights Act, require such decisions to be proportionate. That means narrowly tailored to address an identifiable problem.”

He also said, “There are I think other legal issues that the Met would have to overcome, largely relating to the certainty of the target assembly. Human rights law requires that where restrictions are imposed, then protesters are entitled to know with sufficient certainty if they are affected. I am not sure that’s the case here. While it might (but quite possibly not) be lawful to bring this one specific assembly to an end by imposing a condition, it cannot lawfully be used to impose an effective ban on all assemblies in London, which on one reading the notice seeks to.”

In addition, the Metro spoke to Dr Michelle Farrell, a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool, who reinforced Professor Mead’s comments, stating that the police action “almost certainly fails to meet the legal requirements of necessity and proportionality, obligations that the police must comply with under the Human Rights Act and European Convention on Human Rights.” She added, “The police have failed to establish a legitimate aim for imposing this section 14 order; getting ‘London moving again’ does not cut the mustard legally speaking. The police have not shown in any credible way how the XR Autumn Uprising as a whole raises a general risk of serious public disorder or serious disruption to the life of the community, and, moreover, they have not shown why this general ban is necessary rather than more restrictive targeted measures.”

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year old Swedish campaigner who inspired the global climate strike movement, whose participants now number in their millions, also weighed in, tweeting, “If standing up against the climate and ecological breakdown and for humanity is against the rules then the rules must be broken.”

For Liberty, advocacy and policy manager Gracie Bradley stated, “Banning Extinction Rebellion from protesting in London is a grossly disproportionate move by the Met, and an assault on the right to protest. Their heavy-handed use of this power sets a dangerous precedent. Freedom of expression and assembly are fundamental rights, protected by domestic and international law. The courts have made clear that a protest is not unlawful just because it’s disruptive.”

For Amnesty International UK, Allan Hogarth, Head of Advocacy and Programmes, stated, “Imposing a blanket ban on Extinction Rebellion protests is an unlawful restriction on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. Under UK and international human rights law, the Government has an obligation to facilitate the exercise of these rights. The majority of those protesting have been doing so peacefully, removing and prosecuting activists for engaging in non-violent direct action to raise their voice is deeply worrying.”

There was also widespread condemnation from Green MPs, and from some Labour MPs. Green Party MP Caroline Lucas criticised the ban as a “huge over-reach of police power”, adding, “there’s a right to peaceful protest in this country. The Climate Emergency needs us all to make our voices heard. I stand in solidarity with the rebels for life.”

Diane Abbott, Labour’s shadow home secretary, said that the order was “wrong and completely contrary to Britain’s long-held traditions of policing by consent, freedom of speech, and the right to protest”, and shadow treasury secretary Clive Lewis tweeted, “The action by police overnight is a huge overreach of statutory power — we must protect our right to protest with everything we have. Huge solidarity with the rebels for life.”

Even London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, “issued a statement that appeared to distance himself from the Met’s decision to ban further protests”, as the Guardian described it. Khan said, “I am seeking further information from senior officers about the operational decision to impose a section 14 order on the Extinction Rebellion Autumn Uprising – including at Trafalgar Square – and why this was necessary. I believe the right to peaceful and lawful protest must always be upheld.”

The police’s overreach

Reflecting on this unprecedented move by the Metropolitan Police, it seems to me that they took the only course of action they could envisage that would allow them to non-violently shut down the protests, with senior officers evidently having decided that, after eight days, they had had enough of policing a protest movement that had set up camp in Trafalgar Square and on the edges of St. James’s Park, disrupting “business as usual”, and that had also engaged in freewheeling marches and gatherings up and down Whitehall and in Parliament Square.

Last week, the police’s response, after the first few days of protests, was to shut down all but the Trafalgar Square encampment, reclaiming Whitehall and Parliament Square, and driving protestors to seek another open space to accommodate the many thousands of people now excluded from central London, That space was Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Lambeth, but yesterday that camp too was shut down by police, who demanded that everyone pack up and leave, or face arrest, even though there was clearly nothing going on in Vauxhall that constituted anything resembling “serious disruption to the life of the community.”

Unfortunately, while everyone concerned must be grateful that, after a week of protests, the Metropolitan Police, and, presumably, the Home Office, worked out that using disproportionate force on resolutely non-violent protestors crossed a line that they were not prepared to cross — unlike, for example, in France and Belgium, to name just two examples, where the police have been pepper-spraying non-violent protestors and using water cannons on them — the blanket ban on all XR protest in London is, without a doubt, a troubling and unprecedented infringement of civil liberties.

Moreover, if it is not successfully challenged legally, it will set a precedent that can be used again on any protest movement that the authorities decide is causing them too much trouble, fundamentally gutting the principle that, in a democracy, we have the right to protest, which must be tolerated unless it strays into violence.

This is not to say that every Extinction Rebellion protestor should be allowed to protest without being arrested, but it is crucial that the authorities recognise that there is a difference between, for example, waving a flag, and targetting a corporate office or a government department in an action that is intended to lead to arrest. Many of those involved in the movement are specifically seeking to cross lines that will lead to their arrest — the “arrestables” engaged in non-violent direct action against specific targets: at City Airport last week, in the City on Monday, and at the Department of Transport yesterday, for example.

The “arrestables”, in fact, are central to XR’s mission to overwhelm the system by obliging the authorities to arrest people in significant numbers, thereby forcing much more drastic action on the environment than would otherwise occur if everyone stayed at home and signed online petitions, or engaged in carefully proscribed protests that are essentially toothless.

But by crossing a line and declaring that any perceived Extinction Rebellion protest by two people or more is illegal anywhere in London, the authorities have strayed into dangerous and undemocratic territory, and their Section 14 order must not be allowed to stand.

Yesterday morning, the police tried to defend their actions. At the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee, the Met’s deputy commissioner, Sir Stephen House, “denied a suggestion by the Green member Sian Berry that the revised order was disproportionate”, as the Guardian explained.

“We are not saying, Extinction Rebellion you cannot protest in future”, House claimed, adding, “What we are saying is that, in relation to this demonstration, it must now cease, because it’s been going on for 10 days” — actually, eight — and, as the Guardian described his comments, the Met was “paying a heavy financial and operational price for policing the protests.”

XR challenges and defies the ban

This morning, lawyers for Extinction Rebellion filed an urgent application for a judicial review at the High Court, As the Guardian described it, Tobias Garnett, a human rights lawyer working with XR’s legal strategy team, said that they were challenging  the order because it is “an infringement of the right to protest, disproportionate, and beyond the powers given to police by the Public Order Act.”

“There’s a general consensus that this is unlawful overreach and that it risks criminalising anyone who seeks to protest about the climate and ecological emergency”, Garnett said, adding, “As we saw from Sadiq Khan … yesterday, there is a suggestion that a lot of people think the police have overstepped the mark here, and we hope the court will agree.”

The claimants on behalf of Extinction Rebellion include Baroness Jenny Jones and Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, Clive Lewis, the journalist George Monbiot, and Green MEP Ellie Chowns, who was arrested in Trafalgar Square on Monday evening. In a column for the Metro, Caroline Lucas made a point of noting that Home Secretary “Priti Patel has in the past laid claim to the mantel of the suffragettes, in the ‘fight for democratic freedom.’ She seems to have forgotten that the brave suffragettes resorted to radical tactics in the name of what was right. So have the Extinction Rebellion protesters.”

Via Extinction Rebellion’s media team, Garnett called the ban “a disproportionate and unprecedented curtailment of the right to free speech and free assembly”, and added, “We will call on the government and police to stop silencing protest and instead focus their efforts on telling the truth and acting now to deal with the greatest threat to our planet.”

As Extinction Rebellion proceeded to explain, “If the Met refuse to back down, the test of the legality of this move will come when High Court Judges are tasked with weighing whether the decision to issue blanket suppression of fundamental human rights, over an entire city, was proportionate to the threat posed by peaceful protestors, and only what was strictly necessary. They may also consider whether the rebels’ actions were reasonable and proportionate, given the seriousness of the imminent threat posed to all life by the climate crisis.”

Also this afternoon, defying the ban, thousands of XR supporters gathered in Trafalgar Square, where there were a number of high-profile arrests, including the Green Party’s co-leader Jonathan Bartley and George Monbiot, who had already announced his intention to be arrested today, and had written an article for the Guardian eloquently explaining his reasons for doing so.

However, the sheer numbers of those converging on Trafalgar Square seemed to indicate that the police’s ban had backfired. As XR explained in a tweet, “After rousing speeches on Trafalgar Square maybe 2,500 people [are] now sitting in circles of 10, participating in XR’s democratic decision-making process (people’s assembly) to consider how to respond to govt. silence on Climate & Ecological Emergency in [the] face of attempt to silence us.”

And elsewhere the protests continued, with “arrestables”, of course, largely immune to the intent of the ban, because they are all prepared to be arrested anyway. Extinction Rebellion Youth (with support from Doctors for XR) targeted YouTube, blocking the entrance to the company’s headquarters, and “demonstrating against the platforming of climate denialist videos, which are hugely popular on the site”, as the journalist Xavier Greenwood explained.

Earlier, as XR tweeted, over 100 mothers and babies blockaded Google’s offices, “staging a mass feed-in”, and, in a similar vein to the youth protestors, complaining about the recent revelations about corporation’s donations to climate deniers, and in the early evening rebels converged on the London headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Also today, over a hundred celebrities issued an open letter in support of Extinction Rebellion, acknowledging, “We live high carbon lives and the industries that we are part of have huge carbon footprints”, but calling for “systemic change” of the “fossil-fuel economy” they are “stuck in.” Citing dire warnings about the climate crisis by the International Monetary Fund and Sir David Attenborough, the signatories, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Jude Law, Alison Steadman, Jeanette Winterston, David Byrne, Thom Yorke and Steve Coogan, stated:

Climate change is happening faster and more furiously than was predicted; millions of people are suffering, leaving their homes and arriving on our borders as refugees.

Alongside these people who are already paying the price for our fossil fuelled economy, there are millions of children — called to action by Greta Thunberg — who are begging us, the people with power and influence, to stand up and fight for their already devastated future.

We cannot ignore their call. Even if by answering them we put ourselves in your firing line.

The stories that you write calling us climate hypocrites will not silence us.

The media exists to tell the public the truth. Right now there has never been a more urgent need for you to educate yourselves on the CEE (Climate and Ecological Emergency) and to use your voices to reach new audiences with the truth.

We invite all people with platforms and profiles to join us and move beyond fear, to use your voices fearlessly to amplify the real story.

Thousands of ordinary people are risking their freedom by taking part in non-violent civil disobedience. We’ve been inspired by their courage to speak out and join them. We beg you to do the same.

* * * * *

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), 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.