Andy Worthington's Blog, page 21

Lawyers’ Fears for Guantánamo “Forever Prisoner” Sharqawi Al-Hajj “After Rapidly Declining Health and Suicidal Statements”

Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), representing her client Sharqawi al-Hajj outside the White House on January 11, 2018, the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay.


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Disturbing news from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), who report that one of their Guantánamo clients, Sharqawi al-Hajj, “stated on a recent call with his attorney that he wanted to take his own life.” CCR described this, in a press release, as “a first” in CCR’s long representation of al-Hajj, adding that their attorneys have responded to it “with the utmost seriousness.”

As they further explain, “His suicidal statements follow a steady and observable deterioration of his physical and mental health that his legal team has been raising the alarm about for two years. They are monitoring his condition as best they can, and will provide any further information as soon as they are able.”

In an eloquent statement, CCR’s lawyers said, “When things are in a state of perpetual crisis, as they seem all around today, it is easy to lose sight of just how extreme a situation is, and grow numb to it. We have lost sight of just how extreme the situation in the Guantánamo prison is. We have grown numb to it.”

They added, “The prisoners there have all been in some form of captivity for nearing two decades, since the start of a war in Afghanistan that was so long ago that it counts as history for people now in college. When they first arrived at Guantánamo, the prisoners were shoved off planes, picked up by their necks, thrown in literal cages. Others landed later, after years in underground CIA sites where they were brutalized in the ways that have been documented in scores of reports and testimonials. On top of that treatment, most who remain have been held without charge and will remain in that limbo for as far as they can see. That quality of detention – indefiniteness – has its own cruel effects, physically and psychologically.”

Sharqawi al-Hajj, a 45-year old Yemeni citizen, has been held without charge or trial by the US since he was seized in a house raid in Karachi, in Pakistan, over 17 years ago, on February 7, 2002. Shortly after his capture, he was flown to Jordan, where he was tortured on behalf of the US, along with a still-undetermined number of other prisoners of the “war on terror.” He has said of his time in Jordan that he was subjected to “continuous torture and interrogation for the whole of two years,” and was “shown thousands of photos” of people the US wanted him to identify.

He was held in Jordan for nearly two years, until, in January 2004, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held for four months in the CIA’s brutal “Dark Prison,” which he described as “a pitch dark place, with extremely loud scary sounds.” In May 2004, he was moved to the US prison at Bagram airbase, where he remained until he was flown to Guantánamo with a number of other CIA prisoners on September 19, 2004.

Al-Hajj is also known as Riyadh the Facilitator, and is alleged to have been a senior Al-Qaeda facilitator, and yet, since his arrival at Guantánamo 15 years ago, he has never been put forward for a trial by military commission, even though he was recommended for prosecution by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, a high-level, inter-agency government review process that was established by President Obama shortly after he took office in 2009. Instead, in 2013, he and 17 other prisoners originally recommended for prosecution — as well as 46 other men who the task force recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial — were made eligible for Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process that ended up approving 38 men for release before Obama left office.

Al-Hajj, however, was one of 26 men recommended for ongoing imprisonment by the PRBs rather than release — leading to their description by the mainstream US media, in a rare moment of illumination, as “forever prisoners.” Under Donald Trump, the PRBs have continue to review the prisoners’ cases, but since Trump took office not a single prisoner has been approved for release. Prisoners — al-Hajj included — have responded by refusing to take part in the PRBs, correctly concluding that they are a waste of time under a president who declared, even before he took office, that there “should be no further releases from Gitmo.”   

In January 2018, lawyers for eleven prisoners — including al-Hajj — submitted a habeas corpus petition to the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which they stated 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.” 

A ruling has not yet been delivered in that case, but last summer a lawyer for the government claimed that the remaining prisoners at  could be held for a hundred years, if the government considered that the conflict in connection with which they were seized — the allegedly unending global “war on terror” — lasted that long.  

In response to the phone call with al-Hajj, CCR have scheduled a urgent status conference with Judge Royce C. Lamberth, in connection with al-Hajj’s habeas petition, this coming Friday, September 6, 2019. 

The urgency is in no doubt. As CCR explain, al-Hajj’s body “is so depleted by everything – prior torture, chronic pain, repeat hunger strikes as the only autonomous form of protest he has had – that outside medical experts say he is at risk of total collapse.” 

To this can now be added what CCR call “the first time” that “he has spoken with seriousness and specificity about suicide.” As they proceed to explain, ”Detainees have died or been near death in Guantánamo before. When they have, the government’s response has been to clamp down with secrecy, or downplay the gravity of the health of detainees on the brink, or, in the case of apparent suicides, distort those desperate acts as a form of warfare.”

They also state, “Guantánamo was a system designed to break people down. It is working. Mr. Al Hajj’s desperate state should wake us up once and for all to the reality that it is rotten to its core. Some would say, as members of Congress like Tom Cotton have, that detainees should be left to rot in Guantánamo. The rest of us need to ask what we are willing to accept.”

In al-Hajj’s case, CCR point out that he “has never received adequate mental health treatment for the effects of his torture,” and, in addition, “has suffered for years from severe physical symptoms, including acute abdominal and urinary pain, extreme weakness and fatigue, and recurring jaundice, which are exacerbated by his repeated hunger strikes.” 

In 2017, as I reported at the time, medical experts feared that he was in danger of “imminent irreparable harm” and “on the precipice of total body collapse,” after he “fell unconscious after a hunger strike during which he stopped drinking water, and required emergency hospitalization.” On that occasion, CCR submitted an emergency motion to a federal judge requesting an independent medical evaluation and the release of al-Hajj’s medical records,” but that motion disappeared into a legal void — or, as CCR put it, far more charitably, “has yet to be ruled on.”

Treated with complete contempt by the president, abandoned by the government, and neglected by the courts, the Guantánamo prisoners continue to be America’s forgotten shame. Let us hope that, in Sharqawi al-Hajj’s case, the District Court in Washington, D.C. recognizes its responsibility to act.

* * * * *

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.

One Year Since the Tidemill Occupation Began, Is the Tide Turning Against the ‘Regeneration’ Industry?

The Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford on August 28, 2018, the day before its occupation, to prevent its destruction, officially began (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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One year ago, local residents and activists in Deptford, in south east London — myself included — occupied a community garden, the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, to try to prevent its destruction by Lewisham Council for a housing project. Strenuous efforts had been made by members of the local community for many years to persuade the council that their plans for the garden — originally part of the Tidemill primary school, which moved out of its premises in 2012 — were environmentally deranged, because the garden miligated the worst effects of the horrendous pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street, but they had refused to listen.

The plans involved not just the garden — a magical space created by pupils, parents and teachers 20 years before — but also Reginald House, a block of 16 structurally sound flats next door, which, cynically, were to be destroyed to make way for the new development, and the old school itself. Campaigners had no fundamental objections to the former school buildings being converted into housing, but the plans for the garden and for Reginald House were so profoundly unacceptable that, when the council approved the development in September 2017, campaigners began to hatch plans for the occupation.

The garden had been kept open by guardians who had been installed in the old school buildings after it closed in 2012, and when that contract was terminated, the local community were given “meanwhile use” of the garden instead. A handful of volunteers had opened it at weekends, but as time went on the numbers of people drawn to it increased, and after Lewisham Council made its decision, ironically, interest in the garden mushroomed. Numerous musical and artistic events took place throughout spring and summer 2018, and when the council called for campaigners to hand the keys back on August 29, the long-mooted plan to occupy the garden instead went into effect.

It was a truly wonderful campaign to have been part of. The BBC evening news gave the occupation positive coverage when it began, Sian Berry of the Green Party came to visit and expressed her support, and numerous independent media outlets also took an interest. In environmental circles, news of the occupation spread around the world, with visitors from France and Switzerland turning up almost immediately. Closer to home, campaigners from Grow Heathrow turned up to show support, and there was also solidarity from the Hambach Forest in Germany.

Just as significantly, on the ground in Deptford, solidarity came from many local residents who had been pupils at the Tidemill school, or who had been parents of pupils, and the campaign also tapped into long-simmering resentment at the ‘gentrification’ of Deptford, and throughout the borough of Lewisham in general.

Although the story of the garden overshadowed the story of Reginald House, campaigners made sure that the problems with the proposed housing plans for the site were always mentioned. This part of the story had actually begun ten years ago, when residents of Reginald House were first informed about the proposed plans. At that time, two bigger blocks of flats on Giffin Street were also included in the plans, but they were later dropped, either because the council feared the combative nature of some of the residents, or because there were perceived to be too many leaseholders for the viability of the project.

For many years before the occupation, campaigners had also fought to improve the social housing component of the plans, with the council, and the developers, the housing association Family Mosaic (who merged with Peabody in the summer of 2016), and the private company Sherrygreen Homes being prevailed upon to increase the amount of homes in the plans at “affordable” rents. These efforts had been successful, but the struggle to prevent the proposed destruction of Reginald House had not been successful, even though the block is structurally sound, and 80% of its residents don’t want to have their homes destroyed — something they have told the council and the GLA by letter, because the council has refused to allow them a ballot.

At the time of the occupation, the council spent much of its time bragging about how the “social housing” component of the proposed development was over 50%. This was a lie. 209 homes are planned for the Tidemill site, with 51 for private sale, 41 for shared ownership, and 117 for rent — at allegedly “affordable” levels (or 104, if the 13 rented flats in Reginald House, which are to be replaced according to the plans, are removed from the picture).

What the council failed to mention was that the Tidemill site had been stealthily twinned with Amersham Vale in New Cross, the former site of Deptford Green secondary school, empty since 2012, and on that site Peabody and Sherrygreen are planning to build 120 new homes — 81 for private sale, 15 for shared ownership, and just 24 for allegedly “affordable” rent — meaning that, over both sites, the so-called “affordable” rent component is just 43%.

Moreover, there is also a huge problem with the so-called “affordable” rents; namely, that they will not be social rents, which in Lewisham, according to the council’s own figures, are £95.54 a week for a two-bedroom flat, but ‘London Affordable Rent’, an innovation of London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, that appears to have been designed to stealthily do away with social rents altogether, are 63% higher, at £152.73 a week.

Lewisham Council’s own assessment of the different rental scenarios that currently apply in the borough. ‘Lewisham Stock’ refers to social rents, for council properties and housing association tenants whose tenures preceded changes implemented by the Tories after they came to power in 2010.

Both before and during the occupation, campaigners continued to demand that the Tidemill plans were withdrawn, and that the council and Peabody meet with the local community to work out how to proceed with plans that spared the garden and Reginald House, and that delivered genuinely affordable properties for rent; in other words, at social rents.

However, Lewisham Council and Peabody had no interest in changing their plans, and on October 29 the council hired 130 bailiffs from the notoriously brutal and historically union-busting company County Enforcement to evict the occupiers, who, on the day, were protected by the police, despite their demonstrable violence. That shameful day has, I believe, forever blackened the council’s name in significant sections of the population of Deptford, and will never be forgiven, and it was also very clearly premature, given that the campaigners had an outstanding submission for a judicial review of the legality of the developments in the High Court.

The legal effort was subsequently thwarted by the court of appeals, but the council and Peabody should not have proceeded with an eviction until that approach had been exhausted, leaving attentive observers able only to conclude that the council’s violence was specifically directed at the occupiers, to punish them for having dared to resist the council’s plans.

What has happened since has failed to justify the actions of the council and Peabody. The eviction, whose brutality was most effectively written about by local resident Ruby Radburn (and which I also wrote about here), cost £105,188, and was followed by the presence of a significant number of bailiffs — who were frequently anti-social and antagonistic to local residents — 24 hours a day, complete with floodlights at night and dogs barking at all hours.

In November, campaigners saw off efforts by the council and Peabody to destroy all the trees in the garden, when the company responsible, Artemis Tree Services, very publicly withdrew from their contract, explaining that they had “heard the voice of the Lewisham people” and had “decided to remove themselves from the Tidemill Project.”

On February 27, another dark day, another tree services company, SDL Services, succeeded in destroying all the trees, and, at a council meeting that day, it was revealed that, by that point, the cost of keeping the security in place was a further £1.37 million. Further costs have, of course, been added since, as well as the costs of maintaining permanent security at the old Tidemill school site since 2016, meaning that the whole process of evicting the garden and guarding it, as well as guarding the empty school, may well have cost at least £2.5m in total.

And for what? One year since the occupation began, and ten months since the eviction, no building work has yet taken place, either at Tidemill or at Amersham Vale, and, when it comes to the environmental costs of housing developments, the tide is decisively turning against the recklessness with which the entire building industry has been behaving.

Over the last year, thanks to Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, the environmental costs of our hugely destructive way of life have finally gone mainstream. Cynical politicians — including Lewisham Council — have jumped on the bandwagon, declaring a climate emergency the same week that Tidemill’s trees were cut down, but doing nothing to actually tackle the problem. Killing a garden was bad enough, but knocking down a structurally sound block of council flats is also completely unacceptable.

And this particular problem doesn’t just involve Tidemill. Down the road in New Cross, the council wants to demolish the 87 flats that make up the Achilles Street estate, which is also structurally sound, but has been subjected to “managed decline” over many years. As with Reginald House, the answer is not demolition, but refurbishment, but at every level of politics — central government, the GLA and local government — no provision has been made for the refurbishment of estates.

This urgently needs to change, as the environmental cost of demolition means that it shouldn’t be undertaken unless it is absolutely necessary — and at Reginald House, at Achilles Street, and at another big planned regeneration scheme, Catford Town Centre, no such case exists. These are all planned demolitions of choice, intended to make money for the developers, with residents treated with contempt, and the environmental costs disregarded.

As I explained in an article in May, Deptford’s Tidemill Campaign and the Dawning Environmental Rebellion Against the Dirty Housing ‘Regeneration’ Industry, I hope that environmental campaigners will consider taking action when building work finally begins at Tidemill, and I also hope that, at Achilles Street, where the council cannot proceed without a ballot, which may be approved within the next month, residents will spurn the council’s efforts to get them to approve the destruction of their homes.

Council officials — and Studio Raw, consultants they have employed to butter up residents — are currently making all kinds of wonderful-sounding promises about what they will receive if they vote to approve the destruction of their homes — like for like social rents for life in shiny new properties.

The problem, however, is that none of these promises are legally binding, and what the history of ‘regeneration’ shows us is that, further down the line, costs rise, developers’ profits are threatened, and promises evaporate like the mirages that, in reality, they always were.

And if you have any doubts about this, watch what happened when the comedian Geoff Norcott, who spent a day with Tidemill campaigners as part of his recently broadcast BBC2 programme, ‘How the Middle Class Ruined Britain’, challenged Lewisham councillor Joe Dromey about the ‘promises’ made to residents of Reginald House about them getting like for like social rents for life in the new Tidemill development.

The exchange begins about 35 minutes into the programme, and 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 legal 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.

If the last year has taught us anything, it is that, when it comes to housing, Lewisham Council — and their development partners, like Peabody — cannot be trusted at all.

So is there any hope? Well, there’s always hope, but to my mind it still seems unlikely to happen with continual struggle — although, if you’re looking for another glimmer of light, Paul Burnham, a campaigner in Haringey, has spent some time examining the latest draft of the London Plan, and states that the demolition of council estates will no longer be encouraged in the next London Plan, due for publication next year.

Let’s hope this is the case.

* * * * *

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.

Abandoned in Guantánamo: Abdul Latif Nasser, Cleared for Release Three Years Ago, But Still Held

Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Latif Nasser, cleared for release from the prison over three years ago, but still held, and Camp 6, where he remains imprisoned with 23 other low-level prisoners.


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.

Over 17 and a half years since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, it is, sadly, rare for the mainstream US media — with the bold exception of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times — to spend any time covering it, even though its continued existence remains a source of profound shame for anyone who cares about US claims that it is a nation founded on the rule of law.

Given the general lack of interest, it was encouraging that, a few weeks ago, ABC News reported on the unforgivable plight of Abdul Latif Nasser, a 54-year old Moroccan prisoner, to mark the third anniversary of his approval for release from the prison. Nasser is one of five of the remaining 40 prisoners who were approved for release by high-level US government review processes under President Obama, but who are still held.

In Nasser’s case, as I reported for Al-Jazeera in June 2017, this was because, although he was approved for release in June 2016 by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process that approved 38 prisoners for release from 2013 to 2016, the necessary paperwork from the Moroccan government didn’t reach the Obama administration until 22 days before Obama left office, and legislation passed by Republicans stipulated that Congress had to be informed 30 days before a prisoner was to be released, meaning that, for Nasser, as I described it, “the difference between freedom and continued incarceration was just eight days.”

A year ago, Jessica Schulberg revisited his story for the Huffington Post, “telling it in much greater detail than I had been able to, and, I hope, getting it out to a wide audience,” as I explained when I cross-posted her article.

As I also explained, Schulberg secured commentary from Nasser’s family, who, to the best of my knowledge, had not been heard from before. As I described it, “His wonderfully supportive family reveal a man who would not pose any threat to the US if released, but then the US authorities already know that, having approved him for release in his PRB for exactly that reason.”

For ABC News, Guy Davies also spoke to Nasser’s family, with his brother, Mustafa, explaining how, when he heard the news that the US authorities had cleared his brother for release, “he could barely contain his excitement.” 

“Within 24 hours,” Davies added, “preparations were underway for his return.” By Skype, Mustafa told him, “The entire family was relieved and was helping with the preparations. Everyone was doing something. One person prepared the house he would live in, another his room.” Davies noted that the family “had even found a potential bride for him to marry upon his return.”

Three years later, however, “A series of bureaucratic missteps and political reversals mean that each day Abdul Latif … wakes up in Guantánamo, no closer to freedom.” As his brother put it, “the promise was broken.”

Guy Davies then rather pointlessly ran through the US’s allegations against Nasser, ignoring the outcome of his PRB, when, as I described it at the time, the board members noted that they had “considered [his] candid responses to the Board’s questions regarding his reasons for going to Afghanistan and activities while there,” and “also noted that [he] has multiple avenues for support upon transfer, to include a well-established family with a willingness and ability to provide him with housing, realistic employment opportunities, and economic support.” 

The board members also noted that they “considered [his] renunciation of violence, that [he] has committed a low number of disciplinary infractions while in detention, [his] efforts to educate himself while at Guantánamo through classes and self-study, and that [he] has had no contact with individuals involved in terrorism-related activities outside of Guantánamo.”

Nasser was captured in December 2001 with dozens of other men, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, but as his lawyers at Reprieve explained to Davies, none of the alleged evidence against their client “has ever been presented to a court of law.”

Both Reprieve, and Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who used to work with Reprieve, but is now in private practice, also told Davies that the Northern Alliance sold Nasser for a bounty to the US and that “the testimony of several key witnesses in his case has been discredited,” because it was obtained by torture — to which might also be added the fact that one allegedly key witness, who described Nasser as “one of the most important military advisors to UBL [Osama bin Laden],” is a Yemeni who was notorious for telling lies about over 120 of his fellow prisoners.

Abdul Latif Nasser in Guantánamo

Speaking to Guy Davies, Mustafa Nasser explained that, when he “first heard that his brother had been taken to Guantánamo, the news came as ‘a shock, beyond shocking.’”

As Davies put it, his relatives were unable to speak to him until 2004, by which time “he had spent two years in solitary confinement,” according to Reprieve and his family.

Sullivan-Bennis told Davies that Abdul Latif Nasser’s years in Guantánamo had been “particularly grim,” explaining that “he was held in isolation between 2009 and 2011 for ‘having influence over other detainees.’”

In conversations at the prison, he told her that, between 2006 and 2007, “he was kept in Oscar Block, where generators ‘ran what seemed like 24 hours a day, without cessation, for no discernible purpose other than to make noise.’” As Sullivan-Bennis explained, the generators “caused permanent hearing damage” and “prevented both thought and sleep from reaching the men to any meaningful degree.” 

In addition, the lights stayed on 24 hours a day. Sullivan-Bennis said that Nasser told her, “Shelby, you cannot imagine,” when he spoke of “spending days without sleeping, unable to blot out the light with the thin blankets they were provided [with].”

Nevertheless, as Davies further explained, “Despite these hardships, Abdul Latif has taken the opportunity to immerse himself in Western culture — compiling a list of inspirational quotations from prominent writers among other things,” according to his family. A handwritten note obtained by ABC News features a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson: “Keep busy at something. A busy person never has time to be unhappy.” 

Davies added that, “despite his captivity, it is a philosophy Abdul Latif appears to have lived by,” noting that Reprieve explained to him that he “spoke no English when he arrived at Guantánamo in 2002,” and yet “he never stopped trying to learn, compiling a 2,000-word Arabic-to-English dictionary,” as a result of building up a commanding knowledge of the English language. 

Sullivan-Bennis also explained that that Nasser “is specifically one of the most outspoken men in Guantánamo with regard to women getting an education and people being able to express their freedom about religion.”

Furthermore, as Davies explained, “she maintains that Abdul Latif was ‘never a member of al-Qaida,’ and that the state’s version of events is based on evidence that would be inadmissible in a regular, federal court of law.” As she put it, “If he had the same rights that I did, he would probably be free.”

The malignant role of Donald Trump in Abdul Latif Nasser’s ongoing imprisonment

As Nasser’s lawyers — Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, and Mark Maher, her co-counsel, who is with Reprieve — explained, his continued imprisonment is not just because of what Davies called “a bureaucratic mishap,” with the lawyers explaining that “the Moroccan government did not accept the security terms set out by the PRB” until it was too late, but also because of the “pivotal policy reversal” that took place even before Donald Trump became president, when, on January 3, 2017, he tweeted that there “should be no further releases from Gitmo.”

As Davies proceeded to explain, “According to an opinion on an emergency motion filed by his lawyers in Washington, D.C. 10 days later, the outgoing secretary of defense, Ash Carter, had left the task of notifying Congress to his successor, Jim Mattis,” who had no intention of releasing Nasser.

Six days later, on January 19, District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly rejected the motion, ruling that “[t]he decision to transfer Petitioner pursuant to a recommendation of the PRB rests exclusively within the discretion of the Secretary of Defense,” and adding, “Petitioner has no ‘right’ to such a transfer.”

As Davies explained, “The notification to Congress was never issued. Just days from release, Nasir’s freedom had been snatched from him once again.”

And under Donald Trump, Guantánamo has become what Shelby Sullivan-Bennis described as “a ghost town.” The majority of the remaining prisoners are over the age of 50, and, as she also explained, “A lot of the blocks are actually empty. There are only 24 low value detainees who are kept in any kind of communal living situation.”

What hope remains for Nasser is tied to a habeas corpus petition that he submitted with ten other prisoners in January 2018, which I wrote about here, and in which, as Davies noted, lawyers described Trump’s tweet as constituting an illegal U-turn in the government’s approach to Guantánamo, stating, “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.” 

As Davies also noted, “It’s not clear when a judge will rule on the habeas petition, but the last time arguments were heard between the petitioners and the [government’s] lawyers,” — in July 2018, as I reported here — “a chilling legal possibility was brought to the fore. The government’s lawyers argued that, under the laws of war, which apply while conflict with the Taliban and al Qaeda are ongoing, the detainees could remain in Guantánamo for the next 100 years.” 

Nasser — and the four other men approved for release under President Obama — “live in a judicial limbo,” as Davies put it, “first promised freedom and then forgotten by an administration determined to keep them detained, without releasing evidence as to why.”

Eric Freedman, a professor of constitutional rights at Hofstra University, told ABC News that although the rulings of the Periodic Review Boards “are not legally binding,” it is troubling that they have essentially been “frozen” under Trump, and that “administration policy is that no one is to be released, regardless of the evidence.” He further explained that federal judges ultimately have oversight over Guantánamo rulings, and that, due to “a torrent of professional criticism,” the courts in Washington, D.C. “are beginning to ‘assert their proper role’ with regards to detainees – which offers some hope for the habeas corpus petitioners awaiting their verdict,” and also for Khalid Qassim, a Yemeni who recently won an important case in the court of appeals in Washington, D.C., which I wrote about here.

Mark Maher, Nasser’s co-counsel, told ABC News that Reprieve remained appalled that Trump was waging “an undeclared — and unconstitutional — policy of indefinite detention without trial,” noting that “[a]ny one of six US agencies [in the PRB] could have vetoed his transfer, but they agreed unanimously he should be released from Guantánamo.” 

For Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, the hope is that, “even if Abdul Latif will not be released, more of the evidence used against him will be declassified in order for the defense to attempt to build a stronger case.”

Abdul Latif Nasser, meanwhile, wakes up every day in Guantánamo, constantly asking, as he did in a June 2018 meeting with Reprieve lawyers, “Why do I have to stay here?”

The answer, sadly, is that the US has lost all respect for the law since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and all decent Americans must wait — like Nasser — to see if judges in the capital will finally take back control of this poisonous narrative, and reassert the important of fairness and the law over innuendo and endless imprisonment without charge or trial.

* * * * *

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.

Brexit, Boris the Narcissist Clown and “Career Psychopath” Dominic Cummings

Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, in an image produced for the Daily Telegraph.


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.

 

It’s now two weeks since 92,153 members of the Conservative Party voted for Boris Johnson to be the new Party leader — and Britain’s new Prime Minister. 

Johnson, in case you’ve just landed on earth from outer space, is an Etonian who pretends to play the buffoon (although behind it lurks a vile temper), and who, for eight dreadful years, was London’s Mayor, when he showed little or no interest in the actual requirements of the job, indulged in countless expensive vanity projects, and pandered shamefully to foreign investors with money. 

Johnson’s elevation to the leadership of the UK was greeted by his former editor at the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, with the most extraordinary put-down of his unsuitability to be PM in an article for the Guardian entitled, ‘I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister.’

“[W]hile he is a brilliant entertainer”, Hastings wrote, “he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.” He also observed that “[a]lmost the only people who think Johnson a nice guy are those who do not know him”, and added that Johnson “would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade.”

Instead, Hastings nails Johnson, “[l]ike many showy personalities”, as being “of weak character”, explaining how he is a coward — or, to my mind, more particularly, a narcissist — with “a willingness to tell any audience whatever he thinks most likely to please, heedless of the inevitability of its contradiction an hour later.”

In 21st century Britain, we have made a habit of electing — or having foisted on us — spectacularly bad Tory Prime Ministers. The first was David Cameron, who, propped up by the Liberal Democrats, embarked on a cynical austerity programme, using the global economic crash of 2008 as an excuse, that has cruelly and pointlessly savaged the living standards of millions of British people. 

In 2015, however, in an act of startling cowardice and hubris, he promised a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU to pacify the Eurosceptic wing of his own party, and also to try and stop the rise of the reptilian Nigel Farage and UKIP, failing to remember that one of the few pieces of advice that was Margaret Thatcher’s legacy was to sit on the box containing the Eurosceptics and to never, ever let them out. Tory Leavers presumably think that Thatcher was anti-EU, but in fact she was a huge supporter of our membership of the EU and the single market, and all her bluster and apparent antagonism towards the EU was designed to do exactly what it did — to secure more favourable deals for the UK. 

After Cameron’s hubris led to the EU referendum result, Theresa May was foisted on us — in part because even the Tory Party was appalled that Boris Johnson was so unprincipled that he had led the Leave campaign without even believing in it, thinking only that the Leave campaign would lose, but that having led it would be good for his long-term ambition to be Prime Minister. 

Throughout her three years as the country’s leader, May tried to fulfil the only requirement of the job after the referendum — to negotiate the UK’s departure from the EU via some sort of deal that didn’t completely destroy the British economy. 

However, this was an impossible task, because the only viable deal that isn’t suicidal involves not leaving the EU at all. 60 percent of our trade is with the EU, on a frictionless basis that is unlikely to survive any kind of departure, as business-busting tariffs will make British goods and services less attractive to EU countries than those from other member states, and we are tied to the rest of the EU by a web of laws and treaties that are far too complex to be wished away by fantasies about our illusory “sovereignty”, and a desire for some sort of bizarre isolation from the rest of the world.

Nevertheless, calling the whole thing off was never regarded by May as a viable option, even though the outcome of the referendum was only advisory, and not legally binding, and, in any case, referendums involving major constitutional change generally require at least a two-thirds majority. Fulfilling the “will of people” became an obsessional mantra for her, but even while she was trying to fulfil her impossible task, the Tory Leavers became increasingly hysterical, urged on by our dreadful right-wing media, and by the airtime given to members of the European Research Group, an anti-EU group of Tories whose chair, since January 2018, has been the implausible toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who, like many other pro-Brexit Tories, is already profiting, via investments, from the damage caused to the pound by Brexit.

And so to the present, with Theresa May gone, and Boris Johnson now in the top job, having told the Leavers what they wanted to hear, and now enthusing about his determination to leave the EU on October 31, regardless of whether or not any kind of deal is in place. As I explained on the day he was elected by his Party, echoing Max Hasting’s assessment, above, “Because he has no leadership skills whatsoever, and constantly says to people what they want to hear, this treacherous chameleon, having sucked up to the geriatric, Europe-hating lunatic wing of the Tory Party to get elected by them, is now going to try to secure Britain’s exit from the EU without a deal, which may destroy his career, and the Tory Party, but which will also cripple the British economy at the same time.”

Meet Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s closest advisor and a “career psychopath”

It’s bad enough having a narcissist as Prime Minister, but what’s just as troubling is that Johnson has chosen, as his chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, the former campaign director of Vote Leave, who was famously described by David Cameron as a “career psychopath”, and it is this relationship that most particularly seems to vindicate Max Hastings’ suggestion that Johnson’s premiership “will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability.”

A powerful profile of Cummings on the Reaction website portrays him as an self-declared establishment “outsider”, a public school-educated Oxford history graduate with a kind of teenage contempt for the establishment that he is clearly part of (his wife is the aristocrat Mary Wakefield, the deputy editor of the Spectator).

As the article explains:

Cummings has long made his disdain for Whitehall technocrats, parliamentary politicians, and the civil service no secret. The system “keeps out great people”, it “hoards power to a small number of people who are increasingly crap.” He thinks the Eurosceptic right of the party are a “narcissist delusional subset.” He sees the Westminster machine as designed to attract incompetents who are focussed on their status and desire to get ahead, rather than people who get stuff done.

Cummings has a history of driving what would now be called “populist” campaigns. From 1999 to 2002, he was the campaign director at Business for Sterling, where he helped to defeat Gordon Brown’s efforts to get the UK to join the Euro, and in 2004, he led a successful campaign against Tony Blair’s proposal for a devolved North-East Regional Assembly. 

He also, as the Reaction article explains, “worked as Director of Strategy for Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, before eventually quitting and labelling Duncan Smith as ‘incompetent’ – an insult he grew fond of over the succeeding years for the entire political class.”

After meeting Michael Gove through the anti-Euro campaign, he ended up joining him at the Department of Education in the coalition government led by David Cameron, where, as the Reaction article explains, “his hatred of private schooling, which he saw as propelling mediocrities into positions of great power and influence, acted as an impetus to revolutionise the system.”

At the Department of Education, “[w]hile trying to uproot the private system that allowed ‘incompetents’, as he would describe [them], to gain influence beyond their ability,” the Reaction article explains that “he transformed English schooling … expand[ing] the system of academies, run by private trusts and foundations”, but leaving behind a flawed system.” He also drove efforts to make the UK into a “technopolis” whose primary focus was maths and science, even though that drive came at the expense of humanities and the arts, despite their massive contribution to British life. 

Eventually, Cummings alienated so many people that he left the Department of Education, but he then joined Vote Leave, where he and CEO Mathew Elliot “are credited with being the masterminds of the campaign that secured the narrow victory.“ Cummings, notoriously, came up with the slogan ‘Take back control’, and the infamous NHS bus bearing the message, “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead”, suggesting, implausibly, that the Tories, hell-bent on privatising the NHS, would actually spend money supporting it instead.

And so to his new role, in which he is is “deeply committed to taking the UK out of the EU, and by virtue of being effectively persuaded into Number 10 by Boris Johnson, has signed up to the government’s commitment of leaving 31st October, ‘do or die’, ‘deal or no deal.’”

However, his hatred for the political class — despite the evident hypocrisy of working for the Prime Minister — extends to the ERG and the Tory right, who he “cannot stand  – he thinks they are electoral obstacles, eurosceptic for all the wrong reasons, ‘difficult to work with’ and ‘self-serving.’”

Cummings is apparently “a genuine eurosceptic”, but “that scepticism is rooted in a desire to shift the structures of government. He sees the EU as a vice trapping the UK because those who run the show feel accountable to the higher powers in Brussels, not to their constituents. With no EU there are no higher structures for Whitehall to blame for their inability to change the state of the UK’s global position, and the state of the lives of those in the regions.”

And to achieve his aims, it seems, he “would happily see the party set on fire as a necessary casualty in accomplishing his evisceration and then rebuilding of the entire structures of government.”

The Reaction article concluded however that, “[a]t his core, Cummings is a fundamentally inconsistent character”; namely, “[a]n elite anti-elitist, who hates superficial careerists, shacked up with one of the most ambitious men ever to occupy number 10. He wants to be an outsider, but can’t claim he is while he holds the reigns of the highest power in the UK. He clearly wants to mark himself as different from the SW1 lot, but he has an office inside Number 10 Downing Street. He wants to make Britain into a maths and science focussed “‘technopolis’ but is trained as a historian. The real fear is that this eschewal of norms and casual disdain for those around him could be hugely dangerous.”

The article added, “or it could produce an extraordinary political success”, but I don’t see that as a potential outcome. It is still abundantly clear that a hard Brexit cannot be anything but a disaster, and with Cummings in such an influential position, Boris Johnson not only risks alienating the traditional Eurosceptics — those deluded champions of the UK’s illusory significance like would-be hardman Steve Baker and the fatuous Mark Francois — but is also actively enraging Remainers, or, as we used to call them, the Tory establishment.

As for what happens next, no one knows. MPs, lazy as ever, are on holiday (“recess”), when they should be back responding to a national emergency. Options for when they do finally sluggishly get back to work at the start of September include holding a no-confidence vote on Johnson’s premiership, leading to a general election before the October 31 Brexit deadline, although Cummings’ greatest contribution to enraging pro-EU figures like Dominic Grieve has been to suggest that Johnson was entitled to ignore the result of a confidence vote and to call a general election that would be held after Britain leaves the EU, leading to Grieve suggesting that, if that scenario were to proceed, the Queen might have to sack him, but, as is typical of Brexit-related constitutional issues, opinion is divided as to whether this is possible. 

What is clear, however, is that the UK’s mission to become a global laughing stock continues relentlessly, thanks to the Conservative Party members who, as Max Hastings described it, have “foist[ed] a tasteless joke upon the British people”, a self-serving clown who, in turn, has hired an untrustworthy establishment “rebel” to finally drive the UK off a cliff in an unprecedented act of national suicide.

* * * * *

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.

17 Years Since the Notorious Yoo-Bybee “Torture Memos,” the US Still Finds Itself Unable to Successfully Prosecute the Men It Tortured

John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and prisoners on a rendition plane.


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

August 1 was the 17th anniversary of a particularly grotesque and dispiriting event in modern US history, one that has ramifications that are still being felt today, even though it was completely unnoticed — or ignored — by the US media. 

On August 1, 2002, Jay S. Bybee, then the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the branch of the Justice Department responsible for advising the executive branch on what is, and what is not legal, signed off on two blatantly unlawful memos written by OLC lawyer John Yoo, which attempted to re-define torture, and approved its use on Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner of the “war on terror” that the US declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, who was being held in a secret prison — a “black site” — run by the CIA.

The memos remained secret until June 2004, when, in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, when photos were leaked of torture in a US-run prison in Iraq, one of the Yoo-Bybee memos was also leaked, provoking widespread disgust, although Yoo and Bybee escaped the criticism unscathed. For his services, Bybee was made a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, while Yoo kept his job as a law professor at the University of Berkeley. 

It later emerged that Bybee’s successor, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the memos, concluding that they contained “cursory and one-sided legal arguments,” as he explained in his 2007 book The Terror Presidency, but in 2005 the new head of the OLC, Steven G. Bradbury, once more approved the use of torture via memos that were not released until 2009, under President Obama, when the second Yoo-Bybee was also released.

Elsewhere, journalists began investigating the torture program, first revealing its existence in November 2005, and as the scandal grew the Supreme Court delivered a powerful reminder to the government, in Hamden v. Rumsfeld, in September 2006, that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which specifically prohibits torture, and cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment, applied to all prisoners in US custody. 

In response, in September 2006, George W. Bush announced that the “black sites,” whose existence he had, until that point, strenuously denied, had in fact existed, but were now closed, as the 14 “high-value detainees” who remained in them (of the 119 men, at least, who were held in total) had been transferred to Guantánamo (although it later transpired that some aspect of the “black site” program still existed, as a handful of other prisoners who had been held in some sort of “black site” scenario ended up being transferred to Guantánamo in 2007 and 2008).

While all of this was unfolding, the FBI distanced itself from the torture program, claiming that they had withdrawn their agents from the “black site” where Abu Zubaydah had been held because of concerns about what one agent called the “borderline torture” to which he was being subjected, as was explained in a report about the FBI’s involvement in interrogations that was published by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General in 2008. 

In late July, or August 2002 — just before or around the time the “torture memos” were issued — FBI Counterterrorism Assistant Director Pasquale D’Amuro met with Michael Chertoff, who was, at the time, the Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. 

The report stated that, after the meeting, D’Amuro met with FBI Director Robert Mueller and “recommended that the FBI not get involved in interviews in which aggressive interrogation techniques [i.e. torture] were being used.” As the OIG report noted, “He stated that his exact words to Mueller were ‘we don’t so that,’ and that someday the FBI would be called to testify and he wanted to be able to say that the FBI did not participate in this type of activity.” The report added that “D’Amuro said that the Director agreed.”

Instead, so the story goes, while the CIA continued its torture program, the FBI only got involved again after the 14 remaining “high-value detainees” were transferred to Guantánamo, when, in response to the Bush administration’s belated recognition that the use of torture had made successful prosecutions unlikely, if not impossible, because evidence derived through the use of torture is inadmissible in US courts, the authorities sent in “clean teams” of FBI agents to interrogate the prisoners without the use of torture.

The administration’s intention was to be able to claim that the prisoners in question had produced valid confessions without any mistreatment, although, from the beginning, lawyers for the prisoners asserted that the “clean team” process could not eliminate the lingering effects of torture.

Rather proving their point, last August, just before abruptly resigning as the chief judge of the military commission trial system, Army Col. James L. Pohl, 67, who was appointed in December 2008, and, since May 2012, had also been the judge for the case against the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, refused to allow the government to “introduce any FBI clean team statement from any of the accused for any purpose” in the 9/11 trial.

Col. Pohl’s abrupt departure seemed to demonstrate how everyone ends up being worn down to the point of total exhaustion by the broken nature of the military commission system, in which prosecutors seek endlessly to hide evidence of torture, while defense attorneys insist that no fair trial can go ahead without it being publicly aired, and, nearly a year later, the controversy over the use of “clean team” evidence shows no sign of abating.

The “clean teams” weren’t so clean after all

On July 29, just three days before the “torture memo” anniversary, the New York Times published an article by Carol Rosenberg, “Lawyers Press Case That 9/11 Confessions Given to FBI Are Tainted,” updating the story via claims by defense attorneys that “they have growing evidence that the FBI played some role in the interrogations during the years when the suspects were in the secret prisons by feeding questions to the CIA, and that the CIA kept a hand in the case after the prisoners were sent to Guantánamo,” a situation that, they contend, constitutes “a blurring of lines that undercuts the assertion that the confessions extracted after torture could be legally separated from those given by [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed, [the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks] and his four alleged accomplices to the FBI at Guantánamo.”

The defense team’s claims are based on documents that were turned over to them under court order, the first of which involved a December 2017 pre-trial hearing in the case of Mustafa al Hawsawi, a Saudi national accused of helping the 9/11 hijackers with travel and finances. In the hearing, which challenged whether al-Hawsawi should be tried in a federal court rather than by military commission, Abigail L. Perkins, a retired FBI special agent, said, as the Times described it, that “she had reviewed some of Mr. Hawsawi’s statements to the CIA before she interrogated him in January 2007 as a member of a clean team, four months after his September 2006 transfer to Guantánamo.” She also said that, “while Mr. Hawsawi was held incommunicado at the CIA black sites, the FBI fed questions to CIA interrogators to ask their captives.”

In addition, as the Times explained, “A partially redacted transcript of a national security hearing held last summer at Guantánamo also shows that FBI agents questioned Mr. Hawsawi during his time at a CIA black site but hid their affiliation from him.” At that hearing, the Times also explained, a prosecutor “disclosed that information the government had given defense lawyers to prepare for trial commingled FBI and CIA information [from] the black sites, leaving the impression that it had all come from the CIA.”

Responding to the revelations, Cheryl Bormann, the lawyer for Walid bin Attash, a Saudi national accused of serving as KSM’s deputy, said, “The clean teams were a fiction from the very beginning. There was no separation. It’s all one big team.”

The decision about whether or not to accept the “clean team” evidence will now be decided by the commission’s new trial judge, Col. W. Shane Cohen of the Air Force, who took the job in June. After Col. Pohl’s resignation, prosecutor Jeffrey D. Groharing, who called the “clean team” interrogations “the most critical evidence in this case,” persuaded the interim judge who took over from Col. Pohl, Marine Col. Keith A. Parrella, to reinstate them, but they will now be looked at again by Col. Cohen, in hearings that “could start in September and run until March 2020,” pushing any trial date into 2021 at the earliest, 20 years after the 9/11 attacks.

Before these hearings, however, as the Times put it, Col. Cohen must also “decide the delicate question of how much testimony to take from former black site workers, including agents and contractors whose identities the CIA is shielding by invoking a national security privilege.” The defense lawyers “want the judge to hold an exhaustive hearing on what went on in the CIA prison network between 2002 and 2006 as a basis for deciding whether the clean-team statements are admissible.”

The hearings will probably be lively. In June, at Col. Cohen’s first hearing, James Harrington, who represents alleged 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh, “scolded” the judge for “referring to the FBI interrogations as ‘cleansing’ statements.” Harrington insisted there was “an issue of voluntariness with respect to those statements,” and, as the Times described it, “offered a longstanding defense argument that anything Mr. Mohammed and the other suspects said at Guantánamo was essentially ‘a Pavlovian response’ drilled into the defendants in their three and four years of torture at the black sites, where the lawyers contend that calculated abuse trained the defendants to later tell the FBI agents what the CIA had forced them to say.”

Since the revelations last year, however, the defense lawyers’ position has now shifted to the approach noted above by Cheryl Bormann. As James G. Connell III, who represents KSM’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, described it, also explaining that he has drawn up a list of 112 pretrial witnesses, “Our position is not that the CIA engaged in torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and then the FBI did something different. Our position is that the United States, as a whole, had a plan, a scheme or a program — however you want to describe it — to obtain statements from Mr. al-Baluchi [and, by extension, the other 9/11 co-defendants] by torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” 

A long legal battle, then, still lies ahead. If only all those Bush administration officials mired in torture had thought of the legal problems they were creating when they first embarked on their brutal and pointless torture program 17 years ago …

* * * * *

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.

Photos of WOMAD 2019: Awareness of the Global Environmental Crisis Hovers Over Three Days of Sunshine and Great World Music

A few of my photos from this year’s WOMAD festival at Charlton Park in Wiltshire.


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Check out my WOMAD photos from this year here!

What a difference a year makes. Last summer the global environmental crisis was certainly on many people’s radar, but it hadn’t gone mainstream like it has in the last 12 months. The change has come about in particular because of the resonance of the global climate strikes by schoolchildren, initiated the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, and the actions of the campaigning group Extinction Rebellion, but the real trigger was the publication, last October, of a chilling report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warning that we have just 12 years to avert an unprecedented catastrophe caused by man-made climate change. 

Awareness of the unprecedented climate emergency was everywhere at WOMAD, as you would no doubt expect at a clued-up, globally-minded, middle class festival — and it certainly helped that the day most of the crew arrived, Wednesday, was the second hottest day ever in the UK, with temperatures reaching 38.1C (100.6F) in Cambridge. 

I had numerous discussions with people involved in the WOMAD organisation, in which we either briefly discussed the urgency of the environmental crisis, or alluded to it, although it wasn’t promoted specifically, except through the presence of Extinction Rebellion activists, and the conspicuous efforts to tackle waste and recycling issues. The most shocking example of out-of-control throwaway culture at festivals in recent years was, most notoriously, Glastonbury, whose aftermath was featured in truly shocking photos in 2015, but everywhere our casual addiction to plastic, and an enthusiasm for abandoning tents has led to the aftermath of festivals becoming a vivid and disturbing demonstration of how, collectively, we have become startlingly adept at turning everywhere into a vast dustbin. Even this year, at Glastonbury, where climate change and the environment were the festival’s theme, the sale of single-use plastic bottles was banned, and David Attenborough turned up to thank festival-goers for using less plastic, saying, “That is more than a million bottles of water that have not been drunk by you”, vast amounts of litter were still left behind.

At WOMAD this year, finally, plastic plates and cutlery were banned, and the transformation of the site was immediate and profound. There was also vastly less rubbish left behind in general in our crew campaign area, which was clearly the result of everyone suddenly becoming considerably  more environmentally aware. This was a good start, but much more needs to be be done. Drinks, for example, were served in partly-recycled plastic glasses, whereas a friend told me that at the Shambala festival everyone has to bring their own drinking cups — and if we’re to take waste seriously then it really is time for us to carry our own cups and plates with us wherever we go.

Awareness of the significance of the climate emergency also quite naturally joined with other concerns that have been apparent at WOMAD over the last three years — specifically, the impact of the EU referendum, and the expansion of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” for immigrants into what I believe it would not be inappropriate to call the official transformation of the UK into a country that is actively hostile towards all outsiders. Since the EU referendum three years ago, as racism and xenophobia have become much more horribly pronounced in everyday British life, the British political establishment has begun enthusiastically treating EU citizens as second-class citizens, is actively trying to get rid of as many people who are not full British citizens as possible, and is doing all it can to discourage visitors from other countries visiting on business — unless they’re fabulously wealthy, of course, which most world music musicians are not.

At moments during this year’s WOMAD, when many of the performers spoke of love and solidarity, as those involved in world music so often do, it seemed clear that we were indeed all united as never before — by Brexit, by Donald Trump, by the rise of the far-right in general, and, not coincidentally, by the denial of climate change that is also part of this reactionary, backwards-looking worldview, as well as by a revulsion at how so much of the western world — and not just those on the right — are also opposed to immigration and the free movement of people, whether they are musicians, or, more gravely, refugees, asylum seekers, those driven to flee their homelands because of western wars or economic exploitation, or, increasingly, those fleeing the effects of catastrophic climate change that those in power in the west are still doing so much to deny, or to sideline, by earnestly declaring “climate emergencies”, but then doing nothing about it.

Musicians know all about this closing of borders, of course, and in the three years since the EU referendum it has become noticeably more difficult for artists from around the world — and it seems, Africa in particular — to be allowed to visit the UK to play — a situation that will only get worse if Boris Johnson somehow manages to succeed in his deranged plans for a no-deal Brexit. 

As Chris Smith, WOMAD’s director, explained in February, “It is harder to book artists because of Brexit … We are struggling to overcome it and let artists know they are welcome here and [that] people still want to experience their great music. Lots of artists are finding they can get to Europe but fear taking the next step to the UK, particularly if there is there is no passport union. It will become more complicated. When we are out of the EU the passport arrangements will change, so artists coming from wherever will get into Europe but worry they then won’t be able to cross the Channel.”

But while all this solidarity is quite meaningful in one sense, as the battle lines haven’t been so clearly drawn on racism and xenophobia since the last time fascism reared its ugly head — and, on the environment, we have no precedent whatsoever for the apocalyptic battleground in which we find ourselves — the uncomfortable truth is that WOMAD, like all festivals, remains part of a global capitalist business, with its stages, tour trucks and international travel, while the festival-goers themselves —- ourselves — are also primarily concerned with personal pleasure, and still caught up in a festival world that is a microcosm of the wider capitalist world. Our festival experiences are a litany of choices — which acts to see of the many, many dozens on offer on numerous stages, which food to eat from the plethora of individual businesses competing for our attention, and which shops to browse in in the festival’s hippie simulacrum of a high street.

I’m not singling out WOMAD for particular criticism; rather, I’m reflecting on the fact that, since I committed myself, in May, to the unprecedented requirement to actively get involved in trying to stop the worst effects of the catastrophic climate crisis we are already experiencing, I can’t help but see every aspect of our lives through that prism.

The blunt truth is that we have reached “peak everything” — that we consume too much, throw away too much, are enslaved by plastic, and by our interconnected devices that hoover up an ever-growing supply of climate-destructive electricity. Our world is swamped by billions of man-made things — an uncountable number of clothes, every type of food and drink imaginable that is flown around the world or driven in huge trucks from factories to networks of proliferating logistics hubs, and available whenever we feel like it, as though each of us is some sort of medieval monarch.

We’re also swamped by achingly clever devices, and by wonderfully designed but essentially unnecessary objects that speak to the drive for self-gratification that we are all told, relentlessly, is what we deserve — “because we’re worth it” — but that, fundamentally, are all part of the same grindingly destructive capitalist machine. We’re a clever race, but we’re also frustratingly easily distracted, and capitalism panders to us, and lies to us, working 24/7 to pretend to be our friend, when all it values is profit. Only a tiny fraction of our brainpower is devoted to ideas and products that make the world a better place, because there’s no profit to be made from that.

37 years ago, when WOMAD started, the carbon footprints of festival culture were minuscule compared to today — and the same can be said of almost every human endeavour at the time. When I first stumbled through a hedge to visit the Glastonbury Festival, in 1984, there were a handful of stages, and almost no food stalls or shops. I’d just come from the Stonehenge Free Festival, which basically operated on a subsistence level, and where money was almost peripheral. The free festivals had free food kitchens, DIY stages, and an ethos of “leaving no trace”, a far cry from the reckless disposability of today’s festival culture, which has only finally been challenged this year, and of the capitalist mantra that everyone must relentlessly be offered as much choice as possible as much of the time as possible — so long as they have the money to pay for it. The 21st century capitalist mantra, as I see it, is as follows: “Breathe In. Breathe out. Spend. Breathe in. Breathe out. Spend”, repeated ad infinitum.

I don’t have all the answers to the problems I’ve outlined above. Personally, I’d be happy to attend a WOMAD with, say, three stages, and one vegan, socialist food kitchen (rather like what the Madras Cafe has been doing for years), but that would probably be economic suicide. However, I find it inconceivable that the current state of affairs is sustainable. It really was a great WOMAD this year, and I hope you have time to check out my photos, but it felt like the days of partying like this are severely numbered — just as, in a few weeks’ time, when, with my wife, I’m visiting a friend for a week in southern Turkey, it will feel that the days of millions of us jetting to sunny foreign beaches whenever we feel like it are also numbered.

I hope you’re also starting to see the world the way I do. The more of us accept that we’ve reached “peak everything” and are running out of time, the more it will become feasible that we can actually make a difference — and although, to be blunt, it’s terrifying to consider how much damage we have already done to the world, the more people wake up, the more we can actually start using our brains to work on alternative ways of living that begin to undo all the damage we’ve caused with our all-consuming addiction to capitalism and its myriad appeals to our laziest self-gratifying impulses. 

* * * * *

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 War on Social Housing – on the Centenary of the Addison Act That Launched the Creation of Large-Scale Council Housing

The unnecessary destruction of Robin Hood Gardens Estate in Poplar, in east London, March 2018, to make way for a new private development, Blackwall Reach (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.

 

Today, July 31, is the centenary of the first Housing and Town Planning Act (widely known as the Addison Act), which was introduced by the Liberal politician Christopher Addison, as part of David Lloyd George’s coalition government following the First World War, to provide Britain’s first major council housing programme, as John Boughton, the author of Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, explained in an article published yesterday in the Guardian.

Boughton explained how, when Addison “introduced his flagship housing bill to the House of Commons in April 1919”, he spoke of its “utmost importance, from the point of view not only of the physical wellbeing of our people, but of our social stability and industrial content.”

“As we celebrate the centenary of council housing”, Boughton noted, “this sentiment is not lost in the context of the current housing crisis. From the rise in expensive, precarious and often poor-quality private renting to the dwindling dream of home-ownership, it is fuelling discontent. This escalating crisis means that increasing numbers of people are now forced to deal with the painful consequences of the country’s inability to provide such a basic human need — a stable, affordable home.”

Philanthropists had been creating social housing since the 1840s, beginning with Model Dwellings Companies (privately run companies that sought a return for investors while providing affordable housing for the working class), and the Peabody Donation Fund (now Peabody), founded by the London-based US banker George Peabody, whose aim was to “ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis, and to promote their comfort and happiness”, and whose first project, on Commercial Street in Spitalfields, opened in 1864.

The first council-built housing was created in Liverpool in 1869, and in 1890, as Boughton put it, a Housing Act “established the legislative powers and machinery of state” for the expansion of council housing. He added, however, that “only around 24,000 council homes were built nationally before 1914.”

In contrast, as he described it, the 1919 Addison Act was “a housing revolution” —- and while Addison’s motives were commendable, it must be noted that it took the horrors of the First World War —and the housing plight of those who survived it — for the British establishment as a whole to embrace the need for a major programme of genuinely affordable housing.

As he proceeded to explain, “It required not only that all local authorities conduct a survey of housing needs — within just three months — but that they actively prepare plans to meet them. Beyond what could be raised locally by a penny on the rates, the cost of building these new homes was to be met entirely by the Treasury. The act also insisted on high-quality housing, taking its cue from the wartime Tudor Walters Report, which had recommended ‘cottage homes’ with front and back gardens, bathrooms and pantries at no more than 12 to the acre.”

“Unfortunately”, as Boughton proceeded to explain, “in a post-war era of materials and labour shortages, construction costs were unprecedentedly high — at around £1,000 per house, up to three times the cost of pre-war production — and his programme fell victim to public spending cuts. Just 176,000 homes had been built in England and Wales of the 500,000 Lloyd George had promised”, and “Addison resigned from both the government and the Liberal party in protest”, later joining the Labour Party, where he served under Ramsay MacDonald, and became Leader of the House of Lords during Clement Attlee’s extraordinary post-WWII government.

Following Addison’s resignation, there was a revival of council-built housing via other housing acts in the 1920s, although, as Boughton noted, “the houses were typically smaller and plainer than those envisaged in 1919.” In the 1930s, when the Labour politician Herbert Morrison undertook a visionary expansion of council housing in London as the leader of the London County Council (LCC), further housing bills, which particularly took aim at slum clearances — and introduced rent rebates — also addressed what Boughton described as “one serious deficiency in Addison’s reforms – that their relatively high rents excluded the slum population most in need of rehousing.”

The horror of another war — the Second World War — and, again, the plight of returning soldiers paved the way for the British establishment to once more accept the need for another major programme of genuinely affordable housing, as part of the astonishing post-war government led by Clement Attlee, which also established the NHS and consolidated the welfare state.

From then until 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and set about destroying council housing — through her ‘Right to Buy’ policy, cutting funding for maintenance, and introducing an absolute prohibition on councils spending money from the sale of homes to build new council housing — council housing was promoted by both Labour and Conservative governments, ensuring that, for most of the preceding 60 years, after the 1919 Addison Act, there was, as Boughton put it, “a broad cross-party consensus that accepted the necessity of state intervention to build the homes the country needed.”

As Boughton also explained, “One common factor underlay both eras of reform” — under Addison and Nye Bevan — “and it provides the single constant in the long history of what is now referred to as ‘social’ housing: that is the inability of the free market and the unwillingness of the private sector to provide decent, affordable housing to those in greatest need.”

40 years on from the start of Margaret Thatcher’s assault on social housing, Britain’s housing crisis has become nothing short of a disaster. Thatcher presided over a housing bubble, but also a subsequent crash, when numerous homeowners were caught in a negative equity trap. The market remained cool throughout John Major’s premiership, but when Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, ending 18 years of Tory rule, it didn’t take long for another colossal housing bubble to develop —- one that continues to plague us today, with house prices at an all-time high, private rents unfettered and out of control, and social housing still chronically undermined. Blair failed to roll back Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ project, and also failed to establish the need for a major social homebuilding programme, and, throughout London, and across the country, Labour councils persistently failed to defend council housing, instead launching estate demolition programmes with private developers that have drastically reduced the numbers of social homes available.

Since 2010, the Tories have only added fuel to this blazing fire of inequality, slashing subsidies for social homebuilding and encouraging housing associations — like Peabody — to lose touch with their founders’ aims by becoming, essentially, private developers with a sideline in social housing. Moreover, when Boris Johnson was London’s Mayor, he set ‘affordable’ rents at 80% of market rents (as opposed to social rents at around 30% of market rents), and this injustice has, typically, not been adequately addressed by the Labour Party, or by the major housing associations. Since replacing Johnson in 2016, Sadiq Khan has set up a sliding scale of allegedly ‘affordable’ rents, all of which are considerably more expensive than social rents — ‘London Affordable Rent’ (over 60% higher for a two-bedroom flat), and ‘London Living Rent’ (over 130% higher).

For more information, see my articles, The Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and the Mainstream Media’s Inadequacy in Reporting Stories About “Social Homes” and “Affordable Rents”, Video: I Discuss the Tidemill Eviction, the Broken ‘Regeneration’ Industry and Sadiq Khan’s Stealthy Elimination of Social Rents, as well as Shame on Peabody: Calling on the Former Philanthropic Social Housing Provider to Abandon Its Plans to Destroy the Old Tidemill Garden and Social Housing in Deptford and A Radical Proposal to Save the Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald House in Deptford: Use Besson Street, an Empty Site in New Cross.

The result of the last 40 years of politicians eroding social housing and doing nothing to rein in greed in the housing market is akin to another war, but this time a cannibalistic war waged by British citizens on their less well-off fellow citizens, as those with mortgages taken out before the bubble have seen insane returns on their original investments, and, at the same time, absolutely no legislation exists to prevent those who take out ‘buy to let’ mortgages from exploiting their tenants as much as they wish, while those fortunate enough to live in properties at social rent — myself included — are part of an ever-diminishing minority, and, since 2010, have lived in fear that the Tories will pass legislation intended to fully exterminate social housing, or, if they live on a council estate, that Labour councillors will vote to demolish their homes.

It’s time for the war to end, and for housing to be reinstated as one of three pillars of the welfare state, along with health and education.

Note: If you’re interested in doing something to mark 100 years since the Addison Act, please sign Shelter’s petition calling for the government to build more social housing, and watch George Clarke’s excellent Channel 4 documentary, ‘George Clarke’s Council House Scandal’, which was broadcast this evening, and in which George called on the government to build 100,000 council homes a year, and to suspend ‘Right to Buy.’ An article by George, entitled, ‘We don’t just need more council houses — we need the very best in space and ecological standards’, is here.

* * * * *

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.

I’m Off to WOMAD to Forget About Boris; Why Not Watch Tidemill on the BBC While I’m Gone?

A photo from WOMAD 2018 (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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

 

My friends, I’m off to Wiltshire for six days, for the annual WOMAD world music festival in the grounds of Charlton Park in Wiltshire. My wife runs children’s workshops at this very family-friendly festival, and this will be our 18th year of entertaining children with craft activities, soaking up some of the best music from around the world, and hanging out with friends and family backstage and in crew camping.

It will be a relief to get away from London as the fallout from Boris Johnson’s election as Prime Minister by just 92,153 members of the Tory Party continues, to the dismay of everyone vaguely sentient, and if you’re stuck for something to do until I’m back, why not check out ‘ How the Middle Class Ruined Britain’, a BBC2 documentary featuring working class Tory stand-up comedian Geoff Norcott exploring Britain’s class struggle, which was broadcast last night, but is available on iPlayer for the next eleven months.

I worked closely with the producer and director, and spent an interesting day with Geoff focusing on the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign in Deptford, particularly focusing on the proposals, by Lewisham Council and Peabody, to demolish Reginald House, a structurally sound block of council flats, as part of their planned redevelopment of the old Tidemill primary school and its former wildlife garden, which myself and others occupied for two months last year until we were violently evicted in October.

Geoff met Diann, one of the residents of Reginald House, and was sympathetic to her concerns, remembering his mum and his upbringing on a council estate in Merton, and the great irony of the programme was that Lewisham Council, alarmed at our involvement, demanded a right to reply, with Cllr. Joe Dromey stepping up to make the case for the demolition, but absolutely failing to win Geoff over — or, I suspect, most of the viewers too. 

Dromey claimed that residents had received written assurances that their rents and conditions won’t change when they’re moved into new properties owned and run by Peabody, but was caught out when Geoff pointed out that these alleged promises weren’t actually legally binding, and that therefore Dromey was actually promising nothing.  

Anyway, do check it out if you can, and please also feel free to catch up on my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which I post a photo a day — with detailed accompanying text — from the photographic journeys by bike that I’ve been making throughout London’s 120 postcode over the last seven years. 

I’ll see you next week!

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Extinction Rebellion’s Summer Uprising Shows the Need for Increased Direct Action as the Establishment Fights Back

A screenshot of a video of Extinction Rebellion activists blockading London Concrete’s plant in Bow, in east London, on July 16, 2019.


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.

 

Last week, the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) held a ’Summer Uprising’ in five UK cities — London, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and Leeds — theatrically installing painted boats emblazoned with key messages in all five locations, and engaging in various actions designed to continue highlighting their three core messages: to get the government to “tell the truth” about the unprecedented man-made environmental crisis that is already unfolding at an alarming rate, to “halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025”, and to “create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.”

Since last autumn, when the group announced itself via the occupation of five bridges in central London, and followed up in April with the extraordinary and unprecedented occupation of five sites in central London that lasted for over a week, with the police arresting over a thousand people but refusing to respond with blanket violence to a movement that was resolutely non-violent, Extinction Rebellion has been one of two movements that have captured the public’s imagination in significant numbers regarding the unprecedented emergency facing life on earth  —- the other being the School Strike for Climate initiated by the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. 

With the steely resolve of an individual with Asperger’s who has chosen an implacable route, Thunberg relentlessly confronts world leaders about how they have known about the scale of the unfolding disaster for 25 years, and yet have done nothing about it. She is particularly scathing about the “fine words” they utter when confronted about it, which she correctly assesses as being completely meaningless without the necessary actions to fulfil them. Inspired by her message and her attitude, millions of schoolchildren around the world have taken part in — and continue to take part in — regular school strikes, showing adults the world over how much more clued-up they are when it comes to what should be society’s urgent priorities.

The unexpected success of both movements is not coincidental. Like many other people, I have been extremely receptive to their message because it has become impossible to ignore the scale of the emergency. A key development for myself and many others was the publication, at the start of October, of a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that we have just 12 years to avert an unprecedented catastrophe caused by man-made climate change. 

The resonance of that report was highlighted in an article for the New Yorker by London resident Sam Knight that was published yesterday. Reporting on the ’Summer Uprising’, Knight explained how “the founders of Extinction Rebellion have an extreme, anti-capitalist vision of what they want society to look like”, and quoted Gail Bradbrook, one of XR’s founders, telling a crowd of supporters last week, “I want to live in a beautiful, nature-filled world, and, if we get shot on the streets fighting for it, so be it. I’m willing to have that happen. I’m not calling for it to happen.”

As Knight explained, “The disconcerting thing about such radicalism, at this moment, is that it is the activists — rather than the state or law enforcement — who have the facts on their side. One of Extinction Rebellion’s favored tactics is to quote the first line of the executive summary of the 2018 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: ‘Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.’”

Knight added, “On the day I visited, a study commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, a research organization which dates back to 1754, set a deadline of 2030 to fundamentally redesign British agriculture to withstand the climate crisis and worrying trends in public health. ‘What we eat, and how we produce it, is damaging people and the planet,’ the report said. ‘This is not some dystopian future; this is happening here and now, on our watch.’”

Reflecting on XR’s achievements to date, Knight noted how, after April’s actions, in which “activists glued themselves to buildings, climbed on trains, chained themselves to company headquarters, and occupied key intersections”, representatives of the group ended up “meeting with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and on May 1st, in accordance with one of their demands, Members of Parliament declared a climate and environment emergency, becoming the first national legislature to do so. In June, MPs agreed to another Extinction Rebellion request: to convene a citizens’ assembly, made up of a representative sample of the British population, to discuss the climate crisis. Although the assembly’s recommendations will not be legally binding, as the protesters wished, Extinction Rebellion’s language and its policy agenda have moved into the mainstream at remarkable speed.”

This is certainly true, but to revisit Greta Thunberg’s assessment of politicians, all of these pledges mean nothing if they are not followed up with specific actions to mitigate the worst effects of the crisis, and on this point, it seems to me, the main message from last week’s ’Summer Uprising’ was the need for increased direct action aimed at those responsible for the crisis.

Last week I was entertained by the boat that activists brought to the Royal Courts of Justice, which they named ‘Polly Higgins’, in memory of the lawyer turned environmental activist who died of cancer earlier this year, and who “dedicated her life to fighting to create ecocide law that would make corporate executives and government ministers criminally liable for the damage they do to ecosystems”, and I enjoyed hanging out in Waterloo Millennium Garden, where XR had been allowed to set up a camp that had the feel of a free festival, and that was a great place to meet other activists. 

However, while actions took place throughout the week, a coherent overview was lacking. A call for a “tax rebellion” that took place outside City Hall on Thursday, with Londoners urged to refuse to pay a fifth of their council tax payments (the portion that goes to the GLA) as a protest against the Mayor’s lack of meaningful action on climate change, is an intriguing idea, but it frankly has little chance of being widely adopted, and, in any case, it also rather lets councils off the hook for their own climate-related hypocrisy.

Instead, the most significant event of the week was the blockade, on Tuesday morning, of London Concrete in Bow, a company targeted for their involvement in the construction of the Silvertown Tunnel, a £1bn toll road under the River Thames, whose construction is insane from an environmental point of view — and shamefully hypocritical for a city whose Mayor has declared a climate emergency. In addition, although the tunnel’s supposed justification is to alleviate the congestion of the Blackwall Tunnel, the reality is that will only facilitate more traffic, and therefore generate more pollution. For further information, see the ‘No to Silvertown Tunnel’ campaign, and the Stop Silvertown Tunnel Coalition.

This is exactly the sort of direct action that is required to highlight the hypocrisy of politicians, from central government to the Mayor of London and the GLA, to local councils, but it’s noticeable that, while the Metropolitan Police’s approach to theatrical occupations in central London has generally been peaceful, the protestors at London Concrete were dealt with far less gently, with six people – three men and three women, aged between 30 and 67 – swiftly arrested “on suspicion of aggravated trespass and obstruction of a highway.”

Back in April, the Met got into a bit of a pickle trying not to give XR protestors what they wanted — to get arrested — having correctly surmised that violently arresting demonstrably non-violent protestors was likely to provoke a backlash, and as anyone who has seen footage of French police aggressively pepper-spraying protestors on a bridge in Paris recently can attest to, their restraint was commendable. Ironically, it also led directly to XR campaigners finding themselves engaged in a week-long occupation of central London that demonstrated how much more pleasant life would be if the capital’s unfettered vehicle use was severely curtailed.

However, while the week involved a bizarre ballet of sporadic arrests, with over a thousand people arrested (only a handful of which were in association with specific direct actions, like the Christian climate activists who glued themselves to a train at Canary Wharf), the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) are now talking up the “threat” posed by protestors, and are determined to prosecute all of those who were arrested, prompting Mike Schwartz of Bindmans, one of the defence lawyers involved, to tell the Guardian that “the move by the police and the CPS appeared to be ‘a deliberate and expensive’ attempt to ‘browbeat those in society most motivated to do all they can, peacefully but firmly, to mitigate environmental collapse.’”

He added, “This is an extraordinary decision at a time of austerity, a creaking criminal justice system, rising knife crime and falling rape prosecutions. The proportionality and altruism of the community’s actions is in stark contrast to the face-saving short-termism of the authorities.”

Schwartz is right, of course, but as the London Concrete example shows, the real “threat” to the authorities doesn’t involve blocking streets and bridges and engaging in political theatre; it actually involves hitting “business as usual” where it hurts, and exposing the hypocrisy of politicians with their fine words that mean nothing.

If activists are serious about continuing to exert pressure on politicians, they need to recognise that targeting those most involved in environmental destruction is vitally important. After the London Concrete arrests, Commander Jane Connors of the Met said that the police were “aware that protesters [were] expected to target the construction industry” throughout the rest of the week. Apart from a protest against the “super-sewer” in Bermondsey, focused on the dangerous amounts of concrete involved, I’m not aware that any other actions targeting the construction industry took place, but there are plenty of targets that should be hit if campaigners are serious about forcing urgent political change, and getting politicians to understand that they will repeatedly be exposed as hypocrites for declaring climate emergencies and then doing nothing about it.

Across the capital, vast housing projects are underway, which are all environmentally ruinous. Some are on brownfield sites, and on a truly depressing scale (like the insanely huge building site at Nine Elms, stretching from Vauxhall Bridge to the absurd Battersea Power Station development) while others involve the demolition of council estates that can — and should — be refurbished if there is an iota of truth in councils’ claims that they recognise the urgency of the climate emergency. 

As I write this, contractors working for Southwark Council and Notting Hill Genesis, two merged housing associations that have turned into an aggressive private developer and colossal polluter, are knocking down Chiltern House, a huge concrete block of flats on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, as part of the regeneration of what was formerly one of Europe’s largest council estates.

Chiltern House on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, being prepared for demolition, June 11, 2019 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

When I recently posted a photo I took of Chiltern House in 2013, as part of my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, I came across a fascinating article in the Journal of Green Building by Mike Kane and Ron Yee, two senior lecturers on the Masters in Architecture course at London South Bank University (LSBU), who wrote about the environmental cost of destroying the block, one of seven on the estate as a whole, and the second to be demolished. 

As they explained, “The carbon cost of constructing this building was extremely high. The reinforced concrete structural frame (excluding partition walls and internal elements) is estimated to weigh in excess of 20,000 tonnes which equates to approx. 1,800 tonnes of emitted CO2 for the concrete alone. This figure is significantly increased with the remainder of the construction process and transport emissions. Demolition of Chiltern House requires in the region of 800+ HGV truck journeys through London’s congested streets, and the use of heavy demolition machinery will greatly add to the figure again. Clearly, the CO2 emission cost of reaching just the cleared site (after only 40 years of housing use) is very high; moreover, if the replacement building is of conventional construction (with only 30 year warranty), then the overall environmental cost of providing additional homes is enormous.”

Chiltern House is the biggest block currently being demolished despite politicians’ lip service to the climate emergency, but many dozens of other estates are being demolished or are facing demolition across the capital, with no sign that anyone involved intends to acknowledge their hypocrisy, or to accept that refurbishment (for which zero funding currently exists at any level of our political life) is the only course of action that is acceptable from an environmental point of view. 

And elsewhere, of course, the many dozens of purely private developments also continue to rise up, with no regard whatsoever for their environmental cost. All of these projects involve a huge array of councils, developers and contractors, who all need to be told in no uncertain terms that they urgently need to rethink their entire business model.

Are you up for it, rebels?

* * * * *

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.

Celebrating 800 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

The most recent photos posted in my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’


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.

 

Check out all the photos here!

Over seven years ago, in a world that seemed brighter than today — even though the Tories were in power, and London was in the throes of a corporate and jingoistic makeover as the host of the 2012 Olympic Games — I began an absurdly ambitious project that I soon dubbed ‘The State of London’, which involved me cycling around the London postal area (the 120 postcodes beginning WC, EC, SE, SW, W, NW, N and E), with some additional forays into the 13 Greater London postcodes beginning with two letters (e.g. CR for Croydon) that surround it.

For some reason, I wasn’t deterred by the fact that the London postal area covers 241 square miles, and although my ambition has in some ways paid off, in that, by September 2014, I had visited each of the 120 postcodes at least once, I would be lying if I didn’t concede that my knowledge of much of London — particularly in the west, the north west and the north — remains shadowy to say the least.

That said, my knowledge of a larger part of London — radiating from my home in south east London — has become satisfyingly thorough. There is barely a street in the whole of south east London that I have not visited, and, in addition, east London and south west London, the City, the West End, and parts of north, north west and west London have all become extremely familiar to me.

Moreover, in all these years spent as what a friend, Simon Elmer, has called “a cycling flâneur”, flatteringly comparing me to Eugene Atget (1857-1927), who spent the last 35 years of his life “document[ing] all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization”, I feel that I have also absorbed the city and internalised it as a kind of living map, and as a sort of moral barometer of its bloated change-makers and profiteers, and its many, many victims.

As with Atget — and hence the comparison — I was determined from the beginning to chronicle what was being lost, as the city embarked on an orgy of development, partly driven by the Olympics, partly by the lazy corruption of Boris Johnson, during his dreadful eight years as London’s Mayor, and partly because, after the banker-led global economic crash of 2008, those same international criminals — their ponzi schemes and lawless profiteering from “credit default swaps” and sub-prime mortgages in ruins — seized on land and the development of eye-wateringly expensive developments as the last bastion available to them for the kinds of profits to which they think they are entitled, and which we the people — through our impotence, ignorance, apathy or work-induced fatigue — have been unable to prevent.

In the last seven years, after the Tories conveniently forgot about austerity when it came to funding the Olympics, destroying much of the River Lea for the soulless Olympic Park and re-imagining Stratford itself in an even more soulless manner as some sort sort of hideous “new city”, the orgy of development has been largely unchecked. International investment companies have been buying up huge swathes of the capital, and have been allowed to build priapic towers of unaffordable housing almost everywhere, and cash-strapped councils — and Labour councils in particular — have gleefully embarked on a massive programme of social cleansing, facilitating the demolition of council estates to feed the greed of private developers, and also of housing associations.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, these former providers of genuinely affordable social housing, have, instead, come to resemble private developers (albeit as opaque public-private hybrids), building new developments that mix properties for market sale with rental properties that are more expensive to rent than those that have been knocked down. Along the way, social rents are done away with completely, and no one involved in any aspect of this housing racket has been encouraged to even consider the notion that it would make better economic — and environmental — sense to refurbish estates wherever possible.

The results — along with the damage caused by a housing bubble that has been artificially maintained over the last 20 years —  are painfully clear to see. London today is an even more divided city than it was seven years ago, when the chasm between the rich and the poor was already far too pronounced.

As house prices have escalated, owner-occupiers have become absurdly, immorally wealthy through doing nothing, while private rents are out of control. And with the pool of housing at social rents shrinking all the time, and Tory benefit cuts hacking away at all manner of financial support for ordinary workers pushed to breaking point by all this unfettered greed, homelessness has reached epidemic proportions, vast numbers of hard-working families are having to resort to food banks just to survive, and young people — those particularly bearing the brunt of the disgusting greed of private landlords — are either leaving the capital completely, or building up a so far largely restrained but potentially volcanic resentment at the manner in which they have, to be blunt, been completely screwed by selfish Baby Boomers and the dead-eyed sharks of the bloated private rental market.

When people are paying two-thirds of their income on rent, as many people are, it’s clear that something has gone monstrously wrong, but for the exploiters, morality has become a quaint notion, as they tell themselves that they are entitled to make as much money as possible from their “investments.” For a recent analysis of this, see the recent Guardian article, ‘Poor tenants pay for landlords to live like kings. It doesn’t have to be this way’ by George Monbiot, which provoked a lively debate when I posted it on Facebook.

And so to the celebration of 800 days, which marks the period since I first began posting a photo a day from my archives, which I began on May 11, 2017, on the fifth anniversary of when the project started — first on Facebook, and then, some months later, on Twitter. In the early days of the project, during a lull in activity relating to the main topic of my work for the last 13 years, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, I had posted several dozen London photo sets on Flickr, but when the prisoners seized back the narrative in February 2013, embarking on a prison-wide hunger strike that brought Guantánamo back into the headlines, I didn’t post anything publicly (except a series of protest photos, also on Flickr), until May 2017, when the notion of posting a photo a day occurred to me as a way to get my work out to a hopefully appreciative audience.

If you’re new to ‘The State of London’, please check out the 800 days of photos on Facebook here, where, as you’ll see, I’m fascinated by many, many facets of this extraordinary city, and not just some of its darker manifestations. If you’re along for the ride, I’m delighted to have you with me, and I will — I promise — eventually start looking at trying to get an exhibition arranged, and a book published, as I have been promising for some time. If you can help out at all, please do get in touch.

* * * * *

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