Andy Worthington's Blog, page 25

Supporting Whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Imprisoned for Refusing to Testify in Grand Jury Case Against WikiLeaks

Chelsea Manning, in a photo from a fashion shoot for Dazed on February 12, 2019, just 24 days before she was imprisoned for refusing to testify in a Grand Jury case against WikiLeaks.


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.

It’s three weeks since Chelsea Manning was imprisoned for refusing to testify in a Grand Jury case against WikiLeaks, and I wanted to make sure that I expressed my solidarity with her, as, without her contributions to breaking through the US government’s deliberate secrecy surrounding the prisoners held at Guantánamo, we would know far less than we do about how weak so much of the so-called evidence is that has been used to defend the imprisonment without charge or trial of the men — and boys — held at Guantánamo without charge or trial since the disgraceful prison opened in January 2002.

It was while working as an intelligence analyst for the US Army in Iraq, in 2009, that Manning leaked to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified — or unclassified but sensitive — US military and diplomatic documents, including the “Collateral Murder” video, featuring footage of a US Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists, the Afghan and Iraq war logs, a vast number of US diplomatic cables from around the world, and the classified military files from Guantánamo.

I worked as a media partner with WikiLeaks on the release of these documents in April 2011, and as I stated in an article in January 2017, when President Obama commuted the 35-year sentence that Manning had received after her court-martial in 2013:

[An] intelligent analysis of the files … reveals the extent to which they lay bare the cruelty and incompetence of the authorities at Guantánamo, providing the names of the many unreliable witnesses, who, as a result of torture or other forms of abuse, or being bribed with better living conditions, or simply through exhaustion after seemingly endless — and pointless — interrogations, told their interrogators what they wanted to hear. And the interrogators, of course, wanted whatever information would make the prisoners appear significant, when, in truth, they had been rounded up in a largely random manner, or had been bought for bounty payments from the Americans’ Afghan or Pakistani allies, and very few — a maximum of 3% of the 779 men held, I estimate — genuinely had any kind of meaningful connection with al-Qaeda, the leadership of the Taliban, or any related groups. Most were either foot soldiers or civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, dressed up as “terrorists” to justify a dragnet, from September 2001 to November 2003 (when the transfers to Guantánamo largely ended) that is primarily remarkable because of its stunning incompetence.

I began a detailed study of the Guantánamo files leaked by Manning after their release in 2011, but exhaustion, and a lack of funding, prevented me from analyzing more than the 422 files I covered in detail in 34 articles totaling over half a million words, which are available here, although I do believe that my work on the files constitutes important research. One day I hope to complete the project, but even if I don’t, the files Manning released will provide historians with an unparalleled opportunity to understand the extent to which the so-called intelligence at Guantánamo is a house of cards built on torture and lies, and we should all be grateful to her for leaking them in the first place — just as there are reasons to be grateful for all the other documents she leaked.

On March 8, US District Judge Claude Hilton held Manning in contempt of court and ordered her to be imprisoned after a brief hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, where she confirmed that she had no intention of testifying in the Grand Jury proceedings whose existence was only inadvertently made public last November. 

In a Tweet on March 7, Manning wrote that, they before, she had “appeared before a secret grand jury after being given immunity for my testimony.” She added, “All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in 2010—answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in 2013. I responded to each question with the following statement: ‘I object to the question and refuse to answer on the grounds that the question is in violation of my First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendment, and other statutory rights.’”

Manning also stated, “In solidarity with many activists facing the odds, I will stand by my principles. I will exhaust every legal remedy available. My legal team continues to challenge the secrecy of these proceedings, and I am prepared to face the consequences of my refusal.”

Last week, supporters condemned what they described as Manning’s “solitary confinement” at the William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, where she is held, and where, as the Guardian noted, she “has been held in administrative segregation, or ‘adseg’, with up to 22 hours each day spent in isolation.” 

Just two days ago, Manning’s attorneys “asked the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate (void) District Court Judge Hilton’s finding of civil contempt,” as reported by the Sparrow Project.

The importance of the case against Manning was effectively highlighted by Chris Hedges in an article for Truthdig, in which he explained:

The US government, determined to extradite and try Julian Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange and WikiLeaks did in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning from what the New York Times and the Washington Post did in publishing the same material. There is no federal law that prohibits the press from publishing government secrets. It is a crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of Manning, who on March 8 was sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about this issue.

If Manning, a former Army private, admits she was instructed by WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain and pass on the leaked material, which exposed US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents. The prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama administration, which under the Espionage Act charged eight people with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had been severed.

As Hedges also stated, “The goal of the corporate state is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power, especially those activities that violate the law. Movement toward this goal is very far advanced. The failure of news organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post to vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt them. The corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The target is the press itself.”

Here’s Chelsea’s address, via ChelseaResists:

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning

A0181426

William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center

2001 Mill Road

Alexandria, VA

22314

Her jail does NOT accept:

— books or cards

You CAN write letters with pen or colored pencils on paper, and send newspapers.

Further details here.

Also, donations towards legal costs are accepted here.

* * * * *

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

Seven Years Since He Left Guantánamo, Judge Rules That Omar Khadr’s Sentence Is Over, and He Is A Free Man

Former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr with his lawyer, Nate Whitling, outside court in Edmonton on March 25, 2019, after a judge ruled that his Guantánamo- related sentence was finally over (Photo: Terry Reith/CBC).


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.

 

Some great news from Canada, where a judge has ruled that former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr’s sentence is finally over.

Back in December, I reported how, although Khadr was given an eight-year sentence after agreeing to a plea deal in his military commission trial at Guantánamo on October 31, 2010, the Canadian government continued to impose restrictions on his freedom — disregarding the fact that their ability to do so should have come to an end with the end of his sentence on October 31, 2018.  

As I explained in December, Khadr had been in court seeking “changes to his bail conditions, requesting to be allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj (which would require him to be given a passport), and to speak unsupervised with his sister, who is now living in Georgia.” However, the judge, Justice June Ross of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta, refused to end the restrictions on his freedom to travel, or to communicate with his sister Zainab, who I described as “a controversial figure who, in the past, had expressed support for al-Qaeda.”

It had been a long journey for Khadr over the previous eight years. Under the terms of his plea deal, he was supposed to have spent one more year in Guantánamo followed by seven years’ further imprisonment in Canada, but as I also explained in December: 

In fact, it took nearly two years before he was returned to Canada, and, when he was returned, the Canadian authorities then held him for as long as possible in a maximum security prison, only relenting in August 2013 when, as I described it in 2014, “Canada’s prison ombudsman Ivan Zinger, the executive director of the independent Office of the Correctional Investigator, said that prison authorities had ‘ignored favorable information’ in ‘unfairly branding’ Khadr as a maximum security inmate.”

In January 2014 he was moved to a medium security facility, and in April 2015 he was finally granted bail, moving in with his attorney Dennis Edney, who had cared for him for many years as though he was his own son.

On his 29th birthday, in September 2015, a judge eased his bail conditions, allowing him to visit his grandparents, and agreeing to have his electronic tag removed, and two years later, on his 31st birthday, he was allowed internet access, although bans remained on his ability to travel freely within Canada, or to meeting his sister Zainab.

Monday’s ruling, then, was long overdue, although we should all be thankful to Court of Queen’s Bench Chief Justice Mary Moreau, who, as CBC News described it, “counted the time Khadr spent on conditional release for nearly four years as counting toward his eight-year sentence,” and “declared his sentence over.”

CBC News added that, “After the judge left the courtroom, a beaming Khadr embraced his lawyer, Nate Whitling,” and, outside the court, said he was pleased with the decision.

“I think it’s been a while but I’m happy it’s here, and right now I’m going to just try to focus on recovering and not worrying about having to go back to prison, or, you know, just struggling,” he told reporters.

Whitling, as CBC News put it, “said efforts to overturn Khadr’s US convictions will continue,” but he confirmed that “the completion of his sentence will mean more freedom” for Khadr. “All those conditions that were restricting his liberty up to this point are now gone, so for example he can apply for a passport, he can talk to his sister, he can travel around the world or around Canada without having to seek permission,” Whitling explained 

He also noted that, under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the government has no right to appeal the decision. “It’s a final decision,” he said. “So we do expect this is the end of the road in terms of having to deal with Mr. Khadr’s sentence.” 

Speaking of the situation in the US, Whiting confirmed that he and Khadr “think that these convictions will eventually be overturned,” adding, “And I think it will be determined there was never any jurisdiction to try Mr. Khadr for these offences.”

The ongoing plight of Guantánamo’s unconvicted “enemy combatants”

While everyone who respects justice and the rule of law should be grateful that the Canadian establishment has seen sense, and has ceased to impose unreasonable restrictions on Omar Khadr five months after his sentence should actually have come to an end, the lifting of restrictions on his life stands in stark constant to the restrictions imposed on other former Guantánamo prisoners.

As I discussed just two weeks ago, in an article entitled, As Mohamedou Ould Slahi is Denied a Passport, Remember That All Former Guantánamo Prisoners Live Without Fundamental Rights, in Mauritania, former Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi has not had his passport returned, even though he was told he would get it back two years after his release. That should have been in October 2018, but Slahi didn’t receive his passport, and cannot get an answer from anyone about whether it is the fault of his own government, or if the US is still meddling in his life. 

As I proceeded to explain in my article, Slahi’s case is typical of how former prisoners are subject to endless interference in their lives with no explanation and no basis in law. For prisoners repatriated to their home countries, as I explained, “deals were made between the US government and the prisoners’ home governments,” but “details of these deals have never been made public,” and, in any case, “whatever deals are arranged have absolutely no context in international law.” 

I added that, for those given new homes in third countries, “the situation is arguably even worse, because there is absolutely no precedent for people held by the US at Guantánamo without rights to then be transferred to a third country, where they cannot call upon any of the presumed rights that come with nationality.” 

In conclusion, I stated that “[t]he status of the ‘un-people’ of Guantánamo is a peculiarly aberrant post-9/11 creation, and one that cannot be allowed to stand forever,” and called on the Trump administration to re-instate the crucial role of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, which existed under President Obama, as well as explaining that it is “time for the international community to come together to demand that the disgraceful labeling of people as ‘enemy combatants,’ forever under suspicion, and forever without rights, needs to be brought to an end,” and asking anyone interested in helping address this to get in touch with me to work out how we might deal with it.

This is an invitation that still stands, and, belatedly, Omar Khadr’s case shows why it is so necessary. As someone who went through a legal process — however broken and unjust that process was — Omar Khadr, in the end, has been able to avail himself of rights that, absurdly, those also held at Guantánamo, but never charged or tried, cannot rely on. As he stated in December, when he challenged Justice Ross’s refusal to drop all his bail restrictions, “I am going to continue to fight this injustice and thankfully we have an actual court system that has actual rules and laws.” 

For most former “enemy combatants,” sadly, this is simply not true.

* * * * *

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.

Video: I Discuss Guantánamo with Chris Hedges on His Show ‘On Contact’ on RT America

A screenshot of Chris Hedges and Andy Worthington discussing Guantanamo on Chris’s show ‘On Contact’ on RT America.


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.

 

An injustice does not become any less unjust the longer it endures, and yet, when it comes to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, you could be forgiven for not thinking that this is the case. Over 17 years since the prison opened, it is still holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, and yet these days the prison is rarely in the news, either in the US or internationally.

The is shameful, because, although only 40 men are still held (out of the 779 men held in total by the US military since the prison opened in January 2002), the blunt truth is that no one should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, because that is what dictatorships do, not countries that, like the US, profess to care about the rule of law.

I’m pleased to report that, in an effort to continue to shine a light on the ongoing horrors of Guantánamo, Chris Hedges, one of the most significant critics of America’s current lawlessness, interviewed me for his show ‘On Contact,’ on RT America, which was broadcast on Saturday, and is embedded below via YouTube:

The show is also available on RT America’s website here, where the prison is aptly described as follows:  

The most notorious US detention site in the world, Guantánamo Bay, still holds 40 prisoners. Most of the [nearly] 800 men shipped to Guantánamo Bay since it was opened under George W. Bush in 2002 were sold to US forces for bounty by Pakistani and Afghan officials, militia and warlords. They were stripped of their legal rights, held for years without being charged or given a fair and open trial. Not only is the detention center a recruiting dream for radical jihadists, it costs taxpayers half a billion dollars a year, roughly $11 million for each detainee.

It was a great pleasure to talk to Chris, and also to have the time to be able to discuss Guantánamo in depth. We talked about the Guantánamo files, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, after being leaked by Chelsea Manning, on which I worked as media partner, 

We also spent some time discussing how, under George W. Bush, Guantánamo became a place of torture, and we also looked at how the law has failed the Guantánamo prisoners, via the dysfunctional military commission trial system, but also via the long struggle to secure habeas corpus rights for the prisoners, which, although it led to the release of several dozen prisoners between 2008 and 2010, was subsequently shut down by ideologically motivated appeals court judges, meaning that the men still held are as fundamentally deprived of justice now as they were when the prison first opened.

Over 17 years since Guantánamo opened, the shocking truth is that no one can be released through any legal process; instead, to be released, they must, like medieval prisoners, await the whim of the king; or, in today’s iteration, the president of the United States, in this case, Donald Trump, who has already made it clear that he has no interest in releasing any prisoner under any circumstances.

Given this disgraceful situation, you can probably forgive me for thinking that Guantánamo should be featured more prominently in the news, but as it stands I’d like to thank Chris Hedges for recognizing how the prison’s ongoing existence makes a mockery of any claim that the US is a country that respects the rule of law. 

Note: For anyone wondering when I visited the US to record this interview, it was recorded in January, during my annual visit to call for the closure of the prison on the anniversary of its opening, but wasn’t broadcast until now because Chris’s show only airs once a week, and there were many other newsworthy topics to cover, one of which was Dahr Jamail discussing his book ‘The End of Ice,’ about the environmental catastrophe that is already underway, which was recorded on the same day as my visit, and which I also urge you to watch. Check out all the shows here.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Celebrating 2,500 Days Since I First Started Photographing London’s 120 Postcodes for ‘The State of London’

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

 

Today is the eighth anniversary of an event that triggered the creation of my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and last Friday marked a milestone worth remarking on in the history of that project: 2,500 days since May 11, 2012, the first day I began cycling around London taking photos on a daily basis for the project that initially had no name, but that I soon called ‘The State of London.’

The eighth anniversary, today, is of when I was hospitalised following two months of serious agony as two of my toes turned black, but GPs and consultants failed to work out what was wrong with me for quite some time — only eventually working out that a blood clot had cut off the circulation to my toes — and also failed to prescribe me adequate painkillers. After I returned from a trip to Poland at the start of February 2011, for a short tour showing the film I co-directed, ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,’ until I was hospitalised on March 18, I was rarely able to sleep for more than five minutes at a time; almost as soon as I fell asleep, I awoke in agony. There was, I thought, something ironic about someone who campaigned for the rights of people suffering all manner of torments in US custody — including sleep deprivation — also ending up suffering from sleep deprivation, although in my case it was caused by my own body waging war on me.

After two days in Lewisham Hospital, where I was finally given morphine to take me beyond the pain, my wife figured out that they didn’t really know what to do with me, and so pushed for me to be transferred somewhere that they might have a clue. That somewhere was St. Thomas’s Hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament, where I spent the next nine days, as consultants worked out that attaching me for five afternoons to a drip that pushed what felt like cement into my arteries might open up the blood supply to my toes, thereby saving them. 

They were right. My toes were saved, and, as blood experts at Guy’s Hospital then took over my case, it emerged — in 2012 — that I had developed a rare blood disease — Essential Thrombothycemia, if it’s of interest, which is under control through medication, but only so long as there’s an NHS. My account of my experience, written at the time, is here, and if you check out the articles that follow it you’ll see what I managed to come up with on morphine in St. Thomas’s, where I refused to stop working and found a wi-fi connection in a corner of the building that I proceeded for make my own. 

Back at home, finally cured of the cigarette addiction that had gripped me for 29 years (and which I gave up eight years ago today while waiting to be admitted to Lewisham Hospital), I gave in to my sweet tooth and started piling on the pounds, eventually figuring out that I needed to take up a regular form of exercise, and that cycling might be the best option.

I’ve actually been a cyclist since before I can remember. I think I started at the age of four, and it has been a major part of my life ever since. As a child, growing up in a large village outside Hull, I used to cycle none-handed for whole afternoons, turning left at every junction to avoid having to touch the handlebars while waiting for traffic, and ending up miles from home. I continued cycling throughout my adolescence, and also at university, and in London I had some very particular bursts of cycling activisty — in the early 90s, for example, when I used to cycle from Brixton to Islington, where I worked in a telephone market research centre, and back, often after spending the evening in a variety of pubs playing pool, which I became magically very good at while very drunk.

Photography had also been part of my life since adolescence, when I remember having an Instamatic, but most particularly from when I was 18, when I got a Pentax ME Super, and developed a particular enthusiasm for night photos, using an ISO 800 Kodak film and tripod, and taking photos of Hull at night.

My interest in night photography continued at university when I used to stay up all night, and sometimes cycled along the rivers and canals at night — the only time that my love of cycling and photography had previously come together until 2012.

In the early 90s I ended up without a camera for some time, but when I met Dot in 1996, and we started travelling out of London, my attention soon focused on ancient sacred sites, as I became fascinated — or perhaps obsessed would be the most apt word — with the ancient remains of Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain (and, on a few occasions, Ireland, Brittany and Malta), and I began taking photos again.

In 1997 and 1998 we undertook a number of walks through the ancient landscape of southern England, which I photographed and also wrote about, with the biggest journey being a sinuous 80-mile, eight-day walk I created, ‘The Stonehenge Way’, which connected numerous ancient sites in Dorset and Wiltshire, and ended up at Stonehenge, and others involving Stonehenge’s extraordinary neighbour, Avebury.

The accounts I wrote didn’t end up being published, although they did feed into a related project that became my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, a counter-cultural history of Stonehenge, published in 2004 — and its follow-up, The Battle of the Beanfield.

Then, however, after a couple of summers touring festivals, the fates chose me to chronicle Guantánamo instead, a life-consuming project I began in 2006, when I basically stopped doing much cycling, or photography (except for the photos I took of my family and our holidays) until, in 2012, the two came together again in ‘The State of London, a keep-fit project that has become another obsession.

I haven’t quite been out on my bike in London every day for the last 2,500 days, but the total tally isn’t far off. Every year I’m away for Christmas, for around 10 days in the US in January, and on various other family holidays, but when I’m in London I generally spend at least a couple of hours a day out on my bike, and sometimes many more hours than that — four, five, six if I make a trek to some far-off part of the capital from my home in Brockley, in south east London.

Many of those days — a slim majority, I’d say — have been spent in south east London, particularly involving circuits through Greenwich and Deptford that I  undertake regularly, but also along the River Thames, and to the city and the West End — the heart of London the capital city, and London the banking behemoth — through, in various permutations, New Cross, Packham, Walworth, Rotherhithe and Bermondsey.

I also make regular trips to east London, usually through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel and then up through the Isle of Dogs, often then travelling on along the Regent’s Canal, through Hackney to Islington and Camden, or up the Limehouse Cut and the River Lea to Stratford and beyond — although I do sometimes take trains to give me a head start.

Just as I have disproportionately covered south east London, the City and the West End and parts of east and south west London, my most neglected areas are in the west, north and north west, but I have visited all 120 of the capital’s compass-based postcodes (those beginning EC, WC, SE, SW, W, NW, N and E), which I completed in September 2014, although I very much hope to pay repeat visits to some of the more far-flung postcodes this year, which, in some cases, will be only the second or third visits I have made. I have also made sporadic visits to some of the outlying postcodes, covering the vast expanse of Greater London (near me, for example, the BR postcodes for Bromley, and CR for Croydon).

As a result, 2,500 days since I began this project — and 677 days since I first began posting a photo a day on Facebook — I now have a spacial understanding and an overview of London as a whole that might be along the lines of what traditional black cab drivers get through “the knowledge”, although perhaps more metaphysical. 

Every time I post an article marking some anniversary or other of ‘The State of London’, I struggle to try to express what the project has done to me over the last six years and ten months, and will no doubt struggle again, but here goes:

I do genuinely feel as though, in some way, I now embody London, that I move about it like some sort of independent observer, unconnected to its commerce (unlike cycle couriers, for example), free — unlike so many of its inhabitants — to soak it in, to record it and to assess it without having to do so through being compromised in any way.

My journeys record the fabric of the city in some detail — with much having disappeared in the last seven years — and also reflect my particular interests: politically, the rise of the idiotic phallic towers for foreign investors that are a specific manifestation of the greed of those with power, and the failures of their imaginations after their banking racket collapsed in 2008, and — sadly often allied — the cynical destruction of council estates, which stand on land that is worth far more to developers if their residents’ inconvenient lives are moved elsewhere and their homes destroyed. This is a particular brutal form of 21st century politics, in which everyone is caught up, as budgets are strangled by Tory austerity policies, but politicians on all sides can’t really be bothered to fight for the right of London’s poorer inhabitants to have homes.  

These two aspects of modern London — one, I think, particularly triggered by the hubris and false pride that came with hosting the Olympics, in the year my project began, and the other based on cannibalistically consuming the poor as the entire capitalist edifice crumbles — may well come to define this period in London’s long history.

However, I’m also aware that, in terms of sensation, my journeys around the capital also deal with the more fundamentally experiential aspects of life — the weather, the seasons, the elements — and with nature: the trees, parks, rivers and canals whose co-existence with humanity constantly reinvigorates me when, as sometimes happens, the relentless pressure of London’s human inhabitants becomes too much.

If you’re not already part of ‘The State of London’, I hope you’ll join me. This year I intend to revive my website, which I had designed several years ago, but haven’t had the time yet to populate with photos and text, to put on an exhibition, and to publish a book. They’re worthy aims, but perhaps unattainable without outside assistance, so if you can help in any way please do get in touch.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

As Mohamedou Ould Slahi is Denied a Passport, Remember That All Former Guantánamo Prisoners Live Without Fundamental Rights

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.

In the long quest for justice for the 779 men and boys held at Guantánamo, it’s not just the 40 men still held who are victims of the US’s contempt for the law in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Although they, shamefully, remain held indefinitely without charge or trial, or are charged in a broken trial system, the military commission, that seems incapable of delivering justice, those who have been released from the prison also face problems that, in many cases, will make the rest of their lives a misery.

This is an important fact that those paying attention were reminded of two weeks ago, when Literary Hub published an article about the tribulations of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, torture survivor and best-selling author, who, after nearly 15 years in US custody, was released in his native Mauritania in October 2016.

Although he was never charged with a crime, along with the majority of former Guantánamo prisoners, Slahi expected that there would be restrictions on his freedom following his release, and, sure enough, as Literary Hub described it, “the day after he returned to Nouakchott, Mauritania’s director of state security told him that he couldn’t leave the country for two years.”

The article continued: “Although Slahi said he received no formal document outlining those terms, he accepted them. So when the two-year anniversary of his discharge from Guantánamo passed in October, Slahi expected to be granted his passport. But the Mauritanian government denied his application, he said, leaving him in limbo once again.”

As of the end of February, his lawyer, Brahim Ebetty, was “preparing to file a petition with Mauritania’s Ministry of the Interior and Decentralization asking it to issue Slahi’s passport immediately.” Larry Siems, the editor of Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, and around 200 other people “from the human rights, academic, and literary communities” have signed a letter of support, urging the Mauritanian government to grant Slahi “the freedom of movement to which he is entitled under domestic and international law.” If you want to sign the letter, you can do so here.

The letter also notes that Slahi “requires advanced medical treatment for conditions associated with his ordeal of detention and abuse,” adding that a physician in Germany “has offered to oversee and cover all costs associated with his treatment” — for the “headaches, nightmares, and chronic pain that have plagued him since he left Guantánamo,” as Literary Hub described it.

“I need my freedom. I need it now,” Slahi told the literary magazine.

Literary Hub noted that it “remains unclear” why the Mauritanian government won’t return Slahi’s passport, but Slahi himself suspects that it relates to whatever classified agreement was undertaken between the governments of the US and Mauritania prior to his release. These agreements are never made public, but last year the New York Times noted that third countries accepting former prisoners “provide basic assistance while monitoring them,” and, “typically, the receiving countries also agreed not to let the former detainees travel for two or three years, leaving ambiguous what would come next.” 

In seeking answers, Literary Hub approached the US State Department, but a spokesperson referred them to the Mauritanian government. When the magazine approached the Mauritanian government, however, phone calls and emails to the Mauritanian embassy in Washington and the Mauritania Permanent Mission to the United Nations were not returned.

Slahi not only needs to travel for medical care; he also wants, and should be able to travel abroad to engage with supporters of his writing. As Literary Hub explained, “Guantánamo Diary has been published in more than two dozen countries and languages. And Slahi has continued to write since returning to Mauritania, where he recently completed a novel — for which he is seeking a publisher — and is working on several other projects.”

The letter of support for him notes that some of the signatories “have hosted him in events and have invited him to share his writing in our universities via Skype,” adding, “As rich as these exchanges have been, however, they are limited by time and technology in ways that deny both Mr. Slahi and his hosts and audiences many of the opportunities to share stories and ideas that face-to-face encounters would offer.” This is an extremely valid point, but as it, at least in part, relates to US universities, it is also worth bearing in mind that no released Guantánamo prisoner has ever set foot in the US or is ever likely to under current circumstances.

For now, however, it is Slahi’s medical concerns that preoccupy him. Asked if he looked forward to embarking on a literary tour, he replied that he couldn’t think “beyond his medical concerns at this point.” As he said, “The only thing that I’m concentrated on now is getting my medical treatment. I really, really, need to … be a healthy person. And then from there, when I get to the next bridge, I’ll cross it.”

Dr. Alexandra Moore, co-director of the Human Rights Institute at the State University of New York at Binghamton, who has been working with Larry Siems on getting support for the petition, told Literary Hub that she “includes Guantánamo Diary in the courses she teaches and hosted a Skype event last year where Slahi spoke with her students,” and said that she “is compelled by the diary as both a work of literature and record documenting the failure of the U.S. after 9/11 to uphold its commitment to human rights, rebranding the torture practices banned by the Geneva Conventions as ‘enhanced’ or ‘special’ interrogation.”

As she put it, “What strikes me about Guantánamo Diary is that it tells us a lot about Mohamedou, but it also tells us a lot about the U.S. and the workings of the security state.” She added, as Literary Hub described it, that “she admires Slahi as a person who promotes the values of non-violence and ethical communication that are so crucial to the cause of international human rights.” 

Again, in her words, “It’s clear from being with him and from reading his work, his commitment to peace and to community, to understanding across cultures illuminates Slahi’s openness to everyone around him and his willingness not to do what was done to him, but instead to take each encounter as a chance to establish a personal relationship, even as he’s being abused.” This ability to rise above what was done to him — and, in fact, to stress that only forgiveness liberates those who have been subjected to torture and abuse — is indeed an extraordinary strength on his part, which I have written about previously, after Larry Siems told me about it.

On Skype, Slahi told Literary Hub’s reporter, Jen DeGregorio, that he was hopeful that the law would eventually resolve his current predicament. 

“I will get my rights peacefully, going to court and going through the right channels,” he said, adding, “Isn’t that what everybody wants, my people and your people, that everybody is treated within the rule of law and that peace be everywhere in the world?”

“Enemy combatants” forever stripped of all rights

That is certainly true of those who oppose the existence of Guantánamo, but those who set up the prison, and those who have continued to support its lawlessness over the last 17 years have no interest not only in Slahi’s particular case, but also in the cases of all the other former prisoners — everyone ever held at the prison who is still alive — who will continue to be branded as “enemy combatants” for the rest of their lives — unless, eventually, concerted action is taken by those who respect the law to hold the US to account.

It was noted above that Slahi and those representing him cannot get access to whatever decisions were taken about him, between the US and Mauritanian governments, at the time of his release, but it’s important to remember that the same problem afflicts every other former Guantánamo prisoner. 

In the early days of Guantánamo, prisoners were told not to speak about what happened to them, because otherwise the US would sweep them up and take them back to Guantánamo. This was no doubt an idle threat, and no one was swept up and returned to Guantánamo after their release, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that deals were made between the US government and the prisoners’ home governments, and that details of these deals have never been made public — as well as the fact that whatever deals are arranged have absolutely no context in international law. 

The status of the “un-people” of Guantánamo is a peculiarly aberrant post-9/11 creation, and one that cannot be allowed to stand forever.

Currently, however, the pernicious influence of the lifelong designation as an “enemy combatant” can be seen everywhere. Former prisoners are routinely denied passports — but for how long, and under whose jurisdiction, isn’t made clear. Is the long hand of the US involved? Or do prisoners’ home governments make their own decisions? It may be one or the other, but the decisions are never transparent. 

And, whether or not the US is behind it, prisoners’ own governments can also readily avail themselves of the peculiar non-status of former prisoners, who can, when those governments wish, be regarded as more dangerous than any convicted prisoners, even though almost all of them have never been charged with any crime, let alone convicted, and all we can really say with any clarity is that they were the victims of abuse and sometimes torture, inflicted by the US and its allies. 

Moreover, even when prisoners are theoretically allowed to travel, states avail themselves of opportunities to thwart ex-prisoners’ travel plans whenever they feel like it. Recently, a former prisoner from another EU country — an EU national —  intended to visit London to interview me, but although he had a valid ticket and all his paperwork was in order, a British official, interviewing him in his home country before his flight took off, delayed him so that he missed his flight.

This is just one example of the ways in which former prisoners are routinely abused by their own governments, or by others. And in the case of the British national Moazzam Begg, who has regularly had his travel plans disrupted, an even more sinister development took place in 2014, when, after he had travelled to Syria, where he had been gathering information about the Assad regime’s notorious torture prisons, he was arrested, and imprisoned — re-imprisoned — for seven months until, when his trial date came around, the prosecution dropped the case, claiming that documents had come into their possession showing that MI5 had been aware of, and had consented to, Begg’s travels to Syria, as Begg had insisted all along. It remains more likely, therefore, that Begg’s imprisonment was staged by the British government as a warning to young British Muslims not to travel to Syria.

For former prisoners released in third countries — generally because it was considered unsafe for them to be repatriated — the situation is arguably even worse, because there is absolutely no precedent for people held by the US at Guantánamo without rights to then be transferred to a third country, where they cannot call upon any of the presumed rights that come with nationality. 

As has been shown since Donald Trump came to power, with his colossal indifference towards the fate of former prisoners, which has involved him shutting down the office of the State Department envoy who used to deal with transfers, the former prisoners’ lack of rights has, in two cases, led to men being sent back from the country of their re-settlement, Senegal, to their home country, Libya, where they disappeared and are presumed dead, and in 23 others, has led to men sent to the UAE at the end of Obama’s presidency, to be freed after passing through an ill-defined rehabilitation program, being, in an unknown number of cases, still imprisoned three years later.

In another case, Mansoor Adayfi, a talented writer resettled in Serbia, came into conflict with the government, who then threatened to send him to a Middle Eastern country with a poor human rights record. This didn’t happen, but not because Adayfi had any formal status whatsoever. Outside support and publicity, including from Close Guantánamo, helped him, but legally he — and numerous other former prisoners settled in third countries — remains a kind of ghost.

The examples above show how important it is for Donald Trump to appoint a new envoy for Guantánamo, but I also think it clearly shows that it is time for the international community to come together to demand that the disgraceful labeling of people as “enemy combatants,” forever under suspicion, and forever without rights, needs to be brought to an end. If this is of interest to you, then please get in touch to discuss how we might take it forward, as it is, I confess, something of a long-term plan of mine.

* * * * *

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 1: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work, Campaigning and Creativity Over the Next Three Months

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

 

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work as a freelance journalist and activist, working primarily to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, but also working on social justice issues in the UK, particularly involving housing.

This time of year is always significant to me, as it was when, 13 years ago, three things happened that brought me to where I am today. On TV, on March 9, 2006, I watched ‘The Road to Guantánamo’, a dramatization by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross of the experiences of three British prisoners known as ‘the Tipton Three.’ Around the same time I also bought and read ‘Enemy Combatant’, Moazzam Begg’s account of his life and his time in Guantánamo, and a few days earlier, on March 3, the Pentagon, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, released 5,000 pages of documents relating to the prisoners.

When two prisoner lists were subsequently released — one listing 558 prisoners on April 19, 2006, and another listing 759 prisoners on May 15, all the components were in place for me to begin what seems to have become my life’s work — going through all these documents, and thousands on other pages released by the Pentagon, telling the stories of the prisoners, and working to get the prison closed.

13 years later this is still what I’m doing, having written The Guantánamo Files, an acclaimed book based on my research, followed by over 2,200 articles about Guantánamo, as well as co-founding two campaigning organizations, co-directing a film, singing and writing songs about the prison, visiting the US to call for its closure on a dozen occasions, and engaging in numerous TV and radio shows, as well as undertaking lectures and other speaking engagements. 

And although, throughout this journey, I’ve worked for and with numerous organizations and publications, I have, for several years, been entirely dependant on donations made by you, my readers and supporters, to enable me to continue this work. 

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

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

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

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

Over two years into the execrable presidency of Donald Trump, it’s clear that Guantánamo is not closing anytime soon, but this only highlights the effort that is needed to try and keep the horrible injustice of Guantánamo in the public eye, an objective to which I remain committed.

With your help, I will continue to work for the closure of Guantánamo — and if it’s of any interest to you, I’m lox grateful to receive donations for all the other work I do for which I receive no funding, and which are increasingly difficult in this technological world in which so much of what we do is supposed to be for free, because only the tech companies seem to end up getting paid — my housing activism in the UK, my photography via my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London,’ and my music via my band The Four Fathers.

Whatever donation you can, or cannot give, it remains essential for me to let you know that everything I do only has meaning because of your interest in it. Please keep reading, watching and listening, and if anything I do moves you, then please act on it! A better world is possible!

Andy Worthington

London

March 11, 2019

* * * * *

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

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

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign.

‘Guantánamo Kid’: A Graphic Novel Telling the Harrowing Story of Child Prisoner Mohammed El-Gharani by Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc

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 Tuesday March 12, the British publisher SelfMadeKid is releasing ‘Guantánamo Kid,’ a graphic novel by Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc, which tells the harrowing story of former child prisoner Mohammed El-Gharani. It was first published last year, in French, by Dargaud.

I’m pleased to note that the publishers asked me to write a review for the book, which they have used in the promotional image at the top of this article, and in which I stated, “Mohammed El-Gharani knows all about the horrors of Guantánamo, as a child subjected to torture by the US authorities and held in the prison for eight years. And yet far too many people still don’t know about Guantánamo’s long and abusive history, and one main reason is that no footage or photos of any of the torture and abuse has ever surfaced. Overcoming this critical lack of images, Jérôme Tubiana, a journalist who spent time with Mohammed after his release in 2010, hearing his story, has worked with the talented comic artist Alexandre Franc to bring his ordeal to life in a graphic novel that deserves to be read as widely as possible, as, in page after page of harrowing memories, Mohammed tells his story with wit, endurance and unbreakable spirit.”

I covered Mohammed El-Gharani’s story extensively while he was held at Guantánamo, originally in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in September 2007, in which I explained what I had been able to piece together at the time about his story, via US military documents, and his lawyers, at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve.

As I wrote in my book:

Those who went to Pakistan in search of a new life included Mohammed El-Gharani, who was only 15 years old at the time of his capture [Note: he may actually have been just 14]. Born in Saudi Arabia to parents from Chad, he was not regarded as a Saudi citizen and his opportunities for education and employment were therefore limited. In September 2001, he set off for Karachi, hoping to learn English and to undertake computer training, but was captured a month later during a police raid on a mosque. After his capture, he was treated brutally in Pakistani custody. For 16 hours a day over a three-week period, he was ‘hung by his wrists, naked apart from his shorts, with his feet barely touching the floor,’ and his interrogators beat him if he moved. He was also blindfolded the whole time, apart from a few minutes each day when he ate, and was ‘forced to drink lots of water before his interrogators tied his penis with string so that he could not urinate.’ 

Although he was a minor, and was captured in a random operation, this brutal treatment was only the start of his problems. Transferred to Kandahar, his treatment echoed that described by other prisoners, but with a few novel touches. He was ‘stripped naked and repeatedly beaten,’ was ‘doused in freezing water and left exposed to the elements for three or four nights,’ was ‘repeatedly called “nigger” by US soldiers, a term of racist abuse he had never heard before,’ and said that a guard ‘held his penis with a pair of scissors and told him he would cut it off.’ 

In Guantánamo, as I explained in an article in April 2008, Guantánamo’s forgotten child: the sad story of Mohammed El-Gharani, his abuse continued. As I put it, “unlike three Afghan boys (released in January 2004), who were held separately from the adult population, and treated with something approaching the appropriate care of juvenile prisoners,” he “never received any preferential treatment as a juvenile,” and was, instead, “subjected to torture and abuse as severe as almost any other prisoner,” including being “hung from his wrists on 30 occasions (an experience he described as worse than in Pakistan, because his feet did not even touch the ground).” He was also “subjected to a regime of ‘enhanced’ techniques to prepare him for interrogation — including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions — that clearly constitute torture.”

As I added, “On one occasion, a heavily-armoured riot squad — the Initial Reaction Force (IRF), used to quell even the most minor infringements of the rules — slammed his head into the floor of his cell, breaking one of his teeth, and on another occasion an interrogator stubbed out a cigarette on his arm.”

In November 2008, I established that he was one of at least 22 juveniles held at Guantanamo (the Pentagon, at that time, suggested, under pressure, that it had “only” held 12 juveniles), and I continued following his story in 2009, as a US judge ordered his release in January following a habeas corpus review of his case, leading to his release in Chad in June. However, he then struggled to support himself without his parents, who were still in Saudi Arabia, where he was not allowed to travel.

In January 2011, an extensive interview with El-Gharani was published in the London Review of Books, conducted by Jérôme Tubiana, who had “reported regularly from Chad, Sudan and Rwanda.” 

In the introduction to my cross-post of this interview, I described how Mohammed was “a compelling interviewee — articulate, often funny, and sharp to comprehend the scale of the injustice to which he and the other Guantánamo prisoners were subjected.”

This interview provided the basis for the graphic novel telling El-Gharani’s story, ably illustrated by Alexandre Franc. As I explained in my review of the book, when it comes to Guantánamo — and the US prisons in Afghanistan where prisoners were processed before their flight to Guantánamo — no photos or film footage has ever been leaked to the media, and so a graphic novel provides an extremely powerful way in which the horrors of the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror” can be told.

For the launch on March 12, Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc will be at the London Review Bookshop, where they will discuss Guantánamo, the book and Mohammed El-Gharani with Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor at the LRB. You can book a ticket here.

* * * * *

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

Please Watch ‘The Trial’, A Powerful Video About Guantánamo’s Broken Military Commission Trial System

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.

 

In the long and horrendously unjust story of Guantánamo, the two key elements of America’s flight from the law since 9/11 have been the use of torture, and the imprisonment of men, indefinitely, without charge or trial. A third element is the decision to try some of these men, in a trial system ill-advisedly dragged out of the history books by former Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal adviser David Addington.

That system — the military commissions — has struggled to deliver anything resembling justice, in large part because it was designed to accept evidence produced through torture, and then to execute prisoners after cursory trials. The Supreme Court ruled this system illegal in 2006, but Congress then tweaked it and revived it, and, after Barack Obama became president, it was tweaked and revised again instead of being scrapped, as it should have been.

Throughout this whole sorry period, the US federal courts have, in contrast, proven adept at successfully prosecuting those accused of terrorism, but at Guantánamo the commissions have struggled to successfully convict anyone. Since 2008, just eight cases have gone to trial, but six were settled via plea deals, and, of the other two, one ended up with the prisoner in question (Salim Hamdan, a hapless driver for Osama bin Laden)  being released after just five months, while the other was an outrageously one-sided affair, as the prisoner in question (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a propagandist for Al-Qaeda) refused even to mount a defense. The commissions also have a history of collapsing on appeal — and with good reason, as the alleged war crimes most of the prisoners were convicted of were actually invented by Congress. For an overview of the commissions, see my article, The Full List of Prisoners Charged in the Military Commissions at Guantánamo.

Nevertheless, seven other men face military commission trials — or, more pertinently, seem to be caught up in endless pre-trial hearings, the result of, on the one hand, the defense teams asserting that a fair trial is impossible without the men’s torture being openly discussed, and, on the other, the government’s lawyers seeking to prevent this — and also doing everything in their power to derail any notion that justice might be delivered, by spying on the defense teams’ meetings with their clients, infiltrating the defense teams by hiring a spy, and generally obstructing every request for discovery or any other information vital to their ability to do their jobs properly.

Of the seven men caught up in pre-trial hearings, five are accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and, just a few weeks ago, a 16-minute video profiling the lawyers for one of these men, Ammar al-Baluchi, was released by the Guardian, directed by Johanna Hamilton for Field of Vision, a visual journalism film unit co-created by Laura Poitras, A.J. Schnack and Charlotte Cook, and funded by First Look Media, home of the Intercept.

The video is below, via YouTube — and you can also find it here on the Guardian’s website, and on their YouTube channel. Please also check out Field of Vision.

I’m privileged to have met with and done some work for al-Baluchi’s defense team — James Connell, Alka Pradhan and Lt. Col. Sterling Thomas, all featured in the film, who talk us through the situation al-Baluchi finds himself in, a kind of Groundhog day of injustice, in which any just resolution seems impossible.

One of the topics discussed in the film is how, for the 2012 film ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were involved with the CIA for a year, with, as Julian Borger of the Guardian explained in an article to accompany the release of ‘The Trial,’ the agency sharing details of al-Baluchi’s torture at a secret CIA “black site,” which al-Baluchi’s actual, real life lawyers “had been told were too secret to be divulged.” As Sterling Thomas said, “A movie director gets greater access than a defence counsel.” 

The Guardian’s article also highlighted, as the film shows, how, “In the pre-trial hearings, which have been underway for nearly seven years, the defence teams have been repeatedly denied access to witnesses and documentation that might cast light on their clients’ captivity prior to arriving in Guantánamo.”

As Alka Pradhan explained in the film, “This is a death penalty trial and we’re supposed to be entitled to every scrap of evidence that could be material to the case. Everywhere we go we are looking for information that we have not got from the US government, like where they may have been held, which the government has said absolutely flat out they consider to be classified and they will never tell us.’ As she added, understatedly, “That’s sort of crucial to the case.”

So welcome to the dispiritingly unjust world of Guantánamo. I hope you have time to watch the film, and to marvel at the tenacity of James Connell, Alka Pradhan and Lt. Col. Sterling Thomas, and that you’ll share it if you find it illuminating.

* * * * *

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, 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.

With 25 Days to Brexit, The Four Fathers Release New Single ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’

Today marks 25 days until the UK is supposed to leave the EU, and my band The Four Fathers are taking the opportunity to release — via Bandcamp — our anti-Brexit anthem, ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, which has become something of a live favourite over the last couple of years.

Please have a listen to it, share it if you like it, and, if you want, you can even buy it as a download (for £1/$1.25 — or more if you wish).

I wrote it in the weeks after the referendum, when the chorus came to me out of the blue — as often happens to me — and I then struggled to hammer out some verses, aimed at the stupidity, arrogance and lies of, variously, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and David Cameron. However, although the chorus arrived fully-formed and has never changed, I thoroughly revised the lyrics for the verses after discussions with my friend, the musician and producer Charlie Hart, whose suggestions led me in a direction that was — at least partly — more poetic, especially in the song’s opening lines: 

It was just after the summer solstice

When it should have been sunny and bright

But a darkness fell over everything

Extinguishing all light

You can listen to the song or buy it below:

I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back) by The Four Fathers

I also recognise in my lyrics that some who voted to leave the EU were reacting against the erosion of their lives, communities and livelihoods, which has taken place since the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, and was not reversed under John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron, but it still pains me that so many people don’t seem to realise that the EU didn’t fundamentally play a role in this, and that the blame for it lies with our own governments, whether Tory or New Labour (or, from 2010-15, the Tories backed by the Lib Dems).

In my lyrics, I still take aim at the isolationists, and reflect on how, to my mind, the tendency of patriotism is towards war. I also take aim at the racists and xenophobes, empowered by the referendum, who have changed Britain for the worse since June 2016. Since the referendum, whenever I meet EU nationals, I apologise for that happened, and then ask them if they have been abused in any way since then — and I have yet to meet any EU national who hasn’t, at the very least, been shouted at in the street and told to “f*ck off back home.”

It’s hard to believe that, on March 29, we’re supposed to leave the EU, and that this date marks two years since Theresa May triggered Article 50, the mechanism for doing so. It’s also hard to believe that it’s nearly three years since the referendum, which I still believe was, fundamentally, an act of gross political cowardice and folly on the part of David Cameron that was then picked up on by the Euro-sceptic lunatics on the far right of the Tory Party, who everyone, from Ted Heath onwards, kept in a box, and which they sat on until Cameron, scared by the rise of UKIP and the increasing noise from the box, decided, with monstrous hubris, that he would defuse UKIP and the Euro-sceptic loons with an idiotically ill-conceived referendum. 

Sickeningly, the subsequent twists and turns of the Brexit soap opera have drowned out almost all other meaningful political debate about British politics, as the “age of austerity” that was cynically implemented by Cameron and George Osborne when they took office in 2010 has continued to destroy the state and the very notion of civil society, and continues to see the Tories determined to drag Britain back to the mid-19th century in terms of the suffering and punishment of the poor, and the deliberate fostering of an ever-growing chasm between rich and poor.

And, in the meantime, Labour — for the most part, and in particular in the councils it controls — fails to challenge the austerity agenda, and is now just as gleefully joining in the plundering of the poor for profit — via the disgraceful ‘regeneration’ industry that is committed to destroying social housing and local businesses for unaffordable new developments that are bad for everyone except the developers and the other leeches who profit from them.

In the wake of the EU referendum, the dogged but dim Theresa May, the former home secretary whose six-year tenure was overflowing with the most alarming racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia, filled the void left after David Cameron’s instant departure, and, since then, has obsessively tried to deliver the undeliverable — a Brexit that doesn’t cripple the British economy. 

I share the conviction of others who have looked into Brexit closely, who have realised that it is actually impossible to leave the EU without destroying one’s economy, and who have also realised that this situation was set up deliberately. As the great anti-Brexit analyst Ian Dunt explained in his book, Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now?:

Article 50 is brutal. Insofar as it was ever expected to be used, it was as a punishment mechanism. ‘I wrote Article 50 so I know it well,’ the former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said shortly after the Brexit vote. ‘My intention was that it should be a classic safety valve that was there, but never used.’

It’s not that I believe the EU is perfect — far from it. Its neo-liberal impulses are genuinely dangerous, but freedom of trade and movement within the EU has, to my mind, helped to erode the kind of narrow nationalism that led to centuries of war, and, in any case, on a purely pragmatic basis, untangling over 40 years of laws and treaties tying us to the EU appears, genuinely, to be impossible.

Whatever its failings, changing the EU should take place from within, rather than, as the Brexiteers want, isolating ourselves as a backwards-looking island that is free to be as racist as it likes, and as delusional as it likes, thinking that isolation is the way forward in an inter-connected world in which we need other countries at least a much as they need us.

With 25 days to go, I’m still hoping that there’s an escape route. In the song, I conclude by stating, “The only light in the darkness / Is that Brexit will destroy whoever makes it real”, but I’d rather it didn’t quite come to that, and that we can pull ourselves back from the brink before that destruction comes true.

* * * * *

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, 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.

Violent and Unforgivable: The Destruction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford

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

 

Today is my birthday, and I find myself in a reflective place, looking, at one side, on death and destruction, and, on the other, at life and love and solidarity.

Perhaps this is appropriate at the age of 56, when I am neither young nor truly old — and, believe me, I reflect on aging, and mortality, and what it means, with some regularity, as my restless brain refuses to settle, endlessly asking questions and seeking new perspectives and insights into the human condition. But that is not why I’m in this reflective place today.

Yesterday, in the hallucinatory light and heat of one of the hottest February days in London’s history, I stood on a small triangle of grass by the horrendously polluted Deptford Church Street in south east London, and watched as a small group of tree-killers, SDL Solutions, brought in from Gloucestershire, tore down almost all the trees in a beautiful community garden, the Old Tidemill Garden, whose tree canopy, which would imminently have returned as spring arrives, had, over 20 years, become an increasingly efficient absorber of that horrendous pollution.

As the heat waned and night fell, Lewisham Council held a meeting at which councillors — the same councillors responsible for the destruction of the garden — declared, with no trace of irony, a ‘climate emergency’, which involved calling on the Mayor and Cabinet to “pledge to do everything within their power to make Lewisham carbon neutral by 2030.” As the Lib Dems later tweeted, “you know going (net) zero carbon means you’ll need to store up more carbon in soil & trees? What you’re doing at Tidemill Garden isn’t really compatible with that.”

I cite this as just one example of the abundant contradictions, greed, lies, spin, class prejudice, racism and bureaucratic sickness involved in the destruction of the Tidemill garden — and the proposed destruction of the structurally sound council flats of Reginald House next door, whose residents, by an overwhelming majority, don’t want to have their homes destroyed, but haven’t been asked their wishes by the council.

For ten years, local people have fought to get the council to change their plans regarding a proposed housing development on the site of the Tidemill primary school, the garden (created by pupils, parents and teachers in 1998), and Reginald House, but to no avail. The school moved out in 2012, and guardians then moved into the vacant Victorian school, opening up the garden as part of their social and artistic activities. When they were evicted, the community was given “meanwhile use” of the garden until the development plans were finalised. However, when the council asked for the keys back, on August 29 last year, the community had built up such support for the garden as a genuinely autonomous space for the people of Deptford, and as a precious environmental asset — and the council had shown such  a persistent refusal to listen to why the garden was too precious, too genuinely invaluable to be sacrificed on the altar of profit — that we occupied it instead.

Two months later, on October 29, the council violently evicted us, using the union-busting bailiffs of County Enforcement, with the support of the police. When the council hired a tree services company to begin cutting down the trees in November, we persuaded them to very publicly withdraw from their contract, and the resulting impasse lasted until yesterday, when, in just a few hours, most of the trees were felled by chainsaws and a huge digger, and the entire garden turned into what looked like a war zone.

This is an apt metaphor, because, in a constant search for easy and excessive profits in the broken economy that crawled out of the Western establishment’s self-inflicted global crash of 2008 — when the money-making financiers who claimed to have come up with an endlessly self-fulfilling economic miracle were revealed as the criminals they are, and the politicians who had all gone along with it lost their credibility — the last refuge of all these scoundrels is a kind of cannibalistic capitalism, in which wars are now waged on poorer British people by their own leaders, and by an array of self-serving hypocrites who constantly lie about what they’re doing.

Driving all this is, of course, the open-ended and seemingly endless ‘age of austerity’ that was cynically declared by David Cameron and George Osborne when the Tories got back into power in 2010. This was — and still is — a naked onslaught on the state provision of almost all services essential for civil society and for anything resembling a society that can regard itself as fair and just. The cuts, which are both ongoing, and increasingly savage, hacked away at the funding available to councils and to those providing social housing, pushing both towards a harsh new political and economic reality that, to be honest, both parties have generally taken to with largely undisguised zeal.

Councils, pleading impotence — but, in general, secretly happy to not have to actually do anything themselves, because they prefer to be either lazy, or pimps, or both — have been hooking up with developers in order to build new housing, in deals that are cynical, and nothing but contemptuous of those displaced by these arrangements — in general, the poorer members of these communities, those who, in Labour boroughs, actually vote for those dispossessing them, but who, in the post-Blair Labour Party, are of no concern to the Party’s aspirational, middle class bureaucrats, who actually have contempt for the working class, and are only interested in gentrifying anything that smacks of poverty or the working class.

And these unholy deals involve two routes to the current disaster in which we find ourselves. The first involves private companies awash with international investors’ cash, who are given land by councils — or sold it for a pittance — so they can throw up the almost uncountable number of priapic towers that have risen across the capital in recent years for largely gullible foreign buyers. As this speculative housing market has started to lose its sheen, through unfettered greed and the negative effects on international investor confidence of the self-inflicted madness of Brexit, a new source of profiteering has emerged, via housing associations, who, traditionally, provided genuinely affordable, long-term social housing — and who, since Margaret Thatcher began her destruction of council housing through her ‘Right to Buy’ programme, have also been given control of an increasing number of former council properties.

In recent years, the larger housing associations, who have come together under an organisational mega-umbrella, the G15, which is dangerously large and unaccountable, have almost completely lost touch with their role as social housing providers, becoming an unhealthy public/private Frankenstein’s Monster, knocking down estates or finding other huge empty sites to build a mix of housing for sale, for the scam known as shared ownership, or for rent, with genuinely affordable social rents being devoured by a new regime of allegedly “affordable” rents that are not actually affordable at all, as I have written about on a regular basis — see, for example, The Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and the Mainstream Media’s Inadequacy in Reporting Stories About “Social Homes” and “Affordable Rents” and Video: I Discuss the Tidemill Eviction, the Broken ‘Regeneration’ Industry and Sadiq Khan’s Stealthy Elimination of Social Rents.

At Tidemill, the main developer is Peabody, which still trades on its history as a philanthropic Victorian provider of housing for the poor, even though it is now completely unrecognisable, even from what it was ten years ago. We realised this when, in October, we went to their head offices to protest about their involvement in the project, and were fobbed off by their Head of Corporate Services, who had come to Peabody after working for Barclays on global finance. For some further insight into how Peabody has changed, check out this Corporate Watch report, compiled during our occupation.

To give just one example of how Peabody are now very fundamentally a part of the problem rather than any sort of solution, the former social housing provider recently signed an £8bn deal — yes, you read that correctly — with the rapacious Australian-based international property developer Lendlease to raze to the ground the whole of the Thamesmead estate in the far reaches of south east London over the coming years, in what will undoubtedly be — if it goes ahead — the biggest clearance programme to date in the wholesale social cleansing of London. (Lendlease, in case anyone doesn’t know, are notorious as the destroyers of Southwark’s Heygate Estate, as the would-be destroyers of Haringey’s social housing, and, in Lewisham, they are already malevolently present at the Timberyard in Deptford, near the Thames and the right next to the vulnerable Pepys Estate).

In this destruction — which can, and should, very genuinely, be described as an epidemic of social cleansing — both Labour and Conservative councils are complicit, along with, since 2016, the hapless puppet Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is, fundamentally, little or no improvement on the previous Mayor, the wretched Boris Johnson. To put it simply, an establishment bully and thug has been replaced by the working class son of a Pakistani immigrant who looks perpetually craven and cowed in the presence of big business’s representatives, and who has forgotten — if he ever knew — how to genuinely stand up for the working class people of London, whether they are white British or part of the capital’s extraordinary melting pot of cultures and ethnicities.

And so, yesterday, on the eve of my birthday, as I stood on a small triangle of grass by Deptford Church Street, in that hallucinatory light and heat that, if you lost your focus for a moment, snapped you back to reality with the genuine sensation that it was the height of summer, I watched what I can genuinely describe as a war on the ordinary people of Deptford — and, by extension working class people of all backgrounds and ethnicities across the whole of the UK — by the cannibalistic capitalists of here and now: the councillors who falsely claim to be members of a caring Labour Party, the self-serving highly-paid executives of Peabody, spinning their endless lies about being a charity that provides social housing, the money-grubbing tree-killers of SDL Solutions, and the various other leeches waiting in the wings, salivating over their potential cut of the £100m that, in total, the Tidemill site will deliver to all of those involved in its development as a dull collection of tiny identikit prison units punctuated by pockets of supremely unimaginative landscaping, including the inevitable ‘private’ gated garden for those with the most money.

In conclusion, then — and to offset all this terrible news — where is my hope on this ill-timed birthday?

Well, that, of course, lies with the community that I have grown to be part of over the last year and a half — the local people, the artists, the musicians, the shopkeepers, the market traders, social tenants, private tenants, sympathetic owner-occupiers, the residents of Reginald House, the homeless, the inspiring, hard-working squatters from across the UK and the EU, the environmental activists, visionaries and dreamers who have come together to defend an extraordinarily beautiful community space and green oasis, and who will continue to work together to resist the social cleansing plans of Lewisham Council, Peabody and other developers.

The battle for Tidemill, of course, is still not over, as Reginald House still stands, and the building work has yet to begin, but other battles await elsewhere — primarily, in New Cross, where the council intends to destroy the Achilles Street estate, and a number of shops attached to it, as part of its intended re-making of the whole of the centre of New Cross, and in Catford, where the council intends to destroy the town centre — the 1970s shopping centre and Milford Towers, a council estate above it. In both cases it would make much more sense for Achilles Street and the Catford shopping centre and Milford Towers to be refurbished rather than destroyed and re-created, in developments worth hundreds of millions pounds to developers and other profiteers, but that will do nothing for local people, except to exile former social tenants, to create empty glass towers of over-priced flats that no local people can afford, and to wipe out all existing local businesses, replacing them with empty shops of drearily ubiquitous corporate chains.

Please join us in whichever way you can. The Tidemill garden gave birth to a very powerful notion of what an autonomous space can be, and what an autonomous community can be, as, from the ground up, we dealt with Deptford as it is, not Deptford as its gentrifiers want it to be — providing a safe space for homeless people, providing a green space for children to play in, and for grown-ups to reflect and relax and escape the pressures of the outside world, providing opportunities for gardening, providing opportunities for anyone who wanted to put on arts events and musical events for free to do so, creating a venue for the internationally renowned Deptford X arts festival, and providing a space in which, genuinely, societal change seemed possible — via, for example, the structures that some of the occupiers built using scavenged materials, which could have been replicated to provide homes for the homeless, but which were, instead, smashed up by bailiffs within hours of the garden’s eviction four months ago.

* * * * *

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