Andy Worthington's Blog, page 26

Alarm as Proposals Emerge to Send ISIS Prisoners to Guantánamo, and the UK Strips “ISIS Bride” of Her Citizenship

[image error] 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.

17 years after the US tore up international and domestic laws and treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners, in the “war on terror” that George W. Bush declared in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and which led to the establishment of CIA “black sites” and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, those decisions continue to cast a baleful shadow on notions of domestic and international justice.

A case in point concerns foreign nationals seized during the horrendous war in Syria over the last eight years. 

From the start of his presidency, Donald Trump made it clear that he wanted to send new prisoners to Guantánamo, and those involved in Daesh (more commonly referred to in the West as ISIS or the Islamic State) were particularly singled out.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the proposals came to nothing. Some of those advising Trump pointed out that it seemed probable that a new Congressional authorization would be required to send prisoners to Guantánamo who were not explicitly involved with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or the 9/11 attacks, and, in any case, others recognized that Guantánamo was no place to send anyone if there was any intention of delivering anything resembling justice.

Set up to be beyond the reach of the US courts, Guantánamo was a place where the Bush administration undertook torture and other forms of abuse in a failed effort to secure actionable intelligence, and has ended up warehousing men that it doesn’t fundamentally know how to deal with. In the meantime, its few efforts at pursuing justice at the prison have made it something of an international laughing stock. The military commissions, set up by Dick Cheney, discredited by the Supreme Court, and ill-advisedly revived twice by Congress — once under Bush, and once, to his shame, under Barack Obama — have proven incapable of delivering anything resembling justice at Guantánamo, while the federal courts, in contrast, have a long and uninterrupted record of successfully prosecuting those accused of terrorism.

However, since Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw US troops from Syria, there has also been discussion — again — of sending some of the foreign fighters held there to Guantánamo. A senior State Department official told ABC News, “Our preferred first option would certainly be repatriation and prosecution, keeping [foreign fighters] locked up in countries of origin when possible, where possible. But when countries aren’t willing to take responsibility for their own citizens that went and fought for the Islamic State, if they are high-value detainees, and members of ISIS leadership, then we’re going to make certain that they remain off the battlefield. One way of doing that might include sending them to Gitmo.”

While four Senators — including the notoriously aggressive Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) — have written to Donald Trump urging him to send ISIS fighters to Guantánamo, many other voices are opposed. “The United States can’t be the world’s jailer,” Raha Wala, the director of National Security Advocacy at Human Rights First, said. He added that some countries have said that “they don’t want to cooperate with the US on counter-terrorism issues if the result is sending a detainee to Guantánamo,” as ABC News described it. Wala also spelled out how Guantánamo “has not only been a moral abomination but also a legal and policy disaster for the United States.”

To add to the alarm that mention of bringing new prisoners to Guantánamo brings, the chatter about the ISIS prisoners also raises fundamental questions about nationality and national responsibilities.

The UK and citizenship-stripping in the case of Shamima Begum

In Britain this week, there has been widespread concern after the home secretary, Sajid Javid, stated his intention to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship. Begum, a British citizen, was just 15 when she traveled to Syria after being indoctrinated to join ISIS. Now aged 19, she is living in a refugee camp in Syria, has just given birth to a child, and has asked to be brought back to the UK.

Javid’s decision is so alarming not just because of Begum’s age, and therefore her lack of responsibility for her actions (adults are supposed to be held responsible for the decisions taken by juveniles — those under 18), but also because, by stripping her of her citizenship, he is making her stateless, a situation that is, to be blunt, completely unacceptable.

In case anyone needs reminding — not least Sajid Javid — it is illegal under international law to remove someone’s citizenship if doing so makes them stateless. As the barrister David Anderson, who previously served as a reviewer of the UK’s anti-terror legislation, pointed out to Al-Jazeera, “Those born as British citizens who are not dual nationals cannot be stripped of their citizenship in any circumstances” — and many, many other public figures, including lawyers, academics, politicians and journalists, have made their opposition to Javid’s decision clear. 

Shiraz Maher, the director of the International Centre for Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, told the BBC’s Newsnight, “I think it’s a very dangerous decision, it does create this perception that there is a two-tier system and a system that’s frankly racist. And this is the perception that occurring in Muslim communities across the country. It’s a dangerous situation the Home Secretary has created.” 

However, Javid evidently believes that a section of the 1981 British Nationality Act, and further legislation passed in 2002, allows him to remove citizenship if he can show that the person in question has behaved “in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK,” and that he has “reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the UK, to become a national of such a country or territory.” 

In Begum’s case, that country is Bangladesh, but, although her parents are of Bangladeshi heritage, she has never even visited Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi government has announced that it has no obligation — or intention — to accept her as a citizen. In addition, of course, there is something deeply disturbing about politicians claiming the right to extra-judicially strip someone of their citizenship because he or she regards their behaviour as “seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the U.K.,” without having to explain why he or she thinks that a girl who is not actually accused of horrific crimes herself, only of sympathizing with those regarded as terrorists, constitutes such a threat that she must be stripped of her citizenship.

Five years ago, I was disturbed to discover that Theresa May, when she was home secretary, was involved in enthusiastically stripping dual nationals of their British citizenship — and, in two cases, when they were in Syria, telling the US where they were so that they could be killed in drone strikes. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism established that 41 individuals had been stripped of their British nationality since legislation was passed enabling it in 2002, and that 37 of these cases had taken place under Theresa May.

That was thoroughly shocking, but in general, whilst it is appalling for the British government to suggest that they can strip dual nationals of their citizenship whenever it suits them — and without any judicial process being involved —  mention of stripping British citizens born in Britain of their nationality — in other words, making them stateless — has been both rarer and more contentious.

However, last year, when the last two members of a British quartet of alleged Daesh killers, dubbed “the Beatles,” were , no one seemed to notice that, although one of the men, El Shafee Elsheikh, had moved to the UK from Sudan with his family in the 1990s, the other man, Alexanda Kotey, although generally described as having “a Ghanaian and Cypriot background,” was born in Britain, and was therefore made stateless when his citizenship was stripped.

What will happen to the ISIS fighters held in Syria?

In addition, Britain is not the only country playing dangerous games with the law when it comes to ISIS fighters, their wives and their children. As the so-called caliphate has collapsed, with ISIS fighters “making their last stand in an area smaller than one sq km in the eastern desert near the border with Iraq,” in the Guardian’s words, it has become clear that, as the paper described it, “About 500 battle-hardened fighters are thought to be defending the remains of the caliphate and most are highly motivated foreign nationals who are ideologically committed to fighting until the end. Most local Isis recruits from Syria and Iraq are believed to have slipped back into the general population.”

As the Guardian also explained, “At least 1,000 foreign nationals, including at least 14 British citizens, suspected of being Isis members are held in prisons and camps in north Syria, having been captured by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) over the last three years.” Furthermore, “About 1,500 with links to the group are being held at displacement camps, often in appalling conditions. They are from more than 40 countries and some have been held for at least two years.” When Donald Trump tweeted about the prisoners last weekend, he stated that “over 800” foreign troops were still held,  a number now reduced, as 150 Iraqi-born ISIS fighters were repatriated last week. As ABC News put it, US officials believe that “less than 10 percent of the current detainees” can be considered as “high-value” prisoners.

The situation on the ground is evidently complicated, because the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are holding ISIS suspects, are “a major western ally but a non-state actor,” in the Guardian’s words. As a result, foreign governments are severely constrained in providing any kind of consular assistance.

Nevertheless, as the Guardian explained, “Some governments, including the US and Russia, have repatriated men, women and children for trial or rehabilitation programmes” (with the US to date bringing back 16 fighters, 13 of whom have been prosecuted in federal court), while the French government has said that it will assess its nationals on a case by case basis. Three weeks ago, the French justice minister, Nicole Belloubet, told French radio that, as the Guardian described it, “the government would rather keep track of jihadists than risk them evading justice.” As she said, “We’ve made a choice, which is that we prefer control, which means a return to France.” 

Last weekend, the US “called on European nations and other countries to repatriate and prosecute their citizens who travelled to Syria to join” ISIS, but, just days after, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signified that the US had jumped on the citizenship-stripping bandwagon, when he stated that Hoda Muthana, a US citizen who had traveled from Alabama to join ISIS, and now regretted her decision and wanted to return home with her 18-month old son, was not actually a US citizen. As Al-Jazeera explained, “A lawyer for Muthana’s family, Hassan Shibly, said the administration’s position was based on a ‘complicated’ interpretation of the law involving her father.” Shibly told the Associated Press, “They’re claiming her dad was a diplomat when she was born, which, in fact, he wasn’t.” As Al-Jazeera explained, “Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a person born in the US to a foreign diplomatic officer is not subject to US law and is not automatically considered a US citizen at birth.”

However, this one example from the US, while significant in and of itself, doesn’t match the UK’s blanket hardline approach, which, in particular, smacks of the horrible kind of racism that has been so prevalent in Tory political discourse since the EU referendum in 2016, and that, as I explained when Theresa May became the party’s leader, is an intrinsic part of her thoroughly unpleasant personality.

Nevertheless, whichever way the situation develops over the coming weeks and months, it’s clear that everyone everywhere who cares about the rule of law and the inviolability of citizenship needs to keep a close eye on this evolving story.

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

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

Nikita Woolfe and I Discuss ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the Housing Crisis and the ‘Inspire2Resist’ Handbook on Dissident Island Radio

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

 

Last week I was delighted to be invited, with the filmmaker Nikita Woolfe, to discuss ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the documentary film Niki directed, and which I narrate — and, specifically, the ‘Inspire2Resist’ handbook Niki has put together, with a bit of help from me — on Dissident Island Radio, which describes itself as “a radical internet radio show broadcasting on the first and third Friday of every month from the London Action Resource Centre”, a wonderful community space in Whitechapel.

The show is here as an MP3 (and here on the website), and our section is from 27:30 to 46:00, with our reflections on resistance to the ‘regeneration’ industry, and the many forms it takes, including some mention of the ongoing resistance to ‘regeneration’ in Deptford, via the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign that I’m part of (and see the archive here and here). Our host, Patrick, had done his research, and the interview was exactly the kind of detailed discussion that rarely makes it into the mainstream media.

In discussing who the handbook is for, I stressed that anyone living in social housing is under threat, as councils, housing associations and housing developers continue to work towards destroying secure and genuinely affordable social housing, either through estate demolitions, or through other ongoing efforts to price people out of their homes — like the new rental regime introduced by Sadiq Khan, which I wrote about here.

The spur for the discussion was the screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ that is taking place at the Rio Cinema in Dalton next Tuesday, February 26, at which the ‘Inspire2Resist’ handbook will be launched, and at which Niki and I will be taking part in a post-screening Q&A session. For further information, see the Facebook event page, and see my article here.

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and will share it if you find it useful. I recommend all of it, not just the section on housing — the show begins by focusing on the forthcoming Glasgow Autonomous Bookfair at Glasgow Autonomous Space on March 2, and is followed by a section on the Stansted 15, whose case I wrote about here. Later in the show there’s a section on the Kurdish struggle, followed by loads of great music — Part 2 of DJ Salamander’s 3-part Afrivision set featuring tracks from across the African continent!

Below, if it’s of interest, is a video that Niki and I made last year, on the Aylesbury Estate, as a fundraiser for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ and the ‘Inspire2Resist’ handbook. You can also make a donation to support us here, if you wish.

Crowdfund campaign INSPIRE2RESIST from WOOLFE VISION on Vimeo.

* * * * *

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.

What Happened to the Prisoners the US Abandoned at Bagram, Once Known as Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror?

[image error] 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.

 

My thanks to Jenifer Fenton, for remembering the foreign nationals that the US left behind when it handed over Bagram prison in Afghanistan to the Afghan authorities in December 2014.

I used to write regularly about Bagram, a place of notorious torture and abuse, where an undisclosed number of prisoners died at the hands of US forces, because it had been the main processing prison for Guantánamo, and, under Barack Obama, had become a legal battlefield, as lawyers tried to secure habeas corpus rights for the men held there, so that they would at least have had comparable rights to the prisoners held at Guantánamo, who secured constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights via the Supreme Court in June 2008, even though appeals court judges subsequently gutted habeas of all meaning for them. My extensive archive of articles about Bagram is here, and in 2010 I published the first annotated list of all the prisoners held there.

Bagram was re-named the Parwan Detention Facility in 2009, and the old Soviet building that had housed America’s notorious prison — as horrendous as Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but without the photographic evidence to prove it — was subsequently destroyed by the US. The prison was handed over to the Afghan authorities in March 2013, with the final relinquishing of control taking place at the end of December 2014. Prior to this, in September 2014, I covered the US’s efforts to repatriate prisoners it had held there, in an article entitled, Two Long-Term Yemeni Prisoners Repatriated from Bagram; Are Guantánamo Yemenis Next?, in which I noted how a US military official had told the Washington Post that, at the time, the number of prisoners in US custody in Bagram — none of whom were Afghans — was down to 27. By the time of the final handover, there were just six foreign nationals held, and two of these men — Tunisians previously held in “black sites” — were freed in 2015. For an update from December 2014, see this Newsweek article, and other links here. Also see this Afghan Analysts Network article by Kate Clark from May 2017.

Bringing the story up to date for Al-Jazeera, in “What happened to prisoners at Bagram, ‘Afghanistan’s Guantanamo’?” Jenifer Fenton began by noting how, after “Washington renounced responsibility for the men once held” at Bagram/Parwan, in December 2014, “The handful of prisoners left behind became the Afghans’ problem.”

Fenton noted how one of the last four men held from the US years of control was Said Jamaluddin, a Tajik citizen, who had been given the Internment Serial Number (ISN number) 4057. Fenton described him as “innocent collateral in the US’s so-called ‘war on terror,’” and stated that he “was repatriated from Afghanistan to Tajikistan, where he faces almost-certain ill-treatment, according to legal advocates from the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, who are working on his behalf.”

The clinic also told Fenton that they believed that his brother Abdul Fatah, ISN 4058, “was also forcibly sent back.”

This was in spite of the fact that Tajikistan is notorious for human rights abuses, and Afghanistan is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, which forbids the repatriation of any individual if there are “substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

The Yale clinic also told Fenton of their “fears that 38-year-old Musa Akhmadjanov, an Uzbek national, ISN 20370, might soon be rendered home too.” Mohammad Waqar, the Afghanistan country director of the International Legal Foundation (ILF), said that he was being held in a prison in Kabul.

According to Fenton, “This would mean there might be just one US ‘war-on-terror’ prisoner left, an Egyptian named Abu Ikhlas al-Masri, 55, ISN 21064.” As she explained, “The Pentagon alleged he was a member of al-Qaeda with ties to the Afghan Taliban and related Afghan and Kashmiri groups,” but, crucially, “[n]o proof or any details about any of these allegations have been provided.”

Fenton also explained, “There has been no word of him for years and recent efforts to ascertain his whereabouts proved fruitless,” in large part because the Afghan government “does not publicly provide information on its security detainees.”

As she proceeded to explain —revisiting the reason why lawyers sought habeas corpus rights for the men held at Bagram — they “were not classified as prisoners of war, which would have guaranteed them certain rights,” and “[t]hey had even fewer rights than their counterparts in Guantánamo.”

Ahmed Rashid, a journalist, author and expert on Afghanistan, explained what those studying the US’s “war on terror” detention policies have long understood — that it was lawless and chaotic. “The Bagram prison was a melting pot of innocent and guilty people from all over the region,” he said, adding, “After 9/11, thousands of non-Afghans were rounded up. Many of them were totally innocent.” As Fenton put it, they included “teachers, volunteers, and aid workers.” Rashid added, “Nevertheless, they landed in Guantánamo and Bagram and the lack of due diligence … over the years just strengthened the assumptions that they were terrorists.”

From the beginning, Fenton noted, “the ‘war-on-terror’ ideology freed the American government from the rule of law.” Hope Metcalf of Yale Law School said, “While the Afghans are now the culpable party when it comes to these men, it is a mistake of the US’s making, and they need to stand up and take responsibility.” However, she added, “they refuse to accept any responsibility.”

The stories of the last of the US’s Bagram prisoners

Fenton then expanded on the story of Musa Akhmadjanov, who fled Uzbekistan at the age of 21 “because he faced religious persecution.” He traveled first to the Russian Federation where he found work “at carwash facilities and construction sites,” and then he traveled on to Iran, “where he thought it would be easier to earn a living.”

Instead, it seems, in December 2009, he was deported to Afghanistan, where “[a]fter some time, and after allegedly refusing to pay a bribe to a commander at a border patrol station near Herat, he was handed over to the Americans.” As Fenton notes, “His detention in Bagram began on May 23, 2010.”

A report by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention established that he “was subjected to physical abuse by both his American and Afghan captors during his years of detention.” Years later, as Fenton describes it, the Afghan courts “found that there was no evidence that Akhmadjanov committed a crime, and in June 2015 cleared him to leave.” However, he was, understandably, unwilling to return to Uzbekistan, where he feared torture, abuse or other ill-treatment from the Uzbek authorities.

Mohamed Waqar, of the IFL, told Fenton he had been “trying to gain access to Akhmadjanov and the Tajik brothers,” but had been refused, “despite having the proper permissions.”

Turning to the story of Said Jamaluddin, Fenton noted how, in 2007, at the age of 28, he had “left home for Mashhad, Iran, accompanied by his older brother Abdul Fatah, 37, in hopes of studying there.” She added, “Abdul Fatah returned home but reunited with his brother two years later in Afghanistan after the Iranians deported Jamaluddin for overstaying his visa.”

The two men were staying in a friend’s house in Kunduz when it was raided by US personnel. Reports indicate that “[n]o evidence of wrongdoing was found,” but in March 2009 the brothers were sent to Bagram. In 2010, and again in the years that followed, “a detainee review board comprising US military personnel ruled that the brothers’ imprisonment was unwarranted,” and yet they continued to be held.

Then, as Fenton described it, “In February 2015, after paying a heavy price of years in detention at the Parwan facility, the pair was found guilty in Afghan courts of visa-related violations, for which they could have faced a maximum of three years in prison.” They “were sentenced to prison time but were eventually ordered free by the Afghan Supreme Court.” However, “fearing ill-treatment or worse if repatriated to Tajikistan and with no third country willing to accept them, they preferred to remain in an Afghan prison” rather than returning home.

The report by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention noted that “Fatah, the elder brother, is married and had four children, and that both he and Jamaluddin “are the sons of Amriddin Tabarov, a former political activist who has been accused of being a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and of Jamaat Ansarullah, an alleged extremist group.”

The UN report also stated that, on several visits to see them in Parwan, Tajik officials “allegedly threatened the brothers.”

Wells Dixon, a senior staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Fenton, “The US government has a legal obligation and a moral responsibility to follow up on men who are transferred out of long-term military custody, and to ensure that they aren’t tortured or killed. I worry that nearly two decades after 9/11, the US military continues to compromise its obligations under the Geneva Conventions to treat detainees humanely for the sake of expediency — and perhaps because they think no one is paying attention to these forgotten men.”

Note: For Edmund Clark’s ‘The Mountains of Majeed,’ from which the photo at the top of this article is taken, see 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.

‘Concrete Soldiers UK’: Screening of the Housing Documentary I Narrate at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, Tuesday February 26

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.

 

Tuesday February 26, at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, will be the first screening of 2019 for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the documentary film about the housing crisis, directed by Nikita Woolfe, which I narrate. I’m very pleased to note that, recently, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ was awarded ‘Best Documentary Film’ in the European Cinematography Awards for 2018. You can also now watch it via Amazon Prime.

The Facebook event page for the screening on February 26 is here, the listing on the Rio’s website is here, and if you’d like to attend for a reduced rate of £5, quote “£5 Tuesday Deal” when you get to the box office (it can’t be used to book online).

Focusing on the struggles against the cynical estate ‘regeneration’ industry, using examples in south London — the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark and Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth — the film demonstrates the scale of the problems faced by those living on estates, which councils want to knock down in deals with private developers and dubious housing associations. Crucially, however, the film also offers hope to campaigners, suggesting that people power can triumph.

The trailer is below, via YouTube:

At the screening we’re also launching ‘Inspire2Resist’, a handbook for anyone resisting ‘regeneration’, or who wants to know more about it, which we’ve compiled from the feedback received since the film came out, and through our own research. Niki and I spoke about it on Dissident Island Radio this week, in an excellent interview for this fortnight’s show, which is broadcast at 9pm tonight (Friday February 15), and which will be available as a podcast next week.

We launched ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ just over a year ago, and last year took it on an unconventional tour, showing it to housing groups and other interested parties, and travelling as far as Scotland, where we spent an inspiring weekend with the activists of Living Rent — primarily seeking to rein in rip-off private landlords — in Edinburgh and particularly in Glasgow. It also had resonance in Lewisham, where I live, and where I’ve spent the last year and a half involved in the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, a struggle to save a community garden and a block of structurally sound council flats in Deptford from destruction by Lewisham Council and the developer Peabody.

Niki describes the event at the Rio as “an evening of films about regeneration and people power”, and I’m pleased to confirm that some very interesting short films are also being shown, as well as ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, and that Niki and I will take part in a Q&A session following the screening.

The schedule is as follows:

7pm: A short film about Ridley Road Market, a vibrant street market just down the road from the Rio Cinema, where developers are circling like vultures.

7.10pm: Screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK.’

8.10pm: A work in progress by Tom Cordell, the director of ‘Utopia London’, about Macintosh Court, featured in ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a sheltered housing project in Lambeth whose residents saved it from destruction in 2015, but are now faced with a new attack by Lambeth Council.

8.30pm: Q&A with Nikita Woolfe and Andy Worthington.

Further information is below:

About ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’

An exhilarating and inspirational journey which reveals the battles being fought against the big developers and local councils who are splitting apart communities in the name of progress. Against all odds, these campaigners are winning and showing the way for people power. Interspersed with surprising facts about the UK housing crisis and the Grenfell Tower disaster, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ shows how it all feeds into the ethnic and social cleansing of cities.

‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ is produced by Woolfe.Vision, a film collective working to inspire social change.

About Macintosh Court

For the last 15 months, the tenants at Macintosh Court, a sheltered housing scheme for retired people in Lambeth, have been subjected to endless shoddy building work. In despair they called in the building’s original architect, Kate Macintosh (herself retired and 81 years old) to help them fight to save their homes. But at each stage the building’s owners, Lambeth Council, seem more interested in covering up what has gone wrong than fixing the building. What could they be hiding? This film is a journey into the bizarre world where private business is remaking London, and where nothing is ever what it seems.

See you in Dalston on February 26, hopefully!

* * * * *

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.

As Lewisham Council Spend £1m Guarding the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden from the People of Deptford, Who Will Be Their Tree-Killers?

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.

 

A week last Friday, the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign — which I’m part of, and which is trying to save a community garden and a block of council flats in Deptford, in south east London from the wrecking ball of the cynical ‘regeneration’ industry — received some unwelcome, but not entirely unexpected news.

In the High Court, the court of appeals upheld an earlier decision not to accept a judicial review of the ‘regeneration’ plans, which centred on issues relating to the right to light of tenants in a block of flats next to the proposed building site.

In a statement for the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, I responded by saying, “This is a disappointment, of course, but it doesn’t affect the campaign against the proposed destruction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and Reginald House. We continue to insist that the garden is too important as a barrier to pollution, and as a communal green space, to be destroyed, and that there is no acceptable reason for a structurally sound block of council flats to be knocked down for new housing that purports to be ‘social housing’ but will actually be at ‘London Affordable Rent’, which, in Lewisham, is 63% higher than social rents.”

I added, “The council — and Peabody, the developer — need to go back to the drawing board, and to come up with new plans that spare the garden and Reginald House and that deliver new homes at genuine social rents.”

Campaigner Andrea Carey Fuller, who had worked closely on the judicial review applications with the campaign’s solicitor, explained why they were so disappointed. “This case has wide implications for all future developments with regard to Councils using the BRE [Building Research Establishment ] Guidelines to properly assess the impact of daylight/sunlight on existing residents, when new developments are proposed”, she said, adding, “The expert who wrote the BRE Guidelines, Dr. Paul Littlefair, agreed that the guidelines had been applied incorrectly in this case — knowledge which was put before the High Court.”

Whilst it is seems clear that a ‘right to light’ precedent has been ignored in this case — which, perhaps, indicates a refusal on the part of the courts to fundamentally challenge councils regarding housing developments — most campaigners only ever regarded the judicial review as a delaying tactic, and on that front it succeeded spectacularly, giving us a justification for occupying the garden on August 29, when the council wanted the keys back, after letting us know that they were terminating the “meanwhile use” lease of the garden that had allowed the local community to become so attached to it over the last few years — to add to the many, many local people who remembered the garden and had strong feelings about it, from the 14 years that it existed as the garden of the Tidemill primary school.

Created with input from teachers, pupils and parents in 1998, the garden drew concentric circles on the landscape, and included amphitheatrical elements, a pond in the centre and over 70 trees, including two wonderful Indian bean trees planted when it was created. Across Deptford, untold numbers of children and parents experienced its magic before the school shut in 2012, and guardians then took over the old school site, opening up the garden before they too were evicted, and the local community were given the keys to it — in 2014.

Throughout this period, the council was working on plans to re-develop the site (the school, the garden and the site of the 16 flats of Reginald House), with the housing association Family Mosaic (who later merged with Peabody) and the private developer Sherrygreen Homes, and while doing so they persistently refused to listen to the local community’s requests for the plans to be re-drawn, to spare the garden and the flats.

When the council finally approved the re-development plans in September 2017, the campaign stepped up. More and more local people became involved, and the garden became a thriving autonomous space, where all kinds of free events — music, exhibitions, gardening events — took place. The local community also launched a fundraiser to fund the application for a judicial review, and this was ongoing both when the garden was occupied, and when it was violently evicted two months later, sharpening local opposition to the council’s arrogant disregard not only for the feelings of the local community, but also for the law.

After the news broke about the application for a judicial review being turned down, Cllr. Paul Bell, the Cabinet Member for Housing, suggested to the News Shopper that the council was now “in discussions with developer Peabody to sign the land over, with work planned to start ‘as soon as possible.'”

However, we fail to understand how this is possible. The garden is still full of trees, all of which must be felled for the building work to go ahead. The last time the council tried cutting the trees down, in November, the garden’s defenders rallied immediately, confronting their operatives on the ground, emailing them and leaving messages on their Facebook page, and complaining loudly on social media. One campaigner briefly re-occupied the garden, prompting the police to be called, and one other campaigner, who had been shouting at the tree-fellers and hurling small projectiles into the garden was actually arrested by the police, on the instigation of the bailiffs. His case came to court just last week, and was thrown out by a magistrate who was profoundly unimpressed with the behaviour of the bailiffs, and clearly rather incredulous about the lack of communication between the council ad the bailiffs, and the latter’s apparent lack of understanding that there was a legal challenge in place at the time Artemis began their ill-fated felling of some of the garden’s trees.

Back in November, after our concerted campaign against Artemis, they withdrew from their contract after just two days on site, stating, very publicly, “Artemis Tree Services have heard the voice of the Lewisham people and have decided to remove themselves from the Tidemill Project.”

After we deluged Artemis with complaints, it was clear that they not only understood that a legal challenge against the council’s plans was ongoing, but also that they were responding to the highly-charged atmosphere around the garden, with bailiffs guarding it 24 hours a day, as though it was some kind of a war zone, and with very bad feelings locally — completely unaddressed by the council — regarding the presence of the bailiffs, the endless barking of dogs, the use of floodlights in the garden at night, and the occasional destruction of structures within the garden. In addition, there was wider discontent with the way that the council refused to listen to the local community, and to re-draw their plans, sparing the garden and Reginald House, and either building with greater density on the old school site, or building some of the new homes planned on another site in the borough — perfectly valid options that the council has, sadly, never shown any desire to consider.

With all of this in mind, we wonder, therefore, who Cllr. Bell, the council and Peabody intend to appoint to take up where Artemis left off, as “the voice of the Lewisham people” is as loudly opposed to their plans as was the case back in November — and perhaps even more so now, as it has been revealed that the council has, to date, spent over £1m guarding the garden from the local community.

The ball’s in your court, Lewisham Council — so how do you propose to proceed? We’re watching you very closely.

Note: For further information about the wider resistance to Lewisham Council’s lack of accountability and their broken housing development model, see this article by lawyer and activist Franck Magennis for Novara Media, written after we had the first ‘New Cross and Deptford Community Dialogue’ meeting in Deptford on January 28, which was attended by over 70 very engaged local people. You can also check out my archive of articles about the Tidemill campaign here and here.

And if you want to support the campaign, please also come along to the Birds Nest pub on Sunday evening (February 17) for the latest solidarity gig and fundraiser, featuring the theatrical singalong satire of the Commie Faggots, longtime supporters of the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, Flak Punks, anarcho-tribal punks featuring Tidemill campaigner Roll Rizz on vocals and drums, Berlin-based post-punk electro filth via Das Fluff, and the militant, melodic rock and roots reggae protest music of my band The Four Fathers, who are also longtime supporters of the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign. Entry is free, but, if you do come along, please make a donation to support the campaign!

* * * * *

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.

As the Stansted 15 Avoid Jail, The “Hostile Environment” Continues with Disgraceful New Windrush Flight to Jamaica

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.

 

So there was good news on Wednesday, as the Stansted 15 — activists who prevented a deportation flight from leaving Stansted Airport for west Africa in March 2017 — avoided jail. Three received suspended sentences (with two also receiving 250 hours of community service, with 100 hours for the third), eleven others were given 100 hours of community service, while the 15th “received a 12-month community order with 20 days of rehabilitation”, as the Guardian described it.

However, two troubling aspects of the story remain significant. The first is that the protestors were convicted on charges of terrorism, and, alarmingly, that conviction still stands. As Ash Sardar wrote for the Independent, “Rather than being convicted of aggravated trespass, as other protesters who committed similar offences had been in 2016, the Stansted 15 had an initial trespass charge changed four months into their bail to a charge of ‘endangering safety at aerodromes’ – a scheduled terrorist offence, which potentially carries a life sentence.” The 2016 protest, at Heathrow Airport, against proposals for the airport’s expansion, involved three protestors who were part of the later actions at Stansted — the three who received the suspended sentences. 

Continuing with her analysis of the sentencing in the Independent, Ash Sardar added, “This particular bit of legislation – from the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990, if anyone’s interested – was brought in after the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. Its application in a protest case is completely unprecedented in English courts. You might not agree with the actions of the Stansted 15, but this punitive and misguided use of legislation to criminalise protesters should have you worried regardless.”

Graeme Hayes, a reader in political sociology at Aston University, who observed the entire trial, told the Guardian that, “Although the defendants have not got the custodial sentence, the bringing of a terrorism-related charge against non-violent protesters is a very worrying phenomenon. It’s so far the only case [of its type] in the UK, and points to a chilling of legitimate public dissent.”

The second concern in response to the sentencing doesn’t concern the defendants, but rather the object of their actions — those being forcibly deported from the UK.

In an article for the Guardian, Emma Hughes, one of the Stansted 15, after stating that the trial had been extraordinarily stressful, added, “And yet, however bad things are for us, they are nothing compared with the suffering faced by the people who are forced on to these brutal, secretive, barely legal deportation flights. Those on the flights are often shackled in large waist restraints that make it hard to breathe, and are sent to countries where they face isolation, persecution, destitution or even death. Last year it was revealed that the government wrongfully deported dozens of people, 11 of whom have now died. It is the Home Office that should be on trial.”

After also noting that another 11 people are “still in the UK because we stopped a charter deportation flight”, and that “three have been given the right to stay, the rest are still having their cases heard,” and “[o]ne of those with leave to remain was able to be present for the birth of his daughter”, Hughes then made a point of stating that, on the very day that she and her fellow protestors were spared jail, “the government sent its first chartered deportation flight to Jamaica since the Windrush scandal. The flight contained 35 people, many of whom had come to the UK as children, and who have virtually no relationship with Jamaica. Many will be separated from their children.”

The Windrush scandal, part of the “hostile environment” introduced by Britain’s appallingly racist Prime Minister Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary, primarily involved people who had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries (“Windrush” refers to the ship that brought Caribbean migrants to the UK in 1948). In Theresa May’s “hostile environment”, many of these people were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and, in at least 83 cases (and possibly 81 others), wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office.

Resuming deportation flights to Jamaica

While deportation flights like those to Ghana and Nigeria, stopped by the Stansted 15, have largely continued, deportation flights to Jamaica were suspended in spring 2018. And yet, with inexplicably poor timing, Sajid Javid — who took over as home secretary from Amber Rudd, when she was sacrificed in May’s place as the scapegoat for the Windrush scandal — arranged for a deportation flight to Jamaica to take place on the same day as the Stansted 15 sentencing.

On Monday, two days before the flight was scheduled to depart, Zita Holbourne, the  national co-chair of Black Activists Rising Against Cuts UK and the national vice president of the PCS union, condemned the planned deportations. She noted in the Guardian that those scheduled to be removed included someone “who was actually born in the UK but whose mother is from the Windrush generation”, and another person “who has been in the UK for 41 years and arrived at the age of four.” 

She also explained that eleven of those targeted already “had indefinite leave to remain in the UK”, adding that “[m]any of them have never visited Jamaica since leaving and have nobody there.” She also noted that a “young blind man has been told that he can be cared for by his elderly grandmother, despite her having medical evidence to the contrary.” In addition, “More than 40 children will be separated from a deported parent”, and yet “people are being told by the British government that they can parent their children by Skype.” 

Holbourne also told the story of Twane Morgan, one of those due to be deported, who “was detained a couple of weeks ago while signing in with the Home Office”, and who “has been held at Colnbrook immigration removal centre in London ever since.” As she explained, “Morgan is one of a number of Commonwealth soldiers who have served in the British army to be caught up in this. He should be exempt from removal; those who have served in the army are entitled to become British citizens. Morgan enrolled in the army in his early 20s and served two tours in Afghanistan. He was medically discharged after three years with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He received no aftercare, was denied NHS services, was deemed to be an overstayer and developed bipolar disorder. It was not until 2017, 10 years after he was discharged, that he was able to see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him as having complex trauma PTSD. Morgan has five young children and has been with his current partner for eight years. His eldest son told me that he needs his dad in his life. Because of his conditions Morgan also needs the care of his family in the UK. He has no family in Jamaica. The treatment of Commonwealth soldiers is akin to that of the Windrush generation – they should not be facing deportation.”

On the day of the flight, the Guardian covered it extensively. The academic Luke de Noronha picked up on Sajid Javid’s claim that “[e]very single person that will be on that flight that is being deported is a foreign national offender, they are all convicted of serious crimes, very serious crimes”, and stated, “It’s not clear what the home secretary defines as ‘very serious’ here, as it seems that some people on the flight have been convicted of minor offences.” In the case of Akeem, for example, the young blind man mentioned above, who “suffers from epilepsy following a brain tumour as a child”, the extent of his “very serious crimes” seems to be that he “served a four-month sentence for an assault conviction.”

As de Noronha proceeded to explain, “deportation represents a form of double punishment. Deporting an individual after they have served their sentences abandons all notions of rehabilitative justice. But then perhaps this is precisely the point. After all, the idea of rehabilitation has been under attack for decades and being “tough” on crime often seems to include double and triple punishments, for example the gang members who should expect their families to be evicted if they live in council homes.”

After the flight landed in Jamaica, the Guardian reported that, although 50 people had reportedly been due to leave on the flight, the final tally was just 29 people  because the rest — including Twane Morgan — “were able to have their removal cancelled after their lawyers took action.” Despite Savid Javid and the Home Office claiming that the flight contained only rapists and murderers, a breakdown of crimes committed by the offenders indicated, instead, that “one person on the flight had been convicted of murder and four of various sexual offences including rape.” Fourteen, in contrast, had been convicted of drugs offences, and one, Chevon Brown, had been “deported for driving badly”, as Amelia Gentleman explained in a tweet. She added that all of Brown’s family members live in Oxford, and he hasn’t been to Jamaica since he was 14.

One of those facing deportation, but who gained a last-minute reprieve, was “Owen Haisley, a Manchester-based MC and musician who arrived legally in the UK in 1977, with his mother and sister, when he was four years old.” An online petition calling for the flight to be cancelled, which focused on his case in particular, has been signed by over 100,000 people.

Haisley has three children, all British citizens, and was detained last Friday and  held at Harmondsworth immigration detention centre near Heathrow airport. The Guardian explained that he was “reported to have served a sentence for domestic violence in 2015, before undergoing rehabilitation.” He told Sky News, “I understand the offence, and I brought this on myself. What I don’t understand is the Home Office saying my children will do better without me, that they’d be better off only seeing me over Skype. It’s not right. People are being deported and taken away from their families.”

An update on the petition page confirmed that, on Tuesday evening, his deportation was halted, but added, “It is however possible that the Home Office will still try to deport him and those who remain at Harmondsworth IRC in the short term. At present, Owen remains detained indefinitely — so the fight is far from over.”

Following the flight, there were “calls for the UK government to change its stance.” Stephen Shaw, the former prisons ombudsman, who conducted two independent reviews of immigration detention for the Home Office, “said the inclusion of people who had lived in the UK since childhood on the flights was ‘very cruel.’” In his report in July 2018, Shaw had specifically recommended that “foreign national offenders who had been in the UK since childhood should not be removed.”

Omar Khan, from the race equality think-tank the Runnymede Trust, expressed concern about what the Guardian called “the late cancellation of some detainees’ places on the flight.” As Khan described it, “These ad hoc reprieves are a reflection of the dysfunctional nature of the system.” He also, as the paper put it, “raised concerns about the government’s decision to go ahead with the deportation flight before the publication of the Windrush lessons learned review.”

These were not the only critics. When the plans were revealed at the weekend, MPs including David Lammy and Diane Abbott criticised them as “brutal” and “a scandal.” Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, said, “Britain stopped deporting British criminals to Australia in 1868. This forced repatriation is a scandal in itself, but to re-commence it before the compensation scheme for the Home Office’s previous abuses has been rolled out is an insult to the victims who have already been falsely deported or detained by their own government.”

He added, “I have met many Windrush citizens forced into petty crime precisely because of the government’s hostile environment outrageously stripping them of their rights to work, healthcare, housing and benefits.”

Criticism by MPs, Lords and the UN

The day after the flight, MPs and peers called for an end to the UK’s system of indefinite detention in immigration centres, As the Guardian explained, “The UK is the only European country that does not impose time limits” on immigration detention. In what was described as “a highly critical report”, the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), called the UK’s immigration system “slow, unfair and expensive to run” (£108m a year), and recommended that “detention should be authorised only by decision-makers independent of the Home Office.” They also demanded that a “28-day time limit to end the ‘trauma’ of indefinite detention should be introduced.”

As the Guardian explained, “About 27,000 people a year are detained in Britain for immigration purposes, usually without being given a date for release or deportation. A small proportion are held for more than a year. The report highlighted that “[i]ndefinite detention causes distress and anxiety”, and “can trigger mental illness and exacerbate mental health conditions”, adding, “The lack of a time limit … reduces incentive for the Home Office to progress cases promptly, which would reduce both the impact on detainees and detention costs.” The report also highlighted how “many detainees are wrongly being held in ‘prison-like’ conditions”, and called for there to be “compensation when mistakes are admitted.”

Last July, after Stephen Shaw’s latest report on immigration detention, Volker Turk, the assistant high commissioner of the UNHCR (the UN’s refugee agency), “said he hoped the study would result in [time] limits being put in place, with detention only used as a ‘last resort’” as the Independent explained. This followed the British Red Cross calling for a 28-day limit on detention, “after the charity found cases of asylum-seekers being detained for as long as two years and seven months”, and criticism by Amnesty International and Liberty.

On Thursday, experts from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) also made a contribution to the debate about the Stansted 15, calling for the UK to “cease the use of security and terrorism-related charges against peaceful protesters.” They “described the use of the charge – which had to be signed off by the attorney general – as disproportionate for non-violent protesters”, as the Guardian put it. In their statement, the experts said, “It appears that such charges were brought to deter others from taking similar peaceful direct action to defend human rights and in particular the protection of asylum seekers.”

* * * * *

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.

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo’s 17th Anniversary and Gina Haspel’s War Crimes as a Torturer on RT

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 my recent US visit to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the 17th anniversary of its opening, I was interviewed for RT in New York on January 15, and have only just found the video, which is posted below. I appeared on ‘News. Views. Hughes,’ which the channel describes as “a special daily afternoon broadcast hosted by journalist and political commentator Scottie Nell Hughes.”

Hughes was a paid CNN commentator and vocal Donald Trump supporter during the 2016 presidential election, and, as GQ explained in an article in 2016, “served as one of Trump’s most faithful and pervasive campaign surrogates” on the campaign trail. Her questioning showed an effort to challenge my assessment of the situation at Guantánamo, but, as a long-standing campaigner for the closure of the prison, it isn’t difficult for me to point out that only dictators hold people indefinitely without charge or trial, and that the American people deserve better form their leaders, who are supposed to have a fundamental respect for the rule of law.

I also discussed the unsuitability of Gina Haspel to be the director of the CIA — something that was abundantly clear to me throughout the period of her nomination an her eventual confirmation, and which I wrote about at the time in two articles, The Torture Trail of Gina Haspel Makes Her Unsuitable to be Director of the CIA and Torture on Trial in the US Senate, as the UK Government Unreservedly Apologizes for Its Role in Libyan Rendition.

The six-minute video is below, via YouTube, and I’m pleased to note that it’s had 3,800 views to date:

What was unacceptable, of course, as I explained to Scottie Nell Hughes, was that Haspel had, for part of its existence, been in charge of the CIA’s first post-9/11 “black site,” in Thailand, where torture took place. Torture, of course, was the sole purpose of the ”black sites,” and yet the narrative that was pushed by her supporters seemed to indicate that when she was in charge nothing bad had happened. This was patently absurd, but the even bigger problem with it was that appointing someone so intimately involved with the torture program, after the extraordinary Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2014, which had found it astonishingly brutal and counter-productive, sent exactly the wrong message to the world, to the CIA itself, and to the American people. We clearly live in times when there is no appetite for actually punishing torturers, but actively promoting them to be the director of the CIA is another matter.

At the time of my visit to RT, Haspel was back in the news because information had surfaced adding further weight to the assessment of her unsuitability, indicating that she had also run a “black site” that existed within Guantánamo from the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2004, when it was shut down and the prisoners moved elsewhere because the authorities realized that the Supreme Court was about to grant habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners held by the military. That decision, Rasul v. Bush, delivered in June 2004, pierced the veil of secrecy that had allowed torture to take place at the prison, and that had also shielded the “black site” from scrutiny.

As McClatchy’s Carol Rosenberg explained, Rita Radostitz, a lawyer for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, told a judge in a secret session last year that Haspel had run the “black site” at Guantánamo, which was given the name Strawberry Fields. As Rosenberg described it, “Defense lawyers were arguing, in a motion that ultimately failed, that Haspel’s role at the prison precludes the possibility of a fair trial for the men accused of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks who were also held for years in covert CIA prisons. Neither the public nor the accused was allowed to attend the hearing but, following an intelligence review, the Pentagon released portions of its transcript on a war court website.”

Following McClatchy’s revelations, the anti-torture investigator Jeffrey Kaye added another twist to the story, noting that, “Strangely, neither Rosenberg or anyone else reporting on the new development noted that Radostitz also claimed that Haspel had been present at yet another CIA black site, this one in Poland.”

Kaye explained that Radostitz told the court, “we request permission to provide information to the Senate Select Committee that Gina Haspel was in Site Blue,” the code name for the Polish “black site,” as revealed in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

As Kaye further explained, however, “It is not clear that anyone in Congress ever got Radostitz’s information.” As he explained, “During the Senate confirmation process of President Trump’s nomination of Haspel as CIA director, four Democratic senators on the committee wrote to the Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, asking him to ‘declassify all Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) information related to any involvement by Ms. Gina Haspel, the current Acting Director of the CIA, in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program.’”

Despite the request, “Nothing concerning Haspel’s work or presence at any CIA black sites except the ‘Cat’s Eye’ site in Thailand was ever mentioned during Haspel’s confirmation process for CIA director.”

As a result of the above, it is clear that the stench of criminality clings to Gina Haspel, a stench replicated in other aspects of Donald Trump’s appointments; in, for example, the appointment of the profoundly untrustworthy figure of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a nomination that also attracted ferocious criticism, and which I wrote about in an article entitled, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court Nomination, Has a Dangerous Track Record of Defending Guantánamo and Unfettered Executive Power.

As for RT, after my interview on January 15, I returned to the New York studios the next day for a much more detailed interview with Chris Hedges for his ‘On Contact’ show, which will be broadcast in a couple of weeks’ time, and which I will, of course, let you know about as soon as it is available. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the video above, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Radio: My Interview About Guantánamo with Chris Cook, Plus Dahr Jamail on Our Planetary Environmental Catastrophe

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.

 

It’s nearly three weeks since the 17th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the flurry of media activity that accompanied that somber occasion — although, as is typical, with little or no interest from the mainstream US media — has now largely faded away.

In an effort to keep interest in Guantánamo alive, I will continue to write about it as much as possible this year, to campaign for its closure, and to speak about the need for it to be closed to anyone who shows an interest.

One such person is Chris Cook, in Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada, who has interviewed me on numerous occasions after my annual US visits to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the anniversary of its opening (see our interviews in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017).

Last Thursday, I spoke to Chris by phone about my most recent visit, when, as I have noted in several articles featuring videos, reports and photos from my ten-day trip (see here, here, here and here), I was glad to be able to report that there was renewed energy this year for keeping up the pressure to get Guantánamo closed — not least through the slim hope of action offered by Democrats taking the House of Representatives in the midterm elections n November.

Towards the end of our interview, Chris also asked me about my work on housing issues in London, specifically motivated by my involvement in the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, in which I was part of the two-month occupation of a communal garden in Deptford, in south east London, to try to prevent its destruction. My discussion of how we are plagued by unaffordable new high-rise towers, and how social housing is being cynically destroyed to make way for new and less affordable housing unfortunately resonated with developments in Canada — and, indeed, worldwide, as we are all, it seems, victims of predatory transnational bankers.

Chris also played out with ‘Close Guantánamo’ by my band The Four Fathers, the third occasion that it’s been played on the radio this month.

The one-hour show is available here — or here as an MP3 — and I’ve also posted it below. I hope you’ll have time to listen to it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

My interview took place in the second half of the show, but I do urge you to listen to the first half too, as it features Dahr Jamail, who I first met over ten years ago, when he was reporting from Iraq. Since then, however, he has been investigating and reporting on the unprecedented environmental crisis we are now facing, and he was speaking to Chris about his new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, which has just been published by the New Press.

I happened to bump into Dahr during my US visit, when we were both being interviewed by Chris Hedges for his show on RT, On Contact. My interview will be out sometime next month, as will Dahr’s, but I have to tell you how moved I was watching his interview with Chris from the Green Room. I also spoke to him before and after, and was profoundly impressed by what he had discovered and what he had to say; namely, that it is too late to avert significant environmental destruction, but it is up to us how much we can collectively change our way of living to mitigate some of the worst effects of the unfolding catastrophe.

Dahr’s work also includes a profound spiritual angle — a recognition, on his part, of the need to love the planet that sustains us, but which we are destroying —and this adds a powerfully poignant aspect to his message of doom; one so powerful that, afterwards, I only half-joked with Chris, before our interview, that there really isn’t any other topic worth discussing after hearing what Dahr has to say.

Please do check out his book, and if you want a taster, read this excerpt on Truthout, entitled, “In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve.”

* * * * *

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.

Former Guantánamo Prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Message to the Trump Administration: Close Guantánamo Now!

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.

 

It’s now over two weeks since the 17th anniversary of the opening of the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which, disgracefully, is still open, holding 40 men, mostly without charge or trial, in defiance of all international norms, and in some cases in endless pre-trial hearings in the military commissions, a broken system that is incapable of delivering justice.

As has been the case since 2011, I was in the US earlier this month to call for its closure, including at a vigil outside the White House and at a panel discussion in the New America think-tank on the anniversary itself. Earlier that day, a Congressional briefing had been held on Capitol Hill, co-sponsored by Amnesty International USA and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, at which former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi spoke by video link from Mauritania.

This was significant, because former Guantánamo prisoners are not allowed to visit the US, a prohibition that, not accidentally, helps to preserve the notion that those held at the prison were “the worst of the worst”, a piece of enduring black propaganda that has never been even remotely true, as independent assessments, including my own, have established that only a few percent of the 779 men held by the US military at the prison since it opened have had any significant connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Mohamedou — who spoke by video link accompanied by his former guard Steve Wood, who had traveled to Mauritania to visit him — is one of Guantánamo’s better-known former prisoners. A case of mistaken identity, he was subjected to a torture program designed especially for him, but ended up writing a memoir of his experiences that, after a protracted legal struggle, was published as ‘Guantánamo Diary’ and became an international best-seller, its humor and its humanity an extraordinary counterpoint to America’s lack of both at Guantánamo and everywhere else in its brutal and pointless post-9/11 ”war on terror.”

For the 17th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, Slahi also wrote a perceptive and compassionate article for Amnesty International, which I’m cross-posting below. In it, he calls on all decent Americans to call for the closure of Guantánamo, and states, “It was never, and it still isn’t, popular to stand up for human rights if the accused is considered an ‘other,’ and much less if the accusation is terrorism-related. However, I would say that precisely for that reason, government violence should not be given free reign just because of the nature of the accusation and the background of the accused.”

I hope you have time to read Mohamedou’s call for justice, and that you will share it if it resonates with you.

Gitmo: Time to close the damn thing

By Mohamedou Slahi, Amnesty International, January 11, 2019

I remember that ever-present day that is seared in my memory forever as if it was yesterday. It was more than 17 years ago when secret police officers led me to my old car parked outside my mother’s house in Mauritania, and asked me to follow them in their unmarked, inconspicuous vehicle. There was a visibly ashamed agent waiting to sit beside me in my car.

As I emerged from my mother’s door, she stopped me. She suspected these were agents just from the way they looked. She was afraid for me. Even an apolitical person like my mother could spot them every time.

“I didn’t want them to find you,” said the young agent beside me in the car. I’d met him before. In 2000 on my way home to Mauritania from a trip to Canada, I was arrested in Senegal for baseless suspicions at the request of the US government. When I was rendered from Senegal to Mauritania, this young agent had acted as my prison guard. He had shared with me some of the hardship he was facing because his job wouldn’t pay his bills. I had promised to help him if I ever got out of prison. He told me that he could fix TVs and set up the channels, and I planned to find him clients and improve his knowledge. The night before my kidnapping from my mother’s house, I had hired him to fix my own TV.

As we drove off, I could see in the rear-view mirror the fingers of my mother raised to the sky and counting prayers. I would never see my mother again, nor my older brother because they passed away before my release.

Back then, there wasn’t yet Guantánamo prison as we know it today. I was rendered to Jordan and later onto Bagram Air Base before I was delivered to the Guantánamo detention center.

In an attempt to get a confession from me, US agents subjected me to torture and to other cruel and inhuman treatment. As if losing my freedom, my livelihood and forcibly being separated from my loved ones wasn’t cruel enough.

It would take years of deprivation, pain and suffering until I finally joined my family at the end of 2016. And more than two years after my release I am still a prisoner in my own country, forbidden from seeking the medical treatment I badly need abroad because the U.S. government has instructed the Mauritanian government not to issue a passport to me.

All the above happened in the name of democracy.

In the name of security.

In the name of the American people.

With the premise that only very few people deserve due process, dignity and human rights and the rest of humanity is fair game for the most powerful democracy in the world.

I believe that the U.S. has the right and duty to protect its citizens but that it should never do it outside of the rule of law that it promised to uphold.

I can safely say that I am a living example that a government’s suspicion can never be the reason for undermining the rule of law, for which generations upon generations in the U.S. have fought for. I am an example because the government’s suspicion that I was a criminal was totally and one hundred percent wrong. I was never charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. The only independent judge I ever faced during my ordeal had ordered my release after seeing the secret evidence that even I wasn’t allowed to see.

Brave activists with Amnesty International recognized that non-Americans, too, have the right to be treated with dignity and benefit from the rule of law. They have actively been helping me, to this day. They helped give the world access to my side of the story when I remained imprisoned year after year, stifled and shouting in the dark. And for that I am forever thankful!

It was never, and it still isn’t, popular to stand up for human rights if the accused is considered an ‘other,’ and much less if the accusation is terrorism-related. However, I would say that precisely for that reason, government violence should not be given free reign just because of the nature of the accusation and the background of the accused. Lynching was condemned and eventually abandoned for a reason.

It’s now been 17 years since the opening of that infamous hell that is Guantánamo Bay. The decency of good American people requires their government to close that damn thing.

Please close that prison and treat people within the rule of law!

God Bless you all!

* * * * *

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.

More Video and Radio from the Resistance to the Continued Existence of Guantánamo on the 17th Anniversary of Its Opening

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.

 

How time flies. It’s almost a week since I left the US after my annual visit to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the anniversary of its opening, and here I am still posting videos and audio links of shows I took part in.

That’s a good sign, however. On the last two anniversaries, the focus on Guantánamo had almost entirely disappeared. Two years ago, we were caught in the limbo between the outgoing administration of Barack Obama and the imminent arrival of Donald Trump, and last year, after Trump’s first year in office, the outrage and exhaustion was such that Guantánamo barely got a look-in.

A year on, and you’d be excused for thinking that the situation would only be worse, but although that certainly seems true when it comes to Trump — now obsessed with his Mexican wall, and having shut down the federal government for the longest period in US history (marking a calendar month today) — it is not true of those opposing him on many fronts, including Guantánamo.

This year, there was real energy in the anniversary events calling for the closure of Guantánamo — the annual panel discussion at New America, at which myself and Tom Wilner, representing the Close Guantánamo campaign, were joined by Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch, the annual vigil outside the White House, at which speakers from over a dozen organizations spoke, and, earlier, at a Congressional briefing on Capitol Hill, co-sponsored by Amnesty International USA and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, at which former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi spoke by video link from Mauritania.

I posted links and commentary about some of these events in earlier articles, here and here (as well as my photos of the vigil here), and am now picking up the story after my return to New York, during my last few days in the city before my return home. On Tuesday January 15, a day of aching cold, I wandered up through Manhattan from Third Avenue, between 46th and 47th Streets (where I’d been at RT’s studios — more on this later!) to West 59th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, for a half-hour interview for public access TV with Paul DeRienzo, who had interviewed me for Pacifica’s WBAI radio station on the previous Saturday, at the Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s studios, a busy non-profit community media center, which has been in existence for 28 years.

The interview was a freewheeling investigation into the disaster area that is Guantánamo, looking back, for example, on the colossal mistakes that were made in rounding up the men and boys who ended up in Guantánamo. We also discussed the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, and the role played by significant individuals like John Yoo, who wrote the notorious “torture memos” in 2002, which sought to re-define torture so that the CIA could use it with impunity, and I also spoke about the difference between the torture programs implemented at Guantánamo, and those used in the CIA “black sites.”

The video is below, via YouTube, and I hope you have time to watch it and will share it if you find it useful.

On the morning of January 16, I undertook a radio interview — with Bob Connors and Tom Walker for the Peace and Justice Report on WSLR, a community radio station in Sarasota, Florida. Bob and Tom interviewed me for the first time last year, and it was great to talk to them again. We discussed the Guantánamo story in depth, and I was also delighted that they played two songs by my band The Four Fathers, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ and ‘Close Guantánamo.’

The show is available here, on the Peace and Justice Report page, under Jan. 16, and the interview starts around 20 minutes in.

On Thursday morning — my last day in the US — I undertook another radio interview, with Linda Olson-Osterlund, on KBOO FM, a community radio show in Portland, Oregon. Linda and I have been speaking several times a year for ten years now, and it’s always good to talk to her. She was guest-presenting a show called ‘Voices from the Edge,’ and the show is available here, and here as an MP3.

Linda also played a song by The Four Fathers, closing her show with ‘Fighting Injustice,’ a live favourite, and a personal mantra for me, with its chorus, “If you ain’t fighting injustice, you’re living on the dark side.”

That’s about it for now — although I hope that, sometime soon, the video from my talk at Revolution Books in Harlem, on Sunday January 13, will be available — and, as hinted at above, there’s also something very interesting forthcoming from RT!

For now, however, I’ll leave you with the links above, and, for Spanish speakers, an article based on a phone interview I undertook just before the anniversary, which appeared in the newspaper El Diario on January 11.

* * * * *

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.