Andy Worthington's Blog, page 24

I Pledge My Allegiance to the Struggle for Survival Against Catastrophic Climate Change

Golfers in September 2017 playing a round at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington State, while a devastating wildfire raged in the tree-lined hills behind them (Photo: Beacon Rock Golf Course on Facebook).


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It’s several weeks now since Extinction Rebellion (XR) occupied four sites in central London — Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch — bringing traffic largely to a halt and noticeably reducing pollution, and raising climate change as an urgent matter more persuasively than at any other time that I can recall.

In the first of three demands, they — we — urged politicians and the media to “Tell the Truth” — no more lies or spin or denial. Tell the truth about the environmental disaster we face. When XR formally launched at the end of October, the timing was right: the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just published a landmark report, in which, as the Guardian described it, “The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.” The authors of the report added that “urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target”, which they called “affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the [2015] Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.”

The same week that Extinction Rebellion shut down much of central London, the BBC broadcast ‘Climate Change: The Facts’, an unambiguous documentary by David Attenborough, more hard-hitting than anything he has ever done before, which made clear to millions of people the scale of the environmental catastrophe that we’re facing.  

And then, at the end of XR’s week of actions, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year old Swedish campaigner whose School Strike for Climate movement (also known as FridaysForFuture, Youth For Climate and Youth Strike 4 Climate) inspired huge numbers of schoolchildren worldwide to follow her example, and to take time off school (or to stop going altogether) to campaign for urgent action on climate change, spoke to campaigners at Marble Arch, gave a powerful speech to Parliament, and met political leaders (although Theresa May was a no-show), the upshot of which was MPs approving a motion to declare an environment and climate emergency on May 1.

Words, of course, especially from the mouths of politicians, are generally unreliable, as Greta Thunberg has noted. In her speech to the British Parliament she pointed out that “nothing is being done to halt – or even slow – climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises”, and she has done a great job of repeatedly stating that politicians have been uttering fine words but doing nothing since before she was born. 

In fact, confirming how weaselly and untrustworthy politicians are, on the same day that a non-binding declaration of a climate emergency was announced by MPs, the High Court approved the creation of a third runway at Heathrow, an act of environmental insanity that had been backed by 415 MPs to 119 back in June 2018. As the excellent Zad Forever website explained in a recent post, “Local residents, Greenpeace and London’s Mayor had tried to block the building of the third runway, but the court ruled against them. The third runway could destroy 950 homes, acres of agricultural land and produce more CO2 each year than the entire country of Kenya.”

The path to change

I’m no stranger to environmental awareness. I was only seven when US activists declared the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, but I grew up at a time of great fear about nuclear annihilation and the perils of nuclear waste, and Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were both prominent in my youth. 

Instinctively counter-cultural, I took an interest in the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, and was impressed by the ecological aspect of the new age traveller and free festival scene. 

In 1989, I read Bill McKibben’s bleak, black-bound book The End of Nature, which awoke me to the perils of what was then called “global warming”, but also threw me into what, with hindsight, was some sort of existential depression. 

The ‘90s focused environmental awareness even more sharply. In the countryside (and occasionally the cities), anti-roads campaigners occupied trees to prevent pointless roads from being built, with a reverence for ‘Mother Nature’ that was inspiring, while, in the cities, ‘Reclaim the Streets‘ took back the streets from cars and lorries, reclaiming the land as traffic-free public space. 

These movements, in turn, fed into the anti-globalisation movement of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and, finally — after the West had become obsessed with terrorism and war on Muslim countries — XR’s predecessor, the Occupy movement, which also seized public space to provoke a conversation about our future. 

However, while the anti-globalisation and Occupy movements had largely focused on the perils of capitalism, it has taken until now for the environmental crisis to be the focal point bringing all our struggles together. 

War is environmental disaster, the west’s major companies are , driving life to the point of extinction around the world, and our shallow, self-obsessed materialism — for new clothes whenever we want them, for whatever food we want whenever we want it, for our phones and computers, for unlimited travel by car and by plane — also spells environmental disaster.

To be blunt, capitalism is environmental disaster, as another long-term campaigner, George Monbiot, spelled out two weeks ago in the Guardian, in an article entitled, ‘Dare to declare capitalism dead – before it takes us all down with it.’

In January, a key moment for me was when I was asked by Chris Hedges to appear on his ‘On Contact‘ show on RT to discuss Guantánamo — one of the great focal points of the west’s post-9/11 warmongering, with its unsubtle warning about the suppression of dissent via lifelong imprisonment without charge or trial. 

At the studio, I met up with an old friend, Dahr Jamail, who was discussing with Chris his revelatory new book The End of Ice. I watched from the Green Room as the interview was recorded, and Dahr spelled out the alarming changes taking place, and I then watched him and Chris — two grown men with a deep reverence for nature — talk about the speed of our planet’s environmental collapse, and the necessity of coming to terms with an unprecedented disaster that is already happening, and whose worst effects we can only hope to mitigate if we immediately change the way our entire global capitalist system operates. Afterwards, I told Chris, as we prepared to record our interview, that suddenly everything except this struggle seemed irrelevant. 

That transformative event paved the way for glimpsing the possibility of mass collective action during the XR/Attenborough/Greta Thunberg week, and, as a result, I wanted to make sure that I made a very public pledge about committing myself to what, it seems to me, and, increasingly, to millions of other people in the UK and around the world, is the one great struggle of our times — to prevent the worst effects of a man-made environmental catastrophe that is already unfolding.

This is a struggle that cannot be put off even until tomorrow, and that requires nothing less than a complete overhaul of the way our entire capitalist system operates.

What now?

So what now? Well, it’s obviously good that governments are starting to wake up to the scale of the crisis, but there is still no sign that any government is prepared to do what is required. In the UK, for example, the government, currently, is only committed to reducing carbon emissions by 80% compared to 1990 levels by 2050. Introducing the motion for a climate emergency, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called on the government to commit to achieving net zero emissions before 2050, but that is an impossibly long timescale, and we simply don’t have time, as Extinction Rebellion recognise. Their second demand is for net zero emissions by 2025.

Or, as Greta Thunberg explained to MPs:

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades, or less. And by “stop” I mean net zero – and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

So while we’ve made a start, we’re still nowhere near where we need to be, which is to immediately stop “business as usual”, and to rethink everything. There will need to be more education, and more direct action, but, in the meantime, conversations have started that are not going to stop, and alliances are growing. 

Shutting down central London was inspiring, as suddenly the pollution was cut, and we regained public space, which we could run autonomously — the joke on Waterloo Bridge was that it was the “Garden Bridge“, but it hadn’t cost anything. As a result of the occupations,, everyone realised how much we need to cut traffic, and it also became obvious that most journeys aren’t necessary; that, as I saw it, for example, an entire “food logistics” industry is moving billions of pre-prepared sandwiches and canned drinks to corporate outlets, or moving insane amounts of unnecessary “fast fashion” to corporate clothes shops.

It could all stop — and it must, because everything about it — the plastics, the packaging, the huge journeys undertaken — is environmentally deranged, and we need to start factoring the environmental cost into every aspect of how business operates.

Because I’ve been involved in housing activism for several years, another aspect of the shutdown that particularly impressed me was the sudden lack of lorries involved in all aspects of the building industry, which normally choke up roads across the capital on a regular basis. This was a welcome relief, but a bigger environmental picture for me involves stopping the orgy of cynical council estate demolitions (which are environmental ruinous, as well as socially unjust) and the reckless creation of endless speculative towers for private buyers, on the basis that the entire industry needs to become carbon neutral.

If this is something that interests you, then please get in touch. Eventually, perhaps, XR’s third aim will be taken seriously — for people’s assemblies to be set up to effect change — but for now we need to find more ways to get the word out to people who need weaning off the materialism and sense of entitlement that are so central to our current debased culture, and more commitment to direct action, whether through XR’s arrest and disruption model, or through the school strikes — or, indeed, through other means.

The main thing, however, in the wake of yet another apocalyptic report —the UN’s first Global Assessment study since 2005, featuring the work of 400 experts from at least 50 countries, coordinated by the Bonn-based Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which warns that around one million species “already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss” — is for more and more people to grasp the urgency of the situation in which we find ourselves, and to realise that the crisis we face is so immense that we can no longer put off taking action and demanding an urgent and unprecedented system change.

* * * * *

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.

Radio: As Julian Assange’s Extradition Hearing Begins, I Discuss Guantánamo and WikiLeaks with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

WikiLeaks’ logo and the logo for the 2011 release of the Guantánamo files.


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 Thursday, I was delighted to take part in a half-hour interview with Chris Cook for his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, Canada to talk about the recent eighth anniversary of the release, by WikiLeaks, of the “Guantánamo Files” leaked by Chelsea Manning, on which I worked as a media partner, and which I wrote about here.

Our interview is here, as an MP3 (or here via Chris’s website), and it took up the first half of the show, lasting 30 minutes.

As I explained when I posted a link to the show on Facebook, “Despite the fact that Guantánamo is still open, that 40 men are still held there, and that Donald Trump has no interest in closing it, even though it is a legal, moral and ethical abomination with no redeeming features whatsoever, I rarely get asked to discuss it anymore, so I’d like to thank Chris Cook for having me on his Gorilla Radio show.”

As well as discussing how I came to be involved in the release of the “Guantánamo Files,” and the significance of the files — which, as I described it in my article, “revealed the extent to which the supposed evidence at Guantánamo largely consisted of statements made by unreliable witnesses, who told lies about their fellow prisoners, either because they were tortured or otherwise abused, or bribed with the promise of better living conditions” — we also discussed Julian Assange’s current situation since the Ecuadorian government withdrew the asylum it granted him nearly seven years ago — his 50-week prison sentence for his 2012 bail violation, delivered on Wednesday, and his hearing regarding his proposed US extradition, which began on Thursday. 

Speaking by video link from Belmarsh prison, Assange, as the Guardian explained, “declined a chance to consent to his extradition to the US” as the hearing began. “I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many, many people,” he said.

On Friday the UN also weighed in. As the Guardian noted, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) — which “has twice previously called for Assange to be freed, after it judged his confinement to the Ecuadorian embassy by the threat of arrest should he leave amounted to arbitrary detention” — said it was “deeply concerned by the ‘disproportionate sentence’ imposed on Assange for violating the terms of his bail, which it described as a ‘minor violation.’”

In a statement, the Working Group stated that they regretted that the British  government “has not complied with its opinion and has now furthered the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Mr. Assange,” adding, “It is worth recalling that the detention and the subsequent bail of Mr .Assange in the UK were connected to preliminary investigations initiated in 2010 by a prosecutor in Sweden. It is equally worth noting that that prosecutor did not press any charges against Mr. Assange and that in 2017, after interviewing him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, she discontinued investigations and brought an end to the case.”

“The Working Group added that the were “further concerned that Mr. Assange has been detained since 11 April 2019 in Belmarsh prison, a high-security prison, as if he were convicted for a serious criminal offence. This treatment appears to contravene the principles of necessity and proportionality envisaged by the human rights standards,” and they then reiterated their recommendation to the British government that “the right of Mr Assange to personal liberty should be restored.”

Chris and I also discussed how disgusting and disgraceful it is that a racist like Donald Trump is in charge of Guantánamo, 17 years after it opened, and is determined to keep it open, when what is really needed after all this time is a leader capable of understanding the damage it has caused and is still causing to America’s moral standing on every level.

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and that you will share it if you find it useful.

* * * * *

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.

Slow Death at Guantánamo: Why Torture and Open-Ended Arbitrary Detention Are Such Bad Ideas

An undated photo of a prisoner at Guantánamo being escorted by guards (Photo: Chris Hondros / Getty Images).


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

 

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.

Let’s be clear about two things before we start: torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial are never acceptable under any circumstances. Torture is prohibited under the UN Convention Against Torture, introduced in 1985 and ratified by Ronald Reagan, and Article 2.2 of the Convention states, unequivocally, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” 

In addition, indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is unacceptable because there are only two ways in which it is acceptable for countries that claim to respect the rule of law to deprive someone of their liberty: either by trying them for a crime in federal court, or holding them as a prisoner of war until the end of hostiliites, with the protections of the Geneva Conventions. 

After 9/11, however, the US created a network of torture prisons around the world, and invented a third category of prisoner — illegal or unlawful enemy combatants — who had no rights whatsoever. 

As well as it being legally unacceptable to torture people or to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, the use of both of these tactics also raises other complications, as is apparent at Guantánamo, where, as Carol Rosenberg has just reported for the New York Times, the tortured men who can’t be released, and those indefinitely detained, who the US government, under Donald Trump, doesn’t want to release, are aging, and will need a level of care that, to date, the US government has shown no willingness to provide.

In “Guantánamo Bay as Nursing Home: Military Envisions Hospice Care as Terrorism Suspects Age,” Carol Rosenberg, reporting from Guantánamo as she has done relentlessly since the prison opened, began by stating, “Nobody has a dementia diagnosis yet, but the first hip and knee replacements are on the horizon. So are wheelchair ramps, sleep apnea breathing masks, grab bars on cell walls and, perhaps, dialysis. Hospice care is on the agenda.” 

As she added, last year those in charge at the prison were told to “draw up plans to keep the detention center going for another 25 years, through 2043.”

“At that point,” Rosenberg added, “the oldest prisoner, if he lives that long, would be 96.” As she also explained, “Another of the 40 people still held here — the Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, who was confined to a box the size of a coffin while held at a secret CIA site and waterboarded 83 times to break him — would be 72. Like him, a number of the detainees are already living with what their lawyers say are the physical and psychological aftereffects of torture, making their health especially precarious as they head toward old age.”

In a frank discussion wth Rosenberg and other reporters, Rear Adm. John C. Ring, the prison commander, said, “Unless America’s policy changes, at some point we’ll be doing some sort of end of life care here.” He added, “A lot of my guys are pre-diabetic. Am I going to need dialysis down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that. Are we going to do complex cancer care down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that.”

These are clearly pressing questions. As Rosenberg explained, “The prison is envisioning communal nursing home-style and hospice care confinement” for the 40 men still held. As military commanders put it, prisoners already “suffer typical middle-age conditions: high blood pressure and cholesterol, joint pain, diabetes and, lately, sleep apnea.” However, the appropriate response is not a straightforward matter. As Rosenberg described it, “the military is grappling with an array of questions about how much medical care the prisoners should receive, how it should be delivered and how much Congress will provide to pay for it.”

When military personnel fall ill, and have “medical needs that the small base hospital cannot provide, like an MRI,” they are flown to the nearest major military hospital, in Jacksonville, Florida, 822 miles away. Unhelpful laws passed since 9/11, however, prevent the military from taking Guantánamo prisoners to the US for any reason.

As a result, prisoners with non-routine medical needs have had to have expensive visits to Guantánamo arranged. As Rosenberg explained, “Cardiologists have for more than a decade come to consult on some prisoners’ cases. Other specialists have made regular visits to do colonoscopies and examine orthopedic injuries. A prosthetist comes for those with long-healed battlefield amputations.”

For now, Rosenberg was told, “no prisoner has cancer and anybody using a wheelchair can get himself in and out of it,” but the future is uncertain. Adm. Ring said the military “had no geriatric or palliative care physicians,” and so he was “sending a team to see how the federal Bureau of Prisons handles sick and dying convicts.”

The prison, Rosenberg explained, “has a revolving medical staff of 140 doctors, nurses, medics and mental health care providers,” who care for the prisoners but “also provide some services to the 1,500 troops assigned to the prison.”

However, there does not appear to be much political willingness to address the issues raised by the prisoners aging. Rosenberg noted that the Pentagon “is seeking $88.5 million to build a small prison with communal hospice care capacity” for the so-called “high-value detainees” — 15 men previously held in CIA black sites, including those allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. To date, however, Congress has “declined to fund it, citing more urgent Defense Department infrastructure needs.”

Rosenberg added that their defense lawyers and medical experts they work with “call them Guantánamo’s sickest,” adding that, although the military would like to attribute their ailments to aging, the reality is that some “are actually the aftermath of CIA torture.”

Marine Maj. James Valentine, who represents Hambali, 55, an Indonesian allegedly responsible for terrorist attacks in south east Asia, “is due for a knee replacement,” with Maj. Valentine explaining that the damage to his knee “directly resulted from his first year of CIA captivity, when he was always shackled at the ankles.” 

More severe is the case of Mustafa al-Hawsawi, 50, one of the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators, who, as Rosenberg described it, “has for years suffered such chronic rectal pain from being sodomized in the CIA prisons that he sits gingerly on a pillow in court, returns to his cell to recline at the first opportunity and fasts frequently to try to limit bowel movements,” according to his lawyer, Walter Ruiz, who added that he has “become dependent on a narcotic painkiller called Tramadol to make it through the day.”

Although Rosenberg stated that it “may strike some people as odd that the military is discussing complicated, expensive medical care” for prisoners, “especially those the Pentagon prosecutor wants sentenced to death,” Dr. Stephen N. Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general, who has consulted on Guantánamo cases since 2008, said that, although it might seem paradoxical, “we don’t let people just die in this country. It violates all of our ethics, our medical ethics.”

A particularly challenging case is that of Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, one of the last prisoners to be brought to Guantánamo, in 2008, who “underwent three spine surgeries in September 2017, the first on his lower back, another on his neck and a third to drain a post-operative hematoma.” In October, however, “a senior officer at Guantánamo’s community hospital declared in an email that the patient’s ‘cervical fusion has failed,’” and “offered three possible options: giving Mr. Hadi a neck brace and hoping for the best; bringing in a special screwdriver from a Navy hospital in Portsmouth, Va., to remove hardware inserted in the patient’s neck in an earlier operation, or transporting him to the Portsmouth hospital for complex surgery.” That last option, however, was “obviously not pursued nor explored further given the legal restrictions,” according to a prison spokesperson.

As Rosenberg further explained, “Court filings show Mr. Hadi has chronic pain and back spasms, for which he is prescribed a variety of painkillers and muscle relaxants. His surgeon has testified that Mr. Hadi may not improve. At a hearing on his case in March, guards brought him to court in a wheelchair; he used a walker to transfer to a cushioned rehabilitation chair.”

She added, “Mr. Hadi, now 58, has a February 2020 trial date. To ensure his attendance, the Pentagon fast-tracked bringing a wheelchair-accessible holding cell to the court compound where legal proceedings take place. It was already on order in anticipation of a population of aging detainees. It is triple the size of the court’s other five holding cells, large enough to hold a hospital bed and, according to a case prosecutor, will have a video monitor so Mr. Hadi can watch a feed of his trial from the bed. It will also have a phone to let him or a lawyer call the courtroom next door, if he has something to say.”

As Rosenberg also explained, “The military has already figured out what to do when a detainee dies because that has happened nine times since 2006.”

I can’t, however, end this article without noting that, on the day Rosenberg’s article was published, Adm. Ring “was abruptly fired for unknown reasons,” as the Guardian explained, adding that a “statement from US Southern Command said the change in leadership was ‘due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command.’” 

The Guardian added that officials “said the decision to relieve Ring of his command was not connected to the interviews he gave on detainees’ health issues, but was the result of a month-long investigation that had been submitted to the head of Southern Command, Adm. Craig Faller, in mid-April,” although whether or not that is true remains to be seen. The timing certainly seems suspicious.

* * * * *

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.

Lewisham Council Still Mired in Controversy Six Months After the Violent Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford

A photo taken during the violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford on October 29, 2018 (Photo: Harriet Vickers).


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.

 

Exactly six months ago, the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, a beautiful community space and environmental asset, which had been occupied for two months by members of the local community (the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign) to prevent its destruction by Lewisham Council for a housing scheme, was violently evicted by bailiffs working for the notoriously aggressive — and, historically, union-busting — company County Enforcement.

The garden was part of the old Tidemill primary school, which closed in 2012 and moved to a new site nearby, and the council’s plans are to hand over the site to the housing association Peabody to build new housing for sale on the old school site, and housing for rent or shared ownership where the garden stood, and where Reginald House, a block of 16 council flats, still stands. 

The garden, sadly, was completely destroyed two months ago, by SDL Services, a tree services company from Gloucestershire, but building work has still not begun, and campaigners are still calling for the scheme to be scrapped, and for a new plan to be created with the local community, which reinstates the garden and saves Reginald House.

In the meantime, the council has not been winning hearts and minds. The eviction, which involved 130 bailiffs, protected by dozens of police, cost over a million pounds, and the council has since spent at least another half a million pounds guarding the empty garden from the local community. After much criticism, County Enforcement were eventually removed from Tidemill, but they remain employed elsewhere in the borough, and, at Tidemill, tens of thousands of pounds a week is still being spent on guards from a new company, whose identity has not been disclosed. 

In addition, the council has spent over a million pounds to have the old Tidemill school site next to the garden guarded 24 hours a day over the last few years, meaning that, in total, the council has spent at least two and a half million pounds at Tidemill with nothing to show for it.

Moreover, although, in March, the council confidently went to Bromley County Court to seek possession of the green next to the garden (which is also intended to be part of the building site), under sweeping legislation that prohibits illegal encampments, and is aimed at the homeless, they failed to recognise that it was actually a protest camp, and that therefore those involved in it — continuing the campaign that involved the occupation of the garden — were able to claim that the camp’s existence should be protected under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. 

A court date has been set for May 23, when the council’s lawyers, and barristers representing the campaign, will present their arguments to the court. 

In the meantime, a number of events have taken place on the green, including the creation of 74 white crosses to commemorate the 74 trees killed in the garden’s destruction, and a pedal-powered screening of short films about the garden. 

Another film screening is taking place this Thursday, May 2, at 7.30 pm, so please come along if you can. It’s part of the New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival, and there’ll be a short introduction from campaigners, and snacks and drinks.

As the campaign continues, it’s also worth bearing in mind that the council remains embroiled in numerous other contentious developments across the borough: to name just a few, Amersham Vale, the former site of Deptford Green school, secretly twinned with Tidemill, where the homes could be built that would spare the Tidemill garden and Reginald House; and Besson Street, another potential replacement for Tidemill, where, instead, the council is entering into a partnership with Grainger plc, one of the country’s biggest companies making private homes for rent, which, shamefully, will involve it, for the first time ever, putting its name to homes at full market rent.

The most shameful recent development, however, is No. 1 Creekside, across Deptford Church Street from Tidemill, and next to the Birds Nest pub, where a private development was recently approved by the council, even though it had been well flagged-up in advance that it involves the destruction of trees by the side of the heavily polluted Deptford Church Street (whose pollution the trees at Tidemill had helped to mitigate until their destruction), and, in particular, that the developers had conceded that people living in the development would need to be advised to keep their windows shut at peak traffic hours, because of the pollution, and also that the development, insultingly, involves ‘poor doors’, separate entrances for owner-occupiers and those renting. 

After these facts were exposed by local journalists, including Crosswhatfelds and the Deptford Dame, the story was picked up on by the mainstream media, including the Guardian, the Times, the Daily Mail, Sky News and the Independent, whose coverage added to the council’s humiliation. 

And finally, as we mark six months since the violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, we’d also like to welcome some new players to the debate about questions relating to the environment, sustainability and social justice in Lewisham — namely, Extinction Rebellion, whose Lewisham branch secured a big boost in membership after the extraordinary central London occupations that began two weeks ago. 

We’re anticipating that they may well want to get involved in some creative campaigning, but for now, as we remember the violence of six months ago, and the council’s subsequent shambolic behaviour, it seems to me that a moment’s silence is appropriate to remember the beautiful green space and social space that was the Tidemill garden, and to reflect on how badly we are served by the councillors — and the unelected officials who actually take the decisions about how the council operates — who have an unaccountable Mayor and Cabinet system, and 100% of the available council seats, even though only around 20% of the registered electorate vote for them.

* * * * *

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.

It’s Eight Years Since WikiLeaks Released the Hugely Important Guantánamo Files, Leaked by Chelsea Manning, On Which I Worked as a Media Partner

The logo for WikiLeaks’ release of the Guantánamo Files on April 25, 2011.


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

 

Exactly eight years ago, on April 25, 2011, I wrote an article entitled, “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners” (posted on my website as WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies), for WikiLeaks, to accompany the first of 765 formerly classified military files on the Guantánamo prisoners — the Guantánamo Files — that the organization began releasing publicly that day. The files primarily revealed the extent to which the supposed evidence at Guantanamo largely consisted of statements made by unreliable witnesses, who told lies about their fellow prisoners, either because they were tortured or otherwise abused, or bribed with the promise of better living conditions.

I was working with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the release of the files, and I had written the introductory article linked to above in just a few hours of turbo-charged activity after midnight on April 25, 2011, as I had received notification from WikiLeaks that the files had also been leaked to the Guardian and the New York Times, who would be publishing them imminently.

WikiLeaks had previously become well-known — notorious, even — through its release, in April 2010, of “Collateral Murder“, a “classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff,” and its further releases, throughout 2010, with the Guardian and the New York Times and other newspapers, of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified US documents — war logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars, and US diplomatic cables from around the world. 

Like the Guantánamo Files, all of these documents had been leaked to them by Chelsea Manning (then Bradley Manning), a lowly intelligence analyst based in Iraq who had become profoundly disillusioned with the way that the US operated, although it should be noted that, on Guantánamo, WikiLeaks had previously managed, via a different source, to secure and publish manuals from the prison detailing its “Standard Operating Procedures,” which were released in November 2007, the year after the organization was founded, and which I discussed here.

To provide some background to my involvement with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of the Guantánamo Files (and please do check out all the media outlets, myself included, who have worked with WikiLeaks over the years), I had been contacted by the organization at the end of March 2011, after I had just been discharged from hospital, where consultants managed to save two of my toes that had gone black after I developed a rare blood disease that announced itself via a blood clot that cut off the blood to two of my toes. 

Painfully, because the worst-affected toe was still gangrenous (although it subsequently healed), I made my way to Norfolk, where Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had been given shelter by Vaughan Smith, the founder of the Frontline Club, a journalists’ club in Paddington, following a brief imprisonment related to rape claims made by two women in Sweden. Assange was on bail, and WikiLeaks’ makeshift HQ, in a grand house in the middle of nowhere, looked exactly like you would imagine a bunch of techno-nerds would look like if they were dropped into the plot of a Hollywood thriller. 

I didn’t develop any kind of bond with Assange, but I found him bright and attentive, and, I suspected, slightly chastened by his experience of prison. Mostly, however, I was fully supportive of the need for the Guantánamo Files to be released, and, after they were made available, via secretive measures, to myself and to all the other media outlets working with WikiLeaks on their release, and I subsequently began researching them, I was in no doubt about their importance, as I discussed in the article I linked to at the top of this article, and as I discussed in subsequent articles (some of which were posted on WikiLeaks’ website), including WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantanamo, WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files and WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo, and also in my million-word analysis of over half the files, which I undertook throughout the rest of 2011 and into 2012.

As a result, when we suddenly had to go public wth the files on April 25, 2011, I was able to brief the reporters on the significance of the files when we all met, by Victoria station, in the headquarters of the right-wing Daily Telegraph, the somewhat unlikely new British outlet for WikiLeaks, after both the Guardian and the New York Times had severed their relationship with him. 

At that meeting were representatives of all the other media outlets working on the release of the files — the Washington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, El Pais, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Aftonbladet, La Repubblica and L’Espresso — and afterwards, when the Telegraph took us to lunch, I remember getting some insight into Assange’s frame of mind after the Telegraph‘s representatives, who were excited to have taken over from the Guardian as sponsors of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, were trying to arrange how to get him there to speak, even though he had another appointment elsewhere on the day in question. They suggested that they could hire a helicopter for him, to which he replied that his lawyers had told him to avoid helicopters, because they were the easiest form of transport to sabotage.

Within a week of the files being published, the US government conveniently located and killed Osama bin Laden, an act of Wild West vengeance that both removed the possibility of him ever being interrogated (to finally, perhaps, learn the truth that the nobodies at Guantánamo hadn’t been able to reveal through torture and abuse, because they knew nothing), and also silenced any further discussion of the Guantánamo files. In fact, Republicans and the right-wing media then concocted a false narrative that it was torture at Guantánamo that had led to the US locating bin Laden when that was simply not true.    

Today’s anniversary is significant because Guantánamo is still open, and the files still reveal, to an unprecedented degree, the lies, extracted through torture and abuse, that form the sickeningly groundless basis under which 779 men — mostly not connected in any meaningful manner with either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban — were deprived of their liberty in an experimental and illegal prison in which they were held without charge or trial neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, but as “illegal enemy combatants” — a role invented by the US post-9/11 — with no fundamental rights whatsoever as human beings, a situation that, alarmingly, is still fundamentally true for the 40 men still held.

Free Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning!

Today’s anniversary is also significant, of course, because both Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are currently imprisoned as the US tries to work out if it can prosecute Assange. 

The Justice Department under Donald Trump has revived a Grand Jury investigation of Assange, even though WikiLeaks contentiously released emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, helping Trump to victory, and even though, as the Intercept revealed last year, Assange had expressed a preference for a Republican victory, explaining, essentially, that there would be better resistance from Democrats, liberals and the liberal media with Trump in charge, whereas, under Clinton, there would be inadequate opposition to the Democrats’ worst instincts, 

Despite having been imprisoned for seven years prior to and after her 2012-13 court-martial, at which she received a 35-year sentence that President Obama commuted just before he left office in January 2017, Chelsea Manning was imprisoned again, on March 8 this year, in the women’s wing of the federal detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, for contempt of court because she won’t cooperate with the Grand Jury investigation, and on Monday the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied her request for bail.

Julian Assange, meanwhile, is currently being held in London’s maximum-security Belmarsh prison, having — evidently at the request of the US — been thrown out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, where he had successfully sought asylum nearly seven years ago, under a more sympathetic Ecuadorian president, after breaching his bail.

From Belmarsh he is trying to find ways to fight his planned extradition to the US, although shamefully, since his imprisonment two weeks ago he has not yet been allowed to meet with his lawyers, who are only finally being allowed to meet with him tomorrow.

As we remember the publication of the Guantánamo files today, it remains hugely important that we also continue to call for Chelsea Manning to be freed, and for the British government to refuse to extradite Julian Assange to the US. As I explained after his arrest, in my article, Defend Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: Press Freedom Depends On It:

The arrest of Julian Assange ought to be of great concern to anyone who values the ability of the media, in Western countries that claim to respect the freedom of the press, to publish information about the wrongdoing of Western governments that they would rather keep hidden.

Those who leak information, like Chelsea Manning, need protection, and so do those in the media who make it publicly available; Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as much as those who worked with them on the release of documents — the New York Times and the Guardian, for example

If the US succeeds in taking down Julian Assange, no journalists, no newspapers, no broadcasters will be safe, and we could, genuinely, see the end of press freedom, with all the ramifications that would have for our ability, in the West, to challenge what, otherwise, might well be an alarming and overbearing authoritarianism on the part of our governments.

* * * * *

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.

Extinction Rebellion’s Urgent Environmental Protest Breaks New Ground While Drawing on the Occupy, Anti-Globalisation and Road Protest Movements

Climate emergency: Extinction Rebellion campaigners – mainly featuring an impressive samba band – marching from the camp at Marble Arch to the Oxford Circus occupation today, April 18, 2019. Most of Oxford Street was closed to traffic, like so many roads in central London, including Waterloo Bridge (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.

 

Well, this is getting interesting. On Monday, when the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion began its occupation of five sites in central London — Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus and Marble Arch — I wasn’t sure that the ongoing intention of crashing the system through mass arrests, and waking people up to the need for change by disrupting their lives was going to work. 

I’d taken an interest when Extinction Rebellion started in October — although I was still largely preoccupied by the occupation (and subsequent eviction) of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford — but I’d ended up thinking that, although they had secured significant media coverage, which was very helpful, and their ‘branding’ was extremely striking, this wasn’t going to be enough. 

I was somewhat heartened when, in related actions, school kids got involved in climate strikes, and I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more on that front, but on Monday I couldn’t see how Extinction Rebellion’s latest coordinated protests were going to work. The police seemed, for the most part, to be trying not to give the protestors what they wanted — mass arrests — and although the crowds I encountered at Parliament Square and Oxford Circus reminded me of aspects of social movements of the past — Reclaim the Streets and the road protest movement from the ’90s, the anti-globalisation movement of the late ’90s and early 2000s, and 2011’s Occupy movement — I couldn’t see how the movement was going to be able to take the next step, and to build the momentum necessary for significant change.

That may still be the case, but I saw something yesterday and today that gave me hope that a genuine disruption to the system is possible. 

It was stunningly hot yesterday, and to get to the Waterloo Bridge occupation, which I wanted to witness, I had cycled through a smog-shrouded London, making my way from my home in Lewisham, in south east London, over Southwark Bridge, through the City with its absurd and endlessly greedy building projects, and passing through Temple, where, with a few noble exceptions, lawyers have spent centuries protecting the wealthy, and no one has given a damn about the environment.

All this changed as I reached Waterloo Bridge, normally hideously choked with heavy traffic, which was empty of all but cyclists and relieved pedestrians. As I approached the Waterloo end, there was a stage, various stalls providing food and information, people happily lounging around, and trees brought to the bridge by campaigners — and it wasn’t lost on anyone that, with no expenditure whatsoever, we now had a garden bridge without the insane amounts of money squandered on the ludicrous garden bridge vanity project that Boris Johnson had thrown his weight behind during his eight execrable years as London’s Mayor.

On Waterloo Bridge, everyone realised how pleasant London would be if there was, suddenly and permanently, signficantly less traffic. And it has been the same elsewhere in London as so many major roads have been shut down: most of Regent Street, much of Oxford Street, Marble Arch, Parliament Square.

I hope you have the time to check out this little video I took, of the amazing vibe on the bridge. I don’t know who these women performers were, but they had great spirit and passion, and the dancers’ joy was indicative of the spirit of resistance that is building up.

Noticeably, the police have been unable to stop the protests. They tried and failed on Monday night, arresting many people, but didn’t manage to clear the bridge, and yesterday afternoon, when I was there, their efforts were noticeably half-hearted, as they arrested no more than around ten people, a token gesture rather than anything more significant. 

Ironies abound. Here is a protest movement whose members want to be arrested, but, in response, find the police refusing to give them what they want, meaning that their protest sites have actually become full-blown occupation sites instead. Then, it transpires, the police, short of resources, can’t deal with the numbers involved in the occupations, and, even if they had the resources, couldn’t really justify mass arrests of people who are pretty scrupulously well-behaved, include a wide cross-section of society, and do not involve alcohol or drug use, historically an easy way for situations involving potential conflict to get out of hand.

Even if the bridge is cleared, however, I can’t see Extinction Rebellion fading away. The demand for an urgent and immediate end to the ruinous status quo of the arrogant, amnesiac and thoroughly self-centred culture of the countries of the West, and their capitals, including, of course, London, remains as pertinent as it was last October, when Extinction Rebellion launched, with three demands: for the government to “tell the truth about the climate and wider ecological emergency, reverse inconsistent policies and work alongside the media to communicate with citizens”, for the government to “enact legally binding policy measures to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025 and to reduce consumption levels”, and for a “national Citizens’ assembly to oversee the changes, as part of creating a democracy fit for purpose.”

After my skepticism on Monday about the possibility of success for the campaign via its aims of mass arrest and disruption, yesterday, and again today, I felt genuine people power, and change in the air — and I do hope you’ll also consider getting involved.

If you’re in London, or can get to London, I urge you to come on down. The authorities don’t know what to do with such a large and peaceful gathering, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to meet like-minded people from all walks of life, who all share a huge concern for the environment, and with changing the way our broken, greed-driven materialistic society currently operates. This is, as everyone involved keeps explaining, a climate emergency that won’t go away, and that requires as many of us as possible to get involved.

How did we get here?

To put things in perspective, this has been a long time coming. In just four days’ time (on April 22), it will be 49 years since the first Earth Day, which “brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favour of environmental reform.” 

By the time I reached adolescence, green activism led to extraordinary protests; primarily, the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common in Berkshire, a permanent camp opposed to proposals to host US-controlled Cruise missiles on UK soil, which also provided an opportunity for a radical women’s movement to begin to be heard.

Another source of dissent was the pro-green, anti-nuclear activities of the free festival movement, a collection of green activists, anarchists and travellers who had taken to the road to escape the grinding poverty and unemployment of Thatcher’s Britain in old coaches and trucks, and who held protests/free festivals at green targets like power stations, and who also set up another permanent protest camp against a second proposed Cruise missile base at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire.

Molesworth was evicted on February 6, 1985 by 1,500 troops, the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, symbolically led by the defense secretary Michael Heseltine. The travellers were subsequently harried from site to site across southern England until a final showdown took place on June 1, 1985, at the Battle of the Beanfield, when 1,300 police from six counties and the MOD violently decommissioned the convoy, a story explained in detail in my book The Battle of the Beanfield. The convoy was en route to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic jamboree, which, in its later years, became the size of a town, and occupied the fields opposite Stonehenge for the whole of June.

After the Beanfield, Thatcher’s hopes that she had crushed counter-cultural dissent were revealed as unfounded when two new and unexpected developments took place: the Ecstasy-fuelled rave scene, and the road protest movement, a direct response to the clampdown on travellers, which located direct action not through travel and guerrilla-style occupations of land, but through protestors rooting themselves to one spot, defending landscapes threatened by unnecessary road developments.  

The road protest movement, which was extraordinary in its scope, in turn spawned Reclaim the Streets, which was clearly a big influence on Extinction Rebellion, beginning with the occupation of Camden High Street, via two cars symbolically crashing into one another, and spreading around the world, along the way involving other significant occupations like the takeover of the M41 link road by Shepherd’s Bush, which was also another big influence on Extinction Rebellion.

The road protests then fed into the anti-globalisation movement, which started on June 18, 1999, with the Carnival Against Capital (J18) in various locations, including the City of London, and was timed to coincide with the 25th G8 Summit in Cologne. 

Huge anti-globalisation protests continued, but 2001 was a bleak year. In July, in Genoa, Italy, police killed an anti-globalisation protestor, and in September, America was attacked. In the “war on terror” that has followed, Islamophobia has increased, and civil liberties curtailed. In 2003, the largest protests the world has ever seen — against the illegal invasion of Iraq — took place, but millions who objected were brushed aside like a single fly.

Then came the banker-led global economic crash of 2008, followed, particularly in the UK, by a cynical “age of austerity” designed to cut the state provision of all services, with savage outcomes for the poor. Student protests followed, and in September 2011 the Occupy movement began on Wall Street, the financial centre of New York, which spread around the world, and also clearly provided inspiration for Extinction Rebellion.

St. Paul’s Cathedral was the venue in London where a tent city took root, lasting for several months. Occupy set up non-hierarchical decision-making, and took protest into new territory. Because getting together and marching and then going home wasn’t enough (perhaps demonstrated most vividly following the Iraq war protests), the new movement realised that taking root in the landscape, asking questions and refusing to go home was a good start for a new call for radical change.

It’s taken until now for the next stage in this long story to begin, and it has taken an impending catastrophe to bring it about — the already-unfolding environmental collapse of life on earth, the sixth great Extinction in the planet’s history. 

Unlike all the movements to date, this one is highly focused — in crashing the existing system, because it is incapable of stopping itself, and because we have run out of time. I do hope you can get involved.

* * * * *

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.

Defend Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: Press Freedom Depends On It

Julian Assange, photographed after his arrest at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Thursday April 10, 2019 (Photo: Henry Nicholls/Reuters).


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

 

Last week, when Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after the Ecuadorian government withdrew the asylum it had granted to him after he sought shelter there in 2012, I was about to set off on a long weekend away, without computer access, and I only had time to write a few brief paragraphs about the significance of his case on Facebook.

I noted that his arrest “ought to be of great concern to anyone who values the ability of the media, in Western countries that claim to respect the freedom of the press, to publish information about the wrongdoing of Western governments that they would rather keep hidden.” 

I also explained, “Those who leak information, like Chelsea Manning” — who leaked hundreds of thousands of pages of classified US government documents to WikiLeaks, and is now imprisoned because of her refusal to testify in a Grand Jury case against WikiLeaks — “need protection, and so do those in the media who make it publicly available; Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as much as those who worked with them on the release of documents — the New York Times and the Guardian, for example.”

I added that I had worked with WikiLeaks on the release of the Guantánamo files in April 2011, along with journalists from the Washington Post, McClatchy, the Daily Telegraph and numerous newspapers throughout Europe, and pointed out, along wth posting a link to the page on WikiLeaks’ website showing all the media outlets (myself included) who have worked with WikiLeaks over the years, that “everyone who worked with WikiLeaks needs to make sure that they all fight as tenaciously as possible to prevent Julian Assange’s extradition to the US.” 

Those files — classified US military files from Guantánamo — were extremely helpful, as they revealed the extent to which the so-called evidence against prisoners consisted of unreliable statements made by their fellow prisoners, who were named in the files, but had never been named in any of the other Guantánamo-related documents that the US government had been forced to release over the years via Freedom of Information legislation. My unfinished, million-word assessment of those files is here.

I concluded my Facebook post by stating, “If the US succeeds in taking down Julian Assange, no journalists, no newspapers, no broadcasters will be safe, and we could, genuinely, see the end of press freedom, with all the ramifications that would have for our ability, in the West, to challenge what, otherwise, might well be an alarming and overbearing authoritarianism on the part of our governments.”

The indictment

Since the initial news of Assange’s arrest, the intentions behind it have become clearer. The US Justice Department has unsealed an indictment against him, which, as Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted in an article for the Guardian, includes just “one count of ‘conspiracy’ to violate a computer crime law when he allegedly offered whistleblower Chelsea Manning help in cracking a password in 2010.” As Timm also explained, “The indictment does not allege they ever did crack the password, nor do they allege it helped Assange get any documents from Manning.”

As Jameel Jaffer and Ben Wizner pointed out for Just Security, “Hacking government databases isn’t protected by the First Amendment, and it isn’t a legitimate part of investigative journalism. But the indictment is troubling nonetheless. It characterizes as ‘part of’ a criminal conspiracy journalistic activities that are not just lawful but essential to press freedom.”

These commentators — and many others — were rightfully alarmed that, as Trevor Timm put it, it was clear that the Justice Department was “using the conspiracy charge as a pretext to target Assange and potentially criminalize important and common journalistic practices in newsgathering at the same time”; primarily, as Timm described it, “using encryption and protecting the anonymity of sources”, which, as he also noted, are “are virtually requirements in an age where leak investigations are common.”

The fear, therefore, is that the single charge to hook Assange will be followed by more charges if he ends up on US soil — charges perhaps involving espionage. As Jameel Jaffer and Ben Wizner explained, “While Assange wasn’t charged with violating the Espionage Act — the World War I-era law that criminalizes unauthorized dissemination of ‘national defense information’ — the indictment states that the purpose of the conspiracy for which he was charged was to violate the Espionage Act. This raises the question whether this indictment is just an opening salvo aimed at easing the path for extradition, with more substantial charges to be added later.” Furthering these suspicions, an affidavit was unsealed on Monday providing more detailed information about the case against Assange.

For the Guardian, Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, weighed in against mainstream journalists dangerously suggesting that Assange’s work — and that of WikiLeaks — isn’t journalism, but “activism.” He drew from a column for CNN by Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer, correspondent and world affairs columnist, who as CNN put it, “is a frequent opinion contributor to CNN and the Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review.” 

Ghitis wrote that Assange “is not a journalist and therefore not entitled to the protections that the law – and democracy – demand for legitimate journalists”. As Robinson explained, “This is a dangerous position. Generally, the law doesn’t actually distinguish between ‘journalists’ and ‘non-journalists’, giving everyone the same protections. This is for good reason: if such a distinction becomes legally relevant, it means the government is empowered to decide who the True Journalists are.”

As Robinson also reminded readers, “The Obama administration fished for years to find a charge that would stick to Assange, but ultimately couldn’t find a way of going after him that wouldn’t also criminalize ordinary acts of journalism. Donald Trump’s government is less scrupulous.”

Or, as Trevor Timm put it, “Despite Barack Obama’s extremely disappointing record on press freedom, his justice department ultimately ended up making the right call when they decided that it was too dangerous to prosecute WikiLeaks without putting news organizations such as the New York Times and the Guardian at risk.”

Legitimate criticism of Assange

None of the reasons given above for defending Julian Assange against US overreach is meant to defend him against other complaints. He sought asylum from Ecuador in 2012 to avoid facing potential extradition to Sweden to face rape and sexual assault charges. If there is still a case to answer in Sweden, he should be sent there to face those charges. 

He also alienated numerous former supporters during the 2016 US Presidential Election through leaks designed to damage Hillary Clinton, which can only have ended up helping Donald Trump.

It is also true that, over the years, Assange repeatedly showed a disturbing refusal to contemplate censoring anything in the documents he released. On Sunday, the Observer published an editorial describing hm as having “acted immorally and irresponsibly,” when WikiLeaks “dumped online thousands of unredacted secret diplomatic cables, potentially exposing thousands of individuals named in the documents to grave danger.” 

Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare also noted how Nick Davies of the Guardian, who worked with Assange on the release of the Afghan and Iraq war logs in 2010, until the relationship between the Guardian and Assange soured, “describe[d] Assange’s cavalier response to journalists’ concerns that releasing certain information could endanger the lives of Afghan civilians who had provided information to coalition forces.” Jurecic noted how Davies told Alex Gibney, who directed a film about Assange, that the WikiLeaks founder had said that “if an Afghan civilian helps coalition forces he deserves to die.”

I also witnessed this simplistic insistence that all information must be free in relation to the Guantánamo files, and the threat to a former prisoner’s life if his entire file was published unredacted, and I recall his inflexibility and the difficulty of reasoning with him.

Yet again, however, while these stories and others confirm a difficult naivety and intransigence regarding transparency, as well as a personality that regularly comes into conflict with others, none of it fundamentally detracts from Assange’s right not to be dismissed as a journalist and treated as some sort of terrorist, as Donald Trump wants. As Trevor Timm explained in his article, although “Assange is so disliked in journalism and political circles that many reporters and liberal politicians were publicly cheering” when the Trump administration released its indictment of him, this is a trap, “exactly what the Trump administration is hoping for, as the Department of Justice (DoJ) moves forward with its next dangerous step in its war on journalism and press freedom.”

As Timm proceeds to explain, “What’s the most effective way to curtail the rights of all people? First go after the unpopular; the person who may be despised in society and will have very few defenders. Assange fits this profile to a T. Once there is law on the books that says ‘this aspect of journalism is illegal’, it becomes much easier for the justice department to bring other cases against more mainstream government critics down the road, and much harder for judges to immediately dismiss them.”

His conclusion? “Instead of thinking, ‘I hate Julian Assange, so I’m glad he’s going to be punished,’ ask yourself this: do you trust Trump’s justice department to protect press freedom?”

If your answer isn’t no, you should really ask why it is that you should trust a government department that already had an unacceptable history of pursuing whistleblowers under Barack Obama, long before Trump shuffled into view, with his outrageous beliefs about journalism he doesn’t like. As Timm puts it, “Donald Trump has been furious with leakers and the news organizations that publish them ever since he took office. He complains about it constantly in his Twitter tirades. He has repeatedly directed the justice department to stop leaks, and he even asked former FBI director James Comey if he can put journalists in jail.” 

A president who thinks that way really shouldn’t be indulged.

* * * * *

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.

It’s 700 Days Since I Started Posting Daily Photos From My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

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


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

Check out all the photos here!

700 days ago, on May 11, 2017, I began posting a photo a day on a new Facebook page I’d set up, called ‘The State of London.’ It was five years to the day since I’d consciously embarked on a project that was very ambitious — or perhaps slightly unhinged would be a better description: to take photos of the whole of London by bike.

My plan was to visit all 120 postcodes — those beginning with EC, WC, E, SE, SW, W, NW and N — as well some of the outer boroughs, although when I started I had no concept of how big London is, and it took me until September 2014 to visit all 120 — and I still have only visited some of those furthest from my home in south east London on a few occasions.

Greater London covers 607 square miles; in other words, it is about 25 miles across from north to south and from east to west. It had a population of 8,174,000 at the 2011 census, divided amongst 32 boroughs, and, although it has only a small resident population, the City of London, which, rather shockingly, is in most ways actually an autonomous state.

I began my project in the run-up to the Olympic Games, that horrible excuse for nationalist frenzy that is always insanely expensive, and, moreover, also always brings with it social cleansing, increased authoritarianism, and a permanent hike in the values of land and property. 

Some of this was laid out for all to see — in the cleansing of the Lea valley, the transformation of Stratford into a new city, and the post-Olympics creation of a new postcode for the Olympic Park — but the permanent hike in land prices was harder to envisage. After all, it was less than four years since the global economic crash of 2008, which had hit the UK hard, and the Tories, who took power in 2010, had then hit the country with a cynical “age of austerity” that involved massive cuts to state expenditure. 

This is a policy that never works, as it stifles demand, but the Tories’ trick was to simultaneously strangle the country while creating massive opportunities for predatory foreign corporate investors, hedge funds and other thinly disguised criminal enterprises — shorn of the opportunities for profiteering that had collapsed in the 2008 crash — to turn back to land and property for profits, and to begin buying up as much of London as they could, and then to encourage other investors to buy into the high-rise speculative housing developments built on that land, which have been rising up everywhere since my project began.

In those pre-Olympic days when my project began, I got to know London better than I would have otherwise, because bikes were banned on all trains — and not, as was normal, only on rush hour trains. The Olympics coloured everything, and it wasn’t until afterwards that it started to become apparent that post-Olympics London, with the establishment basking in the country’s enviable haul of gold medals, was able to advertise itself as open for business in the most predatory way.

At the same time, the enthusiasm for land wasn’t confined to empty sites, or to former industrial sites. Council estates, marked for destruction since the early days of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, were also increasingly targeted, for developments generally involving a mix of private developers and so-called social housing providers, the housing associations that had generally started off as charities providing housing for the poor, but had now been co-opted by the government and were also working with the same hungry foreign corporate investors. 

In my nearly seven years of cycling around London taking photos — tens of thousands, of which the last 700 days have just scratched the surface — I have repeatedly chronicled the priapic towers rising up everywhere, as well as lamenting the cynical loss of council estates, and warning that no one on social housing is safe, as the Grenfell Tower fire, in June 2017, showed with such awful clarity, revealing that dispossession is just one aspect of being considered second class, or even sub-human, with entirely preventable deaths as part of the state’s arsenal of contempt. 

To me these are the most significant aspects of what it has meant to try to chronicle London in photos over the last seven years, but a glance through my photos shows that I can find interest almost anywhere in London’s 607 square miles. As well as chronicling the city’s fabric, I also try to present a cross-section of its wonderful geology and nature — the Thames and its other rivers, canals and former docks, its hills, its parks — as well as the changing seasons, which enthral me. Since I started this project, I have, as I have mentioned before, learned (remembered) that we are not meant to be indoors all the time, that we are animals who are supposed to spend significant amounts of time outdoors. Along with this I have also learned — very viscerally on occasion — that we are also waterproof and weatherproof, and that we should go out in all kinds of weather, not just on sunny days.

To everyone following me, thank you for recognising this, and for your interest not just in the most obvious landmarks, photographed in the best possible light. I love the sun, of course (I love nothing more than the hottest days we get in summer, just as I also adore the strong low light of bright winter days), but I also appreciate photographing the fabric of the city in all weather, just as I also enjoy finding things worth seeing and reflecting on where the guide books never send you.

Every time I write about ‘The State of London’, I promise to look into publishing a book, and putting on an exhibition, neither of which have happened yet, for which I apologise, but I continue to juggle my Guantánamo work, my housing activism, my band, and, of course, the daily bike rides that are still ongoing. If you can help with any of my dreams, do get in touch.

I’ll leave you, for now, with a promise to post, as soon as possible, photos from the three postcodes I’ve not yet posted photos from — W7, W14 and SW20. Logic dictates that I should, to date, have posted around six photos from each postcode, but, alas, it has not been possible to visit everywhere equally, and there is a noticeable bias towards the south east, where I live, parts of east and south west London (also within easy reach) and the centre of London (the City, the West End, and the surrounding postcodes of E1, SE1, SW1, W1, NW1 and N1). For anyone keeping count, the Top Ten postcodes I’ve posted photos from in the last 700 days are:

Postcode   Number of photos

E14             34
W1              28
SE8             27
E1               25
SE10           24
SW1            23
SE1             22
SE16           19
E16             17
N1               17

* * * * *

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.

How the US Fell for Chinese Lies Regarding the Uighurs at Guantánamo, and Why the Uighurs Need Our Support

An undated photo of supporters of China’s oppressed Uighur people protesting outside the White House about the imprisonment of Uighurs at Guantánamo. The last of the prison’s Uighurs were freed in 2013, but nowadays the Uighurs are suffering from particularly harsh repression from the Chinese government, with at least a million Uighurs arbitrarily imprisoned in internment camps (Photo: futureatlas.com/flickr).


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.

 

Thanks to the Atlantic, and Richard Bernstein, former foreign correspondent for Time and the New York Times, for revisiting the story of Guantánamo’s Uighurs, the ethnic group in the prison who were most transparently unconnected to the anti-American activities of Al-Qaeda.

The timing of Bernstein’s article, ‘When China Convinced the U.S. That Uighurs Were Waging Jihad,’ is evidently intended — and with good reason — to highlight the terrible situation faced by the UIghurs, a Turkic group from Xinjiang province in north western China, who are currently facing the harshest clampdown by the Chinese government in a long history of oppression, with at least a million Uighurs “arbitrarily detained in internment camps in Xinjiang, where they are forced to undergo political indoctrination,” as the Guardian explained in November 2018, after the United Nations’ Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (the first to study China since 2013) had condemned China for its deteriorating human rights record. As Vox explained, Western governments “had the harshest words for China,” with the US chargé d’affaires Mark Cassayre demanding that China “abolish all forms of arbitrary detention” for Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, and calling on the government to  “release the ‘possibly millions’ of individuals detained there.”

Bernstein’s article focuses on how the Bush administration — shamefully — reversed its opinion about the Chinese government’s oppression of the Uighurs in 2002, to justify its imprisonment of 22 Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, some of whom spent a total of 12 years in US custody, despite it having been obvious to anyone actually paying attention to their cases that, as many of the Uighurs themselves explained, they had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had no animosity whatsoever towards the US.

As Bernstein describes it, while both the US and China knew before 9/11 that Uighur discontent was a local problem, afterwards the Chinese government took advantage of the US’s “global terror” rhetoric to, instead, portray Uighur resistance as being “of a piece with al-Qaeda-style terrorism,” and to portray the separatist group ETIM (the East Turkestan Islamic Movement) as an affiliate of al-Qaeda, even though that claim is disputed.

Even after 9/11, as Bernstein explains, State Department officials connected to counter-terrorism efforts refused to accept efforts by the Chinese government to describe ETIM as terrorists, and at Guantánamo, after the 22 Uighurs arrived at the prison, “reports filed by interrogators found most of them not to be ‘enemy combatants,’ and they were deemed eligible for release.” Bernstein also notes how Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, the prison’s commander in 2002, who famously asked commanders in Afghanistan to stop sending him “Mickey Mouse” detainees, was ashamed of the US treatment of the Uighurs.

However, as Bernstein also explains, “For reasons that have never been made clear,” the Uighurs “were not released — very likely, this was initially because there was no place to release them to, then because, except for a small number of them, the Bush Administration simply refused to let them go.” It was certainly true that it was difficult finding new homes for the Uighurs, because, whenever it was possible, the Chinese government threatened and exerted pressure on countries that offered to help, but in fact the Bush administration only released five Uighurs to Albania in May 2006 to avert what officials thought would be a court ruling against them, and they seem, in general, to have had no interest whatsoever in releasing any of the Uighurs. Instead, Bush administration officials actively left the problem of their release to Barack Obama, despite the Uighurs finally winning a resounding court victory via a habeas corpus petition in October 2008.

What was also significant, of course, which is at the heart of Bernstein’s article, was the cynical decision by Bush administration officials to cosy up to the Chinese government, and to seek to justify the ongoing imprisonment of the Uighurs, by slavishly adopting the Chinese government’s descriptions of ETIM, so that, for example, the assessment of one of the Uighurs, Abu Bakker Qassim, was revised so that he was described as “a probable member” of ETIM, which was, in turn, described as “a Uighur separatist organization dedicated to the creation of a Uighur Islamic homeland in China, through armed insurrection and terrorism.” Adding to this unprincipled change of policy, towards the end of 2002 the State Department dutifully bowed to pressure and designated ETIM as a terrorist organization.

Bernstein’s article concludes with the Obama administration’s successful efforts to release the Uighurs, in a variety of countries between 2009 and 2013 (Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland, El Salvador and Slovakia), and he also mentions what, on Guantánamo, was one of Obama’s weakest moments, when, in response to criticism from Republicans Frank Wolf and Newt Gingrich — themselves parroting Chinese government propaganda — he dropped at the last minute a plan that would have seen some of the Uighurs brought to live in Virginia. This was a move that would have done more than anything to puncture the still-prevalent lies of the Bush administration — that those held at Guantánamo were the “worst of the worst,” the most vile and violent terrorists imaginable — and on this point we continue to pay for Obama’s cowardice.

Bernstein also takes the time to mention that, “even now,” many of the released Uighurs “try to keep their whereabouts a secret,” something that I know from having kept an eye on their stories since the last of them were released at the end of 2013. 

For anyone interested, check out, in particular, this Globe and Mail article by Nathan Vanderklippe from July 2015 about the six men who accepted a new life on the remote Pacific island of Palau in October 2009, and whose government, it was revealed by Vanderklippe, received $93,333 for each man. Some managed to bring their wives and children, one of whom, a toddler, died after falling off a balcony. Eventually the men moved on, and as Vanderklippe explained, “The last man, a gregarious dreamer named Davut Abdurahim, left earlier this year.” However, as he added, “Where the six men and their families went is a secret kept even from some of the country’s most senior leaders.”

Below is a cross-post of Richard Bernstein’s article, and I hope you have time to read it.

When China Convinced the U.S. That Uighurs Were Waging Jihad

By Richard Bernstein, The Atlantic, March 19, 2019

In the chaos surrounding America’s War on Terror, Washington fell for Beijing’s ruse that the embattled Muslim minority posed a threat to the West.

They arrived at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — where, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, the “worst of the worst” would be held — a few months after 9/11, directly from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. There were 22 of them, all men, all of them Muslim, bearded, ranging in age from their early 20s to their mid-40s. Five had been captured by American forces following a battle in northern Afghanistan, and the other 17 were seized by police in Pakistan.

But there was something different about these detainees: All were members of China’s Uighur minority, a Turkic group chafing under Beijing’s tight control of their ancestral home in Xinjiang, northwest China. Uighurs had not been known to have harbored anti-American sentiments, much less to have participated in terrorist attacks against Western targets. None of these men, for example, appeared to have fought in any of the past jihadist battlegrounds — not in Afghanistan itself during the Soviet invasion, nor in Bosnia or Chechnya. And yet, despite the lack of evidence against them, the Bush administration for years resisted legal efforts to free these Uighur prisoners, some of them remaining among “the worst of the worst” for 12 years, until, finally, they were released.

The Uighur community is now in the news again, albeit in a very different way — as victims of what is widely regarded as China’s worst human-rights violation since the days of Mao Zedong. Reports filtering out of the country over the past few months indicate that a million or more Uighurs have been locked up in “transformation through education centers,” which are basically concentration camps constructed in various parts of Xinjiang. Detaining the Uighurs is part of China’s long-term effort, stretching back decades, to impose its will on the region and combat what it calls “Uighur terrorism.”

The United States today is not buying that justification, with senior Trump-administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, publicly criticizing Beijing for its oppression of the Uighurs. Most recently, Pompeo has accused China of “being in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.” The two countries are engaged in a series of disputes, ranging from President Donald Trump’s frustrations over trade to American accusations that Beijing allows the theft of American intellectual property. But those 22 Uighurs who were held at Guantánamo Bay serve as a reminder of a period when the United States viewed China less as a rising foe and more of a cooperative partner in trade and diplomacy, what analysts called a “responsible stakeholder” — and a moment in time when the U.S. government was complicit in the Uighur repression.

By the time the 22 Uighurs were first taken into American custody in late 2001, there had been a number of Uighur attacks against ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang, including bus and market bombings. (There have been more such attacks since, some of them very bloody.) Western scholars of Xinjiang, however, attributed these attacks to mounting Uighur frustration over the mass migration of Han Chinese into their traditional homeland, as well as severe Chinese repression of Uighur discontent, including peacefully expressed frustration. China itself for a long time treated its Uighur problem as a local matter, not a product of international jihadism fomented abroad. But after 9/11, the Chinese government began to portray Uighur violence — indeed, Uighur dissent in general — as of a piece with al-Qaeda-style terrorism, an effort widely seen by human rights advocates and others as a way of justifying its repression. China blamed a group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) for troubles in Xinjiang, portraying it as an affiliate of al-Qaeda, a claim which has been debated.

For a while, the U.S. declined to accept China’s view of the group. Two months after 9/11, Francis X. Taylor, the coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, went to Beijing to further what he called at the time “a robust, multifaceted, and evolving partnership.” Asked by journalists about ETIM, though, Taylor replied that the problems in Xinjiang stemmed from local grievances and could not be dealt with by using “counterterrorism methods.” In March 2002, an assistant secretary of state, Lorne Craner, said while introducing the State Department’s annual human-rights report that China had “chosen to label all of those who advocate greater freedom in [Xinjiang], near as I can tell, as terrorists. And we don’t think that’s correct.” That rhetoric would not last.

In their first meetings with American interrogators in Afghanistan, before their shipment to Guantánamo, the Uighur prisoners made no effort to hide what was later deemed an incriminating fact about them: Later court documents, as well as interviews conducted after their release, show that some of the 17 who had been arrested in Pakistan said that they had spent time in a village in Afghanistan near the Tora Bora mountains, a region that later became well known as Osama bin Laden’s initial place of refuge. They said that they had gotten training on small arms and Kalashnikov rifles while they were there, and acknowledged meeting a man named Hasan Mahsum, who founded ETIM.

Some of the prisoners readily acknowledged in that initial questioning a hatred for China because of its oppressive policies in Xinjiang, but said that they felt no animus toward the United States. Others said that they were merely members of the Uighur diaspora, who can be found in many of the countries of central Asia — there are estimated to be about 300,000 of them in Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries. One of the men making that claim, Abu Bekir Qasim [aka Abu Bakker Qassim], a 45-year-old from the northern Xinjiang town of Ghulja, told me in a Skype interview that he left the province in 2000, going first to Kyrgyzstan before heading to Pakistan, from which, like many Uighur exiles, he hoped to make his way to Turkey. Upon arriving in Pakistan, Qasim learned that he would have to wait in the country for at least two months to get a visa to travel through Iran, and Pakistan was expensive. “Many Uighur refugees told me about a village in Afghanistan where you don’t have to pay for lodging or food and can stay for a couple of months,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea.” He and another man walked across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at the Khyber Pass and took a bus to Jalalabad before setting off on a three-hour drive to what Qasim and other Uighurs knew as “the Uighur village.” In court filings, American government attorneys referred to this village as a terrorist training camp “affiliated” with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

I asked Qasim about the village, the paramilitary training, and Mahsum’s presence. He told me that there were many Uighurs there, and their mere presence alone did not make them members of ETIM, much less enemies of the United States. Qasim said that Mahsum, who was reported killed by the Pakistani army in 2003, may sometimes have been there, but he insisted that this did not mean every Uighur present was a follower of his or a member of his organization. As for small-arms training, he said, weapons were ubiquitous in Afghanistan and everybody was expected, as a condition of their stay in the village, to know how to use them.

Initially, American interrogators believed Qasim and his compatriots. During the Uighur detainees’ first year at Guantánamo, reports filed by interrogators found most of them not to be “enemy combatants,” and they were deemed eligible for release. For reasons that have never been made clear, though, they were not released — very likely, this was initially because there was no place to release them to, then because, except for a small number of them, the Bush Administration simply refused to let them go. Rushan Abbas, who had been a reporter for Radio Free Asia in Washington and who subsequently spent months in Guantánamo as the interpreter for the Uighurs, told me that Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, the commander of the task force responsible for interrogating the prisoners in Guantánamo’s early days, had said to her that he’d felt the Uighurs were being detained in error. Years later, he emailed her: “Every time when I read about how our government screwed up the release of the Uighurs, I feel very angry.” Multiple attempts to contact Dunlavey were unsuccessful, but those remarks are consistent with a statement he has reportedly made about Guantánamo detainees.

In Qasim’s case, a review by what was called the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, dated February 21, 2004, which was among a full set of such memos published by WikiLeaks, acknowledges Qasim’s “prior assessment” as “not affiliated with al-Qaeda or a Taliban leader.” But, it continues, “new information” indicated that Qasim “is a probable member” of ETIM, which “is a Uighur separatist organization dedicated to the creation of a Uighur Islamic homeland in China, through armed insurrection and terrorism.”

In describing ETIM in those words, officials echoed the portrayals of Uighur “terrorists” that Chinese propaganda had been disseminating. The United States had also been incorporating this sort of language into its official statements. In late 2002, reversing its earlier resistance, the State Department designated ETIM as a terrorist organization. A fact sheet on this decision described ETIM as a “violent group believed responsible for committing numerous acts of terrorism in China, including bombings of buses, movie theaters, department stores,” and other targets. Between 1990 and 2001, it continued, “members of ETIM reportedly committed over 200 acts of terrorism in China, resulting in at least 162 deaths and over 440 injuries. Its objective is the creation of a fundamentalist Muslim state called ‘East Turkistan.’”

This statement repeats figures included in a document issued by China’s State Council, the country’s main governing body, in which China publicly laid out its case against ETIM and other Uighur radicals it blamed for violence in Xinjiang. Missing from the State Department fact sheet, and from other statements of the United States’ position, was any echo of Washington’s previous views — that Uighur grievances were local and could not be dealt with by counterterrorism methods, or that China made no distinction between those perpetrating violence and those advocating for greater freedom. In the post-9/11 frenzy, and in its eagerness to enlist Beijing’s support in the wider War on Terror, the United States had adopted China’s position without qualification.

Moreover, whether China’s description of ETIM was accurate or not, it would say nothing about whether the Guantánamo Uighurs were members of the group. When the Bush administration was called upon to make the case that the prisoners were members of ETIM, it also presented evidence that appears to have been generated by China. In 2008, a group of the Guantánamo Uighurs, arguing that “there was not one iota of actual evidence” connecting them to any terrorist organization or act, was able to bring a habeas-corpus suit to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. The government’s lawyers put a cache of classified documents into the record, ostensibly to show that the men were indeed enemy combatants. This material has never been made public. The court, after reviewing the documents, not only overturned the government’s enemy-combatant finding, but also dismissed in derisive terms the evidence presented by the U.S. government, describing it as Chinese propaganda. Judge Merrick Garland, who wrote the unanimous opinion of the three-judge panel, noted that the government’s case rested on four “intelligence documents,” which were themselves full of words and phrases like “reportedly,” or references to “things that ‘may’ be true or are ‘suspected of’ having taken place,” with no indication of who “‘reported’ or ‘said’ or ‘suspected’ those things.”

The classified documents were so similar that they seemed to have a “common source,” which he said was “the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.” In a separate case several months later,  a U.S. district court ordered that the Uighurs detained at Guantánamo be released into the United States. But the Bush administration succeeded in getting that order reversed, and so, except for five of the Uighurs captured in Pakistan, including Qasim, who had been released to Albania in 2006, the others remained at Guantánamo.

The Obama administration accepted that the Uighurs still being held at Guantánamo posed no danger to the United States, and proposed to resettle them in Northern Virginia, where there was a Uighur American community ready to take care of them. But this effort died in the face of vociferous opposition from the Republican representative Frank Wolf and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, both of whom, consciously or not, based their objections on the same Chinese assertions that the government had depended on earlier. Wolf called the Uighurs “these terrorists” who were “members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a designated terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaeda,” while Gingrich warned that the Guantánamo Uighurs had been “instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.”

By the end of 2013, the remaining Uighurs had been released from Guantánamo and sent to a variety of different countries. According to Abbas, the former translator for the Uighurs who has remained in contact with many of them, even now they try to keep their whereabouts a secret, worried that Beijing will pressure their host countries to send them back to China.

Their imprisonment had been part of an effort by the United States to gain cooperation in the War on Terror. Instead, China won American cooperation in its war against the Uighurs.

* * * * *

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.

Rare Words From Guantánamo, From “Forever Prisoner” Ghassan Al-Sharbi

The perimeter fence at Guantánamo, photographed on March 6, 2013 (Photo: Bob Strong/Reuters).


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

 

When the prison at Guantánamo Bay was set up by the Bush administration, over 17 long years ago, the intention was to hide the men held from any kind of outside scrutiny, an intention reflected within the prison, where the prisoners were dehumanized, identified not by name but by what were known as Internment Serial Numbers (ISNs). The ISN system persists to this day, with the 40 men still held after first George W. Bush, and then Barack Obama, shrank the prison’s population to just 5% of the total number of men held since it first opened.

In addition, the effort to hold the men in a permanent state of dehumanization — to prevent any serious form of outside scrutiny — also persists. It is only because the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in 2004 that the men were finally allowed to have lawyers visit them, breaking through the shroud of total secrecy that had previously enveloped the prison, and that had allowed horrendous torture and abuse to take place in its first few years of operations.

Of the 40 men still held, most are unknown to the general public. The most prominent are the seven men facing seemingly interminable pre-trial hearings in the broken military commission system, but few people know who most of the others are — five men approved for release under Barack Obama, but still held, and 26 others, accurately described as “forever prisoners” by the mainstream media, whose ongoing imprisonment was recommended by Obama administration officials who reviewed all the prisoners’ cases after Obama took office, and decided that they were too dangerous to release, while conceding that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

Some of these men — allegedly — were involved with al-Qaeda, but others are not alleged to have been anything more than foot soldiers in Afghanistan when the 9/11 attacks took place, and only continue to be held as a seemingly perpetual threat because they are judged to have a bad attitude; something that is surely understandable when you have been held for up to 17 years in the uniquely lawless confines of Guantánamo.

Recently, lawyers for one of the “forever prisoners” — a Saudi named Ghassan al-Sharbi — reached out to The Intercept, bringing into focus an individual who is generally known only to those who have studied Guantánamo closely.

Way back in the mists of time (on March 28, 2002), al-Sharbi was seized in house raids in Faisalabad that led to the capture of a Saudi-born Palestinian, Abu Zubaydah, for whom the Bush administration’s torture program was developed, on the mistaken basis that he was a senior figure in al-Qaeda (it was later demonstrated that, in fact, he was no such thing, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of an independent training camp that had resisted efforts by Osama bin Laden to take it over).

Al-Sharbi, it transpired, had graduated with a degree in aeronautical engineering from a US college in Arizona, and was fluent in English, an ability that immediately led to him being flagged by the US authorities as a particular threat (as were all English speakers who had ever visited the US). 

Charged in the military commissions set up by George W. Bush, he declared that he had fought against the US at a hearing on April 27, 2006, and that he was proud of the fact. When the Supreme Court ruled the military commissions illegal two months later, Congress ill-advisedly revived them, and al-Sharbi was charged for a second time on May 29, 2008, although the charges against him — and four other prisoners — were dropped just five months later, on October 21, 2008, by the commissions’ convening authority, Susan Crawford.

One reason for this may have been the men’s connection to Abu Zubaydah, and the unreliability of any of his statements, derived, as they were, though the use of torture. The primary reason, however, seems to have been the defection of Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a prosecutor in the military commissions, who had turned on the system — and resigned — when he discovered that potentially exculpatory evidence was not being provided to the defense teams. Vandeveld’s case involved Mohamed Jawed, an Afghan child prisoner, but it was considered, at the time, that the authorities were fearful of further interventions by Vandeveld, whose resignation was a powerful blow to the legitimacy of the commissions. 

Al-Sharbi was also one of the most prominent prisoners within the prison, as became apparent in the summer of 2005, when, in response to a prison-wide hunger strike, the authorities briefly allowed a Prisoners’ Council to be convened, which, of course, demanded better treatment for the prisoners. Tim Golden of the New York Times wrote about this period in the prison’s history in “The Battle for Guantánamo,” published in the Times’ magazine in 2006. 

The council involved six men: the charismatic British resident Shaker Aamer (eventually released in 2015), Ghassan al-Sharbi, Abdul Salam Zaeef, described by Golden as “a former Taliban cabinet minister and ambassador to Pakistan who was the pre-eminent leader of Afghan prisoners at Guantánamo before his release in the late summer of 2005,” Saber Lahmar, an Algerian-born Islamic scholar kidnapped in Bosnia in connection with a non-existent conspiracy to bomb the US Embassy in Sarajevo, who was released in France in December 2009, and two Egyptians, Ala Muhammad Salim, described by Golden as an influential religious leader, and Adel Fattoh Algazzar, described as “a former Egyptian Army officer with a master’s degree in economics.” Both men were also subsequently released (Salim to Albania in November 2006, and Algazzar to Slovakia in January 2010, subsequently returning to Egypt in 2011, where he was imprisoned for another six months), leaving only al-Sharbi still held. 

In the summer of 2005, after the authorities shut down the council, Col. Mike Bumgarner, the warden of the prison, who had played a major role in setting it up, turned on Shaker Aamer, moving him to total isolation in Camp Echo, but “developed a rapport” with al-Sharbi, as Golden described it, adding that al-Sharbi “was described by people who know him as an intelligent, almost ethereal man from a wealthy Saudi family.” Bumgarner told Golden that “he found al-Sharbi a useful interlocutor and met with him repeatedly,” whereas, after August 2005, “he never spoke with Aamer again.”

Since this time, however, al-Sharbi has largely disappeared from sight. In Obama’s last three years in office, he was one of 64 men subjected to Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process in which prisoners were able to present reasons why they wished to be released to a panel of military officers, although he refused to engage with the military officials assigned to represent him, or with a lawyer, and this lack of cooperation essentially ensured that his ongoing imprisonment would be upheld, as indeed it was.

However, al-Sharbi did take part in the interview by video link with US officials on the mainland as part of his PRB, making a shadowy allegation about Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks that was later picked up on by the Associated Press — and the Daily Mail, which noted “that he heard a religious figure in Saudi Arabia used the term ‘your highness’ during a telephone conversation,” and that the religious figure “then urged al-Sharbi to return to the US and take part in a plot against the country that would involve learning to fly a plane.”

Nearly three years later, the state of Saudi politics has prompted al-Sharbi to speak out again, this time via a letter to his lawyers, at the Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic at the City University of New York School of Law, in which he has praised Congress, Lindsay Graham, Thomas Friedman and parts of the US media “because of their courageous stand against the Saudi royals.”

In a telling passage, al-Sharbi explains how he feels that, over the years, he has been used — first by clerics in his homeland, and then by US attorneys. “I was used by Saudi clerics first and that stuck with me. It caused me a complex,” he wrote, adding, “And then came the American liberal attorneys who wanted to use me for their own causes. I didn’t want to be used ever again.”

Most of all, though, al-Sharbi is disillusioned with the Saudi royals, complaining that the royal family “overtly fights terrorism to please the West, while covertly supporting it to please the clerics and others,” and adding that they “also do this so that they are always desperately needed by the United States and the West.” As Murtaza Hussain, the author of The Intercept’s article, noted, his “decision to speak out is itself a product of growing turbulence in the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia in recent years. The killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudi-led war in Yemen have fed a growing public backlash toward the Saudi royal family,” and al-Sharbi “took notice of the changes.”

Below I’m cross-posting The Intercept’s article, in the hope of reaching new readers who may not have come across the original post. I hope you find it interesting, and will also take note of al-Sharbi urging Donald Trump to end conflict between the US and the Muslim world by stopping “supporting dictatorships in Muslim countries,” as well as his closing words, expressing his fear that, following the publication of this article, he may end up being transferred to Saudi Arabia against his will, and then being “disappeared” even more effectively than the Americans have done with him at  Guantánamo.

Guantánamo Bay “Forever” Prisoner Speaks Out — To Praise Congress, Lindsey Graham, and Thomas Friedman

By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept, March 17, 2019

For the past 17 years of his imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, Ghassan al-Sharbi was a mystery to the American public. A prisoner at the notorious prison since his capture in 2002, al-Sharbi has never sought to speak publicly, unlike many other detainees held at the prison. He even refused legal counsel. But now, the Saudi national, known as one of the most defiant prisoners held at Guantánamo, has been moved to speak out for the first time — in order to praise the U.S. Congress, Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., and even New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

“My faith in many US politicians and media outlets has recently risen dramatically, because of their courageous stand against the Saudi royals,” al-Sharbi conveyed in letters and communications submitted through normal processes at the prison, and provided exclusively to The Intercept. “The Saudi royal family overtly fights terrorism to please the West, while covertly supporting it to please the clerics and others. They also do this so that they are always desperately needed by the United States and the West.”

Communicating with detainees at the facility is notoriously complex. Al-Sharbi’s words were conveyed through his attorneys at the Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic at the City University of New York School of Law. They were also passed through a team of U.S. government censors.

Al-Sharbi’s decision to speak out is itself a product of growing turbulence in the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia in recent years. The killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudi-led war in Yemen have fed a growing public backlash toward the Saudi royal family. Al-Sharbi, held in an isolated U.S. prison in the Caribbean, took notice of the changes.

Graham and Friedman were among the public figures who have previously backed Saudi Arabia but have since changed their tune — particularly with regard to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “I’m not blindly optimistic that the change of position by the likes of Senator Lindsay Graham and Thomas Friedman regarding the Saudi royals is not merely pragmatic flip-flopping. I hope that it is a truly ethical correction on their parts,” al-Sharbi stated.

Al-Sharbi said his outlook began to evolve during the public debates in the United States over the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Known as JASTA, the law was passed in 2016 and opened the Saudi government up to facing charges of supporting terrorism. Al-Sharbi said, “The change began for me during the congressional debates around JASTA and its subsequent approval.” Congress overrode a presidential veto to put the law on the books.

Now age 44, al-Sharbi was captured in a 2002 raid by Pakistani forces. In June of that year, he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay, where he has remained ever since. Al-Sharbi’s statements speak less to his own case than to the broader geopolitical changes that have occurred since his detention, particularly the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

As for remaining silent for years until now, al-Sharbi described his decision as an effort to take control of his own fate. “I was used by Saudi clerics first and that stuck with me. It caused me a complex. And then came the American liberal attorneys who wanted to use me for their own causes,” he said. “I didn’t want to be used ever again.”

While many Guantánamo detainees protested their innocence over the years, al-Sharbi is known as one of the most defiant prisoners held at the facility. A fluent English speaker who attended college in Arizona, he denounced the legitimacy of the process during a 2006 military commission hearing, referring to it as “the same circus, different clown.” Accused by the U.S. government of providing English-language translation at a militant camp and training on the use of explosives, al-Sharbi bluntly admitted that the allegations against him were true.

“I’m going to make it short and easy for you guys: I’m proud of what I did and there isn’t any reason of hiding. I fought against the United States. I took up arms,” he said at the hearing, speaking in plain English. “I came here to tell you that I did what I did and I’m willing to pay the price, no matter how many years you sentence me. Even if I spend hundreds of years in jail, that would be a matter of honor for me.”

Due to the notoriously flawed nature of the legal process at Guantánamo, where, among other things, evidence has been frequently tainted by the use of torture, the U.S. government has never been able to convict al-Sharbi of a crime. Today, he is one of the many detainees who the government is unable to convict, but also unwilling to release.

A 2016 decision by the prison’s Periodic Review Board determined that al-Sharbi remained a security threat and could not be let go. The review noted his continued hostility in detention and refusal to discuss future plans were he to be released. “The Board appreciates the detainee’s candor at the hearing,” the review concluded.

In past hearings at the Guantánamo prison, al-Sharbi suggested that he was encouraged to become a militant by individuals associated with the Saudi royal family. He repeated these claims in his recent statements, stating among other things that he had communicated online with bin Salman — who was then a teenager — during the time that the prince’s father had been the governor of Riyadh. (The Intercept was unable to independently verify the decades-old communications, and the Saudi Embassy did not return a request for comment.)

A declassified document from the 9/11 Commission report — which was first flagged in 2016 by the 9/11 disclosure advocacy website 28pages.org — alleged a possible link between al-Sharbi and the Saudi government. According to the document, at the time of al-Sharbi’s detention in Pakistan, a cache of papers was located nearby that included his U.S. flight certificate. The document, investigators said, was found inside an envelope marked with the logo of the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C.

The 9/11 Commission found no evidence of official Saudi support for the September 11 attacks, though it did reveal circumstantial links between the hijackers and Saudi government employees.

Saudi Arabia has nonetheless been accused of playing both arsonist and firefighter when it comes to the issue of extremist violence.

In his recent remarks, al-Sharbi cited the alleged inconsistency in both the Saudi and U.S. position in dealing with militant groups.

He said, “The flip-flopping, the constant branding, marketing, and re-branding of ‘freedom fighters,’ ‘extremists,’ or ‘terrorists’ at certain times, certain locations, and against certain enemies, as it suits political needs is confusing.”

Growing unease in the United States over its support for the Saudi war in Yemen was punctuated last October by the brazen murder of Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. His killing is widely believed to have been ordered by bin Salman himself. The historic ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia have come under unprecedented scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers, the press, and an increasingly vocal American public.

Amid this rising tide of discontent, one of the most notable holdouts has been President Donald Trump himself. In addition to close relationships between the Trump family and Saudi royals, Trump justified continued U.S. support for the Saudi government on economic terms.

On this subject, al-Sharbi took it upon himself to offer some advice for the U.S. president.

“The current president of the United States faces fierce opposition at home and abroad. He relies on his base and believes that creating jobs for them would make him stronger overall. He thinks that Saudi arms deals are essential to achieve that goal of political survival,” al-Sharbi said. “But, I think that his base would admire him more if he walked away from those arms deals and told his base that he was doing it on principle, so that American homes are not built on the ruins of Saudi ones.”

Nearly two decades after 9/11, the metastasizing global war against extremist groups shows little sign of abating. After more than a decade and a half spent in prison, al-Sharbi’s fate remains unclear. His decision to speak out after so many years of silence was not taken lightly, given the potential consequences, he said.

While acknowledging the hesitance of the U.S. public to hear the words of a man once described by the former Guantánamo commander, Maj. General Jay Hood, as “one of the most dangerous men” held at the prison, al-Sharbi nonetheless offered a unique perspective on how the United States may dissuade future generations from joining the ranks of anti-American militant groups.

“Conflict between the United States and the Muslim world can be resolved or eliminated quite simply: If the United States stops supporting dictatorships in Muslim countries. I hope that what I have to share will benefit both Americans, as well as my own people,” al-Sharbi said. “After this story is released, if I am transferred to Saudi Arabia against my will and I meet my fate there, I hope this won’t prevent the media from continuing the true effort of making America great again.”

* * * * *

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.