Andy Worthington's Blog, page 23

Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support my Guantánamo Work, Activism and Photo-Journalism for the Next Three Months

A photo of me calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 2019, the 17th anniversary of its opening, when it had been open for 6,210 days.


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

 

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work as a freelance journalist and activist, working primarily to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, but also working on social justice issues in the UK, particularly involving housing and the environment, as well as chronicling the changing face of London in my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’ 

It’s now 12 years since I began publishing articles about Guantánamo on my website, after I had completed the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007. Since then, I have published nearly 2,300 articles about Guantánamo, telling the stories on the men held, and campaigning to secure the closure of the prison, which remains, as it always has been, a legal, moral and ethical abomination. Since 2012, I have also been augmenting my work here with the  very specific focus of the Close Guantánamo campaign and website.

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

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

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

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

On Guantánamo, of course, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House in January 2017 was a disaster, as he has no desire to release anyone or to close the prison, and it remains an uphill struggle to try to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, especially as the many other crimes of Trump and the Republicans are so time-consuming. Nevertheless, it remains imperative that the shame of Guantánamo is not forgotten, and I hope you will be able to support me as I keep making the case for why the prison must be closed once and for all, and providing examples of its long history of lawlessness, brutality and injustice — like the article I posted yesterday on the 13th anniversary of the deaths of three men at the prison in June 2006, who should not be forgotten.

Elsewhere, I appreciate those who support my campaigning against cynical housing development projects in London, a form of social cleansing that should be seen as a war on the poor, if the mainstream media took an interest in it, which they generally don’t. Since 2017, I have been committed to a campaign in Deptford, in south east London, close to where I live, which has involved trying to prevent the destruction of a precious community garden (which was also a vital environmental protection against pollution) and structurally sound council housing, with the campaign attracting wide support, both in and of itself, but also because it is a microcosm of the problems with the housing regeneration industry. I have also been writing regularly about housing issues for the last few years, on the same reader-supported basis as my Guantánamo work.

And on a final front of reader-supported business, I’d also like to thank those of you who follow ‘The State of London’ and to ask for your support. The photo-journalism project, which I started over seven years ago, involves me cycling every day and taking photos, often in my local neighbourhood, but, on average, making journeys across the capital’s 120 postcodes at least a couple of times a week, and posting a photo a day, with detailed supporting text, on social media. Do check it out, if you haven’t seen it already, and feel free to support me if you like what you see.

With thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work, regardless of whether or not you can support me financially. Without you, none of this would mean anything.

Andy Worthington
London
June 10, 2019

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

13 Years Ago, Three Men Died at Guantánamo, Victims of a Brutal Regime of Lawlessness That Is Fundamentally Unchanged Today

Yasser al-Zahrani and Ali al-Salami, two of the three men who died at Guantánamo on the night of June 9, 2006, in circumstances that remain deeply contentious. The US authorities insist that they committed suicide, but other troubling accounts have robustly questioned that conclusion. No photo publicly exists of the third man, Mani- al-Utaybi.


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

On the night of June 9, 2006, three prisoners at Guantánamo died, their deaths shockingly and insensitively described by the prison’s then-commander, Adm. Harry Harris Jr., as “an act of asymmetrical warfare against us.”

The three men were Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi who was just 17 when he was seized in Afghanistan in December 2001, Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi, and Ali al-Salami, a Yemeni. All three had been prominent hunger strikers.

Al-Zahrani, the son of a prominent Saudi government official, was a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, which John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” who was recently released after 17 years in a US prison, also survived. Over 400 fighters, supporting the Taliban, had been told that if they surrendered, they would then be set free, but it was a betrayal. They were taken to a fort, Qala-i-Janghi, run by General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, where some of the men, fearing they would be killed, started an uprising with concealed weapons. Over the course of a week, the prisoners were bombed, set on fire, and, finally, flooded out of a basement, and when they finally emerged, only 86 of the original prisoners had survived.

In Guantánamo, he was remembered fondly by his fellow prisoners, but the authorities noted a history of him being “non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff.” However, he was regarded as having little or no intelligence value, and his classified military file, dated March 2006 and released by WikiLeaks in 2011, noted that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, detainee can be Transferred Out of Control” of the Guantánamo authorities and back to Saudi Arabia (which, in reality, would have meant him being repatriated and put through Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation program for jihadists, like numerous other Saudi prisoners).

Mani al-Utaybi, who was around 30 when he died, had been in Pakistan undertaking missionary work with Talbighi Jamaat, a vast proselytizing organization, and there is no evidence that he was anywhere near the battlefields of Afghanistan. He was seized in January 2002, near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with four other men, all dressed in burkas, who seem to have taken it up on themselves to try to get into Afghanistan in an absurd and thwarted bid to assist the resistance to the US occupation.

Described by the US authorities as having been “belligerent, argumentative, harassing, and very aggressive,” he was also worthless from an intelligence perspective, and, in June 2005, had been cleared to be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention” (which, as with al-Qahtani, would have meant the Saudi rehabilitation program).

The third man, Ali al-Salami, around 23 years old at the time of his capture, had also been regarded as “aggressive” at Guantánamo, but was also, according to the US authorities, thoroughly insignificant in terms of his intelligence value, “a street vendor who sold clothing,” and “was prompted to travel to Pakistan to receive [a religious] education upon hearing God’s calling.” As with al-Utaybi, there is no allegation that he was anywhere near the battlefields of Afghanistan. He had been studying in Faisalabad at Jamea Salafia University, a madrassa (religious school), but had been living in a dormitory that was allegedly connected to Abu Zubaydah.

The facilitator of an independent training camp, Khaldan, Abu Zubaydah arranged the comings and goings of those seeking military training in Afghanistan, but the CIA mistakenly regarded him as Al-Qaeda’s No. 3, ignoring the FBI, who knew that he was not only not al-Qaeda’s no. 3, but he wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda at all. On capture, he was flown to a secret CIA “black site” in Thailand, where he became the first victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, and was waterboarded on 83 separate occasions. He was later moved to other “black sites” in eastern Europe, before being brought to Guantánamo, with 13 other alleged “high value detainees,” also held in CIA “black sites,” in September 2006, were he has continued to be held, largely incommunicado, ever since.

The dormitory — known as the Crescent Mill guest house — was raided on the same night that the house Abu Zubaydah was staying in was also raided, when al-Salami and 15 other men were seized, but although the US authorities tried to tie them to al-Qaeda, it was fruitless task, and they have all since been freed — except for al-Salami, of course. For a devastating analysis, by a US judge, of the paucity of the US’s claims about those seized in the guest house, see my 2009 articles, Judge Condemns ‘Mosaic’ Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses and Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies.

Investigating the deaths

The US authorities have always stuck to their line about the men’s deaths, even though others have questioned whether the men killed themselves, or whether they were, in fact, deliberately killed by operatives of the US government, or accidentally killed as a result of a torture session that went too far.

The most prominent dissenter from the official line is former Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was in charge of the watch towers on the night of the deaths. Hickman’s account of the deaths, which he bottled up until Barack Obama became president, thinking that it might lead to the truth being exposed, was first reported in Harper’s Magazine, in an article entitled, “The Guantánamo Suicides,” by the lawyer and journalist Scott Horton, in January 2010.

In it, Hickman was reported as stating that frantic activity in response the men’s deaths followed the movement of vehicles to and from the direction of a shadowy facility that he and other personnel had dubbed “Camp No,” because whenever they asked about it, they were told that it didn’t exist. It was Hickman who suggested that,. on the night of the deaths, the men had either been deliberately, or accidentally killed in this facility away from the main base.

However, hopes that Hickman’s account would lead to an honest, impartial investigation were dashed. The Justice Department, which initially expressed interest in it, dropped an investigation before the Harper’s article was published.

Hickman later wrote a book about the alleged suicides, Murder At Camp Delta, which was published in January 2015, and he was also the lead investigator on a 2013 report, “Uncovering the Cover-Ups,” by The Center For Policy and Research at Seton Hall University School of Law, whose director, Mark Denbeaux, had been Hickman’s first port of call when he decided to go public. The report forensically went through documentation released following a report on the deaths by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which found it to be full of glaring holes.

For a detailed article following up on all of the above, please check out “To Live and Die in Gitmo”, published in Newsweek to coincide with the publication of Hickman’s book, and written by Alexander Nazaryan.

As a result of the refusal of the authorities to revisit the alleged suicides, the events of June 9-10, 2006 still remain deeply contentious, even though “Camp No” has subsequently come into sharper focus, as it has been revealed that there were two facilities outside of the control of the US military at Guantánamo — Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, named after two celebrated songs by the Beatles.

Strawberry Fields was a CIA “black site” from the fall of 2003 until spring 2004, when it was moved because the authorities recognized that a US judge was about to grant habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, allowing lawyers into the prison, piercing the veil of secrecy required for Guantánamo’s brutality to go unnoticed.

Penny Lane, meanwhile, was where double agents from the prison’s population were groomed, or, as Alexander Nazaryan put it, “its purpose was supposedly to turn detainees into CIA assets who could infiltrate jihadist networks.” He added that it “appears to have been shuttered for about four months after the three men died.”

According to Joe Hickman’s assessment, it was at this facility that, on the night of the men’s deaths, they were subjected to a torture session that involved what has become known as “dry-boarding,” in which they had rags stuffed down their throats. That would certainly explain what otherwise remains one of the great stumbling blocks to accepting the US authorities’ account of the deaths: how, to paraphrase Alexander Nazaryan, the three men had managed to stuff rags down their own throats, tie their feet together, tie their hands together, create a noose, climb up onto the cell’s sinks, put the noose around their neck, and then jump with sufficient force to die by self-inflicted strangulation, all while shielding their activities from the guards, who were supposed to persistently keep a watch on the cells.

In the years since Joe Hickman first surfaced with his account, it — and Scott Horton’s Harper’s article — have been criticized by some commentators, and, in general , dismissed out of hand by representatives of the US government. However, on re-reading Alexander Nazaryan’s article, I was struck by the following paragraph: “A highly placed source in the Department of Defense who deals with detainees’ affairs, and who asked to remain anonymous because he is not permitted to speak to the media without receiving prior clearance, wrote to me in an email: ‘After reviewing the information concerning the three deaths at Camp Delta on June 9, 2006, it is painfully apparent the personnel involved in fact created an illusion of an investigation. When you consider the missing documents, the lack of key interviews, and the questionable evidence found on the bodies, it is blatantly obvious there was something that occurred that night that is not documented.’”

A damning conclusion

13 years on from the deaths, as I make my annual effort to not let them be forgotten, what strikes me as the most depressing aspect of this sad and unresolved episode in Guantánamo’s long and depressing history is how three men, none of whom had any kind of intelligence value, died at Guantánamo, whether by accident or design, not because of what they had done prior to their capture, but because they had responded with resistance to the appalling ways in which they were treated after capture.

Think about that: three men died at Guantánamo, not because of what they had done prior to their capture, but because, in the pointless brutality of Guantánamo’s grinding, dispiriting, day-to-day existence, they had either killed themselves, in despair at how very far they had ended up from any notion of justice whatsoever, or, even more damningly, because, in resisting that endless injustice, they had angered the authorities to such an extent that they were killed.

Remember too that 40 men are still held at Guantánamo, and that, although some are regarded as significant terrorist suspects, others are still held because they, like the men who died on the night of June 9, 2006, refused to passively accept the injustice of Guantánamo, engaging in hunger strikes and non-compliant behavior, even though they too were nothing more than, at most, insignificant foot soldiers from a long-forgotten war, with no intelligence value and no good reason for their ongoing imprisonment, seemingly for the rest of their lives, without charge or trial.

Note: There have, officially, been nine deaths at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, and some of those other deaths — also of long-term hinger strikers — are also suspicious. For further information, please check out the links in my article about the deaths from last June, and a detailed report from this year about Haji Naseem, who died in 2011, by Jeffrey Kaye, an investigative journalist and retired psychologist, who has been extraordinarily tenacious in his pursuit of the truth about several of the deaths at Guantánamo.

* * * * *

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.

The Long Persecution of John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban”

John Walker Lindh, strapped to a gurney in Camp Rhino, near Kandahar, after his capture in December 2001, when he had already survived a massacre at the Qala-i-Janghi fort.


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

 

The US establishment is nervous about John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban.” 

A US citizen, Lindh was taken into custody by US forces in Afghanistan in December 2001, along with around 85 other Taliban fighters, survivors of a massacre — the Qala-i-Janghi massacre — that is largely forgotten. He received a 20-year prison sentence in a federal court on the US mainland in May 2002 for providing material support to terrorism, but had his sentence reduced by three years because of good behavior. 

He was released on May 23, but with restrictions imposed by a federal judge. As the Associated Press described it, “Lindh’s internet devices must have monitoring software; his online communications must be conducted in English; he must undergo mental health counseling; he is forbidden to possess or view extremist material; and he cannot hold a passport or leave the US.”

Donald Trump opposed his early release, as did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It was reported back in 2015 that, from prison, he had expressed support for Daesh (aka Islamic State or Isis). For the Atlantic, staff writer Graeme Wood, based on prison correspondence with Lindh, claimed that he was “permanently devoted” to violent jihad, and that “public security demands nothing less than close observation [of Lindh] for a very, very long time.” 

Unhelpfully, the BBC’s “shock horror” headline was “John Walker Lindh: What happens when you release a ‘traitor’?” They and other outlets (the Washington Post, CNN) worried about what they perceived to be the lack of a de-radicalization program in the US for those released from prison after being convicted of crimes related to terrorism, but all these worries seem exaggerated to me. Lindh faces restrictions on his use of technology, and has no passport.  

Other commentators wrote about his alleged involvement in the death of CIA operative Mike Spann, shortly after he and the other prisoners were taken to Qala-i-Janghi. 

To understand what happened, we need to revisit the situation in December 2001, as hundreds of Taliban fighters, mainly from the Gulf, but also from Pakistan, north Africa and other countries, who had joined the country’s long-running civil war with the Northern Alliance, surrendered after the fall of the city of Kunduz. 

They had been told, by a Taliban general, that they would subsequently be freed, but they were, instead, taken to Qala-i-Janghi, a large, well-fortified mud fort under the control of Gen. Rashid Dostum, a leader of the Northern Alliance. 

Some of these men, however, had hidden grenades, one of which killed Spann. The suggestion was that Lindh knew the men were armed, but there is no evidence that this is the case. 

What most news reports are failing to mention, however, is that in response to what is generally called the “uprising,” the survivors were bombed, set on fire, and, finally, flooded out of a basement over the course of a week.

As far as we know, perhaps as many as 400 prisoners died as a result of these various strategies, and all the survivors — around 86 men (and boys) in total — were sent to Guantánamo, making up over 10% of the prison’s total population over the years, and where, eventually, the authorities worked out that they were more or less irrelevant foot soldiers. 

One exception is Lindh, for whom the Guantánamo prison number ISN 001 was reserved, but was never used — because Guantánamo is strictly only for non-US citizens.

Lindh was subjected to specific abuse because he was American, as I explained in an article about him in 2011, when I stated that, after capture, “he had been moved to Camp Rhino near Kandahar, where he was stripped naked, blindfolded, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, held in a shipping container ringed with barbed wire and interrogated by the US military and the CIA, who reported regularly to Donald Rumsfeld (and where soldiers scrawled ‘shithead’ on his blindfold and told him he would be hanged).” He was also held on two ships (the USS Peleliu and the USS Bataan), and was brought to the US on January 22, 2002, and charged on February 5 on ten charges relating to his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

As I also explained at the time, “In July 2002, Lindh was persuaded to accept a plea deal, which not only gagged him throughout his sentence and prevented him from challenging anyone in authority about his shameful abuse in US custody prior to his trial, but also led to a punitive 20-year sentence, announced on October 4, 2002”, at the high-security Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute, Indiana, in one of a number of Communication Management Units (CMUs), quite severely isolated environments for mainly Muslim prisoners, whose existence has come under intense criticism from human rights activists, as I explained in two cross-posted articles in 2011, via NPR and the Nation.

In 2009, an article for GQ explained the “special administrative measures” Lindh was subjected to in the CMU: “no mail, no nonfamily visitors, no Arabic.” The SAMs were “unilaterally imposed on John by then Attorney General John Ashcroft”, and, as the author of the article, John Rico, proceeded to explain, “It was designed to ensure that John Walker Lindh not speak, not share his story, not inspire potential followers, and not describe his treatment while in the custody of the US government.”

Rico added, “It was an order of uncertain legal merit (not unlike George W. Bush’s presidential signing statements), but because John was initially deemed an enemy combatant — a brave new legal status of undetermined meaning” — it was, as of 2009, “an order to which Frank and his son’s attorneys [were] careful to comply, lest they risk[ed] John being held after his prison sentence ha[d] ended. So until 2021 — now, presumably, 2019, although is no suggestion that Lindh will speak out publicly —  nothing John Walker Lindh said could be “communicated to the outside world.”

As I noted above, I find it hard to imagine Lindh posing any kind of threat with limited access to technology and no passport, but if the government is concerned they can presumably keep him under old-school surveillance — although I realise that it costs money to actually hire people to watch someone, a seemingly unpopular route for western governments in an age of permanent electronic surveillance.

Most of all, however, I wonder about the disconnect between Lindh’s alleged ongoing extremism, and the way in which his captors seemingly did nothing to try to rehabilitate him, and, instead, kept him in a situation that, presumably, would have a tendency to reinforce extremism rather than to challenge it.

I hope John Walker Lindh gets a chance to see what else life might be, as someone now 38 years old, and with 17 long years lost to prison. He is, after all, no longer the teenager who sought out jihad, captured when he was just 20 years old. As former prisoner Moazzam Begg explained to the AP after his release, “the criticism over Lindh’s early release is misguided. If anything, Lindh was imprisoned too long.”

Begg made a point of noting, accurately, that “many of the other Taliban fighters who were sent to Guantánamo as enemy combatants were released much earlier.”

As for Lindh’s letter in support of the Islamic State, Begg “noted that it was written four years ago and that Lindh might not have had full knowledge of the group’s atrocities from behind bars.” As he put it, “Nobody really knows what his views are right now in 2019.”

In a statement, Begg added, “It is now time for him to be allowed to restart his life in peace and freedom.”

I second that suggestion — and would like to note, in closing, that, although Lindh’s long sentence was harsh, at least it is now over, while the ordeal of the men still held at Guantánamo continues, with no end in sight, even though some of the 40 men still held were no more significant than Lindh was.

* * * * *

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.

34 Years On from the Battle of the Beanfield, Is Widespread Environmental Dissent Conceivable?

A photo from the Battle of the Beanfield on June 1, 1985, when the government of Margaret Thatcher violently decommissioned a convoy trying to get to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.


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

 

It’s 34 long years since the boot of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain crushed one of the most visible demonstrations of counter-cultural dissent in the UK via a brutal demonstration of the violence of the establishment at what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield, when 1,400 police — from six counties and the MoD — shut down a vastly outnumbered convoy of nomadic new age travellers, anarchists, environmental activists and free festival stalwarts as they attempted to get to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.

From humble origins in 1974, the festival grew — reflecting massive discontent in Thatcher’s Britain, where unemployment was at an all-time high in the early ‘80s — so that by the time it was suppressed, tens of thousands of people, for the whole of June, set up a makeshift settlement, the size of a small town, in the fields opposite Stonehenge. 

Drug use was rife, as was acid rock music, while the festival’s regulars, who took part in a circuit of free festivals in England and Wales from May to September, tried to get by via the creation of a low-level, low-impact economy that, like their decision to take to the road in old vehicles rather than stagnating on the dole in towns and cities without jobs, fundamentally challenged the state’s insistence that nomadic activities were reserved solely for Gypsies, who, themselves, have a long history of persecution, as settled people generally, it seems, despise nomadic people. 

The convoy also, unacceptably from the state’s point of view, confronted the establishment’s claimed land rights, embraced environmental awareness in contrast to corporate materialism, and opposed nuclear power and nuclear weapons, both of which were endorsed by Thatcher and the Tories.  

While the state’s brutality dealt a serious blow to the coherence of the traveller and festival movement, it wasn’t enough to stifle dissent. I had visited the Stonehenge Free Festival as a student in 1983 and 1984, and it had a transformational effect on me. News of the Beanfield was genuinely shocking, as was the suppression of the festival, and the passing of new laws, in the 1986 Public Order Act, that were designed to cripple the ability of any group of perceived troublemakers to gather freely, but it was foolish of the Tories to believe that they could prevent active and vocal criticism of Thatcher’s vision of a new privatised Britain of unfettered banking and rabid materialism.

A new drug, ecstasy, soon emerged to create a loved-up party scene involving huge and illegal warehouse raves, which soon attracted survivors of the traveller and festival scene, creating new counter-cultural hybrids, the culmination of which was the last Stonehenge-sized free festival, on Castlemorton Common in Gloucestershire, over the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend in May 1992, where all the many tribes came together — boy racers from the Home Counties meeting the crusty encampments of the Brew Crew, as rave sound systems played 24/7. 

That prompted a further clampdown, via 1994’s Criminal Justice Act, with its absurd efforts to ban music characterised by “a series of repetitive beats,” and further, draconian bans on unlicensed gatherings, as well as the effective criminalisation of trespass, but what no one saw coming was a broad protest movement that saw the earth as sacred, and that involved protestors occupying trees, digging tunnels and working out how to lock themselves on to equipment to prevent the creation of roads and bypasses. 

In 1993-94, a huge battle of resistance took place in east London, to try to prevent the creation of the M11 Link Road, and in the meantime another urban expression of dissent came about via Reclaim the Streets, which blocked roads and held parties in spaces that were suddenly car-free and autonomous.

These movements in turn fed into the huge anti-globalisation movement of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and the Occupy movement of 2011-12, when public space was once more occupied, and the prevailing economic system was dissected and found wanting. Nevertheless, the prevailing trend in the 21st century has been for the corporate world to consolidate its power, turning populations into docile consumers, and trapping as many people as possible in insanely expensive housing so that, in theory, they — we — are too tied up and distracted to rise up.

Sadly, this has been largely successful, but it requires serious levels of employment to work well, and decent jobs, meanwhile, are drying up, through outsourcing, mechanisation and A.I. advances. As those falling through a deliberately frayed safety net — part of the cynical “age of austerity” implemented by the Tories in response to the banker-led global economic crash of 2008 — drop off the system’s radar, they are forced to find ways to subsist peripherally, living on the streets, permanently crashing at the houses of friends, as so-called “sofa surfers”, in tents, in cars or vans, in caravans, or through squatting in empty industrial buildings, which are the only buildings that can now be successfully squatted, after the Tories, disgracefully, made squatting in empty houses a criminal, rather than a civil offence.

In some crucial ways, the situation is similar to that which created a growing traveller movement in the early ‘80s, under Thatcher, but now, of course, people can’t easily sign on and live largely without scrutiny, and the cheap vehicles of the ‘80s no longer exist. Many of the counter-cultural impulses, however, live on, and after the long drought in serious dissent that preceded the Occupy movement, a similarly long subsequent drought in opposing the status quo had to wait until last October, when Extinction Rebellion (XR) announced itself via the simultaneous occupation of five central London bridges.

As someone who has lived through, and taken part in the various counter-cultural movements from the free festivals to the road protest movement to the anti-globalisation protests and the Occupy movement, I was intrigued by the thought that had gone into XR’s efforts at mass mobilisation and mass dissent — disrupting “business as usual” via scrupulously non-violent direct action, and, more contentiously seeking mass arrests, to highlight the unprecedented man-made environmental crisis we currently face, and when, in April, campaigners occupied four central London sites for a week — Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus, Parliament Square and Marble Arch — it felt very much as though a spark drawing inspiration from the extraordinary Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common, the road protest movement, the anti-globalisation movement and Occupy had been re-ignited, that, this time, might lead to significant system change.

I don’t mean to sound naive about the state’s desire and ability to mobilise in resistance to any efforts to break the current state of business, but what XR — and the powerful figure of 16-year old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the school strike for climate movement she inspired — have that none of our previous movements have been able to achieve is a global sense of absolute emergency. We are, to be blunt, already killing the planet as a sustainable entity for humans, and, for the first time, large numbers of people seem to be waking up to the painful truth that, if we don’t embrace a complete, revolutionary change in the way that we deplete and consume the world’s resources, fill the planet with plastic, and pump out carbon dioxide, we face a dangerously super-heated atmosphere and the total collapse of civilisation as we know it not only within our lifetimes, but possibly within the next ten years. 

34 years on, gazing back in time to the Battle of the Beanfield is in many ways a sad indicator of quite how much the world has changed in the intervening decades, with hectic over-consumption, self-absorption and self-entitlement at unprecedented levels, but those of us who have never settled for dystopian materialism as meaningful or worthwhile need to remember that what was being sought back then, and is still being sought now, is more important than ever, and that the struggle for a less rapacious and more sustainable world can still be won, and, indeed, must be won, because nothing less than the very future of humanity is at stake.

* * * * *

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.

Stop the Extradition: If Julian Assange Is Guilty of Espionage, So Too Are the New York Times, the Guardian and Numerous Other Media Outlets

An undated photo of a billboard outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, criticizing efforts by the US to punish Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange for having leaked and published classified US government documents.


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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.

Nearly seven years ago, when WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (on June 19, 2012), he did so because of his “fears of political persecution,” and “an eventual extradition to the United States,” as Arturo Wallace, a South American correspondent for the BBC, explained when Ecuador granted him asylum two months later. Ricardo Patino, Ecuador’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke of “retaliation that could endanger his safety, integrity and even his life,” adding, “The evidence shows that if Mr. Assange is extradited to the United States, he wouldn’t have a fair trial. It is not at all improbable he could be subjected to cruel and degrading treatment and sentenced to life imprisonment or even capital punishment.”

Assange’s fears were in response to hysteria in the US political establishment regarding the publication, in 2010 — with the New York Times, the Guardian and other newspapers — of war logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars, and a vast number of US diplomatic cables from around the world, and, in 2011, of classified military files relating to Guantánamo, on which I worked as media partner, along with the Washington Post, McClatchy, the Daily Telegraph and others. All these documents were leaked to WikiLeaks by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. 

Nearly seven years later, Assange’s fears have been justified, as, on May 23, the US Justice Department charged him on 18 counts under the Espionage Act of 1917, charges that, as the Guardian described it in an editorial, could lead to “a cumulative sentence of 180 years.” 

The charges came six weeks after the Ecuadorian government — under new, pro-US leadership — withdrew Assange’s asylum, leading to his immediate arrest by British police and his unacceptable imprisonment in Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison that is supposed to hold only dangerous convicted criminals, although it has also, since the “war on terror” began, been used to hold alleged terrorism suspects without charge or trial. 

That same day, the US began extradition proceedings, after unsealing a 2018 indictment against him “in connection with a federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion,” as the Justice Department described it, relating to alleged efforts to assist Chelsea Manning to “crack an encoded portion of a passcode that would have enabled her to log on to a classified military network under a different user name than her own, which would have masked her tracks better,” as the New York Times described it. Noticeably, Justice Department lawyers “have not alleged that his efforts succeeded,” and in any case the charge only carries a maximum sentence of five years.

Clearly, though, that charge was just to pave the way for the indictment unveiled last week, which has, understandably, appalled defenders of free speech, enshrined in the US in the First Amendment.

Among the many powerful rebukes to the Trump administration and the Justice Department, Glenn Greenwald’s column in the Washington Post three days ago, “The indictment of Assange is a blueprint for making journalists into felons,” provides a commendable summary.

Greenwald notes that, although the US government “has been eager to prosecute Assange since the 2010 leaks,” up until now “officials had refrained because they concluded it was impossible to distinguish WikiLeaks’ actions from the typical business of mainstream media outlets.”

“With these new charges,” however, “the Trump administration is aggressively and explicitly seeking to obliterate the last reliable buffer protecting journalism in the United States from being criminalized, a step that no previous administration, no matter how hostile to journalistic freedom, was willing to take.”

Dismissing dangerous claims that Assange “isn’t a journalist at all and thus deserves no free press protections,” Greenwald also explains that “this claim overlooks the indictment’s real danger and, worse, displays a wholesale ignorance of the First Amendment.” As he further explains:

Press freedoms belong to everyone, not to a select, privileged group of citizens called “journalists.” Empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections would restrict “freedom of the press” to a small, cloistered priesthood of privileged citizens designated by the government as “journalists.” The First Amendment was written to avoid precisely that danger.

Most critically, the US government has now issued a legal document that formally declares that collaborating with government sources to receive and publish classified documents is no longer regarded by the Justice Department as journalism protected by the First Amendment but rather as the felony of espionage, one that can send reporters and their editors to prison for decades. It thus represents, by far, the greatest threat to press freedom in the Trump era, if not the past several decades.

If Assange can be declared guilty of espionage for working with sources to obtain and publish information deemed “classified” by the US government, then there’s nothing to stop the criminalization of every other media outlet that routinely does the same — including the Washington Post, as well as the large media outlets that partnered with WikiLeaks and published much of the same material in 2010, along with newer digital media outlets like the Intercept, where I work.

As Greenwald also explains, “The vast bulk of activities cited by the indictment as criminal are exactly what major US media outlets do on a daily basis,” adding: 

Outside the parameters of the Trump DOJ’s indictment of Assange, these activities are called “basic investigative journalism.” Most major media outlets in the United States, including the Post, now vocally promote Secure Drop, a technical means modeled after the one pioneered by WikiLeaks to allow sources to pass on secret information for publication without detection. Last September, the New York Times published an article (titled “How to Tell Us a Secret”) containing advice from its security experts on the best means for sources to communicate with and transmit information to the paper without detection, including which encrypted programs to use.

Many of the most consequential and celebrated press revelations of the past several decades — from the Pentagon Papers to the Snowden archive (which I worked on with the Guardian) to the disclosure of illegal War on Terror programs such as warrantless domestic NSA spying and CIA black sites — have relied upon the same methods that the Assange indictment seeks to criminalize: namely, working with sources to transmit illegally obtained documents for publication.

Stop the extradition

It cannot be said with any certainty that the charges against Assange will lead to a successful prosecution in the US, but the best way of making sure that it doesn’t happen would be for the British government to refuse to extradite him, which it is perfectly entitled to do; in fact, under the terms of the US-UK Extradition Treaty, it is required not to agree to the request, because the treaty explicitly states that “[e]xtradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense.” 

Whether the British government will comply with this requirement is another matter. Holding him in Belmarsh seems to me to reveal the contempt with which they regard him, but even so it will be difficult for the British government to ignore what the Guardian described as the near-certainty that his “treatment in the American penal system would be more cruel than anything he might encounter even in our shameful prisons.”

That said, Assange has clearly already been suffering in Belmarsh, as two nights ago he was moved to the hospital wing of Belmarsh after what WikiLeaks’ website described as a “dramatic” loss of weight and deteriorating health, prompting “grave concerns” about his well-being. 

“Mr Assange’s health had already significantly deteriorated after seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, under conditions that were incompatible with basic human rights,” WikiLeaks said in a statement, adding, “During the seven weeks in Belmarsh his health has continued to deteriorate and he has dramatically lost weight. The decision of prison authorities to move him to the ward speaks for itself.”

WikiLeaks also stated that, as the Evening Standard put it, “he could barely talk” when he met his lawyer, Per Samuelson, last Friday. Samuelson said that the state of his health was so poor that “it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him.”

Today, that analysis has been reinforced by Nils Melzer, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, who visited him in prison “earlier this month in the company of medical experts who examined him,” as the Guardian explained. Melzer said, “Julian Assange is showing all the symptoms associated with prolonged exposure to psychological torture and should not be extradited to the US.”

Commenting on his visit with Assange, he said, said, “Physically there were ailments but that side of things are being addressed by the prison health service and there was nothing urgent or dangerous in that way. What was worrying was the psychological side and his constant anxiety. It was perceptible that he had a sense of being under threat from everyone. He understood what my function was but it’s more that he was extremely agitated and busy with his own thoughts. It was difficult to have a very structured conversation with him.”

Noticeably, Chelsea Manning, who, unlike the Trump administration and the Justice Department, is fully aware of the difference between those who leak classified information for the public good, and those who publish it, and who is currently imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with a Grand Jury investigating Assange, after being imprisoned for seven years during the Obama presidency, released a statement from jail on the day Assange was charged with espionage in which she said she accepted “full and sole responsibility” for the 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures.

“It’s telling that the government appears to have already obtained this indictment before my contempt hearing last week,” Manning said, adding, “This administration describes the press as the opposition party and an enemy of the people. Today, they use the law as a sword, and have shown their willingness to bring the full power of the state against the very institution intended to shield us from such excesses.”

Yesterday, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger joined the calls by high-ranking journalists and defenders of press freedom for Assange not to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, which he described as “a panic measure enacted by Congress to clamp down on dissent or ‘sedition’ when the US entered the First World War in 1917.” 

“Whatever Assange got up to in 2010-11,” Rusbridger notes, “it was not espionage.”

When Assange was first arrested by British police, I posted a link to the page on WikiLeaks’ website showing all the media partners it has worked with over the years. What is needed now is for everyone concerned with press freedom — with, in the US, the cherished First Amendment — to declare unconditionally that the charges are wrong, and that the UK should not extradite Assange to the US. 

And while they’re at it, they might also want to point out that holding a journalist without charge or trial in Britain’s most notorious prisons for convicted criminals is not an act of justice, but one of vengeance.

* * * * *

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.

European Elections: Pro-Remain Parties More Successful Than the Brexit Party, While 63% of Electorate Fail to Vote At All

A graph on the BBC website showing how Remain voters outnumbered Leave voters in the UK’s elections to the European Parliament on May 23, 2019.


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

 

I wanted to make sure that I contributed my own analysis to the results of the election of MEPs to the European Parliament last Thursday, before the mainstream media’s juggernaut of distraction and distortion takes over.

The first key conclusion is that, although, out of nowhere, the slimy reptilian Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party took 31.6% of the vote, the Brexit Party (and UKIP’s rump vote, taking the total Leave votes to 34.9%) were outnumbered by pro-Remain parties — primarily via the Liberal Democrats on 20.3%, the Greens on 12.1%, and the SNP, Change UK and Plaid Cymru adding another 8% — 40.4% in total.

The second key conclusion is that only 37% of the registered electorate bothered to vote, meaning that we simply don’t know what the other 63% currently think. What is clear, however, is that, with just 37% of the voting age population to draw on, the Brexit Party’s alleged triumph is actually only an endorsement of its hard line on Europe from just 11.7% of the registered electorate.

As a lifelong opponent of the heartless modern version of the Conservative Party created by Margaret Thatcher, and maintained since 2010 by David Cameron and George Osborne, and, since the summer of 2016 by Theresa May, It was reassuring to see the Tories suffer their worst elections results ever. However, their losses (down to 4 seats, from 19 in 2014, and with just 9.1% of the vote, down from 23.9%), plus Labour’s woes (down to ten seats from 20, and with 14.1% of the vote, down from 25.4% in 2014) won’t be replicated in a General Election, in which our antiquated, profoundly unfair first-past-the-post system — as opposed to the European elections’ much more commendable system of proportional representation — favours the two main parties.

That said, it’s not unthinkable in the current circumstances that the Lib Dems and the Brexit Party could divide the vote sufficiently to destabilise the tired duopoly that has dominated British politics throughout my lifetime, perhaps leading a situation where, finally, we grow up sufficiently to embrace proportional representation as the only fair way of electing our MPs.

But that’s still a long way off. Now, following Theresa May’s imminent departure (amidst the tears she shed for herself, having never apparently cried about anyone else’s misfortune), the Tories are engaged in another leadership battle, bitterly divided between insane ‘no deal’ Brexiteers, led by the truly despicable and unprincipled Boris Johnson, and those more sensibly seeking to avoid economic suicide. 

If there is any poetic justice in this often strangely backward country of ours, the clash between the ‘no deal’ Brexiteers (who, it seems, all stand to make colossal amounts of money from our enforced return to the worst aspects of Victorian Britain) and the centrists still trying to fulfil the unfulfillable mission of leaving the EU without it involving considerable damage to the economy will actually succeed only in destroying the Conservative Party as a major political force.  

The Labour Party, meanwhile, seems finally to be coming off the fence to endorse a second referendum, finally overcoming the reluctance of the leadership (including Jeremy Corbyn) to alienate Labour Leave voters, and, in Corbyn’s case, I think, to continue to cling to a fanciful notion of a socialist Britain somehow freed, rather than crippled, by leaving the EU, a tired old fantasy that somehow ignores how globally inter-connected we all are these days, and that, while there are both good and bad aspects of that, the movement of goods, people and ideas across borders delivers more than it destroys. 

Nevertheless, although it now looks probable that there has been a swing from Leave to Remain in the 72% of the population who voted in the EU referendum, when 52% voted Leave, and 48% voted Remain, the wild card is still the 28% of the population who didn’t vote in the referendum — and who are mostly included in the 63% of the registered electorate who didn’t vote on Thursday. In a second referendum, it remains possible that our rabid tabloid media, plus whatever dark forces are funding Nigel Farage, will prevail again. 

One way out of that disastrous future would be for a second referendum to require our departure from the EU to be endorsed by a two-thirds majority, as is normal in referendums dealing with major constitutional change, and as should have happened in 2016, when, instead, David Cameron’s idiotic hubris set this whole train wreck in operation. 

However, another way would be for MPs — the sovereign power in the UK that Leavers apparently wanted to reinstate — to come together to scrap Brexit via legislation explaining that it is impossible to implement without fundamentally destroying our economy, and then calling a general election, secure in the knowledge that they have put their principles before party politics or their own self-preservation. 

In conclusion, I’d also like to dwell briefly on the two aspects of the European elections that cheered me the most. The first is the success of the Green Party, whose vote rose to 12.1% of the total, up from 7.9% in 2014. The Greens now have seven MEPs, up from three, and while many centrist Remainers voted for the Lib Dems, those more left-leaning and radical obviously voted Green, not just because of their support for remaining in the EU, but also because they’re the only party committed to tackling the true crisis of modern civilisation: not the delusional nostalgia and isolationism of the Brexiteers, but the exact opposite — the forward-looking, global, youthful advocacy for immediate and profound system change as the only way of averting the worst effects of an ongoing man-made global environmental catastrophe, whose urgency has, of course, recently been highlighted to great effect by Extinction Rebellion, by Greta Thunberg and the school strikes for climate — and even by Sir David Attenborough in his powerful documentary, ‘Climate Change: The Facts.’

I’d also like to big up London, my home, the only area in England where the Brexit Party didn’t come first (they came third, after the Lib Dems and Labour), and where the Tories were wiped out, losing their two seats and dropping to 7.9% of the vote, down from 22.5% in 2014.

If, despite all of the above, Brexit really does go ahead, London should surely be as entitled as Scotland to demand independence from a country hell-bent on re-making itself as a permanent “hostile environment” for foreigners, run largely by the US, China and the Gulf countries who already own so much of our land and our businesses, with public school boys acting as well-paid pimps, and with poverty levels that would make 19th century social reformers turn in their graves.

* * * * *

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.

Deptford’s Tidemill Campaign and the Dawning Environmental Rebellion Against the Dirty Housing ‘Regeneration’ Industry

Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaigners photographed in the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford in November 2018 (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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

 

Yesterday, May 23, 2019, another phase in the ten-year struggle by the local community in Deptford to prevent environmental destruction, social cleansing, and the creation of new and inappropriate housing came to an end when campaigners with the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign withdrew from a protest camp —  which had existed for the last seven months — on the green next to the contested site of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden.

However, while Lewisham Council and Peabody, the main proposed developer of the site, will be tempted to see this withdrawal as some sort of victory, they should pay attention to the fact that campaigners have also resolutely pledged to continue to resist the plans to build new homes on the site of the garden, and to demolish Reginald House, a block of 16 structurally sound council flats next door.

Moreover, the council and Peabody also need be aware that the contested Tidemill site is part of a much bigger picture — involving a critical awareness of  environmental destruction and of the need for major systemic change to mitigate the worst effects of an already unfolding global environmental crisis — that has generated considerable awareness and support both globally and locally in recent months via the direct action embraced by the campaigning group Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes inspired by the 16-year old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. 

In addition, the entire model of the housing and ‘regeneration’ industry is under greater scrutiny than ever before, as activists from all walks of life recognise that destroying trees and green spaces, and endorsing a building industry that is, fundamentally, environmentally blind, is no longer acceptable. 

While architects congratulate themselves on designs that are sometimes more environmentally sound than in the past, the dirty route to their creation remains shamefully ignored. A movement amongst campaigners is growing to insist that the building industry reflects the urgency of the call for a massive cut in the emissions that contribute to climate change, which, at present, it shows no willingness to recognise.

As campaigners work towards a united call for all housing developments to be able to demonstrate that they are zero carbon, the current state of affairs is nothing short of an environmental disaster.

What is needed, firstly, is for the environmental impact of destroying existing buildings that could and should be refurbished rather than destroyed to be taken on board. This is the case with Reginald House, of course, but, on a larger scale, it is also still playing out across London, as massive ‘regeneration’ projects continue across the capital — at the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, for example, where a demolition company is currently in the early stages of what will be many months of work demolishing one of the estate’s huge blocks, which was built to last and should have been refurbished. 

In Lewisham, too, Reginald House is just one example of shocking environmental vandalism planned by the council with regard to existing buildings. In New Cross, for example, the council is planning to destroy an entire estate at Achilles Street, instead of refurbishing it, and in Catford Town Centre is planning to destroy the 1970s shopping centre and Milford Towers, the estate above it, when, yet again, the only environmentally sane way to proceed is to refurbish it.

Lewisham Council shouldn’t really need too be told all of this, as they declared a climate emergency at the end of February, but, as so often with politicians, that appears to be nothing but an empty gesture, as councillors passed it the same week that the 74 trees of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden were destroyed by tree-killers hired by the same council.

However, the environmental damage caused by the building industry doesn’t just involve the reckless destruction of existing buildings. All across London, developments on brownfield sites, like the dystopian future rising up at Nine Elms and at Battersea Power Station, present a harrowing picture of nothing more than profit and pollution, The industry, as a whole, sources materials without any regard for the environmental impact of doing so, both in terms of the global plunder that is so much a part of modern-day capitalism, and even, as the Grenfell disaster showed, through the use of man-made materials that are so toxic and unsafe that they led to the deaths of 72 people. 

In addition, the capital’s streets are choked with lorries carrying material to and from building sites, contributing significantly to the emissions that are harmful to our health as individuals living in London, but which also add to the global warming associated with climate change that threatens to destroy us within our lifetimes if we don’t change our behaviour with immediate effect.

Logically, any development site should start with the necessity of refurbishment rather than demolition, and should also involve environmentally sound materials and practices. A brave council would recognise this and act on it — and in Lewisham the example of sustainable self-build homes pioneered in the 1980s by Walter Segal should be drawn upon — but logic and courage are, of course, in short supply when what is actually driving everything — however much those involved are required to spin alternative conclusions — is profit: for the developers, for demolition companies, building companies, chains of suppliers and manufacturers, lawyers, estate agents, advertisers and PR companies.

As Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and even the sainted David Attenborough have shown (in his recently, and devastatingly powerful BBC documentary, ‘Climate Change: The Facts’), nothing less than a complete re-think of how our omnivorous capitalist system operates is required, and the building industry is not only a part of that, but, in many ways, one of its key components, degrading our environments locally, while also contributing to the ongoing global crisis.   

The history of the Tidemill campaign

To give some necessary perspective to the Tidemill story, it’s ten years since the residents of Reginald House were first told that the council wanted to demolish their homes, as part of the proposed redevelopment of the old Tidemill primary school, which moved to a new site in 2012. The garden — a magical oasis created by pupils, teachers and parents over 20 years ago  — was also intended to be part of this development, as, at the time, were two other larger blocks of council flats on Giffin Street, but they were subsequently dropped from the plans, either because the council feared resistance from residents, or because it was considered that there were too many leaseholders, who, unlike council tenants, have to have their homes bought before they can be demolished.

The old Tidemill school — an attractive Victorian affair that is the key component of the Tidemill plans, as it is where the private properties for sale are intended to be located — was then rented to guardians while the plans continued to be developed, and they began opening up the garden to the local community, many of whom, of course, had fond memories of it either as pupils or as parents.

They, in turn, were kicked out by the council when, prematurely, councillors thought their plans had been finalised, at which point the local community were given use of the garden. Throughout this period, strenuous efforts were made to engage with the council, and the developers, Family Mosaic (who merged with Peabody in 2016) and Sherry Green Homes, but to no avail. An architect-led proposal to spare the garden and Reginald House by building more densely on the old school site was summarily dismissed, without any genuine effort made to assess its viability.

In September 2017, Lewisham Council finally approved plans for the Tidemill development. Years of campaigning by the defenders of the garden and Reginald House had led to an increase in the number of proposed “affordable” homes for rent on the site, but there was still no recognition that the garden was too precious an asset to be destroyed — not only providing a rare green space in a part of Deptford that is woefully short of green spaces, but also mitigating the worst effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street, where particulate levels have been measured at six times the safety levels recommended by the World Health Organisation — and that it was completely unacceptable to destroy Reginald House.

The campaign to save the garden and Reginald House only grew stronger after the council made its decision to approve the development plans. Gardening regularly took place, and people seeking peace and quiet were regularly drawn to it as a uniquely calm green enveloping space amidst the urban sprawl and the constant air pollution. In the spring and summer of 2018, numerous events took place, including gigs (one including a hustings, prior to last year’s council elections, at which local councillor Joe Dromey seemed to be the only person to visit the garden who was immune to its charms), and well-attended Jamaican, Peruvian and Brazilian events. 

However, Lewisham Council persistently ignored the community’s requests for new plans to be drawn up, and, instead, stealthily twinned the Tidemill site with Amersham Vale in New Cross — the former site of Deptford Green school — where Peabody and Sherry Green Homes intend to build more new housing, 

The stealth was required because, although the council was persistently trumpeting the number of alleged “social homes” at Tidemill — 104 out of 209 homes, with 51 for private sale, 13 to replace tenants’ flats in Reginald House, and the rest (42) for shared ownership, which I have previously described as “a notorious scam that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist” — its claim that around half the housing at Tidemill would be “social homes” (a proportion that Labour politicians, led by the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, constantly brandish as a fixed policy) was undermined by the plans for Amersham Vale.

On that site, as I explained in an article last October, “just 24 units out of 120 in total” are for so-called ‘social’ rents, with a whopping 81 being for private sale, and 15 for shared ownership, reducing the so-called ‘social’ component over both sites to just 39%. In addition, what the council also didn’t wish to have publicised was the fact that, under a new tiered system of alleged ‘social rents’ developed by Sadiq Khan (with the support of Labour councils), the ‘social’ component of the development wouldn’t consist of social rents (those paid by current council and housing association tenants), which, in Lewisham, average £95.54 a week for a two-bedroom flat, but ‘London Affordable Rent’, which is 63% higher, at £152.73 a week.

Lewisham Council’s own statistics regarding different rent levels in the borough (thanks to Sue Lawes).

Not coincidentally, Amersham Vale’s general invisibility from the plans presented by the council to the public also made it difficult for campaigners to present a case that the best way to proceed would be for the number of private homes at Amersham Vale to be cut, and for it to be used for the ‘social’ homes that would otherwise be built on the Tidemill garden and on the site of Reginald House. 

The council also kept quiet about Besson Street in New Cross, which campaigners also suggested as an alternative site for the proposed Tidemill development, but where the council intends to build new homes in partnership with Grainger plc, one of the country’s biggest builders of homes for private rents, where, if the scheme goes ahead, a Labour council will, shamefully, be putting its name to new homes at full market rent, while also providing additional homes at ‘London Living Rent’, the highest rate of rent in the new rental regime dreamt up by Sadiq Khan, where a two-bedroom flat will cost £225.46 a week. I wrote about Besson Street in October, in an article entitled, A Radical Proposal to Save the Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald House in Deptford: Use Besson Street, an Empty Site in New Cross, and I also recommend recent analysis by Corporate Watch (see here and here).

The long-running campaign to save the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and Reginald House came to a head on August 29, 2018, when the council terminated the lease on the garden, but, instead of giving the keys back, campaigners occupied the garden to prevent its destruction — and please also see my Novara Media article, The Battle for Deptford and Beyond.

The occupation drew support from environmental campaigners and housing activists around the world, and was an inspiring experience to have been part of, but on October 29, 2018 the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs hired by Lewisham Council — at a cost of over £105,188, with a further £1.37m (as of March) spent on the eviction and on guarding the garden from the community via the 24/7 presence of bailiffs, to add to the £1m at least that has been spent on guarding the old Tidemill school site via permanent security guards over the last two years. 

Campaigners then set up a protest camp on the green next to the garden, which is part of the development site.

In November, an effort to cut down all the trees in the garden failed when campaigners let the company in question, Artemis Tree Services, know how bitterly contested the Tidemill site was, and Artemis very publicly withdrew from their contract, stating, “Artemis Tree Services have heard the voice of the Lewisham people and have decided to remove themselves from the Tidemill Project.”

However, on February 27, 2019, another firm, SDL Solutions, destroyed the garden’s 74 trees, in the same week that the council declared a climate emergency. This was an act of stunning hypocrisy given that the garden’s tree cover helped to mitigate the worst effects of the horrendous local pollution.

Just over a week later, on March 8, the council sought a possession order for the green at Bromley County Court, but barristers acting for the campaign pointed out to the judge that the council had failed to take into account the protestors’ human rights under Article 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The judge agreed, and a date for a hearing was set for May 23. However, to avoid potentially onerous costs being awarded against them, campaigners agreed to withdraw from the green, while maintaining their opposition to the council and Peabody’s plans for the site.

In a statement for the campaign, I noted, “We are withdrawing amicably from the protest camp, but our campaign against this misplaced development continues. Through the council’s failure to recognise the human rights issues involved in the protest camp, we have secured a two and a half month delay to the plans for the site, which should have encouraged Lewisham Council and Peabody to think again.” 

I added, “We put up 74 white crosses to commemorate the trees that were destroyed in the garden, and we have continued to secure community support for resistance to these ill-conceived plans. We continue to demand that the council and Peabody drop their current plans, allow the garden to be re-planted, and give up on the proposed destruction of Reginald House, where 80% of residents want to stay but have not been allowed a ballot by the council.”

In the News Shopper, Paul Bell, Lewisham Council’s Cabinet Member for Housing, said he was “pleased that we can progress the scheme to house people, and hope we can avoid any unnecessary eviction.” he added, “I respect their right to protest. We all live in a democracy.” 

Cllr. Bell and his colleagues, however, seem to be completely unaware not only of how their hypocrisy regarding the climate emergency they declared three months ago is being received in the communities they claim to represent, but also of the extent to which the landscape of protest has been changing in recent months, as outlined above. 

Business as usual is no longer tenable, and, at Tidemill, campaigners’ demands for the current plans to be dropped, and for alternative plans to be developed with the local community, are not going away. Soon, no doubt, the green will be fenced off, and the builders will start to move in, but this is still not a battle that the council can win. 

They — and Peabody — still have the opportunity to scrap the plans and to go back to the drawing board, agreeing to re-plant the garden and to spare Reginald House. If they don’t, it may well be that the rising enthusiasm for environmental direct action will make itself felt in this bitterly contested corner of Deptford. 

* * * * *

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.

US Readers: Please Tell Congress to Ease Restrictions on Transferring Prisoners Out of Guantánamo in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

A photo of the operating room at the prisoner hospital at Guantánamo, taken by a member of the US military on December 3, 2002.


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

 

Ever since Barack Obama left the White House, in January 2017, having failed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, despite promising to do so on his second day in office eight years before, it has been difficult to see any light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to that wretched offshore prison. 

The 40 men still held are, for the most part, held indefinitely without charge or trial, while the few who are charged are caught in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings in the military commissions, a broken facsimile of a functioning judicial system. And in the White House, of course, is Donald Trump, who has no interest in justice when it comes to the Guantánamo prisoners; Donald Trump, who wants no one released under any circumstances, and would happily add to the prison’s population if he could.

However, a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel finally re-emerged in November, in the mid-term elections, when Democrats took back control of the House of Representatives. Given the track record of the Obama years, it would be unwise to read too much into this slight shift in the balance of power amongst the US’s elected representatives, but, as Shilpa Jindia noted in a recent article for the Intercept, “On the anniversary of the prison’s opening in January, a coalition of NGOs visited with key House Democrats, who expressed support for various tactics to close Guantánamo.”

The most significant move for Democrats would be to tackle the ban on the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo to the US mainland that has existed since 2011, when, as Shilpa Jindia described it, Republicans “inserted retaliatory provisions” into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) “to stymie the Obama administration’s flagging efforts to close Guantánamo.” 

As Shilpa Jindia also explained, “Two sections in particular landed a decisive blow, prohibiting the use of funds to transfer or release detainees to the United States, and to construct or modify facilities in the US to house detainees. These sections, though slightly amended, have been retained each year, codifying conservative fearmongering about Guantánamo detainees. However, the most effective use of the NDAA is psychological, giving the impression that nothing can be done.”

Crucially, the ban is so sweeping that it prevents prisoners from being brought to the US for any reason — to be tried in federal court, for example, or even to receive medical treatment.

Both these restrictions, however, are coming under increasing scrutiny. As I have been explaining for years, the commissions are not fit for purpose, and their sorry state is only getting worse. As Shilpa Jindia noted in her article, “A protacted legal saga at Guantánamo Bay ended last month, when a federal court tossed out two years of rulings by the judge overseeing the military tribunal trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged leader of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. The ruling was a rare rebuke, as federal courts have largely deferred to the government on matters relating to Guantánamo in recent years.” 

Providing further details, Shilpa Jindia stated, “On April 16, the D.C. Circuit Court issued a unanimous ruling vacating the orders of Air Force Col. Vance Spath, the presiding judge on Nashiri’s case since 2015, because he failed to disclose that he was seeking a job as an immigration judge with the Justice Department — the very same body involved in prosecuting Nashiri.”

With Judge Spath departed from Guantánamo, and with all his decisions erased, it now seems pretty clear that the case, as Shilpa Jindia also noted, “will now certainly drag on for years,” and there is no reason to suspect that anything more speedy will happen in any of the other current cases — of the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi.

The case of al-Iraqi, one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in 2008, is also of relevance to the other pressing problem with the NDAA’s restriction — on bringing prisoners to the US mainland for medical treatment.

This problem — one that only gets worse with the passage of time, as the prisoners get older, and their ailments increase (especially, perhaps, in the cases of those men who were tortured in the CIA’s “black sites”) — was highlighted in a recent New York Times article by Carol Rosenberg, which I wrote about in an article entitled, Slow Death at Guantánamo: Why Torture and Open-Ended Arbitrary Detention Are Such Bad Ideas. 

Al-Hadi’s was one of the cases focused on by Rosenberg, as he has had three spine surgeries, and yet is still in need of the kind of advanced medical care that is simply not available at Guantánamo — and yet, because of current restrictions, he cannot be brought to the US mainland under any circumstances.

Working on the Democrats

Following up on the meetings with Democrats that were organized in January by advocates for the closure of Guantánamo, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) has just launched an action whereby concerned Americans can write to their Members of Congress urging them to allow transfers ut of Guantánamo.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to Allow Transfers Out of Guantánamo

As they explain, they are hopeful that, this year, “Congress is considering fixing some of the damage it caused in previous NDAAs. As Congress begins its work on the FY 2020 NDAA, some in Congress are working to pass provisions that would allow Guantánamo detainees to agree to plea deals by video-conference or to be transferred to the US for trial. Others are working to allow detainees to be temporarily transferred to the US for medical treatment and to otherwise improve medical care at Guantánamo. Still others are working to get rid of restrictions on transferring Guantánamo detainees entirely.”

They add, “Congress will make many of these decisions during the next few weeks as the House and Senate each draft their versions of the NDAA. Please write to your Members of Congress now to tell them that you want them to do the right thing and to lift the restrictions on transferring detainees out of Guantanamo — and at a minimum to allow detainees to be transferred for trial or medical treatment.”

NRCAT are not alone in urging action. Today, in an article for Defense One, entitled, “Treat Guantánamo Detainees in the United States,” Albert J. Shimkus, Jr., an Associate Professor in the National Security Affairs Department of the US Naval War College, who was the first Joint Task Force Guantánamo Surgeon, stated that It is the “absolute responsibility of the US Senate to include and pass, in the next version of the National Defense Authorization Act, specific language that allows for the temporary transfer” of prisoners who are ill “to the continental United States for emergency and/or definitive treatment.”

If you’re in the US and can help at all, please do!

* * * * *

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.

The Taint of Guantánamo: Uighurs in Albania and Bermuda Seek Permission to Join Their Families in Canada

Former Guantánamo prisoner Salahadin Abdulahad, a Uighur (one of 22 Uighurs mistakenly held at the prison), with his three children in Bermuda, where he was resettled after being freed from Guantánamo in 2009. His wife and children are Canadian citizens, and he is seeking permission to join them in Canada. Two other Uighurs are also seeking to join their families in Canada.


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.

Two months ago, in an article about how former Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi was being prevented from having a passport, two and a half years after he was freed from Guantánamo, despite being promised that it would be returned after two years, I wrote about the scandal of how everyone released from the prison “will continue to be branded as ‘enemy combatants’ for the rest of their lives — unless, eventually, concerted action is taken by those who respect the law to hold the US to account.” As I also put it, “The status of the ‘un-people’ of Guantánamo is a peculiarly aberrant post-9/11 creation, and one that cannot be allowed to stand forever.”

I also explained that, although it is reasonable to assume that all kinds of deals were made between the US government and the prisoners’ home governments, details of these deals have never been made public — and even if they were, of course, we shouldn’t forget that whatever deals were arranged have absolutely no basis in international law.

I had reason to think yet again about this enduring injustice just last week, when the National Post, in Canada, published an article by reporter Tom Blackwell looking at the case of former Guantánamo prisoner Ayub Mohammed, a Uighur, part of an oppressed Turkic minority from north western China, also known as the Uyghurs.

Mohammed (identified at Guantánamo as Haji Mohammed Ayub) is one of 22 Uighurs who were seized in the US’s inept post-9/11 dragnet and sent to Guantánamo, where it was fairly swiftly realized that they had been seized by mistake, because the Uighurs — as the prisoners repeatedly told them — bore no malice towards the US, and had just one enemy: the Chinese government that has historically persecuted them, and that, currently, is holding up to three million Uighurs in concentration camps.

Since being released — in Tirana, in Albania, with five other Uighurs and three other prisoners, in May 2006 — Ayub Mohammed “has earned a business degree from the New York University of Tirana in Albania,” and has also “met online and married a Canadian woman, and had three children, all of whom are Canadian citizens.”

“Now,” the National Post added, “he wants to live with them in Montreal. But Mohammed’s four-year ordeal at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and the radioactive stigma that comes with it continue to haunt him.”

Despite the US authorities having concluded, before his release, that he was not, after all, an “enemy combatant,” a Canadian visa officer, “[d]isagreeing with those George W. Bush administration officials,” as the National Post described it, “concluded he was a member of an obscure terrorist organization, and thus inadmissible,” and immigration officials then denied his request for permanent resident status in Canada. 

The Federal Court of Canada recently ordered a new hearing for Mohammed, who is now 35 years old, but was just 17 when he ended up in US custody in 2001, one of at least 22 juveniles who ended up at Guantánamo, where the US authorities — and numerous other countries who sent intelligence agents to interrogate prisoners — ignored their obligations under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on May 25, 2000 and entered into force on February 12, 2002. The Optional Protocol stresses the rehabilitation rather than the punishment of juvenile prisoners — those under 18 when their alleged crimes took place — but it was only ever observed at Guantánamo in relation to three very young Afghan prisoners, who were eventually held separately from the adult prisoners until  their release.

Such is the taint of Guantánamo, however, that, even in court, Canadian federal lawyers argued that “a negative decision on Mohammed’s immigration request was ‘inevitable.’”

Interviewed from Tirana, Mohammed told the National Post, “I live with that everyday, that stain of having been a detainee at Guantánamo Bay.” He added, “Coming out of Guantánamo, I went into another kind of prison. Everywhere I go, I don’t have the documentation, I don’t have the freedom to move around and once people hear about my background, they stay away … After they hear about my past, they just disappear.”

Although the Canadian Federal Court ruled that Mohammed “was denied procedural fairness in the way his visa request was handled,” he is still struggling to categorically refute ungrounded claims that have followed him from Guantánamo, dealing with, as the National Post described it, “whether there is any reason to brand him an extremist.” Despite the US authorities releasing the men because of a recognition that they had no connection to terrorism, their alleged involvement with a Uighur separatist group, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), continues to haunt them, even though it is clear that the US authorities only described ETIM as a terrorist organization in 2002, at a time when, cynically, they were “anxious to win China’s support for the war on terror,” as the newspaper described it. 

This taint of extremism, the newspaper added, is a question that could also have an impact on two other Uighur men who were held at Guantánamo, Khalil Mamut and Salahadin Abdulahad, two of four Uighurs who were given hew homes in Bermuda in 2009. Like Ayub Mohammed, “they also married Uyghur-Canadian refugees and have applied to join them” in Canada. All three men are represented by Prasanna Balasundaram, a lawyer at the Downtown Legal Services clinic in Toronto.

While awaiting a decision from the Canadian court, the US lawyers who represented the Guantánamo Uighurs told the National Post that they were “perplexed at the initial Canadian decision.” Wells Dixon, an attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “With absolute certainty, Ayub is not and never was a member of a terrorist organization. I am shocked and appalled that Canada would deny someone like Ayub refuge on the basis that he was a terrorist.”

Sabin Willett, a corporate bankruptcy lawyer who also represented Uighurs prisoners, told the National Post that “he and his wife visited the ‘lads’ in Albania, and were particularly charmed by Mohammed.” As Willett explained, “He was the youngest. He was just a kid, a very charming, sweet kid. You wondered, ‘How in hell did he get caught up in this mess?’”

Lawyers were not the only ones defending the men. Randall Schriver, a senior State Department official in the Bush administration — who is now Donald Trump’s assistant secretary of defence — told a congressional committee in 2009 that the Uighurs’ imprisonment was “a tragic error.”

Chinese repression of the Uighurs

The National Post also spoke to the former prisoners about Uighur oppression in China now, which, as the newspaper acknowledged, “includes building vast ‘re-education’ camps and pervasive surveillance” in Xinjiang province, the Chinese government’s name for their homeland.

Salahadin Abdulahad said that he “believes what China is doing to the Uighurs is far worse than anything that happened at Guantánamo Bay,” and that he bore “little ill feeling toward the Americans who held him for seven years.” He explained that “three of his brothers are locked in ‘concentration camps,’ while he’s been unable to contact his parents since 2015.”

“I have no idea if they are dead or alive,” he said.

Tom Blackwell then ran though the Guantánamo Uighurs’ story, noting how they “fled their homes because of such persecution,” ending up in Afghanistan. Ayub Mohammed and Salahadin Abdulahad both told him that “they left Xinjiang for Pakistan with hopes of reaching other countries and studying in those places. Mohammed says he obtained a visa to the US, Abdulahad tried and failed to get one for Egypt. Both travelled across the unguarded border into Afghanistan after hearing that the Pakistanis were deporting Uighurs back to China.”

There, they found a small community of Uighurs, but, after the US-led invasion began and their settlement was bombed, they were “lured into a trap by villagers eager to claim hefty bounties the Americans offered for suspected terrorists.”

Despite the unprincipled claims that were made at Guantánamo about the Uighurs’ terrorist associations, to try to persuade the Chinese government to support the “war on terror,” by 2005 US government lawyers “admitted in court documents” that the Uighurs were “no longer classified as enemy combatants.”

When Ayub Mohammed and four other Uighurs were released in May 2006, Albania was the only country at the time prepared to stand up to China by taking them in. However, the National Post noted that Mohammed “has been stranded there ever since,” because he has been “[u]nable to obtain travel papers.” In Bermuda, meanwhile, Salahadin Abdulahad says that, over the last ten years, “people have embraced the Uighurs.” He told the newspaper that “he’s now working 10-12 hour days at a construction company, supporting his wife as she raises their three children in Toronto.”

The National Post noted that, as early as 2005, “Washington was already lobbying various countries, including Canada, to accept Mohammed and others,” but it was never easy finding countries prepared to challenge the Chinese government by taking in any of the Uighurs, especially with both the Bush and Obama administrations refusing to allow any of them to be re-settled in the US. 

Former Bush official Randall Schriver told the congressional hearing on the Uighurs in 2009 that the men’s re-settlement was “something that I worked on directly and found extremely frustrating.” He added, “It was the morally courageous countries that have now stepped forward.”

Mehmet Tohti of the Uyghur Canadian Society told the National Post that he had “also pressed Canada to accept some of the detainees in the late 2000s.” However, he said, one reason that the Harper government declined to get involved “was concern that the gesture might undermine attempts to help Hussein Celil, a Uighur-Canadian jailed in China on what many observers consider fabricated terrorism charges,” who is still imprisoned.

As Ayub Mohammed continues to seek to be allowed to be united with his family, he explained how he met his wife, Aierken Mailikaimu, a Uyghur-Canadian who he calls “the love of my life.” After an anonymous donor funded his degree in Albania, he started chatting on a social media site, where his wife-to-be “had posted a photograph of a fig tree from Artux, which turned out to be the hometown for both.” A year later, she arrived in Albania with her father, to get married to Ayub. As the 

National Post explained, “The oldest of their children, daughter Azia, is now eight, but the couple wants to raise them in Canada.”

In conclusion, Mohammed said that “Canadians have nothing to fear” from him.

“If they knew me, they would know I’m innocent, that I’m a non-violent person, that I’m against any kind of violence and bloodshed,” he said, adding, “I’m the kind of person who cares not just about human rights but cares for all living things. Who feels hurt when other living things hurt.”

* * * * *

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.

Celebrating Seven Years of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

The most recent photos posted on the Facebook page ‘The State of London’ (All photos by Andy Worthington).


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Check out all the photos here!

Seven years ago yesterday, on May 11, 2012, I set out from my home in Brockley, in south east London, to take photos on a bike ride to Greenwich and back, passing through Deptford on the way. It wasn’t a long journey, but the conscious act of recording what I saw — what interested me — was the deliberate start of a photo-journalism project that I envisaged as a kind of cyclists’ version of ‘The Knowledge’, the legendary training whereby black cab drivers are “required to know every road and place of interest in the main London area; that is anywhere within a six mile radius of Charing Cross”, as a cabbie described it on his website.

That same cabbie explained how it took him four and a half years, which, he said, was about the average. Another website explained how cabbies need to “master no fewer than 320 basic routes, all of the 25,000 streets that are scattered within the basic routes and approximately 20,000 landmarks and places of public interest that are located within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.”

I can’t claim to know London in this kind of detail, but I can truthfully state that, after my first journey on May 11, 2012, I gradually began to travel further afield, soon conceiving of a plan whereby I would visit and photograph the 120 postcodes — those beginning WC, EC, N, E, SE, SW, W and NW — that make up the London postal district (aka the London postal area), covering 241 square miles, with, when possible, additional photos from the 13 outer London postcode areas — those beginning BR, CM, CR, DA, EN, HA, IG, KT, RM, SM, TW, UB and WD — that make up Greater London, covering 607 square miles in total.

Fully undertaking this project — which took me until September 2014 to pay at least one visit to each of the 120 postcodes — required me to begin to build my own knowledge of the capital, because, although, in 2012, I had lived here for over 25 years, my knowledge of most of this vast city was pretty sketchy. I had spent almost all my time living south of the river — in Brixton and Brockley, with a few years in Forest Hill and Peckham, and, in the late ‘80s,a brief period squatting in Hammersmith — and I knew the West End well, and parts of the City, as well as areas like Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, but much of the capital was a mystery to me.

The early days of the project involved me getting to know routes into central London, because I started it in the run-up to the Olympics, when there was an absurd ban on taking bikes on trains at any time of the day or night. I also began to explore the routes along the Thames, east and west, on both sides of the river, which are largely publicly accessible, and are one of London’s great joys. 

Also of note are the canals that head out north from Limehouse Basin in east London — the Limehouse Cut, which branches off the River Lea at Bow, and the Regent’s Canal, which passes through Hackney, Islington and Camden, eventually joining the Grand Union Canal in Little Venice, by Paddington. This then heads west through Westbourne Green, Kensal Rise and North Kensington. The routes by water inspired me and continue to inspire me — although I also, of course, had to get to know a various of key road routes.

Within a comparatively short amount of time, I was conversant with the whole of my neighbourhood — not only Brockley and Crofton Park (SE4), but also Deptford (SE8), Greenwich (SE10), New Cross (SE14), Peckham and Nunhead (SE15), Catford (SE6), Lewisham and Hither Green (SE13), Charlton (SE7), Woolwich and Plumstead (SE18), Rotherhithe and South Bermondsey (SE16), and the vast sprawl of SE1, which runs from the river at Waterloo, Bankside and Borough up through Bermondsey to the New Cross border.

After south east London, east London was a magnet for my journeys, accessed via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel and leading me into all manner of urban environments that I had never fully explored before, via some of the capital’s main east-west arteries — the Commercial Road and Mile End Road, for example, and smaller but no less significant routes; Bethnal Green Road and Roman Road — and the great roads north, including the A10, which heads north from Shoreditch as Kingsland Road, up through Stoke Newington and Tottenham, and Cambridge Heath Road, which becomes Mare Street, and heads up to Clapton via Hackney. Further east, the grittiness of Canning Town and Plaistow drew me in, and Stratford (the epicentre of the Olympic overkill), reached via the River Lea, also led on to Leyton, Leytonstone, Wanstead and Walthamstow.

Further west, I also got to know other routes north — the A1 through Islington to Highgate and beyond, the A502 from Camden to Hampstead, and the Finchley Road, heading north west to Brent Cross and Hendon, and south of the river I have regularly travelled from Brockley to Brixton, and on through Clapham to Battersea, Wandsworth and beyond.

The tens of thousands of miles I have cycled in the last seven years have been transformational. I began the project not just because I’m a lifelong cyclist (I think I started when I was four), and have loved photography since I got a Pentax ME Super at the age of 18, but because, in 2012, I had emerged from a major health scare (I developed a rare blood disease in 2011) and, after several camera-less years, was given my first digital camera — a little Canon Ixus that I used for the first 15 months of the project — by my wife at Christmas 2011.

I then got through a number of Canon PowerShot SX270s until, this February, I upped my game with a Canon PowerShot G7X Mark II, which is a dream come true. In those tens of thousands of miles, I’ve also taken tens of thousands of photos, which, at the very least, constitute an archive of London from the Olympics to now that will stand as a testament to how, when vision was needed after the banker-led crash of 2008, what we got instead was the crappiest Tory government imaginable, interested only in pandering to the global super-rich, and pampering wealthy Brits, while hacking the state to a bloody death like a deranged serial killer via the implementation of a cynical “age of austerity” that was designed to destroy the state provision of services, and, with it, any notion of civil society, and to punish the poor as much as possible without actually — yet — bringing back the workhouse.

In hindsight, it was entirely appropriate to start my project in the run-up to the jingoistic, nationalist excess of the Olympics, which resurrected an absurd sense of exceptionalism that, in turn, fed into the Brexit vote, whilst also doing what the Olympics always do to host cities: increasing authoritarianism, and artificially stimulating housing greed.

In the last seven years, I have captured the rise of tower blocks for foreign investors, an epidemic that still shows no sign of grinding to a halt, even though Britain now looks like a basket case, rather than the sexy bet it was post-Olympics. Everywhere lone phalluses or priapic forests of ugly, pointless towers rise up, with the most execrable examples currently being at Nine Elms in Vauxhall, where folly after folly is finally culminating in the mega-folly of Battersea Power Station, an uber-development that looks like the set of a tragically bad sci-fi movie.

Along with the unfettered rise of the towers, this period has also seen a prolonged and ongoing assault on council housing, which I’ve also been chronicling assiduously, as Labour councils have been leading the way in cynically allowing council estates to be razed to the ground, to be replaced by new developments from which most of the previous residents are excluded because the new developments contain at least 50% of homes for private sale, with the rest being a mixture of part-buy, part-rent scams and rental properties that are iniquitously described as being let at either “social” or “affordable’ rents when they are definitely not the former and are generally not the latter either, because both descriptions only really apply to the previous council properties that have just been conveniently knocked down.

In this really rather disgusting manifestation of class warfare, the culprits are not just councils behind them (both Labour and Tory), but also the grotesque private/public partnerships involved in the re-developments — largely via housing associations, which were formerly philanthropic social housing providers, but are now largely indistinguishable from purely private developers.

For seven years I have been photographing council housing, celebrating that which still stands, while mourning — and documenting — that which has been lost, is in the process of being lost, or is marked for destruction across London. Examples are in my home borough of Lewisham, in Southwark, led by the worst of the gentrifiers, where the Heygate Estate has already been destroyed and the vast Aylesbury Estate is following suit, in Lambeth, where corruption and would-be destruction go hand in hand, and in numerous other boroughs, including Tower Hamlets, Newham, Hackney, Brent, Barnet, Greenwich and Bexley.

I have also covered the most disturbing social housing story of all — the neglect, by all parties concerned, of a tower block in west London to such an extent that, in June 2017, 72 people died when the tower in question, Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, was consumed by an entirely preventable inferno, a disaster for which — still — no one has yet been held accountable.

These are not my only enthusiasms, of course. Although I am a thoroughly political creature, I also love nature — London’s trees, parks and other green spaces, and the changing seasons and the changing weather. As I have mentioned before, I cycle every day largely to preserve my mental and physical health. I relish cycling in all weathers, and I have remembered what our culture encourages us to forget — that we aren’t meant to be cooped up in buildings all the time. Many of my photos focus on the light, the weather, the seasons — the experiential aspects of life that I wish more people got to enjoy more often, and especially in the daytime during the week, when so much of London is so empty.

If you’re already following ‘The State of London’, I’m delighted to have you with me as I share my journeys, and if you’ve just stumbled on this article I hope you’ll join me. I intend to get my website up and running this year, and also to make prints, put on some exhibitions, and get a book published. If you can help out at all with any of this, please do get in touch.

* * * * *

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