Andy Worthington's Blog, page 20

Extinction Rebellion and the Undeniable Power of Non-Violent Revolutionary Change

Extinction Rebellion campaigners outside Downing Street on October 8, 2019 (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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As the environmental campaigning group Extinction Rebellion begins the second week of its International Rebellion, it is worth reflecting on how much they — and the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who initiated a rolling global climate strike by schoolchildren that, last month, saw millions of schoolchildren and supportive adults take to the streets in 185 countries around the world — have shifted the terms of the debate on climate change over the last twelve months.

As the Guardian explained in an editorial last week, “Ipsos Mori reports that its latest poll found that 78% of Britons believe the planet is ‘heading for disaster’, up from 59% in 2013.” The actions of Thunberg and XR amplifyied the messages of doom put forward by scientists — in particular, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark report, last October, in which, as the Guardian described it, “The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years [now just eleven] for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people”, adding added that “urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target”, which they called “affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the [2015] Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.” Since then, the doomsday message has been reinforced by the likes of Sir David Attenborough, via his hard-hitting BBC documentary, ‘Climate Change: The Facts’, and the combined weight of all these actions has led politicians to acknowledge the scale of the unprecedented man-made crisis faced by the whole of humanity.

Under Theresa May, the UK government declared a climate emergency and committed to a 2050 target for zero carbon emissions, and last month the Labour party conference took an important additional step, adopting 2030 as the intended zero carbon date.

Obviously, politicians’ commitment to tackling the crisis is largely cosmetic. The UK government was the first to declare a climate emergency, and yet they have done almost nothing to address the urgency of the emergency. As Greta Thunberg pointed out so eloquently to British MPs last April, when it comes to our elected politicians, our so-called leaders, “nothing is being done to halt – or even slow – climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises.”

London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has also declared a climate emergency, and yet is committed to pressing ahead with the Silvertown Tunnel river crossing. If it goes ahead, this will do nothing but increase traffic, which is, of course, a major contributor to the crisis, and in addition, across the capital, councils, who have also been rushing to declare climate emergencies, have shown no willingness to actually follow up with any meaningful actions.

In Lewisham and Hackney, for example, both of the Labour-controlled councils declared climate emergencies in the same week — or in Lewisham’s case, on the same day — that they cut down trees as part of housing development plans, when everything that is possible should be done to avoid cutting down trees, and councils, if they were serious about the climate emergencies they are so breezily declaring, would also recognize that the building industry, and the entire process of wholesale council estate demolitions and lucrative ‘regeneration’ schemes is also appallingly reckless, and needs to be brought to an immediate end.

“Make do and mend” needs to become the motto of the entire building sector — and, obviously, of so many other parts of our throwaway consumer society, such as the monstrosity that is the “fast fashion” industry — and traffic needs to be significantly curtailed, but, as Extinction Rebellion recognise, these are issues that follow on from a position we have not yet reached, but which XR’s most visionary supporters are striving to achieve — which is actually a revolutionary change in the way that the entire global capitalist system operates.

In the Guardian’s view, critics who deride the organisation fail to recognise that “a radical social movement pursuing a strategy of civil disobedience is not trying to be some kind of government-in-waiting. The job of a movement such as XR is to be well organised, innovative and eye-catching and keep the climate crisis looming large in the imagination of the public and politicians. On those criteria, it is succeeding.”

As the Guardian also described it, “The movement’s three demands in these October protests are that the government does more to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis; that it legally commits to net zero carbon emissions by 2025; and that a citizens’ assembly be convened to oversee the changes. In the Guardian’s opinion, “Zero emissions by 2025 is surely an unrealistic goal”, but, as the editors add, “So what? The aim is to provoke and chivvy politicians and businesses, in the hope that the previously inconceivable becomes the far horizon of the possible.” As for citizen’ assemblies, they note that this demand “has already been adopted by President Emmanuel Macron in France and deserves serious consideration”, because “XR claims, with justification, that the adversarial nature of parliamentary politics inhibits the radical risk-taking that the climate crisis requires.”

Roger Hallam and ‘Common Sense for the 21st Century’

However, for Roger Hallam, one of XR’s founders, the Guardian’s position remains, fundamentally, one of an outmoded belief in a “reformist” model of change, one involving “small incremental steps”, whereby advocates for the necessity of change “only tell the truth to the extent that [they] think people can cope with it and [they] only act on it to the extent that [they] think [they] can win (in a gradualist way).”

As Hallam points out in ‘Common Sense for the 21st Century’, his newly-published manifesto for urgent change, which I urge anyone interested in the environmental crisis to read, “the reformist political culture of both left and right in neoliberal society is now not fit for purpose. To put it bluntly, NGOs, political parties and movements which have brought us through the last thirty years of abject failure – a 60% rise in global CO2 emissions since 1990 – are now the biggest block to transformation.”

He adds, “They offer gradualist solutions which they claim will work. It is time to admit that this is false, and it is a lie. They therefore divert popular opinion and the public’s attention and energy away from the task at hand: radical collective action against the political regime which is planning our collective suicide.”

As he further explains, because “the world’s present political systems have facilitated a 60% increase in global emissions since the beginning of the crisis in 1990 and have no ability to stop a continued rise in CO2, let alone create the political will to massively reduce levels (40% in the next ten years according to the UN October 2018 report)”, “This leads us to the grave conclusion that the probability of organising a political revolution to remove the corrupt political class has a higher chance (if small/indeterminate) of succeeding than the chance that the political class will respond effectively to the climate crisis (zero chance, as evidenced by the last 30 years).” As he adds, “The penny has finally dropped – the corrupt system is going to kill us all unless we rise up.”

As a former organic farmer turned student of radical social movements, Hallam has learned from past failures and successes how a non-violent revolution needs to operate if it is to succeed, and it is in this context that XR’s “mass arrest” scenario developed.

The power of mass arrest

When this idea was first enacted last October, during XR’s occupation of five bridges in central London, there was widespread criticism, not just —predictably — from those on the political right, but also from those on the left, who derided the movement as consisting of a bunch of privileged, white, middle class, self-declared “rebels” who were colour-blind and class-blind, failing to recognise that there were substantial reasons why those who are not white, and working class people in general, might want to do all they can to avoid being arrested by a system that would punish them disproportionately.

Personally, I think that not spelling out from the beginning that there was no compunction to be an “arrestable”, and also not spelling out that there was a clear understanding, from white middle class activists, as to why many other people would not want to be arrested, was a major failure, although I also think that, as a result of actions over the last year, this lack of inclusivity should now be considered far less important than the reality of what has been achieved by those who have volunteered to be “arrestable.”

During the occupations of central London in April, the police were largely instructed not to give protestors what they wanted — which was to be arrested — leading to criticism from those on the right that the police were “soft” (and also, incidentally, leading to a a situation whereby the protestors were, instead, able to establish temporary communities that offered ample opportunities to ferment further notions of dissent, as well as to demonstrate what a traffic-free society might look like).

This time around, there have, again, been occupations that have ground traffic to a halt, enabling, yet again, room for people to realise the benefits of a city in which traffic is not dominant, but the police, responding to right-wing criticism, have also stepped up their arrests, with over 1,400 people arrested in London since the International Rebellion began last Monday.

This has, as intended, put a strain on the ability of the infrastructure of the political establishment to cope with imprisoning so many people, and has also shone a light on who exactly is being arrested — and while, as a Guardian profile revealed, many of the “arrestees” are young, many more are retired people, freed from the damage being arrested might cause to their work prospects, and also able to articulate, powerfully, how their generation has failed to address the crisis, and how they are concerned for their children and grandchildren.

Many of these “arrestees” held respectable positions in society during their working lives, and their example undoubtedly resonates with what we might call the political centre of the British establishment, these millions of largely home-owning “liberals” whose support is crucial to any notion that non-violent revolutionary change is necessary and non-negotiable.

In addition, they have been joined by other high-profile “rebels” — I’m thinking, in particular, of the many retired police officers who have joined the movement, and are willing to be arrested. Last week, the Daily Mirror featured profiles of several of them, with John Curran, “a 49-year-old retired detective sergeant who spent more than a decade tracking violent criminals in Nottingham”, and who was arrested in April, explaining that he “went to London with the intention of getting arrested because I felt powerless as a normal person, and getting arrested is one of the few weapons that we have to show the government how we feel about their inaction.” He also said that part of the reason he planned on getting arrested for a second time during the International Rebellion was “the encouragement he got from active police officers.” As he explained, “When the tapes were turned off in the station one of the police officers said to me, ‘you and the people like you will considered heroes one day.'”

Another former police officer, Richard Ecclestone, who spent “13 years in the Devon and Cornwall police force and five years in the second royal tank regiment”, and is “motivated by a sense of duty”, also said that he “has confidence in Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dick — his one time teacher at the College of Policing.” As he put it, “I trust that she understands that this has to remain very, very sensitively managed from a policing perspective, whatever instruction she has from the Home Office. Nobody wants any violence, on either side.”

Despite some own goals on the part of the police — most notoriously involving the targeting of disabled protestors — Richard Ecclestone’s claim that neither XR nor the police want violence is, in the UK at least, largely true. XR’s commitment to non-violence, and the rigorous training in empathy, “de-escalation” and not “othering” those it confronts, which permeates all the regional groups that have sprung up over the last year, is working, because it directly tests a crucial truth about civil society: that disproportionate violence cannot be used on non-violent protestors, or we cross a line into dangerous authoritarianism.

I’m no fantasist, however, and I recognize that the police, if ordered to do so, will become violent, As the author of a book about The Battle of the Beanfield, in 1985, when 1,300 police engaged in the most violent peacetime repression of civilians in living memory, decommissioning, with shocking brutality, a group of around 400 dissenters (travellers, anarchists and peace campaigners, including men, women and children), who were travelling in a convoy of liver-in vehicles, and were trying to make their way to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th Stonehenge Free Festival, I know how the police can be used to violently suppress dissent.

At present, however, it is significant that we are not seeing, in the UK, the violent use of tear gas and water cannons that have been the state’s response to Extinction Rebellion events in, for example, France, where, in June, young people were pepper-sprayed at close range while sitting peacefully on a bridge, and Belgium, where on Saturday, as XR explained, “Using water cannons, pepper-spray, batons and shields, police tore through a crowd of approximately 1000 people, wounding and traumatizing with an air of mockery and spite … In the space of an hour and a half, hundreds of people were pepper-sprayed in the face, including a 2-year-old girl. The police used the water cannon three times, pummelling the seated protesters with ice-cold water. They wrestled non-violent rebels to the ground, pressing their heads into the cobbles, and they laughed as they did it.”

The International Rebellion continues

While the arrests continue this week, it is also noticeable that XR activists, having realised that they have had to be more nimble in their response to a stepped-up police presence, have, instead of standing still, been hitting an impressive array of targets, and continue to do so. Last week, they staged a demonstration at City Airport, where partially-sighted Paralympian James Brown climbed on top of a plane, and this week they are targeting the City of London, “disrupting the system bankrolling the environmental crisis”, as they described it.

As the Guardian described it, “The protest outside the major finance institutions bankrolling big oil comes after the Guardian’s polluters investigation, which found that the world’s three largest money managers had a combined $300bn fossil fuel investment portfolio, using money from people’s private savings and pension contributions. The Guardian found that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, had continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies even after the Paris agreement, which set out the urgent need to drastically scale back fossil fuel expansion.”

Today, in the City, Andrew Medhurst, a former City trader turned full-time activist, told the Guardian that “the financial industry needed to realise that some of the projects it was financing were ‘essentially leading us to destruction.’” As he described it, “We have no more time left in terms of taking action. We haven’t got 12 years. We should have started yesterday. We have to decarbonise our economies, so for the banks to be lending money to fossil fuel companies – it’s just barmy. It doesn’t make sense. It basically means there’s a disconnect between those emotional family connections [between City workers] and their future children and grandchildren, and making money, which is morally repugnant.”

In addition, on Saturday, another group of unlikely climate rebels — climate scientists — “endorsed a civil disobedience campaign aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change, warning that failure could inflict ‘incalculable human suffering’”, as Reuters reported. In a joint declaration, nearly 400 “climate scientists, physicists, biologists, engineers and others from at least 20 countries broke with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest from Amsterdam to Melbourne.” Today, the number of signatories is over 700.

“Wearing white laboratory coats to symbolise their research credentials”, a group of about 20 of the signatories gathered outside the Science Museum to read out their declaration. Emily Grossman, a science broadcaster with a PhD in molecular biology, read out the declaration on behalf of the group, stating, “We believe that the continued governmental inaction over the climate and ecological crisis now justifies peaceful and non-violent protest and direct action, even if this goes beyond the bounds of the current law. We therefore support those who are rising up peacefully against governments around the world that are failing to act proportionately to the scale of the crisis.”

I don’t mean to suggest that we are, as yet, anywhere other than in the very early stages of the non-violent revolution that Roger Hallam and XR are calling for — and whose logic Hallam outlines so compellingly in his book — but I am more reassured than ever, not just by the events in London, but also in around 60 other cities around the world (see XR’s daily reports here), that there is a compelling momentum to this movement for non-violent revolution — although let’s not forget that, fundamentally, this isn’t because of its organising principles, but because of the urgency of its message — that, as Hallam describes it, we are “heading into a period of extreme ecological collapse”, and, if we don’t effect far-reaching changes to the entire way our capitalist system operates, with immediate effect, we will not be able to avoid a global catastrophe on an almost unimaginable scale, in which, as he also describes it, “we are “looking at the slow and agonising suffering and death of billions of people.”

* * * * *

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.

No Escape from Guantánamo: Former Child Prisoner Boycotts Broken Review Process, Calls It “Hopeless”

Former Guantánamo child prisoner Hassan bin Attash, in a photo included in his classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011.


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

 

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

For the 40 men still held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, the wheels of justice have, fundamentally, ground to a halt under Donald Trump.

It’s now nearly ten years since a high-level government review process established by President Obama — the Guantánamo Review Task Force — issued its recommendations about what to do with the prisoners inherited from George W. Bush. The task force recommended that 156 men should be released, that 36 men should be prosecuted, and that 48 others should continue to be held without charge or trial — on the basis that they were regarded as “too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution” (a self-evidently dubious designation, as it accepted that there were fundamental problems with the so-called evidence used to establish these men’s guilt).

Throughout the rest of his presidency, Obama managed to release all but three of the 156 men that the task force recommended for release, but an evolving crisis in the military commission trial system (which basically involved convictions being overturned because the war crimes for which prisoners had been prosecuted were not internationally recognized war crimes, but had been invented by Congress), meant that half of those originally deemed eligible for prosecution were, instead, lumped in with the 48 men recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.

In March 2011, Obama issued an executive order personally authorizing the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of the 48 men regarded as “too dangerous to transfer” (or rather, 47, because one man had, in the meantime, died at the prison), but, recognizing that human rights advocates and attentive lawyers would have a problem with prisoners being imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, he also authorized periodic reviews of their cases to ascertain whether or not they were still regarded as too great a threat to be released.

In all, 64 men were deemed eligible for these reviews, and when the system — the Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process requiring the men not to discuss their innocence or guilt, but to show contrition, and to propose viable plans for a peaceful post-Guantánamo life — finally began in November 2013, it led, over the last three years of Obama’s presidency, to 38 of the 64 men being recommended for release, with all but two of the men transferred out of the prison before Trump took office.

For the 26 others, however — accurately dubbed “forever prisoners” by the mainstream media — the Periodic Review Boards under Trump have become a zombie process, leading to no new recommendations for release, as is to be expected under a president who, even before he took office, tweeted, “There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.”

It’s ten months since I last wrote about the Periodic Review Boards, in an article entitled, Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Boards: The Escape Route Shut Down by Donald Trump, following up on a previous article in June 2018, No Escape from Guantánamo: An Update on the Periodic Review Boards. I also wrote about the PRBs in May 2017, in two articles, Under Trump, Periodic Review Boards Continue at Guantánamo, But At A Glacial Pace and Review Boards Approve Ongoing Imprisonment of Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo’s Oldest Prisoner, and Two Others, establishing, in all these articles, how the continued existence of the PRBs allows the Trump administration to pretend that meaningful review of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial still exists, when the reality is that it is a sham.

In the last ten months, the PRBs have been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media and by NGOs, with only Human Rights First regularly sending observers to watch the unclassified portions of the proceedings at a secure military facility in Virginia, where, via a video link to Guantánamo, the prisoners can present their case for why they should be released.

Under Obama, most of the prisoners took part in the process, accompanied by their lawyers and by the personal representatives from the US military who are assigned to help them explain why they should be recommended for release. Increasingly, however, the prisoners have stopped turning up, as, in solidarity, have their lawyers, leaving just the personal representatives left to talk to the panel members. Under Obama, a no-show by the prisoners meant that they would not be recommended for release, and this remains true under Trump, with the result that, although the boxes can be ticked to show that the reviews are ongoing, they are now nothing more than a charade.

Former child prisoner Hassan bin Attash

Below, I will briefly run through the cases heard in the last ten months, but I’d like to begin by focussing on the most recent review, in the case of Saudi citizen Hassan bin Attash. The younger brother of Walid bin Attash, one of five Guantánamo prisoners facing a trial for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, Hassan bin Attash was seized in a house raid in Pakistan on September 11, 2002 with another of the five, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and was then sent for torture in Jordan, and in other “black sites” run by the CIA, before arriving at Guantánamo in September 2004, where he has been held ever since.

Most shockingly, bin Attash was just 16 or 17 years old when he was seized, and has therefore spent over half of his life in US custody (or in proxy US custody) without charge or trial. In addition, like almost all of the 23 or so juveniles held at Guantánamo, he was never treated as a juvenile, held separately from the adult prisoners, and subjected to rehabilitation rather than punishment, even though those are the requirements of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), to which the United States has been a signatory since January 23, 2003. According to the Optional Protocol, juvenile prisoners — those under the age of 18 when their alleged crimes took place — “require special protection.” The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes “the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities”, and requires its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

Hassan bin Attash’s latest review took place on September 23, 2019, although, as Human Rights First explained, it was “yet another [PRB] hearing that ended as soon as it began,” lasting “all of two minutes, with neither bin Attash nor his personal lawyer in attendance.” In a statement to the board, David Remes, his attorney since 2005, stated that “Hassan continues to refuse to participate in the PRB process because he believes, understandably, that participation is pointless.”

In addition, his personal representative noted that he “has refused all requests to attend scheduled meetings” — 18 in total — and has also “never replied to written correspondence,” a far cry from, for example, his engagement with the process under President Obama.

Prisoners boycott the PRBs

As noted briefly above, bin Attash’s refusal to engage with Donald Trump’s debased version of the PRBs has been echoed throughout all of the cases heard over the last ten months, even though they are the first full reviews to take place since 2016 (the PRBs administratively review prisoners’ cases every six months, but the full reviews every three years are the only occasions in which the prisoners can present their case to the panel members via video link). Below I run briefly through their cases, providing links to their 2016 reviews for those of you who want to know more about their stories, and to appreciate the disillusionment that has settled in since Donald Trump took office.

Last December, Sanad al-Kazimi, a 48-year old Yemeni citizen, who, like bin Attash, was tortured in Jordan and CIA “black sites” before his arrival at Guantánamo in September 2004, boycotted his PRB, and, in January this year, Said Bakush, an Algerian about whom the US authorities are shockingly ignorant, also “refused to appear at the hearing or cooperate with his government-appointed personal representative.”

In February, Sharqawi al-Hajj, a 44-year old Yemeni also held in Jordan and in CIA “black sites,” and brought to Guantánamo in September 2004, also refused to participate in his PRB, and his despair is such that he recently attempted to commit suicide whilst on a phone call with his lawyers.

In March, Human Rights First attended the hearing for Suhayl al-Sharabi, a 42-year-old Yemeni national, noting that “Al Sharabi and his private counsel refused to attend the hearing, leaving only Al Sharabi’s US government-appointed personal representative to appear before the Board. The hearing lasted less than four minutes.”

On May 21, two more reviews took place, for Mustafa Faraj Muhammad Masud al-Jadid al-Uzaybi (aka Abu Faraj al Libi), a 48-year-old Libyan citizen, and Mohd Farik bin Amin (aka Zubair), a 44-year-old Malaysian citizen. Again, neither man attended the hearing, although it was noted that “Bin Amin’s personal representatives said the detainee’s private counsel instructed him to refrain from meeting with his personal representatives so they could focus instead on his habeas case in US federal court. [Al-Uzaybi’s] personal representatives provided even less detail, stating only that he had refused three meetings since his last file review in 2018. Both hearings lasted less than five minutes.”

In June, Mohammed Bashir Bin Lap (aka Lillie), a 42-year-old Malaysian citizen, also refused to attend his PRB, and he was followed in July by Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, a 45-year-old Kenyan citizen who “declined to attend.”

All of the above led to decisions to continue holding the prisoners in question because of the assessment that “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” making 23 such decisions, in the PRB’s full review process, since Trump took office.

Just three cases are currently outstanding — those of Hassan bin Attash, and also of Abdullah al-Sharbi (aka Ghassan al-Sharbi), a Saudi whose review took place in August, and Pakistani citizen Mohammed Ahmed Rabbani, whose review took place the week before bin Attash’s.

Al-Sharbi also refused to attend his hearing, with his personal representative noting that he “met with me on five (5) separate occasions since February 2019, but has refused all meetings since (May 14th, May 22nd, June 12th),” and Rabbani also refused to attend, with his personal representative noting that Rabbani, astutely, “does not feel that the current political situation will allow any detainees to depart GTMO,” and, as a result, he “has declined to participate in [the] PRB process.” The representative added that he “has refused to meet with the Personal Representatives for the last 41 scheduled meetings.”

Nearly 18 years since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, it is absolutely unacceptable that the only mechanism to review the cases of prisoners who, otherwise, will be imprisoned for the rest of their lives without charge or trial, has been so comprehensively debased by Donald Trump that the prisoners themselves have given up on it offering them any opportunity to demonstrate why they should be released.

As we approach the 18th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo (on January 11, 2020), and the run-up to the next presidential election begins in earnest, it is almost certain that none of the candidates will discuss Guantánamo, but that will be a damning omission, as all of the men at Guantánamo have been shamefully abandoned by the law, and by the values that America claims to hold dear — not just the 26 “forever prisoners,” who have decided to boycott a shamefully broken review process, but also the five men approved for release by high-level government review processes under Obama, who Donald Trump has no interest in releasing, and the nine others caught up in an equally broken and unjust process, the military commissions.

If the candidates won’t listen, the people — that small number of principled people who still care about the injustice of Guantánamo — need to make their voices heard to remind the world that Guantánamo’s continued existence is as fundamentally unfair as it has always been, and that the prison must be shut down, and those held either charged in a viable forum (in federal courts on the US mainland) or released. No other course of action will finally deal with this terrible and enduring stain on the US’s claim to be a nation that respects the rule of law, when, in fact, it behaves like a dictatorship, locking men up forever and throwing away the key.

* * * * *

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.

In Abu Zubaydah Court Case, US Judges Admit That He Was Tortured

An image of Abu Zubaydah by Brigid Barrett for an article in Wired in 2013. The original photo is from the classified US military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011.


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.

 

When it comes to the disgraceful US prison at Guantánamo Bay, where men are held — on a seemingly endlessly basis — without charge or trial, and where many of the 40 men still held were the victims of torture in CIA “black sites” before their arrival at the prison, the dominant reaction, from the mainstream US media and the American people in general, as Guantánamo nears the 18th anniversary of its opening, is one of amnesia.

With the valiant exception of Carol Rosenberg, who has been visiting the prison since it opened, and who, these days, is often the only journalist visiting and paying attention to its despairing prisoners and its broken trials, the mainstream media largely pays little or no attention to Guantánamo, as was apparent in June, when a significant court victory for the prisoners — challenging the long-standing nullification of the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights, dating back to 2011 — was completely ignored. I wrote about it here for Close Guantánamo, and also posted it here, where it secured significant interest from the small community of people who still care about the injustices of Guantánamo, but it was dispiriting that no one else noticed.

Two weeks ago, the mainstream US media once more largely failed to notice a significant court ruling relating to Guantánamo — and the US torture program — which was delivered by judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in relation to Abu Zubaydah, held at Guantánamo since September 2006, and the prisoner for whom the CIA’s torture program was first developed back in 2002.

In their ruling, relating to an ongoing case in which lawyers for Abu Zubaydah are seeking to compel the architects of the torture program, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to answer questions relating to an ongoing criminal investigation in Poland regarding the officials who established and operated the Polish “black site” that was one of the locations for the torture of Abu Zubaydah, two of the three judges reviewing the case, which had previously been turned down by a District Court judge, stated, “To use colloquial terms … Abu Zubaydah was tortured.”

The story was reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, which noted that the ruling “took the rare step of disdaining the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’” and was also picked up on by the Associated Press, whose report was published by some US regional newspapers and websites.

Cornell University law professor Joseph Margulies, who represented Abu Zubaydah for more than a decade, told the Chronicle, “It’s the first time an appellate court, to my knowledge, has come right out and said that the enhanced interrogation techniques were torture. We’re no longer going to equivocate.”

It was also, as Margulies explained, “the first time a court has acknowledged that the government was simply mistaken about Abu Zubaydah, the poster child for the torture program.” The judges noted that, although Abu Zubaydah “was thought to be a high-level member of Al-Qa’ida with detailed knowledge of terrorist plans,” the  Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, whose executive summary was released in December 2014, “later revealed this characterization to be erroneous.”

All of the above has been known, to anyone paying attention, for over a decade. In 2007, the New York Review of Books published a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross featuring interviews conducted by ICRC personnel with Abu Zubaydah and other “high-value detainees” brought to Guantánamo from the “black sites” in September 2006, in which they described their torture in agonising detail, and a court case in 2009 found the government “back[ing] away from the Bush administration’s statements that Zubaydah was the No. 2 or No. 3 official in al-Qaeda who had helped plan the 9/11 attacks,” and “admitting for the first time that “Zubaydah did not have ‘any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,’ and was neither a ‘member’ of al-Qaeda nor ‘formally’ identified with the terrorist organization.”

However, having a court declare openly that a “war on terror” prisoner was tortured — and to also endorse the Senate committee’s conclusion that his characterisation as a high-level member of Al-Qa’ida” was “erroneous” — is significant.

The use of euphemisms for torture — primarily, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — has generally been so prevalent that, for example, the Senate report didn’t actually use the word torture, the New York Times only began using the word “torture” in relation to the US torture program in August 2014, and the only Bush-era official who publicly admitted that a prisoner was tortured was Susan Crawford, the convening authority for the military commission trials at Guantánamo, who, in January 2009, just before George W. Bush left office, told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that she had refused to endorse the proposed prosecution of Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was held at Guantánamo and considered to have been the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, and for whom a brutal torture program was approved by Donald Rumsfeld, because, as she put it, “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”

I’m cross-posting below an article about the decision that Margulies wrote for the Boston Review, a political and literary forum that publishes a quarterly magazine, in which, as well as addressing the significance of the ruling, he also explains how Abu Zubaydah has been persistently failed by the US legal system — with a District Court judge failing to issue a ruling regarding his habeas corpus petition, which was submitted in 2008, and with the D.C. Circuit Court also ignoring a request by lawyers to intervene. In addition, as he states, “Abu Zubaydah has also never been charged in the military commission system,” but when his lawyers “took the extraordinary step of demanding that he be charged there,” so that they “could finally make plain that he committed no act that authorizes his detention,” that request was also ignored.

Margulies also notes the significance of amnesia regarding Guantánamo and torture, noting that the US “is gradually reaching the point when it can publicly face up to our history as torturers precisely because it is history,” noting that, as a result, torture “can now be recast in service of one of our most cherished myths — that while we may stray from the path of righteousness, we will eventually find our way back as we labor to form ‘a more perfect Union.’” As he also states, “the most important role of a national disgrace that has faded into the distant past is the permission it gives to the present. As a political matter, a wrong that escapes condemnation is no wrong at all. Scandal unpunished is no scandal. If society never registers its collective disapproval, either in a court of law or the court of public opinion, the behavior embeds itself within the range of acceptable policy responses. This invites not merely repetition, but expansion. Once we tortured prisoners; now we torture children at the border.”

The references to Donald Trump, which also include mention of the current impeachment scandal, are to be welcomed, but Americans also need to ask themselves if they too have been removed from the moral impact of torture by the passage of time, and by the ways in which its significance has been officially diminished. Let us never forget that, in August 2014, Barack Obama breezily dismissed the entirety of the torture program by stating, “We tortured some folks,” carefully chosen words that acknowledged that the US had “crossed a line,” but that fundamentally downplayed the gravity of the torture program, turning it into some kind of folksy aside.

I hope you have time to read Margulies’ article, and that you’ll share it with others who might appreciate the importance of remembering what torture is, and why we must continue to call for justice for its victims, and accountability for those who authorized it and implemented it.

In Abu Zubaydah’s case, it remains to be seen what happens next — or rather, what significance it will have. As the San Francisco Chronicle explained, the appeals court’s ruling “said only that a federal judge had gone too far” in concluding that any questioning of Mitchell and Jessen “would expose state secrets about CIA detention and interrogation practices,” and directed the lower court to “take a closer look to determine which subjects could be safely examined.”

In the majority opinion, Judge Richard Paez — “joined by US District Judge Dean Pregerson of Los Angeles, temporarily assigned to the appeals court”, with only Judge Ronald Gould dissenting — refuted Justice Department claims that answers given to questions put to Mitchell and Jessen “could reveal classified information about CIA intelligence sources, foreign government cooperation and terrorist investigations.”

As the Chronicle described it, “the appeals court said some information about the CIA’s torture program and its past operation in Poland has long been known to the public,” and in any case, as Judge Paez explained, the purpose of confidentiality rules “is to protect legitimate government interests, not to shield the government from uncomfortable facts.”

He added that the lower court judge in charge of the case should be able to “disentangle the privileged from nonprivileged information” regarding the questioning of Mitchell and Jessen.

As the Chronicle also explained, “it’s not clear how much of the information, if any, will be turned over to Polish prosecutors,” but it to be hoped that some information will be forthcoming. In July 2014, as I explained at the time, “the European Court of Human Rights unanimously condemned the US for implementing a program of extraordinary rendition and torture, and condemned Poland for its involvement in the program” by hosting a CIA “black site,” and, in February 2015, ordered the Polish government to pay €130,000 ($148,000) to Abu Zubaydah, but they did so without any input from the US government, which, to date, has refused to provide any information to Polish prosecutors regarding the torture of Abu Zubaydah — and other “black site” prisoners — on Polish soil.

U.S. Judges Admit Enhanced Interrogation Is Torture

By Joseph Margulies, Boston Review, September 26, 2019

Last week, for the first time, a federal appellate court said that “enhanced” interrogation techniques are torture.

In case you have forgotten, these were the brutal interrogation methods developed by the CIA after the September 11 attacks in 2001. A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals crossed the Rubicon in a case involving Abu Zubaydah — the first person thrown into a CIA “black site,” the person for whom former Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General John Yoo wrote the infamous torture memo, and the only person subjected to all the “enhanced” techniques. As far as we can tell, Zubaydah, who is still being held at Guantánamo, is the only post–9/11 detainee whose interrogation was the subject of discussion and debate inside the White House. As the court wrote:

The details of Abu Zubaydah’s treatment during this period are uncontroverted: he was persistently and repeatedly waterboarded; he spent hundreds of hours in a “confinement box,” described as coffin-sized; he was subjected to various combinations of interrogation techniques including “walling, attention grasps, slapping, facial hold, stress positions, cramped confinement, white noise and sleep deprivation”; his food intake was manipulated to minimize the potential of vomiting during waterboarding. To use colloquial terms … Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

The panel also did what no court, appellate or otherwise, has ever done. It acknowledged that the allegations made to justify this torture — claims that were repeated over and over again by countless officials, including President Bush — were simply mistaken:

Abu Zubaydah was thought to be a high-level member of Al-Qa’ida with detailed knowledge of terrorist plans. A 2014 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program (“Senate Select Committee Report”) later revealed this characterization to be erroneous.

This decision, which unfortunately will have no immediate effect on Abu Zubaydah’s detention, came in a case that began a couple years ago, when my colleagues and I served a subpoena on James Mitchell and John Jessen, the former psychologists who designed and implemented the “enhanced” techniques for the CIA — which paid their company more than $80 million. We wanted to ask them questions in support of an ongoing criminal investigation in Poland directed at the officials who created and operated the Polish detention facility where Abu Zubaydah had been tortured. The U.S. Justice Department has shielded Mitchell and Jessen from questioning, arguing that it could reveal classified information.

The district court dismissed the case, saying the information we sought was a state secret. In our appeal a divided panel of the Ninth Circuit disagreed, concluding that at least some of the information we sought was no longer secret, and directing the district judge to disentangle wheat from chaff. The purpose of confidentiality rules, they ruled, “is to protect legitimate government interests, not to shield the government from uncomfortable facts.”

The Ninth Circuit opinion passed virtually unnoticed in the news, but it teaches us a great deal about hubris masquerading as patriotism, which is always a lesson worth learning. If the United States government did not get it right in the first case — the case that set the standard for all the torture that followed and was subject to closer vetting and more heated debate than any other — then we are right to ask whether it is a choice they should have ever entertained.

I represented Abu Zubaydah for more than a decade, beginning shortly after the Bush administration shipped him to Guantánamo in September 2006 and continuing until only a few months ago. In that time, my colleagues and I have challenged aspects of his detention and torture in two federal district courts, two federal courts of appeal, administrative agencies and state courts in Texas, a national court in Poland, and The European Court of Human Rights in France. We have written endlessly about his case. We have made countless trips to Cuba and have conducted investigations all over the world.

The litigation — if you can call it that — has been maddening. The primary challenge to his detention has been underway since 2008 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. I take no pleasure in saying this, but the district judge, who needn’t be named here, has been inexplicably slow to act. We became so frustrated at the court’s inaction that we went over his head and urged the federal appellate court to intervene and order the lower court to get on with it. At this writing, the appellate court has not yet ruled. Abu Zubaydah has also never been charged in the military commission system, but we even took the extraordinary step of demanding that he be charged there, where we could finally make plain that he committed no act that authorizes his detention — even a kangaroo court is better than no court at all. That demand has also gone unanswered.

Through it all, we have insisted that the “enhanced interrogations” used on Abu Zubaydah were torture, and that he had no connection to Al-Qa’ida or the attacks of 9/11. Yet it took until now for a court to speak what is plain.

The passage of time explains a great deal. The country is gradually reaching the point when it can publicly face up to our history as torturers precisely because it is history. It is not simply that it happened in the past, but that the controversy no longer stirs the political blood. We have moved on; waterboarding is so 2002. When an issue drops out of the news cycle so completely — when it becomes as unfamiliar to most Americans as COINTELPRO — then it has lost its political potency. It no longer has the capacity to stoke political action.

For most of the post–9/11 era, employing the word torture was an act of political speech that marked the speaker as a partisan. Torture was not simply an outrage that happened elsewhere, committed by others; it was something perpetrated by the Bush administration, and using the word meant leveling a charge. Not always, of course, but often enough to make it taboo among those who wished to appear nonpartisan. Now it is fast becoming just another word. Defused, it loses its explosiveness, and may be handled freely, even by those who seek to keep up an appearance of evenhandedness, including judges.

Even worse, it can now be recast in service of one of our most cherished myths — that while we may stray from the path of righteousness, we will eventually find our way back as we labor to form “a more perfect Union.” This teleological view of history encourages us to view the past as benighted in order to intensify our perception of the present as enlightened. We like a dark past, as long as it is also distant.

Yet the most important role of a national disgrace that has faded into the distant past is the permission it gives to the present. As a political matter, a wrong that escapes condemnation is no wrong at all. Scandal unpunished is no scandal. If society never registers its collective disapproval, either in a court of law or the court of public opinion, the behavior embeds itself within the range of acceptable policy responses. This invites not merely repetition, but expansion. Once we tortured prisoners; now we torture children at the border.

Today, there is a credible allegation that our sitting president tried to influence a presidential election by coercing a foreign government into investigating his political opponent. As expected, the allegation has become the object of partisan fury. Repeating it has become an act of political speech, marking the speaker as a partisan.

As before, the risk is great that our values will once again succumb to our politics. Too many people will tiptoe around this disgrace as they did around torture, at least until it is safely behind us. Then they will condemn the behavior as a betrayal of our “true” principles. But by that time, it will be too late. We will have moved on to something worse.

We like to believe that values have a power of their own, and can compel a result even when there is no political will behind it. The lesson of history is not kind to that belief. The arc of the moral universe is very long indeed, but we should be clear-eyed that it rarely bends toward justice when justice is needed most. If we are to make our values meaningful, we must demand that they be honored even when sitting politicians are unwilling to act, for that is the only time our values can do much good.

* * * * *

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.

Murderous Intent and Breathtakingly Cynical Opportunism: The Contours of the Brexit-Fuelled New English Civil War

Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.


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

 

The last few days have been a particularly dispiriting time to be living in Britain, as anger over the failure of the UK to leave the EU — anger deliberately provoked by our disgraceful Prime Minister Boris Johnson — has begun manifesting itself in threats of, and incitements to violence by prominent Brexiteers.

Boris Johnson, elected by just 92,153 Tory Party members, and with no majority in Parliament, is largely leading this thrust towards violent, and even murderous intent. Last week, Johnson, who is aggressively pushing for a no-deal Brexit on October 31, was compelled to recall Parliament, after the Supreme Court ruled that his decision to prorogue (suspend) it was unlawful, but when he appeared before MPs, he not only failed to apologise, but suggested that the court’s ruling was wrong.

Since then, he has begun suggesting that the justices should be approved by Parliament, which is alarming in and of itself, but the biggest immediate problem with his rhetoric is that it adds fuel to Brexiteers’ notion of judges as “the enemy”, and as “traitors”, which began when, after the referendum, the High Court supported a lawsuit brought by the businesswoman Gina Miller, establishing that Parliament had the right to be consulted before Article 50 (triggering the UK’s departure from the EU) was invoked by the then-Prime Minister Theresa May.

Anyone with a keen sense of irony was aware that sovereignty in the UK resides in Parliament — which is what those who voted for Brexit are supposed to want returned to the UK — but it seems that their notion of sovereignty is hopelessly confused, and that what they prefer instead is the Daily Mail fuelling their seemingly insatiable desire to be victims by publishing a front page describing the judges as “Enemies of the People.”

In addition, when Parliament reconvened on Wednesday, Boris Johnson indulged in a spree of inflammatory rhetoric, calling the Benn amendment, passed by Parliament to block a no-deal Brexit by forcing the PM to ask for an extension beyond the deadline of October 31, if a deal has not been agreed with the EU, the “surrender bill”, and regularly mentioning opposition to a no-deal Brexit as “capitulation.”

However, when a number of women MPs expressed their fears about the death threats they regularly receive from Brexiteers, in response to the increasingly febrile atmosphere in which Johnson is playing a major part, he dismissed those fears as “humbug”, and, adding insult to injury, suggested — both illogically and offensively — that the best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox, the pro-Remain MP who was murdered by a far-right extremist just before the referendum, was to “get Brexit done.”

The next day, a man was arrested in Birmingham after banging on the windows of the constituency office of Labour MP Jess Phillips — who “revealed last year that she had received some 600 threats of rape in the space of 12 months”— and reportedly shouting “Fascist” at her, but instead of backing down Johnson has continued to defend his position, brushing off critics including his own sister, Rachel, who told Sky News, “My brother is using words like surrender and capitulation as if the people standing in the way of the blessed will of the people as defined by 17.4m votes in 2016 should be hung, drawn, quartered, tarred and feathered. I think that is highly reprehensible language to use.”

On Friday, former minister Amber Rudd, who “quit the government and resigned the Conservative whip earlier this month in protest at the prime minister’s policies”, also weighed in, declaring, “The sort of language I’m afraid we’ve seen more and more of coming out from No 10 does incite violence. It’s the sort of language people think legitimises a more aggressive approach and sometimes violence.” Rudd compared Johnson’s behaviour to that of Donald Trump during the US presidential election in 2016, and added that “the casual approach to safety of MPs and their staff [was] immoral”, as she also urged ministers to “consider their own judgments rather than be desperately loyal.”

Meanwhile, the escalation of inflammatory rhetoric has continued unabated. Johnson’s chief advisor, the public school-educated, self-styled rebel Dominic Cummings, who has contempt for the whole of the British establishment, which he petulantly wants to destroy, and was campaign director of the Vote Leave campaign, was confronted last week by Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Hull East. Turner told Cummings that Johnson’s attitude in the House of Commons had been “appalling”, and that he had received threats that were “incredibly threatening” and “credible”, Cummings’ only response was “get Brexit done”, his and Johnson’s insistent mantra, which Cummings, presumably, thinks will have as much resonance as his winning phrase for Vote Leave — “take back control.”

In addition, the posturing provocateur Brendan O’Neill, a self-styled ‘libertarian’, who has gone from the far-left of the political spectrum to the far-right over a tawdry career as an alleged journalist, was inexplicably invited onto the BBC’s Politics Live show, where he said he was surprised that there hadn’t been riots on the streets regarding Britain’s failure to leave the EU, and, when challenged, said that there “should be” riots.

And in Newport, at a Brexit Party rally, Nigel Farage told the crowd that, “once Brexit is done, we will take the knife [to] overpaid pen-pushers in Whitehall.” He later claimed that he was only suggesting job cuts, but in today’s political climate words that suggest physical violence will undoubtedly be taken literally.

Perhaps some readers think I’m being unnecessarily alarmist, but it only takes a brief foray into the sewer of the Brexiteers’ social media accounts to reveal that violence and death threats are being advocated, urged and encouraged on an ongoing basis and to an alarming degree.

Last month, Robert Vidler, a 64-year old from Harrow, was jailed for 18 weeks after making threatening phone calls to six MPs. Tory MP Nicky Morgan was told her “days were numbered”, former Tory MP Nick Boles (who resigned the whip in April and is now an independent MP) was told, “we know where you live”, and was threatened with having his throat cut, Labour MP (and shadow Brexit secretary) Keir Starmer was told that he was a walking “dead man” and a “traitor”, and that Vidler would “cut his neck”, and Dominic Grieve, one of 21 Tory rebels sacked by Boris Johnson, was told, “You’re dead, Grieve, we know where you and your family live.”

And just days ago, a serving British soldier, who is now being investigated, sent a tweet to the Labour MP Angela Rayner warning her that she will “perish when civil war comes”, and suggesting that people who voted for Brexit would be “gunning for blood if we don’t leave.”

The undiminishing insanity of Brexit

And behind it all, of course, is the reason for all this anger — the UK leaving the EU, which, although voted for by a slim majority of those who could be bothered to turn up to vote in the EU referendum on June 23, 2016, remains an aspiration of — to be blunt— colossal stupidity.

Leaving the EU — and most particularly without a deal — will be the most insane act of voluntary economic suicide undertaken by any country in living memory, fatal to a huge number of businesses, leading to shortages of food and of crucial medicines, the probability of some sort of martial law, seemingly unreconcilable problems regarding the Irish border, which may well reignite “the Troubles”, a renewed push for independence in remain-majority Scotland, and chaos for the millions of British citizens living in EU countries. EU nationals living in the UK, meanwhile, have been treated as second-class citizens since the referendum, and are now required to jump though all kinds of dubious hoops regarding their “settled status” in the UK.

Three years and seven months since David Cameron formally announced the referendum, in February 2016, I have still not heard a single coherent argument about why it is necessary for the UK to leave the EU. Apparently, the notion of regaining our sovereignty was considered to be of great significance, but for the most part people seem to have been successfully lied to during the referendum campaign — by the likes of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson, who notoriously told them that, by leaving the EU, we would regain £350m a week to spend on the NHS, which was patently untrue.

Clearly, what was also hugely significant was the notion that we would stem immigration to the UK — but again, those pushing this message mostly glossed over the fact that our economy largely relies on immigration: in the NHS, in farming, and in countless low-paid jobs that most disgruntled British people haven’t even thought about, and as Aditya Chakrabortty of the Guardian explained last year, the real damage has been caused by the cynical “ages of austerity” introduced by the Tories in 2010.

In an article I wrote just two weeks after the referendum, I shared with readers a passage from an astonishing briefing by Chatham House (aka the Royal Institute of International Affairs), entitled, ‘Britain, the EU and the Sovereignty Myth’, in which it was noted that, “Apart from EU immigration, the British government still determines the vast majority of policy over every issue of greatest concern to British voters – including health, education, pensions, welfare, monetary policy, defence and border security. The arguments for leaving also ignore the fact that the UK controls more than 98 per cent of its public expenditure.” (emphasis added)

Moreover, while there are different groups of Brexiteers — the dispossessed in places that have suffered horribly since Margaret Thatcher started Britain’s neoliberal power-grab in the ’80s (which is what the problem is, rather than the EU), old rural Tories obsessed with a fantasy past viewed through rose-tinted glasses, Lexiteers, who are right to dislike neoliberal tendencies within the EU, but surely misguided in thinking that isolation in an independent country in Tory control is any kind of solution, and, in particular, the powerful backers of Brexit, who, while selling the notion of “taking back control”, seem actually to be primarily enraged in profiteering, making a fortune by betting on the Brexit-fed collapse of the pound, whilst simultaneously believing that they will be able to continue making a fortune in a post-Brexit Britain shorn of all protections for its workers and citizens, a slave pool to be exploited by whatever plunderers these opportunists can get into bed with.

Rachel Johnson also touched on this when criticising her brother last week, attributing his aggressive behaviour to the people behind him “who have invested billions in shorting the pound in expectation of a no-deal Brexit.” This claim has since been picked up on by the former chancellor Philip Hammond (one of the 21 rebels sacked by Boris Johnson), who stated in a column for the Times yesterday that, “Boris Johnson asserts, ever more boldly, that we will leave the EU with or without a deal. But as his sister has reminded us, he is backed by speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit – and there is only one outcome that works for them: a crash-out no-deal Brexit that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring.”

Hammond, in turn, inspired Nick Macpherson, former permanent secretary to the Treasury, to state today that he was “right to question the political connections of some of the hedge funds with a financial interest in no deal”, adding, They are shorting the [pound] and the country, with the British people the main loser.”

Will they get away with it? That remains to be seen, but while I still hope that the majority of the British establishment, which supports staying in the EU, will somehow prevail, I can see a number of bleak futures, reinforcing the notion of the new English civil war I mention in the title of this article. I’ve always believed that MPs, who support staying in the EU by a clear majority — should decisively shut down Brexit themselves, and then hold a General Election the day after, secure that have done the right thing for the country, but that seems as unlikely as ever, and, instead, the drive seems to be for a second referendum, following a withdrawal agreement approved by MPs, in which the British people can actually decide what kind of Brexit they want — or don’t want.

But for hardcore Brexiteers, any second referendum will be perceived as a betrayal, and in fact, over the last three years, the most rabid enthusiasts for Brexit seem to have decided that they want a no-deal Brexit (even though that wasn’t what anyone was asked to vote for, and also wasn’t the intention of most of those pushing for Brexit at the time), and are increasingly prepared to suffer financially as a result.

None of them seem to have realised that the most cynical of Brexit’s backers have been profiting all along, while others have joined in since, having realised that Brexit offers an unprecedented opportunity to smash the state and profit from the unfettered plunder of whatever remains of Britain’s assets.

In the bleakest scenario — a no-deal Brexit — I can even imagine that, however disastrous the collapse of the British economy will be, the most rabid Brexiteers will still blame the EU, or immigrants, or both, and may well — having so enthusiastically shown their contempt for judges and for any MPs or journalists, or be frank, anyone else who disagrees with them — embrace a far-right dictatorship as the ideal way forward.

These are genuine fears of mine, but while I’m happy to be reassured by anyone who disagrees with my fears, I can say confidently that, if the far-right drift continues in the UK, those who disagree will not capitulate without a fight.

* * * * *

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.

14 Million Dollars Per Prisoner Per Year: The Absurd Cost of Guantánamo

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.

Thanks to Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times for exposing what the US no longer wants to remember: that the prison at Guantánamo Bay is, per capita, by far and away the most expensive prison in the world.

According to figures obtained by the Times, “the total cost last year of holding the prisoners,” and of “paying for the troops who guard them, running the [military commissions] war court and doing related construction, exceeded $540 million.”

With 40 men still held (and one released during the year to which the figures refer*), that’s over $13 million per prisoner, but In fact it seems to be even more costly. Rosenberg noted that, for the year to September 2018, the Defense Department stated that it cost $380 million “for Guantánamo’s detention, parole board and war court operations, including construction.”

To that are added the “manpower costs” referred to in April this year by the prison’s former commander, Rear Adm. John Ring, who explained that “[c]onsolidation through new construction would allow the prison to reduce its staff … by 74 troops, saving $8 million,” indicating that the cost per member of the military personnel was $108,000 a year — which, for 1,800 troops, adds another $194.4 million, bringing the total cost to $574.6 million.

That’s over $14 million per prisoner — or to put it another way, 180 times as much per prisoner as it costs to hold someone in the federal “supermax” prison in Colorado, where the cost per prisoner per year in 2012 was $78,000.

As Rosenberg explains, the estimated annual cost — of $574.6 million — “does not include expenses that have remained classified, presumably including a continued C.I.A. presence.” However, “the figures show that running the range of facilities built up over the years has grown increasingly expensive even as the number of prisoners has declined.”

A Defense Department report in 2013 calculated that the annual cost of operating Guantánamo’s prison and court system was $454.1 million, around $120 million less than last year. Moreover, at the time, there were 166 prisoners, meaning that the cost per prisoner was $2.7 million, less than a fifth of what it is now.

That report also “put the total cost of building and operating the prison since 2002 at $5.2 billion” to the end of 2014, a figure that, as Rosenberg describes it, “now appears to have risen to past $7 billion.”

Capt. Brian L. Mizer, a Navy lawyer who represented Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, at his military commission trial in 2008, rather appropriately called the prison at Guantánamo “America’s tiniest boutique prison, reserved exclusively for geriatric alleged jihadists.”

The cost of geographical isolation

Part of Guantánamo’s absurd cost relates to its isolation, because, as Rosenberg explains, it is “totally cut off from the Cuban economy,” and everything has to be brought from US. As Rosenberg adds, “It operates in some respects like an aircraft carrier at sea, even desalinating its own water with fuel brought in by tanker.”

As she also explains, “Nearly all of the base supplies — like family household shipments, frozen pizza dough for the bowling alley food court and rental cars for the base commissary — arrive twice monthly on a government contract barge from Florida. A refrigerated cargo plane brings fresh fruit and vegetables weekly.”

The military costs, however, seem very clearly to be excessive. 1,800 troops work at the prison — 45 for each prisoner. As Rosenberg explains, they “work out of three prison buildings, two top-secret headquarters, at least three clinics and two compounds where prisoners consult their lawyers.” Some also work as guards at Camp Justice, the military commissions’ court, and also the location of the hearing room for the Periodic Review Boards, the review process set up in 2013 by President Obama, which led to the release of 36 prisoners in Obama’s last three years in office, although it has become meaningless under Donald Trump, as no prisoner has been approved for release since he took office nearly three years ago.

Rosenberg also explains other costs: “The prison’s staff members have their own chapel and cinema, housing, two dining rooms and a team of mental health care workers, who offer comfort dogs. Judges, lawyers, journalists and support workers are flown in and out on weekly shuttles.”

One critic of this outrageous expense is Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and, as Rosenberg describes it, “a longtime proponent of closing the prison.” In June, Smith said, “I don’t think there’s any need to have an incredibly expensive facility down at Guantánamo housing, you know, 40 people. So ultimately I think they should be transferred here.”

Rosenberg notes that comparing Guantánamo with federal prisons on the US mainland is “tricky,” because workers at the latter are “civilians who pay for their own food and health care, drive their own cars, live in their own homes and amuse themselves on their days off,” whereas the military — which employs mostly National Guard forces and reservists on nine-month rotations at Guantánamo — has to pay for everything, but it is, nevertheless, apparent that the initial hysterical over-manning of the prison has never been adequately challenged.

As Rosenberg describes it, Guantánamo’s “uniformed staff members” include “a Coast Guard unit that patrols the waters below the cliff top prison zone; Navy doctors, nurses, psychological technicians and corpsmen; a unit of Air Force engineers; lawyers, chaplains, librarians, chaperones and military journalists,” and each of these have “layers of commanders who oversee their work and manage their lives at Guantánamo.”

The prison also employs “Defense Department contract linguists, intelligence analysts, consultants, laborers, information technology professionals and other government workers.” In 2014, there were 300 of those civilian workers. (The naval base, meanwhile, has around 4,000 personnel, which also seems excessive, although they have their own budget “separate from the costs of the prison and the court.”)

The area in which the prison is located — within the naval base, but essentially separate from it — also “has its own headquarters, motor pool, mental health services, minimart, and public affairs team, which recently referred to the troops assigned there as ‘warfighters.’” And while an Army security force of fewer than 300 soldiers … live in prefabricated containers within the prison zone, most troops who work in the prison complex live on the naval base” — some in townhouses, while others “live in the kind of trailer park familiar to forces who served in Iraq or Afghanistan” — CHUs, or containerized housing units.

One expense that hasn’t so far been added to the prison’s bill relates to an approval by Congress, in 2018, for $115 million to be spent on “a dormitory-style barracks complex to replace trailer housing for 848 troops.” However, “no contract has been awarded, construction has not yet begun and Navy spokesmen could not provide the target completion date.”

The prison, nevertheless, continues, to swallow money with abandon — with its “watchtowers and Humvees and dirt roads and a series of permanent and semi-permanent prison facilities, all of them built since 2002 and surrounded by razor wire that rusts in the salt air,” the three separate cellblocks for the prisoners, and the “seven or eight different sites” where they can be found on any given day — including the court, the PRB hearing room, the base hospital, and “two adjacent compounds where the prisoners consult their lawyers.”

Other costs involve “wear and tear,” particularly noticeable in south east Cuba, where Guantánamo is located, which is “hot, humid, whipped by tropical storm winds and the occasional hurricane.”

As Rosenberg explains, “In the past two years, the military hired contractors to do $15 million in repairs to the guards’ townhouses, a $14.5 million expansion of the war court compound, $1.5 million in repairs to the trooper clinic, more than $1 million renovating air conditioning and ventilation in the officers’ homes, $648,000 on erosion and climate control around the general population prison complex, $273,110 to replace a latrine near a now defunct kitchen and $47,690 to renovate the prison staff chapel.”

By any measure, I think, paying  $273,110 to replace a latrine is excessive, although, as Rosenberg also explains, “Defense Department contractors who bid for these jobs have to factor in the cost of bringing in their own workers and equipment, including bulldozers and buzz saws. As a measure of how expensive it is to do construction here, the projected cost of a new prison for 15 former CIA captives that was first proposed during the Obama administration has jumped from $49 million to $88.5 million in five years.”

The crippling cost of the military commissions

As Rosenberg explains, a huge part of the cost of running Guantánamo relates to the military commissions, which, based on congressional documents, cost more than $123 million in 2018, even though only eight men are facing charges.

As she describes it, “Each hearing requires a major movement of people and materials from the United States to the base on passenger planes the Pentagon charters for $80,000 one way. There were 52 such commercial flights in 2018 between Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington, and Guantánamo. Until the start of a trial — the trial of the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks is scheduled to begin in early 2021 — the majority of the legal work is carried out in a warren of rental offices near the Pentagon, some of which have sat empty for more than a year as they await security upgrades.”

Just two weeks ago, NPR undertook an investigation into the costs of the court, under the heading, “Whistleblower Cites ‘Waste Of Funds’ At Guantánamo Court And Prison,” noting that “a former top attorney” in the commissions had “filed a federal whistleblower complaint alleging gross waste of funds and gross mismanagement.”  

Sacha Pfeiffer of NPR’s investigations team was told that, “every year, hundreds of thousands of dollars [worth] of government devices — hard drives, cellphones, laptops — are destroyed because of spills of classified information.” She added, “There are a lot of lawyers working down there, hundreds of them. Some of them are death penalty specialists, who are private attorneys, paid by the Pentagon. They cost more than regular government lawyers. Some of them bill about a half a million dollars a year.”

Pfeiffer spoke to Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, the chief defense counsel for the commissions, who said, bluntly, “Holy crap. People need to know the travesty that is Gitmo. You know, it’s beyond comprehension that it is 2019 and people that were accused of crimes that occurred in 2001, captured in 2003, are nowhere near trial.”

The whistleblower is retired Air Force Col. Gary Brown, who was the legal adviser to the commissions’ convening authority, Harvey Rishikof. However, both men were sacked in February 2018 after pushing for the death penalty to be taken off the table for those accused of the 9/11 attacks. This was because, as Pfeiffer described it, Brown “believes it’s going to be hard to get death penalty convictions because so much evidence is tainted by torture,” and, “[e]ven if there are convictions, there could be 15 years’ worth of appeals, which would take another $1.5 billion.” Instead, Rishikof and Brown proposed to settle the cases via plea deals, whereby the prisoners “would plead guilty and get life in prison. That would speed things up and lower costs.”

So when will this nightmare end? After the Times article was published, Donald Trump, on Air Force One, told reporters, “I think it’s crazy. It costs a fortune to operate it and I think it’s crazy,” and also blamed President Obama for failing to close it. “He was going to have everybody removed and Guantánamo Bay closed up by the time he left office and he didn’t do that,” Trump said, adding, “So we’re stuck with it.”

That sounds positive, but with Trump it would be foolish to expect that anything sensible or decent will happen when it comes to Guantánamo. This, after all, is the man who tweeted, two weeks before taking office in January 2017, “There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.” As the lawyers who submitted a habeas corpus petition on behalf of eleven prisoners last year stated, the ongoing imprisonment of men at Guantánamo “is based only on Trump’s raw antipathy towards Guantánamo prisoners – all foreign-born Muslim men – and Muslims more broadly.”

And, sadly, I don’t see that ending anytime soon.

* Ahmed al-Darbi was released at the start of May 2018, meaning that he was held for seven months of the year for which the figures obtained by the Times apply.

* * * * *

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.

The Green Generation: The Furious Energy of Young People and the Global Climate Strike

Children taking part in the Global Climate Strike in London on September 20, 2019 (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.

 

If you’re reading this, and, like me, were comfortably born within the long reach of the 20th century, then pause for a moment and imagine what the future looks like for those born this century, those who aren’t even able to vote yet, and who make up a large part of what has been termed ‘Generation Z’ — those born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s — as well as those born more recently, who trend-watchers don’t even seem to have a name for yet, although they might want to think about calling them the ‘Green Generation’ if yesterday is anything to go by.

Yesterday’s Global Climate Strike — the third this year — was the biggest yet, and the biggest climate protest ever. in 185 countries, at least three million people — mostly young — took to the streets to demand urgent action to prevent the worst effects of an already unfolding environmental catastrophe.

By now, no one should have any doubts about the urgency of the crisis. In the Northern Hemisphere, where 90% of the earth’s population lives, the last five summers have been the hottest since records began in the late 19th century, with this summer being the hottest yet. Globally, the only year that was hotter was 2016.

Anecdotally, everyone knows that something is badly wrong. In the heatwaves of the ’90s, it was still possible for complacent westerners to joke about “global warming”, but in recent years this has changed. The heatwaves in June and August were difficult even in northern Europe, where temperature records were broken in numerous countries, and it also became apparent that, increasingly, other, hotter countries — the locations of wealthier westerners’ beloved summer holidays — were becoming off-limits. For those living in these countries, the reality is, of course, considerably more alarming.

A huge boost for this unprecedented global climate change movement came last October, when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a landmark report, in which, as the Guardian described it, “The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.” The authors of the report added that “urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target”, which they called “affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the [2015] Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.”

That report, with its unambiguous “12 years to doomsday” message — now 11 years — fed the urgency of two new movements: school strikes inspired by the teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who, last August, began taking time off school to call on her government to take urgent action on climate change, and Extinction Rebellion (XR), which began occupying public spaces last October, calling on governments to “Tell the Truth”, and to to commit to urgent measures to tackle climate change. Two manifestations of the Global Climate Strike — in March and May — revealed young people’s massive enthusiasm for urgent action, and in April Extinction Rebellion showed a glimpse of an alternative future when activists shut down central London for a week after occupying several key sites — Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus and Parliament Square — with a base at Marble Arch.

To be blunt, it is unsurprising that young people, their futures already ransacked by the eye-watering greed and inflexibility of the neoliberal idiocy that has dominated politics and economics since the 1980s, are rising up in unprecedented numbers to demand urgent action on climate change.

Yesterday, at Parliament Square, it was inspiring to see so many young people with so many wonderful hand-made placards revealing their understanding of the urgency of the environmental crisis, and their disgust at the politicians who have so dismally failed to do anything about it. What impressed me the most, however, was when, despite the Metropolitan Police imposing geographical limits on the protest, absurdly suggesting that this was based on “intelligence reports that suggested that a large number of protesters were planning on causing serious disruption and criminal offences that would stop Londoners, and those visiting, from moving freely around the Capital”, a group of young people marching up Whitehall broke off, heading towards Northumberland Avenue, where the police scrabbled to contain them. They ended up returning to Whitehall and convening by a cordon marking the Met’s limits on the protest south of Trafalgar Square, and on both occasions dozens of those present directly confronted the police, while the crowd as a whole staged noisy sit-downs, with call and response chanting from whoever wanted to take the mike.

A campaigner using a traffic cone as a megaphone during the Global Climate Strike in London on September 20, 2019 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

As well as regularly singing, “Where the f*ck is the government?” to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’, some of the speakers, in the call and response with their fellow protesters, poignantly pointed out how they are both scared and furious — two key concepts to which those in power need to pay close attention. This is a movement that is not going away, composed of significant numbers of young people who are rebelling against the complacent greed and stupidity of those in charge — mostly, it should be noted, old white men like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Brazil’s Amazon-destroying Jair Bolsonaro, with whom they genuinely appear to have absolutely nothing in common.

Yesterday’s Global Climate Strike was also the first to which adults had been specifically invited, and they too turned out in significant numbers — parents, grandparents and concerned citizens in general, as well as trade unions, and some corporate workers. As the Guardian noted, “Trade unions representing hundreds of millions of people around the world mobilised in support, employees left their workplaces, doctors and nurses marched and workers at firms like Amazon, Google and Facebook walked out to join the climate strikes.”

Architects opposing climate change

I was also pleased to see that there were engineers opposed to climate change, and, closer to my heart, architects, as the building industry is a major polluter, and yet, hypocritically, although the industry as whole trumpets the ecological benefits of the new buildings they’re designing, they completely ignore the much more colossal environmental cost of demolishing existing buildings — and, my particularly bugbear, existing, and structurally sound council estates — and the environmental costs of removing the debris of demolition, and of manufacturing and transporting the materials used in building the environmentally sound buildings they have designed.

Recently, Rowan Moore, the architecture critic of the Observer, wrote an article entitled, ‘Where are the architects who will put the environment first?’, following the launch, earlier this year, of Architects Declare, in which, as he put it, “17 winners of the Stirling prize proclaimed a set of principles by which they and – they hoped – others would from now on work, and by the debate that followed.”

As Moore also explained:

The argument of Architects Declare … goes something like this: architects (and for that matter contractors, clients, engineers and everyone else involved in making buildings) have no excuse for not giving their utmost to make their work have as little impact on the environment as possible. They have to consider everything – how far stone might have to travel from quarry to site, for example, and whether or not a building’s components will end up as landfill when it is demolished.

It is not enough to reduce what are called the “in-use” costs – heating, ventilation, lighting, water, waste, maintenance – but also the “embodied energy” that goes into construction and demolition: quarrying cement, smelting steel, firing bricks, shipping materials to site, putting them in place, taking them down again and disposing of them. Until recently the construction industry has concentrated on in-use costs. The British building regulations, for example, set reasonably high standards for the performance of buildings, but are silent on embodied energy. This makes no sense – there’s little point building something that performs magnificently in use, if it takes decades or centuries to pay back the expenditure of energy that went into its construction.

Painful choices may be required – giving up some dearly beloved brutalist-style concrete or a favourite brick. It might mean some genuinely difficult dilemmas: concrete, if used right, slows the rates at which a building cools down and warms up (good) but is made with cement, a material that singlehandedly accounts for about 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions (not good).

As he also put it, “the architectural profession needs to reconsider its value systems, what is considered good and what bad. Architects are still trained from studenthood to perform in what Steve Tompkins, one of the driving forces behind Architects Declare, calls a ‘competitive and individualistic profession.’ They get more glory for designing a singular new building than they would if they worked out a good way of insulating old houses. Yet, as most of the building stock of the future is already with us, and as demolition and rebuilding entails the chucking away of whatever went into making the original building, the latter is likely to be more useful than the former.”

Another group visible yesterday was the Architects Climate Action Network, who declare on their website that they are “a network of individuals within architecture and construction who are taking action to address the twin crises of climate and ecological breakdown.” Recognising that they “can no longer remain secluded within our personal and professional silos”, they explain that, “In the UK, the built environment as a whole is responsible for 42% of national emissions. The manner in which we produce our built environment continues to curtail biodiversity, pollute ecosystems and encourage unsustainable lifestyles.”

Their launch event is on Tuesday October 1st, at 6.30pm, at The Jago, 440 Kingsland Road, London E8 4AA, with an Architects Assembly following on Tuesday October 22 at The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT, also starting at 6.30pm.

Naysayers – and negativity

Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, who have an International Rebellion beginning on October 7 and running through to October 20, are not without their critics — and not just from the right of the political spectrum. A particularly influential critic is Cory Morningstar, an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, whose series ‘The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent’, seeks to expose the manner in which well-meaning, would-be environmental activists are actually being manipulated by what she describes as “the non-profit industrial complex.” XR has also been subject to criticism — although less for being an unwitting front for opportunist capitalists than, it seems to me, for mistakenly positing mass arrests as a way to bring down the system.

Nevertheless, while anyone interested in changing the current economic system as swiftly as possible needs to assess the credentials of those involved, there is something fundamentally deflating about the manner in which most critics of both Greta Thunberg and XR have simply embraced inaction as a virtue. While I don’t dispute the hard work of Cory Morningstar, most of the people following her are  doing nothing more than being cynical on social media, and dismissing movements that have managed to galvanise public opinion on a huge scale while doing nothing remotely constructive themselves.

To my mind, the more the protests continue, and the bigger they become, the more chance there is that some of those involved will contribute in a way that no one can foresee, and that may be genuinely transformational in a way that the results so far — appeals to politicians and public ‘happenings’ and disruptions — may not be able to achieve.

We are in uncharted waters, but already the campaigns have pushed the authorities in numerous countries — at central government and local government level — to declare climate emergencies, instead of, as they have been doing for decades, burying their heads in the sand. These climate emergencies are almost entirely toothless, and more often than not colossally hypocritical, as the homicidal, capitalist ‘business as usual’ continues almost entirely uninterrupted, but our leaders’ hypocrisy can now be very publicly exposed, while those concerned with us having a future — as opposed to the suicidal visions of Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro and all the other poisonous old white men in positions of power — can continue to work out how to effect the swift and unprecedented political change that we all so urgently need.

* * * * *

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.

Beyond Irony: Peabody Launches ‘The Muse’ at Amersham Vale in New Cross, Profiting from the Destruction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden

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.

 

In the London Borough of Lewisham, ground works have started on a long-empty site at Amersham Vale in New Cross, which was formerly occupied by Deptford Green secondary school. What most people don’t know — because Lewisham Council and the developers, the aggressively huge housing association Peabody and the private developer Sherrygreen Homes, worked assiduously to hide the information — is that the Amersham Vale site was stealthily twinned at the planning stage with another, highly-contested site in Deptford, containing the old Tidemill primary school, the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and the 16 structurally sound council flats of Reginald House, with the two sites blandly identified as ‘Deptford Southern Housing.’ 

At Tidemill, campaigners — myself included — spent many years trying to persuade the council and the developers to drop the Tidemill garden from their plans, because it is — or was — a magical, autonomous green space in a heavily urban environment, and also because it mitigated the worst effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street, where particulate levels have been recorded that are six times the recommended limits set by the World Health Organisation. We were also fighting to save Reginald House from cynical destruction as part of the plans, but although we secured significant media attention by occupying the garden for two months last year, we ended up being violently evicted, and the garden was destroyed in February, although building works have not yet begun.

Instead, at Amersham Vale, the arrival of the ground works team has coincided with Peabody launching a page on their ‘Peabody Sales’ website advertising homes for sale on the site, which they are calling, without any apparent trace of irony, ‘The Muse’ — the muse in question being, presumably, that of gentrification and the lure of filthy lucre.

As Peabody state in their breathless PR talk, “This stylish development of thoughtfully designed homes sits beside the newly landscaped Charlottenburg Park, and will boast modern interiors and high quality finishes throughout. From conveniently modern 1-bed apartments with stylish specifications to spacious 4-bedroom townhouses with private landscaped gardens, homes at The Muse are the ideal backdrop to London-living in an exciting and inspiring part of south-east London.”

They add, “And within minutes of New Cross and Deptford rail station with direct links to London Bridge and Charing Cross, The Muse is set to welcome a new community into the heart of an established neighbourhood renowned for its connection to the creative. Make every day a work of art at The Muse, Amersham Vale — and register your interest in the scheme to be amongst the first to find out more about the development.”

Misleading figures

When we were fighting to save the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and Reginald House from destruction, we were regularly obliged to challenge misleading figures presented by the council, who still have the effrontery to claim, on their website, that 76% of the intended 209 homes on the Tidemill site will be “affordable.”

On the Tidemill site, 51 homes are planned for private sale, 38 for shared ownership (a notorious scam whereby those purchasing a share of the property are only assured tenants until they have paid for 100% of the property, and stand to lose everything if they fall into arrears), and 117 for rent, but 13 of those are replacements for tenants in Reginald House, so the true figure of what could be termed new and ‘affordable’ is actually 104 properties, or 49.7% of the total. 

Moreover, it is disingenuous of the council to describe these new homes for rent as ‘affordable’, when they will be at ‘London Affordable Rent’, which, for two-bedroom flats, is 63% higher than truly affordable rents — the social rents that existing, long-term council and housing association tenants enjoy.  

Just as significantly, however, the council continues to ignore the fact that, at Amersham Vale, where 120 properties are planned, in what the architects, Pollard Thomas Edwards, describe as “a new mews street of much needed family houses”, just 24 of those properties are for rent, with 16 for shared ownership and a whopping 80 for private sale (interestingly, Sherrygreen Homes claim that there will be “86 private houses and apartments” on the site). So overall, the proportion of housing on both sites that could conceivably be described as ‘affordable’ is actually just 38.9% — and bear in mind that none of those 128 homes for rent will be at social rent levels.

And as for the 13 replacement flats for tenants in Reginald House, the council is promising to offer them like for like rents for life in the new properties, but refuses to provide legally binding contracts, a deception that was brilliantly exposed by the comedian Geoff Norcott in his recent BBC2 documentary, ‘How the Middle Class Ruined Britain’, in which, after Lewisham Council demanded a right to reply to the campaigners, myself included, who were being filmed for the programme, the councillors’ dissembling was exposed in an exchange between Geoff and Cllr. Joe Dromey. 

As I described it in a recent article, marking the first anniversary of the start of campaigners’ two-month occupation of the Tidemill garden, “when Geoff asked Joe Dromey what he had to say about Reginald House residents’ concerns about there being no guarantees about them getting new homes at social rents, and not facing rent hikes further down the line, he wasn’t reassured by Dromey telling him that residents had received a ‘written guarantee’ that they wouldn’t pay more. ‘Is it legally binding?’ Geoff asked, repeatedly, to silence from Dromey, who ended up, at Geoff’s prompting, claiming that he would resign if the ‘promise’ was broken.”

Achilles Street

Similar evasiveness is happening just up the road from Amersham Vale, at Achilles Street, an estate of 87 homes and associated business on New Cross Road. Achilles Street is a structurally sound estate, although it has been subjected to ‘managed decline’ by Lewisham Council for many years, and the council now wants to destroy it to build a new development of 450 homes, half of which will be for private sale.

As I explained in a Facebook post last week, “Because of new rules regarding estate demolitions, instigated by Jeremy Corbyn and since adopted by the GLA, residents of estates earmarked for demolition have to be balloted about the proposals before they can be approved, but in an effort to prevent a ballot from interfering with their plans, Lewisham Council has hired Studio Raw, a Deptford-based PR, branding and place making company, who have previously worked with Lendlease (the destroyers of the Heygate Estate at the Elephant and Castle), and Cathedral, who built housing in Deptford High Street with no homes for social rent, to sweet talk residents into voting for the destruction of their homes, via drop-in sessions in a refurbished flat on the estate, which has been open every Wednesday afternoon since mid-June.”

As with Reginald House, however, “Residents have no guarantees that what they’re being lavishly promised — like for like rents for life in the new properties — will actually happen, as no legally binding contracts are being issued, and they are only being offered two options — demolition or continued ‘managed decline.’” 

As I also explained, “Given that tenants and the associated businesses on New Cross Road (also earmarked for demolition, but without them being offered a ballot) have dutifully paid millions of pounds in rents (over £2.6m between 2011 and 2017), but have had less than £240,000 spent on repairs and maintenance in that same period”, I join with campaigners in asserting that the council has an obligation to refurbish the properties rather than demolishing them, as otherwise their behaviour is that of the worst sort of slum landlord, running down properties and then using that neglect as an excuse for demolition.”

I added, “I know that no funding for refurbishment is provided by central government or the GLA, but that is no excuse for councils not to demand a way out of this predicament. We need London-wide funding for refurbishment NOW!”

In conclusion, I added that “it is extraordinarily hypocritical of the council, who declared a ‘climate emergency’ in February, to contribute significantly to environmental pollution by knocking down a structurally sound estate and turning New Cross into a building site for several years.” The council’s hypocrisy regarding its ‘climate emergency’ was highlighted as soon as it took place, because, astonishingly, it coincided with the destruction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden.

Social rents – and no more estate demolitions

If the council is serious about tackling the ‘climate emergency’, there must be no more environmentally ruinous estate demolitions. The proposed destruction of Achilles Street should be called off, and, at the Tidemill site, Reginald House should be removed from the building plans, the Tidemill garden should be reinstated, and all the properties to be built on the old Tidemill school site and at Amersham Vale should be at genuine social rents. 

Just imagine if all 120 homes at Amersham Vale and the 51 planned private homes at Tidemill were to be at social rents. That would be 171 new council homes — far better than the 128 new homes currently planned, all at ‘London Affordable Rent.’ Perhaps if everyone involved wasn’t so obsessed with sating The Muse — of profit and gentrification — we might actually get what the hard-working people of Lewisham really need: more homes at social rent. 

* * * * *

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.

18 Years After 9/11, the Endless Injustice of Guantánamo is Driving Prisoners to Suicidal Despair

The terrorist attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, and the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the day it opened, January 11, 2002.


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.

18 years ago, on September 11, 2001, the world changed irrevocably, when terrorists, using hijacked passenger planes, attacked the US mainland, killing nearly 3,000 people. In response, the administration of George W. Bush launched a brutal, global “war on terror,” invading Afghanistan to destroy Al-Qaeda and to topple the Taliban government, and embarking on a program of kidnapping (“extraordinary rendition”), torture and the indefinite detention without charge or trial of alleged “terror suspects.”

18 years later, the war in AfghanIstan drags on, the battle for “hearts and minds” having long been lost, a second occupied country — Iraq — illegally invaded on the basis of lies, and of false evidence obtained through torture, remains broken, having subsequently served as an incubator for Al-Qaeda’s savage offshoot, Daesh (or Islamic State), and the program of indefinite detention without charge or trial continues in the prison established four months after the 9/11 attacks, at Guantánamo Bay on the US naval base in Cuba.

Torture, we are told, is no longer US policy and the CIA no longer runs “black sites” — although torture remains permissible in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, and no one can quite be sure what the US gets up to in its many covert actions around the world.

What is clear, however, is that torture continues to permeate Guantánamo, corroding efforts to bring the alleged 9/11 perpetrators to justice, because the government is still trying not to publicly admit to what it did to the men in their long years in the “black sites” — despite it being exposed so thoroughly in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, which was released in December 2014 — while the men’s defense teams, of course, point out that there can be no justice unless the truth is exposed.

For those not facing trials — 31 of the 40 men still held — there no longer appears to be any attempt by the authorities to even pretend that they should receive any form of justice. Under George W. Bush, most of the men released were freed because of political pressure from their home countries. From 2008 to 2010, there was a brief period when, following a momentous Supreme Court ruling, the law penetrated Guantánamo, and 38 men had their habeas corpus petitions granted by US judges, until appeals court judges cynically rewrote the rules, gutting habeas corpus of all meaning — and vacating or reversing five of those decisions.

To his credit, Barack Obama initiated two review processes to deal with the prisoners he inherited from George W. Bush. The first, 2009’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, approved 156 prisoners for release (roughly two-thirds of those held when he took office), and all but three of those men were eventually released. And from 2013-16, the Periodic Review Boards (PRBs), a parole-type process, partly designed to sidestep Republican efforts to prevent any releases from the prison, led to another 38 men being approved for release, with all but two of them released before Obama left office.

However, 26 men had their ongoing imprisonment approved by the PRBs, and, with the five men approved for release but still held, these 31 men are locked in Guantánamo, apparently forever, by Donald Trump, who, even before he took office, announced that there should be no further releases from Guantánamo.

The PRBs continue, but have not delivered a single recommendation for release since Trump took office, and the prisoners, as a result, are sinking into a grave sense of despair. Human Rights First, the only organization to consistently keep an eye on the PRBs, has regularly been reporting that prisoners are no longer attending their hearings, having concluded that, under Trump, they have become a sham.

For a roll-call of prisoners refusing to engage with the PRBs, see their articles, Alleged Bin Laden Bodyguard Boycotts Periodic Review Board Process (in December 2018), No End in Sight for GTMO Detainee and Another GTMO Detainee Refuses to Participate in PRBs (in February this year), Another GTMO Detainee Opts Out of the Review Process (in April), Two PRB Reviews and Two No-Shows as Detainees Continue to Opt Out (in May), Another Detainee No-Show Demonstrates a Defunct PRB Process (in June) and PRB Hearings Continue While Guantanamo Detainees Sit on the Sidelines (in August).

A suicide attempt by Sharqawi Al Hajj

Last week in a shocking demonstration of how deep the despair at Guantánamo runs, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) issued a press release in which they revealed that their client Sharqawi Al Hajj recently attempted suicide.

In an emergency motion submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C., CCR revealed that Al Hajj had “cut his wrists with a piece of glass while on a recent call with his lawyer [on August 19], after making specific statements in prior weeks about wanting to ‘try to kill himself,’” which I reported in an article last week.

In the motion, CCR’s attorneys state that there “appeared to be utter confusion for several minutes about what was going on,” with Al Hajj stating that he was “sorry for doing this but they treat us like animals,” and adding, “I am not human in their eyes.”

Al Hajj also told his attorneys that he “had been moved to a Behavioral Health Unit in Guantánamo after his [previous] suicidal statements, where he was held in harsh, isolating conditions, despite being told by his doctor that the doctor had recommended against the move. In the unit, [he] began protesting by refusing to drink water for two days. By the third day he was urinating blood and was in the hospital. After his discharge, [he] was placed in a cell that felt freezing cold to [him] because of his frail condition, and was denied doctors’ recommendations for a warm blanket and warm clothes. In protest, he stopped drinking water again.”

On Friday Al Hajj’s attorneys urged the court to order “an immediate independent psychiatric assessment of Mr. Al Hajj to prevent further harm or death.”

CCR Senior Staff Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei said, “Any notion that Mr. Al Hajj is not actively suicidal is deliberately blind or indifferent. For months he has made increasingly hopeless and suicidal statements of intent and planning, culminating in an actual premeditated attempt, in a context where the outlook couldn’t be bleaker – no prospect of release after more than 17 years of captivity.”

She added, “When similar behavior by Guantánamo detainees in the past has not been taken seriously, detainees have died. Mr. Al Hajj’s actions must be treated with the utmost gravity and care by everyone with responsibility over him.”

As CCR also explained, “Attorneys began raising alarms about Mr. Al Hajj two years ago, after he fell unconscious following a hunger strike during which he stopped drinking water. At the time, medical experts warned the court that Mr. Al Hajj was in danger of ‘imminent irreparable harm’ and ‘on the precipice of total bodily collapse.’ They cited both pre-existing health conditions as well as the effects of Mr. Al Hajj’s indefinite detention — now at over 17 years — including over two years of torture in secret CIA custody.”

In response to his deteriorating condition, CCR filed an emergency motion two years ago, in September 2017, calling for the release of his medical records and an evaluation by an independent doctor, which I wrote about at the time. Astonishingly, however, the court has not yet ruled on that motion.

Since then, as CCR proceeded to explain, “Mr. Al Hajj’s mental and physical health have been in steady decline.” Last October, his attorneys filed an urgent request to appear before the court, because of concerns about his mental health, but the courts have, fundamentally, let him down.

It remains to be seen if the courts will finally address the contempt for any notion of justice that emanates from the White House and from Congress when it comes to Guantánamo, although, to date, the wheels of justice appear to be moving at a glacial pace.

Sharqawi Al Hajj is one of 11 prisoners who submitted a habeas corpus petition to the District Court in Washington, D.C. in January 2018, when their lawyers declared that, “Given President Donald Trump’s proclamation against releasing any petitioners — driven by executive hubris and raw animus rather than by reason or deliberative national security concerns — these petitioners may never leave Guantánamo alive, absent judicial intervention.”

In this case, however, as with Sharqawi Al Hajj’s emergency motion of September 2017, no ruling has yet been delivered, and while the delays continue, it seems, from Al-Hajj’s despair, that the prisoners’ very lives are at stake.

POSTSCRIPT: The judge has “refused to order an independent medical evaluation of Sharqawi Al Hajj,” as CCR explained in a press release. Pardiss Kebriaei. said, “In the face of Guantánamo’s inability to change the course of Mr. Al Hajj’s mental health trajectory from suicidal statements to actual attempt, and independent medical opinion that Mr. Al Hajj is ‘actively suicidal,’ the court’s denial of an outside medical evaluation takes a chance with Mr. Al Hajj’s life. Mr. Al Hajj’s attempt was not taken seriously, and it was seen as volitional – harm of his own making, as if he weren’t a prisoner we had tortured and imprisoned without charge for 17 years, with still no prospect of release, and as if willfulness matters in the assessment of real risk.”

* * * * *

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support my Guantánamo Work, My Housing Activism and My London Photography

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on September 9, 2019, two days before the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when the prison had been open for 6,451 days.


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

 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s just two days until the 18th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in response to which the Bush administration launched a brutal, global “war on terror” that led to the US and other Western countries jettisoning core values that they claimed to uphold — a ban on torture, and a recognition that only dictators imprison people indefinitely without charge or trial.

14 years ago — more or less on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 — I became extremely concerned about the most bleakly enduring icon of the US’s post-9/11 lawlessness — the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay — and I subsequently embarked on a project that has largely come to define my life ever since: finding out who has been held at Guantánamo, telling their stories, and campaigning to get the prison closed.

Little did I realize, 14 long years ago, that George W. Bush would eventually be replaced by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, but that Guantánamo would remain open, and that Obama would, eight years later, hand the prison on to Donald Trump, whose contempt for the law, and whose animosity towards Muslims, is so extreme that he doesn’t even acknowledge that the continued existence of Guantánamo is a stain on the values that America claims to hold dear, and who has no intention of releasing anyone from the prison under any circumstances.

Under George W. Bush, 532 prisoners were released from Guantánamo, and another 197 were transferred out of the prison by Barack Obama, leaving 41 men still held when Trump took office. Since then, just one man has left the prison, a Saudi whose agreement to a plea deal in 2014, in the prison’s broken and ill-fated judicial system, the military commissions, was contingent on him being repatriated to continue to serve a prison sentence in his homeland.

Disturbingly, Trump’s support for Guantánamo has not increased indignation about the prison’s continued existence; rather, it has almost entirely fallen off the radar. Partly, of course, this is because of all the other disgraceful policies implemented by this most shameful of presidents — including, of course, his much-contested Muslim travel ban and his disgraceful treatment of refugees and migrants, including children, at the Mexican border — but it remains imperative that those of use who care about Guantánamo continue to write about it, to share information about it, and to call for its closure, and with your help that is what I have continued to do, and will continue to do until, one day, the prison will, I hope, be closed.

To that end, as an independent journalist and activist, I am reliant on your support to enable me to continue the work I’ve been doing over the last 14 years — via this website, and the nearly 2,300 articles about Guantánamo that I have published since I completed the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files in May 2007, and via the Close Guantánamo campaign and website that I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. 

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

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

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

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (to 164A Tressillian Road, London SE4 1XY), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

I’m also seeking support for other work that I undertake — for instance, my campaigning as a housing activist in London, primarily resisting the cynical destruction of housing estates as a key component of an out-of-control housing ‘regeneration’ industry that is delivering eye-watering profits and ‘operating surpluses’ to private developers and housing associations by wiping out homes at genuinely affordable rents. In a London-wide epidemic of social cleansing, these are being replaced with properties for private sale, with the scam that is shared ownership, and with a model of ‘affordable’ rents that are actually around 60% higher than the social rents that they are replacing on demolished estates. 

I am calling for budgets to be allocated for refurbishment, which do not currently exist, either via central government of the GLA, and, as I have also become more involved in awareness of the environmental catastrophe that we are all facing, I am also calling for a halt to demolitions for environmental reasons, especially as so many of those responsible have hypocritically declared ‘climate emergencies’, and yet seem intent on doing nothing about it beyond fashionable posturing.

I’m also seeking support for my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which I began over seven years ago, in May 2012, and which has involved me cycling around London taking photos in all of the capital’s 120 postcodes. Since May 2017, I have been posting a photo a day — with accompanying essays — on ’The State of London’ Facebook page, and on Twitter, and any support you can give for this ongoing project will also be very gratefully received, as I hope, in the near future, to get a website up and running, to make prints, and to publish a book.

With thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work. If you can help out at all, that will be greatly appreciated, but I understand that times are hard all round. Regardless of whether or not you can make a donation, your continued interest in my work helps me to continue as a genuinely independent voice in a world crowded with “fake news.”

Andy Worthington
London
September 9, 2019

* * * * *

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.

Guantánamo Torture Victim Mohamedou Ould Salahi and the Extraordinary Power of Forgiveness

Former Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Salahi photographed by Amanda Thomas-Johnson for Middle East Eye.


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In the long and dispiriting history of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, few of the 729 men and boys released have become household names, but one who has is the Mauritanian citizen Mohamedou Ould Salahi, best known as the author of the acclaimed memoir Guantánamo Diary, written while he was at the prison.

A victim of the US’s global network of torture prisons, and subjected to a special torture program at Guantánamo that was approved by then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Salahi (generally identified at Guantánamo as Slahi) was mistakenly regarded as a significant player in Al-Qaeda, but was finally approved for release in July 2016, and was released in Mauritania three months later, almost 15 years since his own government, as he so memorably put it, “turned me over, short-cutting all kinds of due process, like a candy bar to the United States.”

Despite being freed, Salahi is trapped in Mauritania, as his government has broken a promise to return his passport to him after two years, a situation that I wrote about in March, when, as I also pointed out, everyone released from Guantánamo — all those men and boys described by the US as “enemy combatants” — are forever tainted by the experience, and continue to live fundamentally without rights.

Recently, Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a journalist based in Dakar, Senegal, visited Mauritania to interview Salahi for Middle East Eye, where he found him to be as frank, eloquent, and, crucially, as forgiving of those who wronged him as we have come to expect. The whole article is worth reading, but below I’m focusing in particular on Salahi’s current situation, and his reflections on his experiences, rather than running through the history of his imprisonment and torture, which I have discussed in previous articles, and which is best explored by reading Guantánamo Diary.

Thomas-Johnson noted that, although Salahi was “beaming” when he met him, with a “welcoming smile” that he took as “a sign that our conversation, delving into his recent past, may not be so excruciating after all,” the refusal of the Mauritanian authorities to return his passport continues to have a major impact on his life. As Thomas-Johnson explained, “He can’t travel for treatment to fix a longstanding nerve condition” that “was exacerbated by his Guantánamo torturers,” and, although he has a newborn son in Germany, he “is unable to be formally registered as a citizen because Salahi can’t get there to sign papers.” Without a passport, Salahi also “cannot work or register to vote in Mauritania.”

The extraordinary significance of forgiveness 

Nevertheless, in his conversation with Thomas-Johnson, Salahi revealed how, despite these obstacles, the US authorities cannot fundamentally suppress him. In speaking of his prison experiences, for example, he explained how the US efforts to dehumanise him actually gave him a sense of freedom. “If you are at the bottom of society, you are not afraid of anything because they cannot do anything to you because you are already at the bottom,” he told Thomas-Johnson, adding, “That’s how prison is. I don’t need to pretend anything. It’s freedom in a weird way, freedom of [the] soul.”

Thomas-Johnson explained how he was “[s]urprised, and a little bewildered by his comment,” and asked “if he found happiness at Guantánamo.”

“Absolutely,” was Salahi’s immediate response.

He proceeded to explain that, although, at first, after his release, as he put it, “I wanted revenge,” he soon learned the value of forgiveness. As he told Thomas-Johnson, “I don’t have beef against anyone. I’ve wholeheartedly forgiven everyone.”

This ability to forgive is one of Salahi’s most compelling attributes, and, in recent history, reminds me of the impact of Nelson Mandela’s refusal to be consumed by hatred after his long imprisonment in South Africa, and his insistence that a process of truth and reconciliation was the only way to avoid a cycle of violence and recrimination. As Mandela put it, “courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.”

I have noted the importance of Salahi’s forgiveness before. In March 2017, after he appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” I noted that, to my mind, “his most poignant comment came soon after his release, when, in a video made for the ACLU, he said, ‘I wholeheartedly forgive everyone who wronged me during my detention, and I forgive because forgiveness is my inexhaustible resource.’”

I also explained how, in January 2017, when I met Larry Siems, the editor of Guantánamo Diary, who had recently visited Salahi in Mauritania, he told me that Salahi had “elaborated on his theory of forgiveness, explaining that, if people do not forgive those who have wronged them, then they cannot let go of their pain, and it will, essentially, eat away at them or drag them down, whereas he, as he said, is absolutely free.”

Salahi also explained to Thomas-Johnson how the solitude that came with his imprisonment freed him from being a “slave of time.” 

“The life many people live now doesn’t allow you to have time to think about anything because we are the slaves of time,” he said, adding, “I was like that as well, but then my life was cut short by prison. I had to redefine who I was and my relationship with God. I had time to think. All the great prophets, including Muhammad, and all the great philosophers, they went through this process of solitude. It allows you to know who you are. I had to redefine everything, it was a complete life transformation.”  

Nevertheless, as Thomas-Johnson also explained, “Salahi still has nightmares about being stuck in Guantánamo, a sign that while he was able to find some spiritual space within his torturous constraints, he is not immune from the effects of his treatment,”” and he also stated that “he feels guilty that he has left the camp which still holds some 40 people, and regularly lobbies his lawyers to help them.”

Post- Guantánamo life

Salahi also recounted with amusement his adjustment to technological changes following his release. As Thomas-Johnson described it, one of his first requests after he arrived back home “was to ask his family to buy him two large TV sets” with a large number of channels. Thomas-Johnson explained that “[a] strict diet of curated news and information fed to him by his US captors had made him hungry to understand what the world was really like.”

However, when he “asked his niece to set up the channels,” she “looked at him and said, ‘I have never touched a TV in my life,” and instead used a smartphone to watch everything.” Salahi said that he realized that “the world had moved on and that he was now playing catch up.” As Salahi put it, “Oh God, I’m so freaking old, man.”

As he also explained, “TV wasn’t important at all and now everybody watched the news on the internet. It was like I had just stepped from a time capsule and was there trying to fit in.”

Not every change was so easy to absorb, however. As Thomas-Johnson also explained, by the time of Salahi’s release, “his mother and one of his brothers had died,” although “he had new nieces and nephews.” As Salahi himself put it, “I didn’t recognise a lot of my family. People were getting old, and some who weren’t born were now men and women.”

Since being released, because he is unable to travel, Salahi told Thomas-Johnson that he has spent “a lot of time writing.” In Guantánamo, after completing his memoir, he “wrote four more books,” but “was not allowed to take them with him.” He is currently rewriting one of those books — about human happiness — and has also “completed a novel about Mauritanian Bedouin life.”

Thomas-Johnson arrived in Nouakchott, Mauritania’s capital, the day after a presidential election, and explained that, during their conversation, Salahi “took a phone call warning him about protests that [had] sprung up across Nouakchott, disputing the result” of the election. As Thomas-Johnson described it, “Many here distrust the political establishment which has been dominated by the military for decades,” and in the latest election, former army chief Mohamed Ould Ghazouani secured the presidency, replacing Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, another senior military figure, who had been president for ten years. The new president is a close ally of Abdel Aziz, and both men were involved in two coups against previous leaders, in 2005 and 2008.

Salahi told Thomas-Johnson that, the day before the election, “he had already written a letter — in French, Arabic and English, a language he learned in Guantánamo — to the next Mauritanian president, whoever it would be.” In it, as Thomas-Johnson described it, “he tore into his country’s ruling establishment,” describing it as one of a number of “decaying and corrupt Arab systems, where those in power abuse the poor and the oppressed”.

He told Thomas-Johnson that he was “certain the next president won’t grant him his passport even though he has never been convicted or charged during his 20-year ordeal.” As he put it, “None of them will be ballsy enough to say I am going to apply the law. I am a Mauritanian citizen, but we don’t have this understanding of the law in this country. Anyone who wants to stay in power, they have to serve America first. I think the slogan of our president should have been ‘America first.’”

Despite this, he refuses to be silent, telling Thomas-Johnson that “inside … he is free, and he speaks without fear.” As he explained, “I accept that the United States should follow and put to trial all the people who are harming their citizens. I agree with that. But I disagree with them that if they suspect you, they kidnap you, they torture you, and let you rot in prison for 15 or 16 years. And then they dump you in your country and they say you cannot have your passport because you have already seen so many things that we don’t want you to travel around the world to talk about.”

In conclusion, he said, “I’m being punished” — and it’s difficult not to agree with him.

* * * * *

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.

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