Andy Worthington's Blog, page 22

CIA Torture Unredacted: New Report Fills in Crucial Gaps in 2014 Senate Torture Report

The front cover of “CIA Torture Unredacted”, a 400-page report by Sam Raphael, Crofton Black and Ruth Blakeley, published in London on July 10, 2019.

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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.

Congratulations to Sam Raphael and Ruth Blakeley of The Rendition Project, Crofton Black of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and all those who worked with them, for the publication of “CIA Torture Unredacted,” their 400-page report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, which was launched in London last Wednesday, and is available online, in its entirety, here — and see here for a chapter by chapter breakdown.

The report is the culmination of nine years’ work, which began in 2010 with funding from the UK-based Economic and Social Research Council, and which led, in May 2013, to the launch of The Rendition Project website, which, as Ian Cobain and James Ball explained for the Guardian, “mapped the US government’s global kidnap and secret detention programme, shedding unprecedented light on one of the most controversial secret operations of recent years.”

At the time of its initial launch in 2013, The Rendition Project drew on previous work conducted by researchers for a variety of NGOs and international bodies, which included an influential report for the Council of Europe about secret prisons and rendition in Europe, published by Swiss Senator Dick Marty in 2007, a detailed analysis of the secret detention programme for a UN study in 2010, for which I was the lead author, and in which, as I described it in an Al-Jazeera article in 2014, “I sought to ascertain the identities of the 94 ‘ghost prisoners’ in CIA custody — including 28 subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation’ — who were referred to in a memo from 2005 by [US government] lawyer Steven G. Bradbury that was released by the Obama administration in April 2009. Another major report, by the Constitution Project, was published in 2013.

The next step in the long road to the truth about the CIA torture program — and one day, we hope, accountability for those who organized and ran it — came in December 2014, with the publication of the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA torture program.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s full report — 6,700 pages in total, which cost $40m and involved an analysis of more than six million pages of classified documents — has never been released, but the executive summary was — and remains — a devastatingly powerful criticism of the brutality and pointlessness of the program.

In it, the committee made clear, as I explained in the Al-Jazeera article mentioned above, that “torture was ‘not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees,’ that the CIA made ‘inaccurate claims’ about the ‘effectiveness’ of the programme in an attempt to justify it and that it led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases.”

I also pointed out that the committee concluded that the interrogations “were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others,” that “non-approved techniques were used widely,” that “[a]t least 17 detainees were subjected to CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without authorization from CIA headquarters,” and that “multiple detainees were subjected to techniques that were applied in ways that diverged from the specific authorization, or were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques by interrogators who had not been authorized to use them.”

The committee, as I also pointed out, was also critical of the central role played by two contract psychologists — James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen — from the US military’s SERE program, which taught US military personnel how to resist torture in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen were paid $81m to implement the program, even though neither of them “had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of Al-Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”

Significantly, for those researching the victims of the torture program, the report also confirmed that Steven Bradbury’s figures were wrong, and that the CIA “detained at least 119 individuals, of whom at least 39 were subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” Moreover, of these 119 “at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard” in the secret Bush administration memorandum that established the program in September 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

It was at this point that Sam Raphael, Crofton Black and Ruth Blakeley reconvened, using the list of the 119 individuals as the basis for their work over the last four years, in which they sought, in particular, to “unredact” the many redactions in the executive summary of the torture report that, as Black explained this week in an article for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “could identify specific times and places where abuses had occurred,” and which the committee was “compelled by the Obama administration, and by the CIA itself, to censor.”

“This is important,” he added, “because without being able to tie illegal activities to specific times and places, the quest for redress is hamstrung, and meaningful accountability — legal, public, historical — remains a mirage.”

Black explained how the CIA’s prisoner list had “a date of custody (redacted) and a record of how many days they were held (also partly redacted),” and that their work over the last four years involved “reconstructing this list to reveal the hidden dates,” some of which, as Sam Raphael noted at Wednesday’s launch, was easier than anyone would have imagined, because the CIA didn’t use justified text, and so it was relatively easy to work out how many letters or numbers had been blacked-out.

However, most of the work involved cross-referencing with other sources. As Black explained, “Figuring out a date often meant that we could match it to a flight record; matching to a flight record meant that we could determine where a prisoner was brought from or sent to. As we cross-correlated thousands of data points — from declassified government documents, footnotes in the Senate report, aviation data, records of corporate outsourcing of rendition flights, legal cases, media reporting and NGO investigations — the contours of the CIA’s programme of secret detention and torture began to emerge more clearly. Rather than just understanding certain individual histories, we could begin to discern the entire scope of the programme’s development.”

Black also explained:

When the Senate Committee released their report, fewer than half the names on the list of prisoners were known. We reported in 2015 that only 36 of those held by the CIA had been taken on to Guantánamo Bay, while the fate of many of the others remained a mystery. Seized in secret, held in secret, they were then disposed of in secret — some back to their homes, some into continued custody in other countries, again often in secret.

Since then, we’ve been able to establish the histories — at least to some extent — of around 100 prisoners. We’ve traced over 60 operations to transport them to and from prison sites. We’ve uncovered who was held in Afghanistan, and revealed more fully than before who was sent to the European black sites, in Poland, Romania and Lithuania. We’ve also brought to light further details of how deeply implicated the UK was in the overall running of the CIA’s torture network.

Last year, some of our findings were cited in two judgments at the European Court of Human Rights, which held that Romania and Lithuania had assisted the US in illegally holding prisoners incommunicado on their territory. Elsewhere, our work has assisted legal teams, police inquiries and citizen accountability projects.

“CIA Torture Unredacted” is the most comprehensive public account of one of the most disturbing elements of the ‘War on Terror’: a global programme of systematic disappearance and torture, carried out by the world’s most powerful liberal democratic states in contravention of laws which they purport to uphold. In the face of continued obstruction and denial by the governments involved, we hope that it will stand as a central reference point for all those interested in accountability, truth and the rule of law.

I hope so too.

* * * * *

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.

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Published on July 16, 2019 02:45

2010 Guantánamo Military Report Expresses Concerns About Reliability of Intelligence from Prisoners with Mental Health Problems or on Mind-Altering Medication

An undated photo of a Guantánamo prisoner being escorted by guards in the prison’s Camp 6 (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images).

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.

Many thanks to Jason Leopold, senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News, for securing, through a Freedom of Information request, a DoD Inspector General report from 2010 entitled, “Review of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo’s Inclusion of Mental Health information in Intelligence Reports.”

Leopold, whose dogged pursuit, through FOIA requests, of documents the government would rather keep hidden secured him a description as a “FOIA terrorist,” posted the heavily related 33-page report on Twitter, noting that the report had taken seven years to be released since he first filed a FOIA request for it, and explaining that it was “about the mental health of detainees and the reliability of intel they provided to their captors.”

The report states that it was “conducted to determine whether DoD Intelligence Information Reports (IIRs) published by Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF GTMO) and its predecessor organizations included information regarding the mental health status of sources or their history of medication with substances and to determine the possible effect on finished intelligence.”

Unfortunately, while the report is helpful to some extent in shining a light on the multi-layered bureaucratic mess of Guantánamo, it is severely lacking in details about how medical information was used by interrogators. The section, “Inclusion of Information in Intelligence Information Reports,” for example, is almost entirely redacted, as are the key findings in the section entitled, “Impact of Information on Finished Intelligence,” the inferrence being, of course, that the redactions were deemed necessary to hide an uncomfortable truth: that unreliable information was indeed extracted from drugged prisoners and/or those with mental health problems.

Despite its redactions, the report is, however, openly critical of a lack of clarity regarding the protocols for sharing medical information with interrogators, stating, “Present regulatory guidance authorizes health-care providers to share detainee medical information with interrogators, but does not provide specific guidance on how to do so. As a result, execution of these policies at Guantánamo has been inconsistent, resulting in confusion for both health-care providers and interrogation elements.”

Also of interest is an assessment of how different branches of the military viewed the sharing of medical records. The report notes that United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), which oversees Guantánamo, “issued guidance directly applicable to detainee operations at Guantánamo” in a Policy Memorandum in August 2002, which stated bluntly that “communications between detainees and health-care providers are not confidential,” and “charged medical personnel to convey any information concerning the accomplishment of a military or national security mission.”

Additional guidance was issued in a memorandum in August 2004, which noted that “medical information could be made available to appropriate military authorities and released by the JTF GTMO surgeon or the United States Southern Command Surgeon.”

However, the report also noted that, in June 2003, the Detention Hospital at Guantánamo published Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which “stipulated that intelligence and law enforcement personnel were not allowed to check out medical records or to view medical records in clinical areas,” adding that, “Only members of the Behavioral Science Consultant Team (BSCT) were permitted to view medical records.”

Additionally, SOPs in 2005 “directed that no medical or dental information was to be used for the purposes of furthering intelligence gathering and that all release of medical or dental information must have the written approval of the Surgeon General or his deputy,” and that “at no time would active detainee medical or dental records leave the custody of the detention medical staff.”

In a summary, the report found that “policies for both medical support to detainees and interrogation have evolved over time. Health-care providers and interrogation staff described an evolving information-sharing environment ranging from unrestricted access to medical records by interrogators to an almost total restriction on the disclosure of medical information in support of interrogations.”

The summary added that an interview with a former commander of the Joint Medical Group, JTF GTMO, a survey from a former interrogator, and the Admiral Church investigation of detention operations “indicate that from the commencement of detainee operations at Guantánamo, interrogators reportedly had unrestricted access to detainee medical records.” Then, in April 2003. “the JTF Surgeon designated BSCT personnel as intermediaries to review detainee medical records on behalf of interrogators,” and two months later, in June 2003, “access to detainee medical records by personnel became subject to review by the JTF Judge Advocate General.” And finally, in June 2004. the JTF Surgeon “updated local policy and prohibited BSCT personnel from accessing detainee medical records without the JTF Surgeon’s express approval.”

The summary also stated that “[t]he majority of interrogation supervisors and interrogators we surveyed (covering the period of 2002 to 2008) confirmed that they did not have access to detainee medical/mental health records. However, as will be discussed in Finding B, the interrogation staff clearly had access to mental health information, If not the actual records. Furthermore, in spite of the obstacles placed on interrogators’ direct access to detainee medical records we discovered no policy prohibiting the sharing of detainee medical information with intelligence components for interrogation purposes.

Eagle-eyed eyes readers will have spotted a tantalizing reference to “Finding B” in the paragraph above, but unfortunately ‘“Finding B” is the “Inclusion of Information in Intelligence Information Reports,” mentioned above, which is almost entirely redacted.

However, despite the shortcomings of the report, its release is useful not only as part of the historical record, but also as a reminder of the still-unfolding story of detainee treatment — and, most crucially, mistreatment — at Guantánamo, and particularly those aspects of this long and sordid story that involve drugs administered to prisoners, and the exploitation of those with mental health problems.

Precursors to the 2010 report

As Jason Leopold stated in his Twitter thread, “This particular report grew out of a prior DoD investigation into whether Guantánamo detainees were given mind altering drugs to facilitate interrogations.”

That report, “Alleged Use of Mind Altering Substances on Detainees by DoD Personnel for the Purpose of Interrogation,” dated September 2009, is here, and Jason’s article about its significance, written with the psychologist and investigative journalist Jeffrey Kaye, and entitled, “DoD Report Reveals Some Detainees Interrogated While Drugged, Others ‘Chemically Restrained,’” was published by Truthout in July 2012 (and cross-posted on my site, with my own commentary, here).

Leopold and Kaye wrote about how the DoD report established that “[d]etainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful anti-psychotic and other medications” that, as the report described it, “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information,” and, in addition, “were subjected to “chemical restraints,” [and] hydrated with intravenous (IV) fluids while they were being interrogated.”

Earlier, in 2010, Truthout had published another ground-breaking article by Leopold and Kaye, “Controversial Drug Given to All Guantánamo Detainees Akin to ‘Pharmacologic Waterboarding,’” (cross-posted with my own commentary here), which alleged widespread use of the controversial anti-malarial drug, mefloquine, administered regardless of whether or not the prisoners had malaria, and known for causing severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety.

It’s also worth noting that the 2009 report only came about at the instigation of Senators Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel and Carl Levin, who had been appalled to read a Washington Post article in April 2008, by Joby Warrick, entitled, “Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned,” which seems to have been the first time that allegations surfaced about prisoners being drugged in connection with interrogations. Warrick’s article focused on Adel al-Nusairi, a Saudi policemen, freed in 2006, who said he had been drugged and interrogated, and the Post, drawing on statements made by “[a]t least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere,” stated that al-Nusairi and others “believed the injections were intended to coerce confessions.”

The spur for Warrick’s article, in turn, was the release of a 2003 Justice Department memo that “explicitly condoned the use of drugs on detainees.” As Warrick explained, Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices, the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo [the author of the notorious 2002 “torture memos”] rejected a decades-old US ban on the use of ‘mind-altering substances’ on prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they did not inflict permanent or ‘profound’ psychological damage. US law ‘does not preclude any and all use of drugs,’ Yoo wrote in the memo.”

Further allegations of medical abuse by prisoners

As I was revisiting the aspects of the Guantánamo story relating to drugging, interrogations, and the use of medical records, I realized that I hadn’t previously seen the US authorities refer to prisoners’ dental records, but that I had heard about prisoners discussing how dental problems were used by interrogators. My source is an unpublished report about medical abuse in Guantánamo, compiled by former prisoner Omar Deghayes after his release from the prison in December 2007.

Deghayes noted a several examples of prisoners with severe tooth pain. In most cases, he stated, the authorities did nothing, and in another “dentists pulled out four good teeth and left the tooth that had caused the pain.” Revisiting these claims, I couldn’t help thinking that they were tied to interrogations, and that they very obviously would have required interrogators, or the behavioral science consultants working closely with the interrogators, to have had access to prisoners’ medical records.

Mostly, however, revisiting Omar Deghayes’ collection of prisoner accounts has reminded me of the extent to which medical abuse appears to have been rife at Guantánamo, making questions about the reliability of intelligence from prisoners with mental health problems or on mind-altering medication just a sub-set of a a regime of medical neglect or specific abuse that was entirely connected to perceptions of cooperation. As well as being cruel and, I’m pretty sure, deserving of prosecution for all involved, this also helped to create an environment in which, while the US professed to be seeking the truth in interrogations, almost everything it did tended to do the opposite — to encourage prisoners to lie to secure medical treatment, or to stop specific abuse, all of which, of course, is why one of the most shocking truths about Guantánamo, which, to this day, far too few people realize, is the extent to which the supposed evidence justifying the imprisonment of the men held at Guantánamo was profoundly unreliable.

Deghayes’ assessment of the medical staff at Guantánamo was that they “had a policy, which they would always remind us about, that ‘their job was not to treat any illnesses but rather to only keep us alive and prolong our suffering unless we had information to provide the interrogators.’ This was said to us again and again, especially during interrogations, and they kept repeating this to make sure we understood that. So the only way to get any treatment at Guantánamo was to comply with providing interrogators information, even if you didn’t have any information, or to become a false witness against others. Some people, while suffering excruciating pain, had to go down this route so that they could get some medical attention because their condition became unbearable.”

* * * * *

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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on July 08, 2019 13:30

Deprivation and Despair: New Report Details Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo

The cover of ‘Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo,’ a new report by the the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

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.

Many thanks to the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) for their new report, Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo.

As CVT state in their introduction to the report on their website, “the experiences of detainees and independent civilian medical experts with medical care at the Guantánamo Bay detention center not only broadly refute the claim that detainees receive care equivalent to that of U.S. service members, but also evidence specific violations of the Nelson Mandela Rules, the universally recognized UN standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, which the United States has championed.”

In the introduction to the report itself, CVT and PHR provide a summary of Guantánamo now, “in its eighteenth year”, explaining, “Forty Muslim men still languish there, 31 of whom have never been charged with a crime. Five detainees have long been cleared for transfer by consensus of the Executive Branch’s national security apparatus, which determined that the men pose no meaningful threat, if any at all, to the United States. Many of the remaining detainees are torture survivors or victims of similarly significant trauma. All of them are either suffering from or at high risk of the additional profound physical and psychological harm associated with prolonged indefinite detention, a form of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. As the men age under these conditions, they are increasingly presenting with complex medical needs.”

The authors proceed to explain how, in April this year, Rear Adm. John C. Ring, the Joint Task Force-Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) Commander, “expressed concern to a gathering of reporters about Guantánamo’s ability to provide medical care to the remaining detainees as time passes and with seemingly no prospect of their release.” As he said, “Unless America’s policy changes, at some point we’ll be doing some sort of end of life care here … A lot of my guys are prediabetic … Am I going to need dialysis down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that. Are we going to do complex cancer care down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that.”

Adm. Ring’s tenure as Commander was terminated shortly after, although it has not been possible to establish that it was his remarks that led to his departure. Noticeably, six years previously, Gen. John F. Kelly of the U.S. Marine Corps, who was the Commanding General of U.S. Southern Command, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, had referred to “a ‘major challenge’ facing the United States at Guantánamo: ‘complex issues related to future medical care of detainees.’” He explained that “the medical issues of the aging detainee population are increasing in scope and complexity,” and that “aging detainees could require specialized treatment for issues such as heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, or even cancer,” and warned that “Guantánamo did not have the ‘specialists and equipment’ necessary for that level of care.”

The 58-page report features a number of powerful case studies of current and former prisoners, The three men still held are Nashwan al-Tamir (Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi), one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in 2007, who has been charged in the military commission trial system, Sharqawi al-Hajj, a “forever prisoner,” held since 2002, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, also facing a military commission trial. All three were held in CIA “black sites” before being brought to Guantánamo. The former prisoner is Tarek El-Sawah, released in January 2016, whose medical state I wrote about in 2013, in two articles, Lawyers Seek Release from Guantánamo of Tariq Al-Sawah, an Egyptian Prisoner Who is Very Ill and How the Egyptian Media Has Reported the Story of Tariq Al-Sawah, a Severely Ill Prisoner in Guantánamo. Other prisoners’ experiences are referred to throughout the report.

As the report states, The case that perhaps best illustrates the state of medical care at Guantánamo is that of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (aka Nashwan al-Tamir) … On September 5, 2018, Mr. al-Tamir collapsed incontinent in his cell from a degenerative spinal condition — one about which he had told Guantánamo’s medical personnel more than 10 years earlier, they had independently diagnosed at Guantánamo in 2010, and that outside medical experts concluded had obviously required urgent surgical intervention years earlier. To avoid paralysis, a team of specialists from the mainland had to fly to Guantánamo on a moment’s notice and perform emergency surgery. Four additional surgeries later — all performed at Guantánamo, but again by off-island specialists — Mr. al-Tamir’s spinal condition is still not resolved, he continues to suffer, and he may require additional surgery.”

The report adds, “Nevertheless, the government has pushed forward with Mr. al-Tamir’s prosecution in the military commissions, which has required him to attend court on a gurney, take pain medication during legal proceedings, and sleep in the courtroom when the predictable effects of that medication set in. Because of Mr. al-Tamir’s fragile state, Guantánamo’s senior medical officer repeatedly recommended that Mr. al-Tamir not be forcibly extracted from his cell to attend court proceedings (or otherwise). Prosecutors assured the judge in Mr. al-Tamir’s case that he did not need to issue an order to the same effect because Guantánamo’s non-medical staff would respect the recommendation. They were wrong. At the next hearing, prosecutors conceded that, in fact, Guantánamo’s non-medical commanders ‘are not bound by the [senior medical officer’s] opinions nor will they defer to them in every instance.’”

Sharqawi al-Hajj — tortured in Jordan on behalf of the CIA before his transfer to Guantánamo in 2004 — has numerous health problems, but as the report states, “In July 2017, after several weeks of a hunger strike because of increasing despair over his poor health and indefinite detention, Mr. Al Hajj fell unconscious and required emergency hospitalization. Shortly thereafter, he brought an emergency motion for an independent medical evaluation and production of his medical records. The government opposed both requests and, as of June 2019, the court had not ruled.” In addition, it was noted that he “refuses mental health care at Guantánamo for lack of trust.”

In the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for over four years, Dr. Sondra Crosby, one of the few medical professionals who has been allowed to visit the prison and assess prisoners, stated in 2015 that he “is most likely irreversibly damaged by torture that was unusually cruel and designed to break him … Making matters worse, there is no present effort to treat the damage, and there appear to be efforts to block others from giving him appropriate clinical care.”

Below I’m posting the executive summary of the report, which provides a good summary of the report’s key findings and recommendations, but I do urge you to read the whole report if you have the time.

Deprivation and Despair: Executive Summary

From the inception more than 17 years ago of the Guantánamo Bay detention center located on the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, senior detention facility personnel have consistently lauded the quality of medical care provided to detainees there. For example, in 2005, Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantánamo’s then-commander said the care was “as good as or better than anything we would offer our own soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines.” In 2011, a Navy nurse and then deputy command surgeon for JTF Guantánamo made a similar claim: “The standard of care here is the best possible standard of care (the detainees) could get.” In late 2017, Guantánamo’s senior medical officer again echoed those sentiments: “Detainees receive timely, compassionate, quality healthcare … [which is] … comparable to that afforded our active duty service members on island.”

There have been many more such assertions in the intervening years and since. Following an in-depth review of publicly available information related to medical care at Guantánamo — both past and present — as well as consultations with independent civilian medical experts and detainees’ lawyers, the Center for Victims of Torture and Physicians for Human Rights have determined that none of those assertions is accurate.

To the contrary, notwithstanding Guantánamo’s general inaccessibility to independent civilian medical professionals, over the years a handful of them have managed to access detainees, review medical records, and interface with Guantánamo’s medical care system to a degree sufficient to document a host of systemic and longstanding deficiencies in care. These include:

• Medical needs are subordinated to security functions. For example, prosecutors in a military commission case told the judge explicitly that the commander of Guantánamo’s detention operations is free to disregard recommendations of Guantánamo’s senior medical officer.

• Detainees’ medical records are devoid of physical and psychological trauma histories. This is largely a function of medical professionals’ inability or unwillingness to ask detainees about torture or other traumatic experiences during their time in the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program, or otherwise with respect to interrogations by U.S. forces — which has led to misdiagnoses and improper treatment.

• In large part due to a history of medical complicity in torture, many detainees distrust military medical professionals which has led repeatedly to detainees reasonably refusing care that they need.

• Guantánamo officials withhold from detainees their own medical records, including through improper classification.

• Both expertise and equipment are increasingly insufficient to address detainees’ health needs. For example, a military cardiologist concluded that an obese detainee required testing for coronary artery disease, but that Guantánamo did not have the “means to test” him, and so the testing was not performed. With regard to mental health, effective torture rehabilitation services are not, and cannot be made, available at Guantánamo.

• Detainees have been subjected to neglect. One detainee urgently required surgery for a condition he disclosed to Guantánamo medical personnel in 2007 — and they diagnosed independently in 2010 — but he did not receive surgery until 2018 and appears permanently damaged as a result.

• Military medical professionals rotate rapidly in and out of Guantánamo, which has caused discontinuity of care. For example, one detainee recently had three primary care physicians in the course of three months.

• Detainees’ access to medical care and, in some cases, their exposure to medical harm, turn substantially on their involvement in litigation. For example, it appears extremely difficult, if not impossible, for detainees who are not in active litigation to access independent civilian medical professionals, and for those who are to address a medical need that is not related to the litigation. For detainees charged before the military commissions, prosecution interests have superseded medical interests, as with a detainee who was forced to attend court proceedings on a gurney writhing in pain while recovering from surgery.

These deficiencies are exacerbated by — and in some cases a direct result of — the damage that the men have endured, and continue to endure, from torture and prolonged indefinite detention.

It is long past time that the medical care deficiencies this report describes were acknowledged and addressed. Systemic change is necessary; these are not problems that well-intentioned military medical professionals — of which no doubt there are many, working now in an untenable environment — can resolve absent structural, operational, and cultural reform. Nor, in many respects, are they problems that can be fully resolved as long as the detention facility remains open.

Guantánamo should be closed. Unless and until that happens, the Center for Victims of Torture and Physicians for Human Rights call upon Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary to adopt a series of recommendations aimed at meaningfully improving the status quo. These include, but are not limited to: lifting the legal ban on transferring detainees to the United States and mandating such transfers when detainees present with medical conditions that cannot be adequately evaluated and treated at Guantánamo; ensuring detainees have timely access to all of their medical records upon request while otherwise maintaining confidentiality of those records (especially with regard to access by prosecutors); and allowing meaningful and regular access to Guantánamo by civilian medical experts, including permitting such experts to evaluate detainees in an appropriate setting.

If the United States declines to take the steps this report recommends, complex medical conditions that cannot be managed at Guantánamo should be expected to accelerate in frequency and escalate in severity.

* * * * *

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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on July 05, 2019 13:46

Andy Worthington: An Archive of My Articles About Guantánamo and My UK Housing Activism – Part 25, July to December 2018

Outside the White House, singing in Washington, D.C., and with a loudhailer outside the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, on October 29, 2018, the day its occupiers were violently evicted.

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.

This article is the 25th in an ongoing series of articles listing all my work in chronological order since I first began publishing articles here in May 2007. It’s a project I began in January 2010, when I put together the first chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the more than 3,150 articles I have published, which, otherwise, are not available in chronological order in any readily accessible form.

I receive no institutional funding for my work, and so, if you appreciate what I do as a reader-funded journalist and activist, please consider making a donation via the Paypal ‘Donate’ button above. Any amount, however large or small, will be very gratefully received — and if you are able to become a regular monthly sustainer, that would be particularly appreciated. To do so, please tick the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and fill in the amount you wish to donate every month.

As I note every time I put together a chronological list of my articles, my mission, as it has been since my research in 2006-07, for my book The Guantánamo Files, first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, revolves around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions. In addition, as released prisoners have been abandoned by the government under Donald Trump, who has shut down the State Department office responsible for negotiating resettlements, and monitoring those released from the prison, a fifth aim is to seek justice for those released from Guantánamo.

In the second half of 2018, unfortunately, Guantánamo largely slipped off the radar, as a result of Donald Trump’s complete lack of interest in doing anything other then keeping it sealed shut and releasing no one under any circumstances. 40 men were held at the start of July 2018, and those same 40 men are still held today. I’m glad to note that, after the mid-term elections in November, when the Democrats gained a majority in the House of Representatives, activists have finally been able to discuss Guantánamo again with at least a handful of their elected representatives — some now chairing House committees — leading to some glimmers of hope that have been followed up on in the first six months of 2019, and that will be covered in the next chronological list.

From July to December 2018, however, with so little going on, I was at least free to take up another cause — direct action for the environment and for social housing, focused on a small but resonant community garden in Deptford, in south east London, where I live, which Lewisham Council and the housing association Peabody intended to destroy for a housing project masquerading as the benevolent provision of “affordable” homes, when, instead, it was just another example of land in public hands being sold off cheaply, and profiteering by all those involved in the corporate housing industry (which very much includes the big housing associations, like Peabody, who pretend to be concerned social housing providers).

At the end of August, to prevent the destruction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a precious green space and community asset, and a notable buffer against the horrendous local traffic pollution, myself and others occupied the garden in a protest that lasted for two months until our violent eviction at the end of October — although that was not the end of the story, as campaigners, myself included, continued to call for the plans for the garden’s destruction — and the destruction of Reginald House, a block of structurally sound council flats next door — to be dropped, and for new plans to be developed, in consultation with the local community, that would deliver genuinely affordable publicly-owned homes for rent.

This is a struggle that has continued into 2019, and I hope it is of interest if you haven’t already come across it. Throughout this period, I also continued to post a photo a day on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’, drawn from my seven years of cycling around London’s 120 postcodes taking photos, and my band The Four Fathers also continued to play regularly, as well as releasing our online single ‘Grenfell’, about the terrible and preventable fire in west London in June 2017, in which 72 people died, and which has been the main driver of my involvement in the struggle to save social housing from cynical regeneration projects like the one at Tidemill. These projects are mentioned in the list below, but please follow the links above for further information, and feel free to follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

I hope the various strands of my life as a reader-funded journalist, campaigner, photographer and musician are of interest to you, and that you’ll find the list below to be useful, and will consider making a donation to support my work if you can.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part 25, July to December 2018

July to August 2018

1. Guantánamo, habeas corpus, US courts: Tomorrow, Lawyers Will Argue in Court That Donald Trump’s Guantánamo Policy Is “Arbitrary, Unlawful, and Motivated by Executive Hubris and Anti-Muslim Animus”

2. Guantánamo, Supreme Court: Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court Nomination, Has a Dangerous Track Record of Defending Guantánamo and Unfettered Executive Power

3. Guantánamo, habeas corpus, US courts: Really? Trump Lawyer Argues in Court that Guantánamo Prisoners Can Be Held for 100 Years Without Charge or Trial

4. Guantánamo, military commissions: A “Cluster Covfefe”: Guantánamo Prisoner Majid Khan’s Damning Verdict on the Shambolic Military Commissions

5. Guantánamo, torture, UK complicity: UK Torture: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner’s Memories Provide A Reminder That We Need Accountability

6. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: “The World Has Forgotten Me” Says Ahmed Rabbani, 95-Pound Hunger Striker in Guantánamo

7. Guantánamo, “forever prisoners”: Abdul Latif Nasser’s Story: Imagine Being Told You Were Leaving Guantánamo, But Then Donald Trump Became President

8. Abu Zubaydah, torture: 16 Years Since John Yoo and Jay Bybee’s “Torture Memos” Were Issued, Abu Zubaydah Remains in Guantánamo, Silenced and Alone

9. Guantánamo media: A Beautiful Article About Love by Former Guantánamo Prisoner Mansoor Adayfi: Please Read It and Then Donate to Support Him

10. Guantánamo, military commissions: Guantánamo Judge Bans So-Called “Clean Team” Evidence in 9/11 Trial, Then Resigns

September to October 2018

11. Guantánamo lawyers: 41 Attorneys from the Cincinnati Area Call on Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo

12. 9/11, Guantánamo: The Bitter Legacy of 9/11, on its 17th Anniversary: Endless War, Guantánamo, Brexit, Trump and the Paranoid Security State

13. Life after Guantánamo: Fears for Guantánamo Prisoner Resettled in Serbia, Where the Government Wants to Get Rid of Him

14. Guantánamo media: “Saifullah Paracha: The Kind Father, Brother, and Friend for All at Guantánamo” by Mansoor Adayfi

15. Guantánamo prisoner list: Just Updated: Parts 1-3 of My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List (see Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 1), Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 2) and Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 3))

16. Guantánamo, Supreme Court: Karen Greenberg on Brett Kavanaugh, and How Guantánamo is Poisoning US Law

November to December 2018

17. Guantánamo prisoner list: Just Updated: Parts 4-6 of My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List (see Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 4), Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 5) and Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Part 6))

18. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners is Bad for Them – and US Security

19. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Boards: The Escape Route Shut Down by Donald Trump

20. Guantánamo, murders in US custody: Remembering Those Murdered by the US in the “War on Terror”

21. Guantánamo campaigns: Today Guantánamo Has Been Open For 6,175 Days, and on Jan. 1, 2019 It Will Have Been Open for 6,200 Days: Please Join Our Photo Campaign!

22. Senate torture report: It’s Four Years Since the Executive Summary of the Senate Torture Report Was Published: Where’s the Full Report?

23. Guantánamo, habeas corpus, US courts: Remembering Judge John J. Gibbons, The Man Who Brought Habeas Corpus to Guantánamo

24. Guantánamo, torture: The Forgotten Torture Report: It’s Ten Years Since the Publication of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Pioneering ‘Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody’

25. Life after Guantánamo: The Unending Punishment of Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr

An archive of UK-related articles, July to December 2018

July to August 2018

1. Photos, Trump visit: Photos: The London Protest Against Donald Trump’s UK Visit, July 13, 2018

2. Protest music, videos: New Videos by The Four Fathers: ‘Rebel Soldier’, ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Grenfell’ Recorded Live

3. Housing crisis: Good News! Haringey Council Ends Its £2 Billion Social Cleansing Deal with Predatory Developers LendleaseResistance to Social Cleansing: Screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ in Bristol, August 9, 2018

5. Photos, WOMAD: Photos: The WOMAD World Music Festival 2018 – Global Joy and Creativity, Threatened by Brexit

6. Brexit: Brexit: Inspiring New Polling Analysis Shows Majority of Constituencies Now Support Remaining in the EU

7. Battle of the Beanfield, civil liberties, housing crisis: Video: The Battle of the Beanfield, Free Festivals and Traveller History with Andy Worthington on Bristol Community Radio

8. London photos: Year 2, Day 100 of My Photo Project, ‘The State of London’, Recording A City Gutted by Greed Since the Olympics

9. Housing crisis, Tidemill occupation: Why We’ve Occupied the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford to Prevent Lewisham Council’s Demolition Plans

September to October 2018

November to December 2018

22. Housing crisis, Tidemill occupation: Video: The Peaceful Occupation and Violent Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford
23. Housing crisis, Tidemill occupation: Video: I Discuss the Tidemill Eviction, the Broken ‘Regeneration’ Industry and Sadiq Khan’s Stealthy Elimination of Social Rents
24. London photos: Celebrating 550 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’
25. Austerity, housing crisis, Extinction Rebellion: Broken Britain: UN Rightly Condemns Eight Years of Tory Austerity, But the Labour Party Is No Saviour; Try Extinction Rebellion Instead
26. Housing crisis, Tidemill occupation: The Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and the Mainstream Media’s Inadequacy in Reporting Stories About “Social Homes” and “Affordable Rents”
27. Housing crisis, Tidemill occupation: Lewisham Council’s Self-Inflicted Woes Increase: Chaos Over Tidemill Eviction Costs, and the Sacking of CEO Ian Thomas
28. Housing crisis, Tidemill occupation: Tidemill Solidarity Gig: Come and Celebrate the Resistance at the Birds Nest This Sunday, Dec. 9
29. Stansted 15, immigration detention: Why the Conviction of the Stansted 15, on Terrorism-Related Charges, Must Be Overturned
30. Housing crisis, Tidemill occupation: Lewisham Council Narrowly Avoids Defeat of Its Tidemill Plans by the Constituency Labour Party
31. London photos: Celebrating 600 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’, as 2018 Ends

Also, as an additional anomaly, see: RIP Steve Ditko: You, Jack Kirby and Wally Wood Opened My Eyes to a World of Heroic Fantasy

* * * * *

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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on July 03, 2019 13:48

A Rare Court Victory Offers Hope for Guantánamo’s “Forever Prisoners”

Guantánamo prisoner Khalid Qassim, in a photograph included in his classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, and ‘Titanic in Black and White,’ an artwork he made at Guantánamo in 2017, consisting of paint over gravel mixed with glue, which was included in the show ‘Art from Guantánamo Bay’ at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York in 2017-18.

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.

Anyone who has been following the alleged legal basis for the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of prisoners at Guantánamo should be encouraged by a ruling on June 21, 2019 by a three-judge panel — consisting of Judges Patricia A. Millett, Cornelia T. L. Pillard, and Harry T. Edwards — in the D.C. Circuit Court (the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia) in Qassim v. Trump, a case involving Khalid Qassim, a 41-year old Yemeni citizen who has been held at Guantánamo without charge or trial for over 17 years.

Close Guantánamo’s co-founder Tom Wilner argued the case before the court, and, as he explains, the court “reversed an eight-year rule that has prevented Guantánamo detainees from seeing and rebutting the evidence purportedly justifying their detentions,” as part of a ruling in which the judges granted Qassim’s request to reverse the District Court’s denial of his petition for habeas corpus.

To give some necessary perspective to the significance of the ruling, it is important to understand that, for most of Guantánamo’s history, the law has failed to offer them adequate protections against executive overreach. In a glaring demonstration of arrogant folly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration decided that anyone who ended up in US custody would be treated neither as a criminal (to be charged and put on trial), nor as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, who could be held unmolested until the end of hostilities. Instead, the prisoners were designated as “unlawful enemy combatants”; essentially, human beings without any rights whatsoever.

It took until June 2004, when Guantánamo had been open for nearly two and a half years, for the Supreme Court to rule, in Rasul v. Bush, that, as Wilner describes it, “the detainees have the right to habeas corpus review under the original habeas corpus statute passed by the first Congress of the United States.” Later that year, another case, Al Odah v. United States, “established the Guantánamo detainees’ right to legal counsel.”

Wilner was lead counsel in both cases, and as he further explains, “Following that decision, Congress repealed the statutory right of the Guantánamo detainees to pursue habeas relief.” Wilner and other lawyers “challenged that repeal, arguing that it was unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court agreed, ruling in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the detainees’ right to habeas corpus is protected by the United States Constitution and that they are entitled to pursue their habeas petitions in the district courts of the District of Columbia.”

The two years following the Boumediene ruling were the only period resembling a golden age for Guantánamo and the law, as 52 cases were heard by judges in the District Court, and, in 38 of those cases, ruled that, despite there being a low evidentiary hurdle, the government had failed to demonstrate that the men in question had any meaningful connection to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The majority of those 38 men were subsequently released.

Unfortunately, as these rulings were taking place, judges in the D.C. Circuit — in particular Judges A. Raymond Randolph, Laurence Silberman, Janice Rogers Brown and Brett Kavanaugh (disgracefully elevated to the Supreme Court last year) — were fighting back, issuing rulings that made it harder for the lower court judges to continue to be as openly critical of the government’s many evident failings, and, indeed, to grant prisoners’ habeas petitions.

Three of the 38 rulings mention above were reversed on appeal, three others were vacated (sent back to the District Court to re-consider), and, from July 2010, no more habeas petitions were granted, and, after eleven straight losses (through to October 2011), the prisoners and their lawyers gave up.

What is also shameful — and worth noting — is that, since this time, the Supreme Court has never once revisited the Guantánamo litigation, and, as a result, has tacitly allowed the appeals court to usurp Boumediene and set their own inferior standards instead.

One of the District Court rulings that was reversed was Kiyemba v. Obama (originally Kiyemba v. Bush), involving 17 Uighurs, transparently innocent prisoners, and an oppressed minority in China, whose only enemy was the Chinese government. However, in February 2009, the D.C. Circuit “held that the government had the authority to detain the Uighurs indefinitely,” as Slate explained a year later when, shamefully, the Supreme Court refused to take up their case.

As Tom Wilner describes it, in Kiyemba the D.C. Circuit “declared that, although the detainees may have a right to a habeas hearing, they have no constitutional right to due process of law.”

And so to the legal wasteland of the last eight years, as the District Court, in Wilner’s words, has “strictly followed and uniformly interpreted that decision to deny the detainees the right to view any of the purported evidence against them that the government claims is classified.”

As Wilner adds, “Because the government claims that almost all the evidence is classified, the Kiyemba decision effectively prevents the detainees from seeing, confronting and rebutting the purported evidence against them, making it virtually impossible for them to prevail in a habeas proceeding. In the eight years since that decision, not a single habeas petition contested by the government has been granted.”

Discussing the challenge to Kiyemba in the D.C. Circuit Court, Wilner points out that Qassim “has never been charged with any crime, such as material support for terrorism. Rather, he is detained on the assertion that he was an ‘enemy combatant’ who was part of or supported the Taliban or Al Qaeda more than seventeen years ago. He denies that assertion but has never had the opportunity to view and rebut the purported evidence upon which it is based. Significantly, had Mr. Qassim been charged with material support for terrorism and convicted, he would in all likelihood have already served his sentence and been released.”

Wilner adds that, “Recognizing that Mr. Qassim could not prevail in any proceeding in which he was denied notice of the government’s evidence purportedly justifying his detention, we moved the district court to disregard Kiyemba and hold that due process governed the proceedings, and we conceded that we could not prevail unless it did. The district court ruled that it was powerless to disregard Kiyemba, denied our motion and ruled against us on the merits. We appealed.”

As he further explains, “Last Friday, the D.C. Circuit granted our appeal and reversed and remanded to the district court to conduct Mr. Qassim’s habeas proceeding in accordance with procedures that would afford him a ‘meaningful review’ of the basis for his detention. The court did not overrule Kiyemba, but limited that decision to its particular facts and emphasized that neither it nor any other decision establishes a prohibition on affording the detainees any constitutional protections and that the habeas process must afford Mr. Qassim a ‘meaningful review’ of the basis for his detention.”

As Judge Millett, who wrote the court’s opinion, stated in the ruling, “As it now stands, the record is insufficient for this court to resolve Qassim’s constitutional challenge. We leave it for the district court to address on remand both Qassim’s claimed constitutional right to access the classified information in the government’s hands and the constitutional source (if any) of such a right.” Judge Millett also addressed a recent concession by the government regarding classified information, stating, “In so doing, the district court can also address the government’s belated concession, made for the first time on appeal, that some of the sought-after information may properly be disclosed in this case.”

Tom Wilner’s conclusion sums up the judges’ ruling — and the hope it offers — perfectly. “This decision,” he explains, “tears down the major barrier that has prevented the Guantánamo detainees from receiving a fair hearing.”

While everyone concerned with justice should enjoy this victory, it now remains to be seen how the District Court responds. To help the lower court to understand the significance of the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling, please share this news as widely as possible, as we note that, to date, the mainstream media has not yet seen fit to report on it.

* * * * *

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

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on June 30, 2019 13:31

On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Donald Trump is Holding Children in Detention Centers in Circumstances Comparable to “Torture Facilities”

Migrants outside a makeshift encampment at the US Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, May 15, 2019 (Photo: Loren Elliott/Reuters).

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.

Tomorrow is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which, I was slightly shocked to realize, I’ve been writing about most years since 2007 — see my reports from 2009, 2010 (and here), 2011, 2012 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2018.

When it first took place on June 26, 1998, 21 years ago, it was to mark the 11th anniversary of the date in 1987 when the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the UN Convention Against Torture), which I described last year as “an enormous breakthrough in the global moral struggle against the use of torture,” came into effect. As I also explained, June 26 “also marks the date in 1945 when the UN Charter, the founding document of the United Nations, was signed by 50 of the 51 original member countries (Poland signed it two months later).”

For most of the last 12 years, I have focused on the need for the US to be held accountable for the torture it inflicted, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, on prisoners rounded up and tortured in CIA “black sites” around the world, as well as the torture inflicted on prisoners in Guantánamo, in Bagram and numerous other facilities in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, where the use of torture was rife, even though George W. Bush pretended that, unlike in all the other places mentioned above, prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions.

As I reflect on the US’s use of torture, it strikes me in particular that we shouldn’t forget that the 40 men still held at Guantánamo — although no longer subjected to the torture programs that were prevalent at the prison in its first few years of operations — are still, for the most part, held indefinitely without charge or trial, a situation that is disgraceful for a country that claims to respect the rule of law, but that also, crucially, exerts a particular mental toll on those subjected to it — not knowing when, if ever, their imprisonment will end, because no judge has given them a sentence, and because the US establishment appears to have no notion that there should ever be an end to the hostilities in connection with which they were seized so many long and lawless years ago.

The effects of this open-ended arbitrary detention were first publicly voiced as a concern back in October 2003, when Christophe Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross — which normally keeps quiet about what its representatives see in the prisons they visit, as they work behind the scenes to ensure humane treatment of prisoners — voiced his concerns about the effects of open-ended imprisonment without charge or trial in an interview with the New York Times. With reference to a Guantánamo visit, Girod said, “One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely. The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

I can’t truly imagine how much worse that problem must be now, over 15 years since Girod first made his observations, when the prison had only been open for 21 months, rather than 6,375 days, as is the situation today, but while I leave you to reflect on that I’d also like to shift the focus to another torture story that is currently unfolding, which involves Donald Trump and his treatment of migrant children at the Mexican border.

Torturing migrant children

It’s just two days since ABC News reported that Dolly Lucio Sevier, a doctor working in private practice in Texas, had submitted a medical declaration, after visiting the Ursula facility in McAllen, in the south of the state, in which she witnessed migrant children, the youngest being just two and a half years old, “sleeping on concrete floors with the lights on 24 hours a day”, and having “no access to soap or basic hygiene,” as a result of which she stated, “The conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities.”

The Ursula facility is the largest Customs and Border Protection detention center in the country, and the visit took place after lawyers “found out about a flu outbreak there that sent five infants to the neonatal intensive care unit.” Lucio Sevier assessed 39 children under the age of 18, and “described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including ‘extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.’” She added that all the children she assessed “showed evidence of trauma,” and the teens “spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody.” She compared it to being “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.”

Speaking to ABC News, she said the facility “felt worse than jail,” adding, “It just felt, you know, lawless. I mean, imagine your own children there. I can’t imagine my child being there and not being broken.”

According to Lucio Sevier, conditions for infants were “even more appalling,” with many teen mothers in custody explaining that they weren’t even able to wash their children’s bottles. As she explained in her declaration, “To deny parents the ability to wash their infant’s bottles is unconscionable and could be considered intentional mental and emotional abuse.”

Elsewhere in the migrant detention gulag, as Rolling Stone explained, “the Associated Press and the New York Times reported on the conditions at a Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, which was recently visited by a group of lawyers investigating whether the facility was abiding by the Flores settlement, a 1997 agreement holding that migrant children must be held in safe and sanitary conditions.”

“This was not the case in Clint,” Rolling Stone stated, adding:

According to the Times, children as young as seven and eight “wearing clothes caked with snot and tears,” are being entrusted to care for infants. “Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants,” the report continues. “Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.” The children are hungry, visibly “filthy,” and locked in cages for almost the entire day. “There is a stench,” Elora Mukherjee, one of the lawyers who visited the facility, told the Times. “The overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since they crossed the border.”

“In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,” Holly Cooper, a co-director of the University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic, told the AP.

For another report, see this New Yorker article.

Meanwhile, the architect of this horror show, Donald Trump, who is planning mass deportations, has been trying to claim that it was President Obama who separated migrant children from their parents, whereas he (Trump) ended it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As Rolling Stone described it:

Families attempting to cross the border under President Obama were separated only in rare circumstances, such as when there was concern for the safety of the child, or when the adult could not be confirmed to be the child’s parent. Last spring, however, the Trump administration instituted a “zero-tolerance policy,” holding that every adult crossing the border would be prosecuted, and thus separated from their child or children. A leaked Department of Homeland Security memo revealed that family separation was an intended consequence of the policy, with authorities hoping it would deter other families from attempting to cross the border.

ABC News explained that, as a result of the policy, “2,700 children were separated from their families in a matter of weeks.” To make matters worse, as Vox reported last July, “The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents,” because “[t]he department that separated families at the border didn’t talk to the agency that took custody of separated kids,” and in January this year it was revealed that thousands more migrant children were separated from their parents under Trump than was previously known, because the Trump administration was separating families well before the policy was made public in April 2018.

Although Trump “signed an executive order to suspend his own administration’s zero-tolerance policy,” after it was widely criticized, Rolling Stone explained that “children are still being separated from their parents if authorities deem the parent poses a risk to the child,” adding, “Such separations are on the rise, often for reasons as petty as the parent having a traffic violation on their record.” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt recently told the Houston Chronicle, “In the last few months these types of separations have risen drastically. The government is trying to drive a truck through what was supposed to be a very narrow exception.”

ABC news explained that “documents from the US Department of Health and Human Services — obtained by immigration rights groups and the Houston Chronicle through a Freedom of Information Act request — “showed more than 700 children were separated from parents between last June and May” this year.

On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Donald Trump not only needs to be held to account for not closing Guantánamo, and for having appointed a torturer to be the director of the CIA, but also for the torture he is inflicting on children at the Mexican border, where, to judge from the accounts above, US morality has well and truly gone to die.

* * * * *

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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on June 25, 2019 14:13

This Summer Solstice, The Party’s Over; Now It’s Time to Save the Planet

The summer solstice 2019 at Stonehenge (Photo: Hannah McKay/Reuters).

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 is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and at Stonehenge, the astonishing Bronze Age temple on the downs in Wiltshire, around 10,000 people gathered to watch the solstice sun rise through the heart of the temple, on one of the relatively rare years that the dawn sky was clear. It’s a contemporary celebration of the cycle of the seasons, but it also ties us to our mysterious ancestors, 4,000 years ago, who spent untold years transporting and shaping the vast sarsen stones that make up the temple’s epic bulk, so that it aligned with the rising sun on this particularly significant day.

People seem to have been drawn to Stonehenge for the summer solstice for centuries, although many archaeologists have a different take on the monument’s purpose, suggesting that it was not built to celebrate the summer solstice, but to celebrate the other end of this cosmic axis: the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, when, as the archeologist Aubrey Burl has suggested, our distant ancestors — whose lives, to quote Thomas Hobbes, were “nasty, brutish and short” — sought to reassure themselves that life would return from the dead world of winter.

Burl may be right, and much of the archaeological record supports his Hobbesian analogy. Life was indeed hard and short, but the romanticised view of our ancestors celebrating the summer solstice — rather than undertaking the building of stone circles and other extraordinary monuments to seek reassurance, in the depths of winter, that life would return to a dead world — has a powerful resonance for anyone who lived through, or has been influenced by the counter-cultural movements of the western world in the decades following the Second World War, and, in particular, the 1960s and 70s.

In the flowering of opposition to the existing order, the “hippie” movement — a broad term of reference for a multiplicity of responses to the status quo — sought the overthrow of the existing system, had a tendency to challenge everything, and also demonstrated a colossal enthusiasm for all manner of hedonism; “sex and drugs and rock and roll”, as Ian Dury so memorably described it. As these 60s iconoclasts looked around for opportunities to party, to challenge the existing order, and to seek reference points in the past, whether real or imagined, for an alternative world view, one of the things they picked up on was the significance of the summer solstice — an opportunity to party, to celebrate our links to the ancient past, and to celebrate the cycle of the seasons.

It was a time of great enthusiasm for alternative world views, for the unexplained, and for grand politicised analogies, ranging from the absurd to the confrontational. In the former camp, intriguing theories of ley-lines — lines of energy across the planet — were absorbed into the hugely popular fantasies of extra-terrestrial intervention proposed by Erich von Daniken, while in the latter, as radical feminism grew, some of its adherents envisaged a matriarchal utopia that had existed in the ancient past before the patriarchy crushed it.

However, while I have long believed that the “hippie” movement fundamentally fractured in the 1970s, when its political wing, which was resolutely confrontational, was sidelined, and its focus on self-improvement took over — inadvertently creating the new age-influenced “me me me” world of self-fulfilment and self-entitlement that has largely taken over all walks of western life in the decades since — it is clear that other aspects of the revolutionary upheavals of the times — those, I would say, that continued to combine both the political and the personal — had a powerful resonance whose influence can still be felt, and whose importance is fundamentally undiminished.

In the US, for example, some of the “hippies” withdrew from the overt political struggle on the streets, and established off-grid, self-sufficient communes, vestiges of which survive to this day. And as environmental awareness grew, the first Earth Day took place in the US, in April 1970, which “brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favour of environmental reform.”

Free festivals and road protests

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth also grew out of this dawning environmental awareness, and, in the UK counter-culture, as co-ops were established and notions of communal living spread, the manifestations of an alternative culture, and an alternative future, were often inspiring. As a free festival circuit was established, initially drawing on the examples established in the late 60s in the US, those involved were drawn to an ancient ritual year, divided by the solstices and equinoxes, and the cross-days (Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhain, at the start of February, May, August and November, with Beltane and Samhain corresponding to May Day and Halloween) that clearly had more reverence for nature than the 52-week, 9-5 workday corporate model, with its debased Christian appropriation of the winter solstice (for Christmas), and the spring equinox for Easter.

The free festivals’ most potent manifestation was a giant anarchic affair, the Stonehenge Free Festival, that established itself in the fields across the road from Stonehenge every year from 1974 to 1984, growing from a small, prankster-ish intervention into a full-blown assault on Thatcher’s Britain, with tens of thousands of people creating a makeshift city of tents and vehicles for the whole of June, by the time of its suppression in 1985 at a one-sided, violent assault on travellers heading to Stonehenge to establish the festival by 1,400 tooled-up police, fresh from suppressing the Miners’ Strike, at what has become known as the Battle of Beanfield.

The Stonehenge Free Festival in 1984, as viewed from a police helicopter.

For detailed accounts of Stonehenge and the post-war British counter-culture, check out my book Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion, and, for the Beanfield, my book The Battle of the Beanfield.

The Stonehenge festival’s notoriety drew in tens of thousands of day-trippers and counter-culture tourists, whose concern for their personal environmental footprint was not necessarily pronounced, but the hardcore travellers who made up the festival circuit, from May to September — modern-day nomads in cheaply-bought trucks, vans and coaches — generally respected the intention to “leave no trace”; in other words, to tidy up a site after use and to leave it as they found it.

Although the traveller culture was largely destroyed as a result of the Beanfield and the subsequent harrying of travellers in the years that followed, its driving environmental impulses refused to die. Unable to travel freely, its successors rooted themselves to the land when they started a movement against road expansion in the early 90s, an extraordinary and inspiring mixture of insurrection and reverence for ‘Mother Earth’, whose key battles included Twyford Down, Solsbury Hill, Newbury and the struggle against the M11 Link Road in east London.

Although most of the battles were lost, the movement successfully forced the government to largely terminate future road expansion plans, and in this fertile period for environmental resistance, when direct action groups like Earth First! were prominent, and other movements like Reclaim the Streets occupied city streets, reclaiming them from vehicles and temporarily reinstating them as public spaces, a more hopeful future seemed possible.

The last 20 years of turbo-charged, planet-killing capitalism

Unfortunately, however, just as Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had reinstated capitalism’s broken narrative in the 1980s, particularly unleashing the greed of the banking sector, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton dutifully followed, unleashing an unprecedented orgy of consumer materialism, expanding on the 80s mania for outsourcing vast swathes of production to the developing world, further empowering bankers, and facilitating the growth of remorseless international tourism, fuelled by the essentially unfettered activities of the car and plane industries that has dominated our relationship to the earth — and promoted our inflated sense of self-entitlement — to such an extent that our very existence is now imperilled.

Throughout the last 20 years, there has still been resistance. The anti-globalisation movement, for example, building on all of the movements described above, dominated headlines between 1999 and 2001, and this week, I note, was the 20th anniversary of a giddy protest in London, the Carnival Against Capital, that noisily challenged the impunity of the City of London.

But for the most part resistance movements have been hamstrung over the last 18 years: firstly through a cynical “climate of fear” and warmongering, also involving the suppression of civil liberties, that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and, since 2008, when the global banking system collapsed under the weight of its own greed and corruption, under the weight of a cynical “age of austerity” — imposed in the UK in particular — which, combined with a permanently and deliberately sustained housing bubble, has persistently benefited the rich at the expense of the poor, millions of whom are now barely scraping by, over-worked and over-exploited, in an atomised society, and with a media so permanently engaged in stifling even the notion of dissent that a concerted movement of resistance seems impossible.

However, what none of the cynical powermongers driving this greed and inequality foresaw was how their twin messages of constant empowerment for the already rich, and silent acquiescence for the poor, would start to come undone as the planet itself rebels against man-made disorder.

No one who has been paying attention to environmental issues since Earth Day took place nearly 50 years ago is at all surprised by this, as numerous scientifically-minded Cassandras have been warning us of the dire consequences of our actions ever since, but the scale of planetary collapse is now so grave that a new, multi-faceted environmental protest movement looks to be gaining the kind of mainstream support that all the movements I’ve described above could only dream of.

The blunt truth — and no truth could be blunter, sadly — is that man-made climate change, and particularly how it has developed since Thatcher and Reagan seized back control of the capitalist narrative 40 years ago, and how it has become even more horribly turbo-charged in the last 20 years, is raising the global temperature to such an extent that the entire eco-system that supports human life on earth — and much of the flora and fauna we share the planet with — is collapsing.

Urgent and unprecedented resistance is required NOW!

Last year, two movements began — Extinction Rebellion (XR), and the School Strike for Climate, launched by the 15-year old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg — that have gained significant support, and that secured a major boost in popularity when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report in October in which, as the Guardian described it, “The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.”

The report’s authors said that “urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C — an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted by 196 countries in December 2015.

A further alarming report was produced at the end of October by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which warned that “humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.”

However, while the Paris agreement was a step forward in a long-running effort to get governments to pay more than lip service to the need for strenuous efforts to restrict man-made greenhouse gas emissions, Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg have become spokespeople for the need for much more radical change. In February, Thunberg told the EU’s European Economic and Social Committee that countries must reduce their CO2 emissions by 80% by 2030, while XR is calling for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.

Governments have been rattled, and are now making promises they have never made before. Theresa May, for example, recently promised to make the UK carbon neutral by 2050, but as Green MP Caroline Lucas explained, “Britain may be the first G7 country to set a net-zero emissions target by 2050, but others have shown greater ambition. Finland committed to be carbon-neutral by 2035, Norway has a 2030 target and eight EU countries have asked for all members of the bloc to commit to net-zero by 2050 and dedicate a quarter of the EU’s next budget to projects fighting climate change. Britain wasn’t among them.”

But even the pledges that seem the most ambitious fall woefully short of what is required, which is truly radical change as immediately as possible; changes that can and must affect every way that our spoilt, complacent, entitled, planet-wrecking culture behaves, with our all too frequent flying, our incessant driving, our hunger for cheap clothes produced in countries where ‘fast fashion’ is literally killing the environment — the list goes on and on and on, not just at the personal level, but in terms of the corporations and companies, almost entirely unobstructed by politicians, who are either at the front line of deadly over-exploItation (via deforestation, for example), or are engaged in environmentally ruinous pursuit — not just the oil and gas industries, who head the list of major carbon emissions polluters, but almost every industry the more fortunate members of humanity have come to regard as key components of the life they deserve.

In 2017, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions produced some key graphs demonstrating how, globally, energy production of all types accounts for 72 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, with the primary sources being the generation of electricity and heat (31%), transportation (15%), manufacturing (12%), agriculture (11%), and deforestation (6%, although figures from 2011 have this at over 11%).

While an increasing focus on renewable energy can tackle some elements of this orgy of emissions, other aspects are more problematic, as an article in Science last June demonstrated, identifying “difficult-to-decarbonize energy services includ[ing] aviation, long-distance transport, and shipping; production of carbon-intensive structural materials such as steel and cement; and provision of a reliable electricity supply that meets varying demand.”

As those of us who care try to take in the ramifications of these findings — for example, how the meat industry, and our greed for beef in particular, is driving deforestation, and how the entire building industry is hugely reliant on cement, for concrete, which is a major pollutant, and how we need to permanently get cars and other vehicles permanently off the roads — I remain amazed and appalled by how key stories about our enfolding environmental catastrophe remain under-reported, like the research published on Monday demonstrating that “the melting of Himalayan glaciers has doubled since the turn of the century, with more than a quarter of all ice lost over the last four decades”, and the warning by scientists that “the accelerating losses indicate a ‘devastating’ future for the region, upon which a billion people depend for regular water.”

Every day, devastating environmental news emerges that should stop the world, and lead to an immediate global pledge to fundamentally re-think the entire way the global economy operates, and yet, for the most part, our consumer carousel of distraction and self-gratification continues unabated.

At Stonehenge today, as, unremarked, people will be cleaning up after last night’s revelry, the throwaway culture will stand in marked contrast to the 70s exhortation to “leave no trace” — and ironically, this summer, as the massive commercial festival business continues to demonstrate how wildly successful the original template of the “hippies” was, with its drive to gather people outdoors to hang out and listen to music, the throwaway culture will, as usual, leave colossal amounts of waste behind, further confirming how far we have strayed from the encouragement to “leave no trace.”

Viewed globally, of course, these are just small examples of the brattish, self-absorbed, disposable culture that needs to be brought to an immediate end. Globally, humanity needs to urgently grasp the necessity to “leave no trace” as much as possible, and to do it as swiftly as possible, to avoid a not-too-distant dystopian future in which we will all be compelled to recall ruefully how we basically did nothing while the planet burned.

* * * * *

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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on June 21, 2019 11:35

US Supreme Court Supports Lifelong Imprisonment Without Charge or Trial at Guantánamo; Only Justice Breyer Dissents

Guantánamo prisoner and Yemeni citizen Moath al-Alwi, in a photo from Guantánamo included in his classified military file, dated March 2008, and released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, after being leaked by Chelsea Manning. Al-Alwi has been held without charge or trial for over 17 years, but last week had his request for a Supreme Court review of his case turned down.

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.

Remember when the US courts used to guarantee the rights of any individual not to be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, in defiance of all accepted domestic and international laws and treaties?

Yes, so do we, but unfortunately all that changed nearly 15 years ago, when the Supreme Court, in a case called Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, dealing with the sole US citizen held at Guantánamo, Yasser Hamdi, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1980, but living in Saudi Arabia since he was a child, ruled that foreign prisoners held at Guantánamo could be — yes, you guessed it — imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial.

Hamdi, seized in Afghanistan in December 2001, had been held at Guantánamo until the US authorities realized that he was a US citizen, at which point he was moved to a military brig on the mainland, where he became one of three US citizens or residents held as “enemy combatants” and subjected to torture (the others being US citizen Jose Padilla, and legal resident Ali al-Marri).

In the Hamdi ruling, the Supreme Court (in a plurality opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) specifically ruled that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the AUMF), passed by Congress the week after 9/11 and authorizing the president to sweep up, in an undefined global dragnet, anyone he regarded as being connected to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or in relation to the 9/11 attacks, could be detained “for the duration of the relevant conflict,” in order to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, a decision that effectively endorsed a parallel — and unnecessary — version of the Geneva Conventions, which permits the detention of combatants until the end of hostilities.

However, while the specific wording of the Hamdi ruling doesn’t sound like an authorization of indefinite detention without charge or trial, in reality that is what has transpired, as all efforts made by prisoners in the last few years to establish that the “relevant conflict” has ended have been turned down by the courts.

In January 2015, President Obama declared, in his State of the Union Address, “Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” Lawyers for Mukhtar al-Warafi, a Yemeni prisoner, then asked a federal court to order his release, as I explained in an article at the time, because, as Shane Harris described it in an article for the Daily Beast, al-Warafi said that, “since President Obama has declared the war in Afghanistan is over, there are no longer any legal grounds to hold him.” As Harris also explained, however, “when US attorneys respond, they could argue that, in fact, hostilities haven’t come to a conclusion, and there are still grounds to hold the man. That could put them the strange position of undercutting the president, and arguing that just because the commander-in-chief says the war is over doesn’t necessarily make it so.”

In July 2015, Harris’s suggestion came true, when, as the New York Times described it, and as I explained in another article, District Judge Royce C. Lamberth “ruled that regardless of what Mr. Obama has said about the status of the war in Afghanistan, there continues to be fighting between the United States and the Taliban. As a result … the government retains the legal authority to detain enemy fighters, including Taliban members, to prevent them from returning to that fight.” Judge Lamberth stated, “A court cannot look to political speeches alone to determine factual and legal realities merely because doing so would be easier than looking at all of the relevant evidence. The government may not always say what it means or means what it says.”

Moath al-Alwi

Subsequently, Moath al-Alwi (aka Muaz al-Alawi), a Yemeni prisoner held at Guantánamo since January 16, 2002, just five days after the prison opened, revisited the “end of war” argument. Al-Alwi had spent years lawfully seeking his release from Guantánamo. Back in June 2004, on the same day that the Hamdi ruling was delivered, the Supreme Court also ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that the prisoners at Guantánamo could petition federal courts for writs of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention. Lawyers were then allowed to take on clients in the prison, and in 2005 al-Alwi petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus. Unfortunately, Congress then moved to take away the prisoners’ habeas rights, and it wasn’t until June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the Supreme Court revisited the Guantánamo cases, granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights.

Al-Alwi’s habeas petition was subsequently decided in December 2008, when District Judge Richard Leon ruled that he could continue to be held because he had “stayed at guest houses associated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda … received military training at two separate camps closely associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban and supported Taliban fighting forces on two different fronts in the Taliban’s war against the Northern Alliance.” In other words, as I explained in an article at the time, Judge Leon ruled that he “could be held indefinitely without charge or trial because, despite traveling to Afghanistan to fight other Muslims before September 11, 2001, ‘contend[ing] that he had no association with al-Qaeda,’ and stating that ‘his support for and association with the Taliban was minimal and not directed at US or coalition forces,’ he was still in Afghanistan when that conflict morphed into a different war following the US-led invasion in October 2001.”

Al-Alwi then appealed, but his appeal was turned down by the D.C. Circuit Court in July 2011. He then appealed to the Supreme Court, but was one of seven cases that were turned down in June 2012. To its shame, the Supreme Court has not taken up a Guantánamo case since Boumediene was decided in June 2008. Al-Alwi also had a request for his release via a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established under President Obama, turned down in October 2015.

What’s particularly depressing about all of this is that, although al-Alwi has, over the years, resisted the fundamental lawlessness of his imprisonment by becoming a long-term hunger striker, he doesn’t seem to pose any kind of threat to the US. In 2017, he became celebrated, amongst those inclined to remember that the Guantánamo prisoners are human beings, as a talented artist who was spending all his time making beautiful sailing ships out of cardboard and whatever other discarded materials he could scavenge.

A ship made by Moath al-Alwi, as featured in the exhibition “Art from Guantánamo Bay,” shown in 2017-18 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Al-Alwi’s second habeas petition, submitted in 2015, was turned down by the District Court, and an appeal was then turned down by the D.C. Circuit Court in August 2018. He then asked the Supreme Court to consider that, as the New York Times described it, “the legal basis for holding him as a wartime detainee had unraveled because so much time had passed since his capture and because the conflict in Afghanistan had changed.”

The Supreme Court and Justice Breyer

Last week, however, unfortunately but predictably, the Supreme Court refused to take up his case, but in a statement accompanying the refusal, Justice Stephen Breyer declared that it was “past time to confront [a] difficult question left open by Hamdi” — whether “detention for the ‘duration of the relevant conflict’ could amount to ‘perpetual detention.’”

Specifically, Justice Breyer wrote:

Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion [in Hamdi] cautioned that “[i]f the practical circumstances” of that conflict became “entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war,” the Court’s “understanding” of what the AUMF authorized “may unravel.” Indeed, in light of the “unconventional nature” of the “war on terror,” there was a “substantial prospect” that detention for the “duration of the relevant conflict” could amount to “perpetual detention.” But as this was “not the situation we face[d] as of th[at] date,” the plurality reserved the question whether the AUMF or the Constitution would permit such a result.

With reference to al-Alwi’s case, Justice Breyer noted that the court of appeals (the D.C. Circuit Court) “agreed with the Government that it may continue to detain him so long as ‘armed hostilities between United States forces and [the Taliban and al-Qaeda] persist.’ The Government represents that such hostilities are ongoing, but does not state that any end is in sight. As a consequence, al-Alwi faces the real prospect that he will spend the rest of his life in detention based on his status as an enemy combatant a generation ago, even though today’s conflict may differ substantially from the one Congress anticipated when it passed the AUMF, as well as those ‘conflicts that informed the development of the law of war.’”

Justice Breyer concluded, “I would, in an appropriate case, grant certiorari to address whether, in light of the duration and other aspects of the relevant conflict, Congress has authorized and the Constitution permits continued detention.”

Justice Breyer’s intervention is commendable, but as Mark Joseph Stern explained last week in an article for Slate, it is 15 years too late. At the time of Hamdi, four Justices formed the plurality (O’Connor, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Anthony Kennedy, and Breyer), while two others, David Souter, joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “concurred with the plurality’s judgment that due process protections must be available for Hamdi to challenge his status and detention, providing a majority for that part of the ruling,” but “dissented from the plurality’s ruling that [the] AUMF established Congressional authorization for the detention of enemy combatants.”

Just one Justice, Clarence Thomas, sided entirely with the Bush administration, while two others — the conservative Antonin Scalia, joined by the veteran liberal Justice John Paul Stevens — dissented, noting, as Mark Joseph Stern put it, that “Congress had failed to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which grants individuals the right to challenge their detention,” and that, “Unless and until Congress suspends this right — which it can only do ‘in cases of rebellion or invasion’ — the president cannot revoke citizens’ due process.” Moreover, as Stern described it, Scalia noted that “the AUMF does not actually confer the broad detention powers the government claimed. Thus, Hamdi should either have been given a fair trial or released.”

As Stern proceeded to explain, “Scalia and Stevens, the strange bedfellows who defended habeas corpus, are gone. The court’s Guantánamo swing votes, O’Connor and Kennedy, have resigned, replaced by Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh. Both staunchly oppose rights for Guantánamo detainees. Indeed, while serving on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh played a leading role hobbling Kennedy’s efforts to bring constitutional protections to Guantánamo.”

Mark Joseph Stern also asked what, for Justice Breyer, would be “an appropriate case” for certiorari. “Why isn’t al-Alwi’s case appropriate?” he asked, noting that “Breyer didn’t say.” In Breyer’s defense, however, it may be that he has correctly surmised that, given the Supreme Court’s current line-up, no victory is possible. With Kavanaugh having to recuse himself from Guantánamo matters because of his history, any ruling is likely to be split 4-4, with Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Obama’s two nominees, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan on one side, and Thomas, Alito, Trump’s other nominee Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts on the other, preserving the current, and thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs.

And yet the need for some part of the machinery of US government to take action to bring this disgraceful situation to an end is one of perpetual urgency, if the law is to mean anything at all in the United States.

As Mark Joseph Stern explained, since Hamdi, “the Supreme Court has allowed an expansion of indefinite detention beyond so-called enemy combatants. In two recent cases, the conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to detain certain immigrants indefinitely — a development that Breyer decried as betrayal of ‘our basic values.’ With the court’s assent, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is creating an archipelago of Guantánamos where due process has been suspended for immigrants.” As Stern also noted, Breyer wrote in a 2018 dissent, “I would find it alarming to believe that Congress” intended this result.

Stern’s conclusion is relevant:

There is a lesson to be gleaned from these awful cases: The power of indefinite detention is a weapon that presidents can wield recklessly and brutally. In Hamdi, the Supreme Court turned over this weapon to the executive branch, which continues to use it in a predictably appalling and arbitrary manner. Congress must repeal the AUMF, as well as any statute — particularly immigration laws — that can arguably be read to allow endless imprisonment. The Supreme Court can no longer be trusted to enforce due process, despite Breyer’s pleas. If Congress doesn’t put a stop to this unconstitutional cruelty, no one will.”

Or, as the Los Angeles Times put it in an editorial, addressing whether the “nature of the current war against Al Qaeda and similar groups justifie[s] open-ended detention,” “The sooner the [Supreme] Court faces that question , the better, because there seems little chance that either Congress or the Trump administration will move decisively to address the issue. Yet it needs to be addressed, because it is utterly inimical to our laws and our Constitution to hold dozens of people for decades — or even indefinitely — in an offshore prison without charging them with specific crimes or allowing them to face their accusers or to refute the charges by presenting evidence.”

We couldn’t agree more.

* * * * *

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 six 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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on June 17, 2019 10:01

Two Years On From the Grenfell Tower Fire, A Growing Anger at the Way Those in Social Housing Continue to be Treated as Disposable

A photo of Grenfell Tower, lit up with a green light, and bearing the message ‘Forever in our hearts’, on the eve of the 2nd anniversary of the fire that killed 72 people on June 14, 2017, for which no one has yet been held accountable (Photo: Tim Downie on Twitter).

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.

Two years ago, I switched on my TV and watched in horror as flames engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey tower block on the Lancaster West Estate in North Kensington, in west London, leading to the loss of 72 lives.

To anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the safety systems built into concrete tower blocks, it was clear that this was a disaster that should never have happened. Compartmentalisation — involving a requirement that any fire that breaks out in any individual flat should be able to be contained for an hour, allowing the emergency services time to arrive and deal with it — had failed, as had the general ability of the block to prevent the easy spread of fire throughout the building. Instead, tGrenfell Tower went up in flames as though it had had petrol poured on it.

It took very little research to establish that what had happened was an entire system failure, caused by long-term neglect and a failure to provide adequate safety measures (in particular, the tower had only one staircase rather than two, and had no sprinkler system fitted), and, more recently, through a refurbishment process that had turned a previously safe tower into a potential inferno.

Moreover — and this was the truly damning revelation — residents had been warning about a potential inferno for many years, but had been completely ignored by those responsible for their safety — Kensington and Chelsea Council, and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), a management company that had taken over all of the council’s social homes in 1996.

The 40-year war on social housing

As a social tenant myself, since the 1980s, it had long been apparent that we were all regarded as pariahs, or, at best, second-class citizens. The rot set in when Margaret Thatcher began her war on social housing through her ‘Right to Buy’ policy, first introduced in 1980, and her cuts to funding for council estate maintenance.

New Labour had further entrenched Thatcher’s legacy, as was recently revealed when a 1999 article in The Week, ’Shelter for the Middle Class’, resurfaced, noting how “Labour councils in London are using their housing policies to alter the social mix in their boroughs. The move is part of a deliberate process of gentrification that will result in social housing being replaced by owner-occupied dwellings and developers being given free rein to build luxury flats.”

When the Tories regained power in 2010, the war on social housing intensified, with further cuts as part of their sweeping austerity programme, cynically introduced as a response to the banker-led global economic crash of 2008.

Deaths foretold at Grenfell Tower — and lives still at risk

Into this sorry saga of historic under-investment, which, at Grenfell, led to fire doors that didn’t work, and windows that were not adequately sealed and fire-resistant, came a raft of public-private tiers of management, and private contractors refurbishing — when they weren’t demolishing — structurally sound but neglected estates with a truly scandalous disregard for safety. At Grenfell, the appearance of an inferno spreading like wildlife as though the block had petrol poured on it was uncannily close to the truth — the cladding used was dangerously flammable, and in installing it, the structural integrity of the block had been fatally compromised.

As I noted in my article, Deaths Foretold at Grenfell Tower: Let This Be The Moment We The People Say “No More” to the Greed That Killed Residents, written two days after the fire, all of this was known in advance by residents of the block. As I explained:

On November 20, 2016, under a photo of a tower block on fire and the heading, ‘KCTMO – Playing with fire!’, a representative of the Grenfell Action Group wrote, “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders. We believe that the KCTMO are an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia who have no business to be charged with the responsibility of looking after the every day management of large scale social housing estates and that their sordid collusion with the RBKC Council is a recipe for a future major disaster.”

The author of the post also stated, “Unfortunately, the Grenfell Action Group have reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation.”

It was also stated, “It is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar high density residential property is the most likely reason that those who wield power at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to justice!”

The article also pointed out, “We have blogged many times on the subject of fire safety at Grenfell Tower and we believe that these investigations will become part of damning evidence of the poor safety record of the KCTMO should a fire affect any other of their properties and cause the loss of life that we are predicting.”

Two years on from the Grenfell fire, as those us who live in social housing, or who care about it, are still faced with the inconvenient truth that tenants — and, ironically, leaseholders who bought flats under the ‘Right to Buy’ programme, as well as those who are now tenants of private owners — are confronted every day with the knowledge that even our lives, as second-class citizens, can be sacrificed at the altar of profiteering and cost-cutting, the political establishment and the building industry have shown a shocking unwillingness to acknowledge their own responsibility for the lives that were lost in the Grenfell Tower fire.

Many of the survivors are still in temporary accommodation, and, moreover, in the last two years the authorities’ collective response to the dangers of flammable cladding has been pitiful.

As the Guardian reported yesterday, out of 158 social housing blocks with flammable cladding, 56 have been fixed, but “tens of thousands of people are likely to be living in buildings that remain at risk.” In the private sector, the response has been even poorer, as developer sand insurers have wrangle dover who should be reponsible for costs, and, in numeorus cases, have tried to make leaseholders pay. As the Giuardian explained, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government admitted this week that, “In the past four months, only three of the privately owned housing high-rises found to be wrapped in Grenfell-style cladding have been fixed, leaving 146 still vulnerable.”

As the Guardian also explained, “Tests on other cladding materials such as high-pressure laminates that may prove to be combustible are yet to be completed, raising the prospect that more [blocks] may need to be fixed”, and, in addition, “Fire risks presented by faults unrelated to cladding are emerging as a potentially bigger problem, with faulty fire-breaks, dangerous insulation, missing intumescent paint and wooden cladding emerging as risks on 14 blocks in Manchester alone.”

Grenfell United

From the moment the Grenfell fire occurred, the community in Notting Dale, Notting Hill’s historically poorer neighbour, where Grenfell is located, had to organise their own reponse to the disaster, in the face of paralysis by central government, the council and KCTMO, and, via a handful of organisations — Justice4Grenfell, for example, and Grenfell United, profiled here in a Guardian long-read by Robert Booth — they have established themselves as an unassailable force for the right of those in social housing to no longer be treated as fundamentally disposable by the political establishment, and the right of everyone to live in a safe home, and their persistence stands in stark contrast to the ponderous progress of the official inquiry into the fire.

As Booth described it, Grenfell United “have been drawn towards bigger goals”, far beyond their immediate neighbourhood, “including winning greater powers for England’s 9.5m renting households, improving fire safety and ending prejudice against social-housing tenants”, all while “wrestling with their own grief and trauma.”

“In a way”, he added, “they had no choice, because the fire at Grenfell exposed some of the gravest social problems facing Britain today. Deepening divides along race and wealth lines, and the seriousness of the housing crisis, were reflected in the fate of a single neglected council block.”

On Wednesday evening, Grenfell United highlighted the authorities’ ongoing failure to deal adequately with the fallout from the Grenfell fire by projecting messages up to 12 storeys high on buildings in London, Greater Manchester and Newcastle, warning that, as the Guardian described it, “two years after the fire that killed 72 people, they are still not fitted with sprinklers, feature defective fire doors or are wrapped in dangerous cladding.”

The London projection was on Frinstead House on the Silchester estate, next to Grenfell, and highlighted the block’s lack of sprinklers. As the Guardian explained, “All new residential towers require them, but retrofitting is not mandatory.” In Salford Quays, a private block, NV Buildings, was illuminated with a message that read, “2 years after Grenfell and this building is still covered in dangerous cladding. #DemandChange.” A leaseholder in the building, Peter Brown, explained that, scandalously, “nearly 250 households faced a bill of nearly £3m to make their homes safe.”

Two years on, however, those driving Grenfell United’s pressure for meaningful reform to the way in which those living in social housing — and in flammable private blocks — are treated are “considering a change in strategy”, as Booth described it. Ed Daffarn, one of the tower’s survivors, told the Guardian, “You have to make something good come out of something bad, and what is so terrifying about this is I am beginning to doubt whether that’s going to happen.”

Speaking of the ministers and civil servants with whom he and others have had more than 30 meetings, he said, “There’s an empathy gap, but they also have this problem that they are indifferent and incompetent. We had every right to shout at people and be upset. We haven’t done any of that. We have gone in and negotiated. We have worked. We have been grown-up about it.”

Now, however, as Booth put it, Grenfell United “are considering a different posture.” As Booth described it, Daffarn conceded that, “Such was the violence they suffered during the fire, the idea that more violence could help is anathema”, and Grenfell United “has been committed to a peaceful, constructive and pragmatic approach.” But as Daffarn also told Booth, “The one thing they fear is social unrest – and rightly so. Go to any meeting in Kensington and that anger is still there. It hasn’t dissipated. We wasted [two years] trying to do it this way, and now we have to come up with another solution. We have learned a lot. They failed us.”

London-wide resistance

That anger is most palpable in North Kensington, of course, because of the as yet unrepeated loss of life in the Grenfell Tower fire, but it is also echoed across the capital, and across the country, where profiteering, cost-cutting and contempt for those living in social housing — even Margaret Thatcher’s supposedly cherished leaseholders — continues to be implemented in estate demolition programmes that are hugely unpopular with local communities: in Southwark, Newham, Lambeth, Lewisham and Hackney — all Labour-led, and all identified as enthusiasts for estate regenerations and social cleansing in The Week‘s 1999 article — as well as other boroughs, like Tower Hamlets and Haringey.

In Lewisham, I’ve been involved for the last two years in one of the capital’s many campaigns against the demolition of estates — and, in our case, a precious environmentally significant community space — against the juggernaut of ‘gentrification’ and ‘re-generation’, and, as in other places, our efforts are providing serious grass-roots challenges to the long-held notion, by those in power, that estates and their residents are fundamentally disposable. See the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign page here, and my archive of articles here.

On the second aniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, as we have all watched and honoured the commitment of the survivors and the wider North Kensington commmunity to effect change through negotiation, I wouldn’t want to quibble with Ed Daffarn’s assessment that “social unrest” may be the only way forward, as those who play with our lives, socially cleanse our neighbourhoods and destroy our homes don’t seem to understand the gravity of their actions unless, frankly, they are made to feel threatened.

Note: For another response of mine to the Grenfell Tower fire, please check out my song, ‘Grenfell‘, recorded with my band The Four Fathers, and produced by Charlie Hart, who also played accordion on it. If you’d like to buy it as a download, all the taking will go to the Grenfell Foundation, established last year “at the direct request of bereaved and survivors from Grenfell Tower” to “provide independent support to the former residents of Grenfell Tower, their families, dependents, and the local community.”

&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://thefourfathers.bandcamp.com/tr... by The Four Fathers&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;

* * * * *

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 six 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.

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Published on June 14, 2019 13:24

Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo and the Tidemill Campaign on Wandsworth’s Riverside Radio, Also Featuring Songs by The Four Fathers

Andy Worthington at a previous radio appearance, discussing Guantánamo in Northampton, Massachusetts in January 2015.

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

On Saturday, I was delighted to be visited by Andy Bungay, from Wandsworth’s Riverside Radio, for an interview broadcast on Andy’s evening show on Sunday, in which we discussed Guantánamo, which I’ve been covering for the last 13 years, and campaigning for its closure, and the housing crisis in London, which I’ve also been involved in challenging for the last few years. I was on Andy’s show back in September, and it was great to have the opportunity to talk agin.

The full show is here.

Our interview starts about 1 hours and five minutes into the show, with a discussion of Guantánamo, and, in part, the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, whose release in October 2015 I campaigned to secure, initially working with the Save Shaker Aamer campaign, and, over the last year of Shaker’s imprisonment, via We Stand With Shaker, a campaign I set up with fellow activist Joanne MacInnes. This involved creating a giant inflatable figure of Shaker, a PR stunt that might have been widely ignored, but that, instead, led to a hundred celebrities and MPs being willing to have their photos taken with the figure, and to call for his release.

At 1:22, Andy played ’Song for Shaker Aamer’, a solo version of The Four Fathers’ song, used as the campaign song for We Stand With Shaker, which was recorded live in Washington, D.C. in January 2016, with lyrics amended to reflect Shaker’s release.

The interview resumes just before 1:42, with further discussion of Guantánamo, and then, around 1:47, we moved on to a discussion of the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, working to save the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a beautiful and environmentally important community garden in Deptford, and Reginald House, a block of structurally sound flats next door, from destruction as part of an inappropriate housing development. See my archive of articles about Tidemill here.

Although the garden has been destroyed, the campaign to persuade Lewisham Council and Peabody to allow it to be re-created, and to save Reginald House continues, and I spoke about my hopes that the growing drive towards environmental direct action, as shown by Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, will feed into direct action against the horribly polluting corporate building industry. Tidemill is just a small part of the London-wide and country-wide problem with inappropriate housing developments, but it provides a powerful example of how social cleansing and environmental destruction manifest themselves in reality, behind all the spin about providing “affordable” homes, and declaring climate emergencies.

At 1:52, Andy played The Four Fathers’ song ‘Grenfell’, written about the horrendous fire in a tower block in west London on June 14, 2017, which led to the entirely preventable deaths of 72 people. The recording features The Wiz-RD beatboxing, was recorded live by a German TV crew in October 2017, and is available as a video here. And feel free to check out the studio recording here.

We then continued talking about Tidemill, the failings and corruption of the housing market, problems with the mainstream media, the state of the Labour Party, and the state of our divided nation since the disastrous EU referendum nearly three years ago. The interview ended around 2:08.

* * * * *

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 six 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.

View more on Andy Worthington's website »

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Published on June 12, 2019 14:46

Andy Worthington's Blog, page 22

July 16, 2019

CIA Torture Unredacted: New Report Fills in Crucial Gaps in 2014 Senate Torture Report

July 8, 2019

2010 Guantánamo Military Report Expresses Concerns About Reliability of Intelligence from Prisoners with Mental Health Problems or on Mind-Altering Medication

July 5, 2019

Deprivation and Despair: New Report Details Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo

July 3, 2019

Andy Worthington: An Archive of My Articles About Guantánamo and My UK Housing Activism – Part 25, July to December 2018

June 30, 2019

A Rare Court Victory Offers Hope for Guantánamo’s “Forever Prisoners”

June 25, 2019

On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Donald Trump is Holding Children in Detention Centers in Circumstances Comparable to “Torture Facilities”

June 21, 2019

This Summer Solstice, The Party’s Over; Now It’s Time to Save the Planet

June 17, 2019

US Supreme Court Supports Lifelong Imprisonment Without Charge or Trial at Guantánamo; Only Justice Breyer Dissents

June 14, 2019

Two Years On From the Grenfell Tower Fire, A Growing Anger at the Way Those in Social Housing Continue to be Treated as Disposable

June 12, 2019

Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo and the Tidemill Campaign on Wandsworth’s Riverside Radio, Also Featuring Songs by The Four Fathers

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