Andy Worthington's Blog, page 27

Photos: Renewed Resistance to Donald Trump at the Close Guantánamo Vigil Outside the White House, Jan. 11, 2019

See my photos on Flickr here!
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 nine days since the 17th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo — a day that I marked by flying to New York, taking the bus to Washington, D.C., appearing at an annual panel discussion at the New America think-tank (broadcast live by C-SPAN), and taking part in another annual event: a vigil outside the White House, featuring members of the campaigning group Witness Against Torture and speakers from over a dozen rights groups, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve US. The video of the entire vigil is here.

I also took over 40 photos of campaigners with posters showing how Guantánamo had been open for 6,210 days on the anniversary — posters I had made via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded seven years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner — and I published them on our website and on social media, and on my return to New York I undertook a number of TV and radio appearances. I wrote about some of these events, TV shows and radio appearances here and here, and will be posting another article bringing the story up to date in a few days’ time, but for now I wanted to share with you another project I undertook during the vigil — taking photos, which are available on my Flickr page, to add to previous sets I posted in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

I know that the best opportunity for there to be interest in these photos was as soon as possible after the event — or even tweeted or posted to Instagram or Facebook at the time — but the problem with fixating on the media moment is that, nine days later, no one notices that the problem that needed highlighted has now been forgotten.

And yet, of course, as I regularly explain, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where men are held indefinitely without charge or trial, or, if charged, are held in a broken system incapable of delivering justice, is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and every day it is open is a source of shame for all decent Americans.

And so those of us who care about the ever-pressing need for Guantánamo to be closed must keep on finding ways of preventing it from being forgotten — ten days after the anniversary, 20 days after, a month after, three months after, six months after and so on.

The photo project referred to above is ongoing, with posters for 6,300 days on April 11, 6,400 days on July 20 and 6,500 days on October 28, and I invite you to get involved in sending in photos on those dates, and also to visit and share another ongoing Close Guantánamo initiative, the Gitmo Clock, which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open, and urges Donald Trump to close it.

I’ll also continue to focus on the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners, and to mark significant anniversaries throughout the year, but, as myself and other campaigners realized in Washington, D.C. and New York over the last two weeks, we also need to take the opportunity that has arisen through the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in November to follow up on preliminary meetings that were organized through campaigners and took place in Washington, D.C. last week, focusing on the need for Democrats to get Guantánamo back on their radar, and also to understand the significance of Donald Trump’s decision to close the Office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, set up under Barack Obama, which arranged prisoner resettlements and monitored released prisoners for national security reasons, which I wrote about last year, in an article entitled, Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners is Bad for Them – and US Security, in which I explained how Trump’s decision to close the envoy’s office has endangered some former prisoners, and may even have led to the deaths of two Libyans repatriated to Senegal after being resettled in Senegal.

If you’re interested in being involved in these ongoing efforts to get Guantánamo back on the political radar, then please get in touch, and also feel free to contact your Senators and your Representatives, especially those Democrats in the House who might be interested in addressing the shameful and unwavering injustice that is Guantánamo.

Also see the photo album 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.

Video and Radio Featuring Andy Worthington: The Close Guantánamo Vigil Outside the White House and Two Radio Shows

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’m nearing the end of my ten-day trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the 17th anniversary of its opening, and in this article I’d like to follow up on my previous analysis of what I’ve found on trip, as explained in my article, On My Annual US Visit to Call for the Closure of Guantánamo, Reporting Resistance in Trump’s Shutdown America.

In that article, I linked to a panel discussion at the New America Foundation, and a radio show I undertook with Michael Slate, and below, bringing the story more up to date, I’m posting below the video of the vigil outside the White House, featuring Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Close Guantánamo, CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Defending Rights & Dissent, Justice for Muslims Collective, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

As ever, Witness Against Torture took the lead on actions across the capital during the week before the anniversary, while they were staying a local church and fasting, and their reports can be found here, here, here and here.

For the vigil, Luke Nephew of the Peace Poets and Aliya Hussain of CCR led the gathering and introduced the speakers. My speech, in which I enthusiastically condemned Donald Trump for holding the 40 men still held as his personal prisoners, begins eight minutes in, but I you have time to watch the whole video, which features numerous great speakers including Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Maria Luisa Rosal of School of the Americas Watch, Maha Hilal of Justice for Muslims Collective, Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, and Jessica and Leila Murphy, who lost their father at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and who spoke out eloquently against the vengeance that consumed the US in the wake of the attacks.

The video is below:

I also undertook a number of further radio interviews after my return to New York with blogger The Talking Dog and Debra Sweet, the national director of the World Can’t Wait, on Friday evening — and into Saturday morning.

First I spoke by phone with Paul DeRienzo of Pacifica’s WBAI station for his ‘Trump Watch’ show. The segment on Guantánamo starts around 7 minutes in, and lasts for seven minutes.

Later that day I visited the WBAI studios in Brooklyn for a longer interview with Sunsara Taylor for her show ‘We Only Want the World,’ in which I was able to present a much more detailed explanation of the significance of Guantánamo and why it must be closed. That show is available here as an MP3 (and is also here), and I’m also pleased to note that, in the show, Sunsara played ‘Close Guantánamo‘ by my band The Four Fathers.

Please also check out this MintPress News article by Alexander Rubinstein, who spoke to me at the vigil outside the White House, and then spoke to me again by phone in New York.

As I explained, “All of the work I do is to get Guantánamo closed because it’s a legal, moral and ethical abomination for a country that claims to respect the rule of law to be holding people on the basis under which they’re held at Guantánamo; which is that they are neither held as criminal suspects who will face speedy trials nor are they held as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Convention.”

In fact, as I explained at the vigil, the 40 men still held at Guantánamo are, fundamentally, Donald Trump’s “personal prisoners.” Trump, of course, has no interest in releasing any of them, and, shamefully, there is no mechanism that can oblige him to do so. Legally speaking, therefore, the men at Guantánamo are as fundamentally deprived of all rights as human beings today as they were when the prison was first set up 17 years ago.

I hope you find the above useful, and will share links if you do. And there’s still more to come. Yesterday I appeared with Paul DiRienzo on his half-hour public access TV show ‘Let Them Talk,’ which will be available soon on YouTube, and tomorrow and Thursday I’m also recording two more radio shows, which I’ll make available in due course. I also made two trips to RT — one for a news slot that I’ll try and find online, and another for an exciting interview that I’ll keep under wraps until it’s broadcast, hopefully in a couple of weeks’ time!

Note: The photo at the top of this article shows me holding a Close Guantánamo campaign poster marking 6,210 days of the prison’s existence on January 11, 2019. Check out the campaign here, and also feel free to visit the Gitmo Clock, which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open. Future posters are for 6,300 days on April 11, 6,400 days on July 20, and 6,500 days on October 28.

* * * * *

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.

On My Annual US Visit to Call for the Closure of Guantánamo, Reporting Resistance in Trump’s Shutdown America

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

 

I’m six days into my annual trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, on and around the 17th anniversary of its opening (on January 11), and while it would be foolish to suggest, in any sense, that there is going to be any sort of movement on Guantánamo from the execrable Donald Trump, it’s certainly noticeable that, for the first time for three years, there is a real energy in the movement to finally get Guantánamo closed.

Three years ago, there was an energy to the efforts to get Barack Obama to close Guantánamo before he left office (which didn’t work, but did lead to him reducing the prison’s population to just 41 men), but two years ago we were caught in a dreadful limbo between the end of Obama and the start of Trump, and last year everyone seemed pretty crushed by the grim realities of Trump’s first year in office.

In part, this is just one aspect of what looks to be a growing resistance to Donald Trump on numerous fronts, and of course it’s not insignificant that I arrived. on Monday evening, during Trump’s petulant government shutdown, in which, to pursue his vile racist obsession with a wildly expensive expansion of the wall between the US and Mexico, he has shut down the salaries of millions of Americans who work for the government. At the time of writing, I’m glad to note, the effects of the shutdown seem to be damaging him in terms of his popularity.

In the longer term, however, another aspect of this resurgent energy has come from the chink of light offered by the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, so that, after two years of the Republicans controlling both the Senate and the House, and having no interest, even nominally, in  addressing Guantánamo at all, now campaigners can try and get Guantánamo back on the table — and, I hope, also raise the question of the shameful and dangerous situation whereby no one in the Trump administration has responsibility for Guantánamo, after Trump closed the office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure. For meetings with Democrats, see this email from Witness Against Torture describing meetings that took place just before the Guantánamo anniversary.

The office was set up under Obama, not only to re-settle former prisoners, but also to monitor them after release, and its closure — essentially because Trump has no intention of releasing anyone — has not only endangered, or even led to the deaths of former prisoners, because there is literally no one in the State Department that anyone can talk to when it comes to any Guantánamo issues, but has also meant that there is no office within the US government that is actively monitoring former prisoners from a national security perspective.

I discussed these problems most recently in an article in November, Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners is Bad for Them – and US Security, and I look forward to finding ways to work on them with other organizations this coming year, as well as continuing to seek ways to get Democrats to pay attention to the ongoing need for Guantánamo to be closed. For reports on the envoy issues, see these news articles here and here by UrduPoint News.

Below is the video of a panel discussion about Guantánamo that I took part in on the anniversary, at the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C., with the attorney Tom Wilner, with whom I set up the Close Guantanamo campaign seven years ago, and Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch, and as I explained when I posted it on Facebook, “The event — which, I’m glad to note, was also broadcast live by C-SPAN — was extremely well-attended, and in complete contrast to last year, when everyone seemed crushed by Trump’s first year in office. This year there was a real spirit of resistance, in part because of people’s realization that there is no option but to resist, and partly because of the slim glimmer of hope offered by the Democrats taking the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.”

Please also check out this clip of me speaking outside the White House, at the vigil that took place afterwards. I hope that video of my entire statement will be made available online sometime soon by Witness Against Torture, but as Middle East Eye and the Turkish Anadolu Agency explained in articles on the day, part of my short, sharp attack on Donald Trump for having the 40 men still held as “political prisoners” or even as his own “personal prisoners,” involved me saying, “Today Guantánamo has been open for 6,210 days. That’s 6,210 days of shame for every decent American. Every day this prison is open is a source of shame for all decent people. This isn’t an ordinary prison where people have been tried and convicted. This isn’t a war prison where people are taken off the battlefield and held, protected by the Geneva Conventions, until the end of hostilities. This is a prison where people were taken to in the first place so they could be held absolutely without any rights whatsoever”, a situation that, essentially, continues to this day, as no one can be released except at the whim of the president.

For further information, feel free to check out the interview below, which I conducted by phone with Michael Slate before I left New York for Washington, D.C. I’ll be posting more links soon, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to interview me. Please also check out all the Close Guantánamo photos of campaigners holding posters marking 6,210 days of Guantánamo’s existence on Jan. 11, the 17th anniversary of the opening of the prison, and calling for its closure.

* * * * *

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.

On the 17th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo, Please Write to the 40 Men Still Held, Donald Trump’s “Forever Prisoners”

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 a year since I last encouraged you to write to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, to mark their first year of imprisonment under Donald Trump, and I’m asking you to do so again, to let them know that they have not been entirely forgotten.

I’ve been encouraging opponents of Guantánamo to write to the prisoners on a regular basis since June 2010, when I was first prompted to do so by two Muslim activist friends in the UK, who had initiated a project to get people to write to the prisoners still held at that time — 186 in total.

I repeated the letter-writing project in June 2011, and then did so again every six months or so until July 2015, with two further calls in 2016, the last being in the dying weeks of the Obama presidency.

As I explained when I posted last year’s call for letters, Donald Trump “started his presidency threatening to send new prisoners to Guantánamo, but although he has not made good on his unacceptable, belligerent threat, he has, nevertheless, effectively sealed Guantánamo shut, refusing to contemplate releasing any of the prisoners still held, not even five men who were approved for release by high-level government review processes during Obama’s presidency.

As we prepare to mark the shameful 17th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, 40 men are still held, just one less than when Trump took office. The only man he has released is a Saudi who agreed to a plea deal in his military commission trial in 2014, which authorized his repatriation to ongoing imprisonment in his homeland in February 2018. The rest of the prisoners, however, are effectively Trump’s personal prisoners, all fundamentally deprived of anything resembling justice and held, if Trump gets his way, forever.

The 40 consist of the five men approved for release, nine men facing or having faced trials in the broken military commission system, which, for the most part, is not fit for purpose, and is incapable of delivering justice, and 26 others who are officially held indefinitely without charge or trial, subject to a parole-like review process, the Periodic Review Boards, that was set up by Barack Obama in 2013, and that led to 38 prisoners being approved for release — and 36 of those 38 released before Obama left office. Under Trump, however, the PRBs have failed to deliver a single recommendation for a prisoner’s release, even though some of the men held played quite astonishingly insignificant roles in the US’s post-9/11 military engagements.

As a result, it is fair, I believe, to describe all the men still held as Donald Trump’s “forever prisoners” — or, as I put it above, his “personal prisoners” — deprived of justice, and facing ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial for as long as Donald Trump remains in office, and, shockingly, with no assurance that another Republican-Led administration — or even a Democrat-led administration — would do anything fundamentally different.

In the list below, I have divided the remaining 40 prisoners into those approved for release (5), those whose ongoing imprisonment has been approved by Periodic Review Boards (26), and those charged or tried in the military commissions system (9).

Please note that I have largely kept the spelling used by the US authorities in the “Final Dispositions” of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was released through FOIA legislation in June 2013. Even though these names are often inaccurate, they are the names by which the men are officially known in Guantánamo — although, primarily, it should be noted, those held are not referred to by any name at all, but are instead identified solely by their prisoner numbers (ISNs, which stands for “internment serial numbers”).

Writing to the prisoners

If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off.

When writing to the prisoners please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (these are the numbers before their names).

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name

Detainee ISN

U.S. Naval Station

Guantánamo Bay

Washington, D.C. 20355

United States of America

Please also include a return address on the envelope.

The 5 prisoners approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama

ISN 038 Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi (Tunisia)

ISN 244 Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN 309 Muieen A Deen Jamal A Deen Abd al Fusal Abd al Sattar (UAE)

ISN 694 Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria)

ISN 893 Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The 26 prisoners whose ongoing imprisonment was approved by Periodic Review Boards

ISN 027 Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 028 Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 063 Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 242 Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 569 Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi (Yemen)

ISN 682 Abdullah Al Sharbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 685 Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush (Algeria) aka Abdelrazak Ali

ISN 708 Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN 841 Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN 1017 Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN 1094 Saifullah Paracha (Pakistan)

ISN 1453 Sanad Al Kazimi (Yemen)

ISN 1456 Hassan Bin Attash (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 1457 Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (Yemen)

ISN 1460 Abdul Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 1461 Mohammed Rabbani (Pakistan) aka Ahmad Rabbani

ISN 1463 Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN 10016 Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn aka Abu Zubaydah

ISN 10017 Mustafa Faraj Muhammed Masud al-Jadid al-Usaybi (Libya) aka Abu Faraj al-Libi

ISN 10019 Encep Nurjaman (Hambali) (Indonesia)

ISN 10021 Mohd Farik bin Amin (Malaysia)

ISN 10022 Bashir bin Lap (Malaysia)

ISN 10023 Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN 10025 Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

ISN 3148 Haroon al-Afghani (Afghanistan)

ISN 10029 Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

The 9 prisoners charged or tried

ISN 039 Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (Yemen)

ISN 10011 Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10013 Ramzi Bin Al Shibh (Yemen)

ISN 10014 Walid Mohammed Bin Attash (Yemen)

ISN 10015 Mohammed al Nashiri (Saudi Arabia) aka Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri

ISN 10018 Ali abd al Aziz Ali (Pakistan)

ISN 10020 Majid Khan (Pakistan)

ISN 10024 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Kuwait)

ISN 10026 Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi (Hadi) (Iraq)

Note: For further information about the prisoners, see my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six).

* * * * *

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.

My Ninth Successive US Visit – for Events Marking the 17th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo

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 (as “Close Guantánamo Events Marking the 17th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo”)  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.

As 2019 began, the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay marked a shameful milestone. January 1 was the 6,200th day of operations at the prison, and we marked the occasion with the latest stage of our ongoing photo campaign, in which supporters take photos with posters showing how long Guantánamo has been open and urging Donald Trump to close it, based on our Gitmo Clock project, which counts in real time how long the prison has been open.

In seven days’ time, the prison will reach another appalling milestone: the 17th anniversary of its opening. This is on January 11, and to mark the occasion Close Guantánamo’s co-founders, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney Tom Wilner and the London-based journalist Andy Worthington (making his 9th annual visit for protest and events on and around the anniversary) will be taking part in a panel discussion at the New America think-tank, and will also be part of an annual vigil outside the White House organized by and attended by representatives of a dozen rights groups. Andy is also discussing Guantánamo in New York, two days after the anniversary, and both Andy and Tom are available for media interviews, and for further events, throughout the duration of Andy’s visit, from January 7-17.

Details of the events are below:

Friday January 11, 12.15 pm-1.45 pm: Seventeen Years of Guantánamo

New America, 740 15th St. NW #900, Washington, D.C. 20005

Tom Wilner and Andy Worthington, with Laura Pitter, the interim deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas program, discuss the prison’s present and future, in a panel discussion moderated by New America’s David Sterman, asking, “What will happen to the prison and its detainees in the remaining years of the Trump administration? Will anyone else be released? Will the prison ever close?”

See the event page here, and please RSVP if you’re coming along.

Friday January 11, 2.30-4pm: Rally to Close Guantánamo – Rule of Law, Not Rule of Trump

Outside the White House, Lafayette Square, 1608 H St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20006

Andy Worthington joins speakers from 12 rights organizations at the annual vigil outside the White House calling for the closure of Guantánamo: Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Close Guantánamo, CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Defending Rights & Dissent, Justice for Muslims Collective, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

See the event page on Facebook here.

Please also check out Witness Against Torture’s page about their Fast for Justice, a week of events in Washington, D.C. involving fasting and political actions.

Sunday January 13, 5-7pm: Andy Worthington Talks at Revolution Books NY

Revolution Books, 437 Malcolm X Boulevard/Lenox Ave (at 132nd Street), New York 10037

As Revolution Books states, “Andy Worthington, the British journalist who has covered the men imprisoned in the US torture camp at Guantánamo since 2006, speaks on the state of the prison under Trump; the 40 men who are still held, and on what released prisoners have encountered as they’ve been scattered across the world. Andy, a member of The Four Fathers, may sing for us. Q&A to follow.”

See the event page on Facebook 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.

Celebrating 600 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’, as 2018 Ends

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

 

Over six and a half years ago — in fact, 2,426 days ago, on May 11, 2012 — I embarked on a project that provided me with a new creative outlet, and that would, in many ways, re-define my life. With a point-and-shoot digital camera in my pocket, given to me by my wife for Christmas at the end of 2011, I started a photo-journalism project that, in time, I gave a name that I think has a powerful resonance — ‘The State of London’, and that I soon conceived of as a personal photo-journalistic record of the fabric of the city, in which I intended to visit and take photos in all 120 of its postcodes (those beginning SE, E, N, NW, W, SW, EC and WC), as well as in some of the outlying boroughs.

Five years after I started the project, on May 11, 2017, with tens of thousands of photos sitting on my computer (and, yes, on a separate hard drive), and with a skeletal website lying dormant because of my inability to find time to populate it with images and stories, I decided instead to start posting a photo a day on Facebook — and later on Twitter. Today marks 600 days since that project began, and I’m delighted that I now have over a thousand followers on Facebook. 

See all the photos here!

On that first day, as I cycled from my home in Brockley, in south east London, down through Deptford and Greenwich, looking at everything with a photo-journalist’s eye, I had no real concept of quite how big London is, and how immense a project would be that involved visiting and taking photos in all 120 of its postcodes. It took me until September 2014 to visit all 120 postcodes — and although I’ve managed to post photos from the majority of these postcodes in the last 600 days it’s only fair of me to admit that there are some areas of London that I’ve still only visited once or twice — although, ever enthusiastic for journeys to far-flung corners of the capital where i can still get lost, as I used to do wherever I went in the early days, I hope to remedy that in 2019!

Since that first day of ‘The State of London’, back in May 2012, I have been out on my bike with my camera almost every day, and I calculate that, as I have worked my way through three cameras (with a new one needed in the new year — hopefully a Canon G7 X Mark II), I have cycled at least 20,000 miles!

Many of these bike rides have only been local — from my home in Brockley, down to Deptford to Greenwich and back again, for example — and others have involved creating my own regular routes — along the Thames from Greenwich out east to Woolwich, for example, and sometimes beyond; often to Thamesmead, and sometimes on to Erith; or along the Thames from Deptford heading west around Rotherhithe to Tower Bridge, and back inland through Bermondsey. 

Other popular routes involve me cycling to the Isle of Dogs through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, and then cycling up the western side of what locals refer to as “the island” (it isn’t actually an island), and then cycling up one or other of the canals that feed into the Limehouse Basin, once the heart of Britain’s maritime trade empire — the Regent’s Canal, which passes through Hackney, Islington and Camden, and eventually feeds into the Grand Union Canal, heading west out of London from Little Venice; or the Limehouse Cut, which meets the River Lea in Bow, and heads north through Stratford to Clapton, and on through Tottenham Hale, up to Edmonton and beyond. 

When I cycle up the east of the Isle of Dogs, I either go on through Poplar and meander around the East End, through Stepney and Whitechapel, for example, before heading home via Tower Bridge, or I head our further east, though North Woolwich and even venturing into Beckton, before, often, returning via East Ham, West Ham, Upton Park, Plaistow and Canning Town.

Although I do it less frequently, I also love cycling out to Barnes and Kew, via Battersea, Wandsworth and Putney on the south of the river, or out through Fulham, Hammersmith and Chiswick on the north, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I also regularly trawl the City and the West End, although the familiar tourist attractions are not what generally interest me, as I’ve always been drawn to the everyday, even the mundane, the hidden, the overlooked, the abandoned, the forgotten and the endangered, as well as nature in all its glory.

My project has coincided with major change in the city. It began with the upheaval and jingoism of the Olympic Games, which has, sadly, been followed by an orgy of new developments rising up everywhere, a speculative frenzy, based largely on  foreign investment that has, disgracefully, been matched by a frenzied ‘regeneration’ industry that is intent on destroying council estates that could and should be refurbished. This, theoretically, is because of funding shortages emanating from central government, but it also quite prominently involves the greed of developers and the failures of local government (particularly, it seems, Labour councils) to challenge this toxic status quo, to stand up for the poorer inhabitants of their boroughs, to preserve genuinely affordable social housing, and to call for the implementation of a massive social homebuilding programme. 

Many of my photos features these twin changes — the cold phallic forests rising up everywhere, and the destruction of vibrant council estate communities, and, partly as a result of this project, the housing crisis has become a major part of my journalistic work in general. 

However, while a documentary aspect has always been a major part of the project, it is also an artistic project, and has become more so as time has passed, and I have become more interested in taking memorable photos as well as simply chronicling the changing ‘state’ of the capital. I have, however, always been drawn to the changing weather and the changing seasons, always on the lookout for strong light, and also willing to get completely soaked as has happened on several memorable occasions. The vagaries of the weather no longer affect me. I go out in all weathers, and have realised two fundamental truths: firstly, that we’re waterproof, and, secondly, that we shouldn’t be indoors all the time, as so many of us are, and that being outdoors and taking regular exercise keeps most colds and similar ailments at bay. 

Every time I write about ‘The State of London’, I also fumble towards a more philosophical assessment of what my project has involved — the feeling that, at some level, I have come to embody the city I have so relentlessly chronicled. A friend, Simon Elmer of ASH (Architects for Social Housing), recently compared me, flatteringly, to Eugène Atget, a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, who, over 35 years, wandered the streets of Paris documenting its architecture and street scenes before their disappearance to modernization. As a cycling flâneur, I can only hope that my project has a similar resonance.

For 2019, I hope to have an exhibition in south east London, and also to publish a book, crowd-funded or otherwise. If you can help with an exhibition (at any location) or with the book proposal in any way, please do get in touch!

In the meantime, thanks for your interest, keep telling other people who might be interested, and, if you’d like make a donation to support my work, please feel free to do so. Everything I do is, essentially, reader-, or, in this case, viewer-funded.

* * * * *

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.

Lewisham Council Narrowly Avoids Defeat of Its Tidemill Plans by the Constituency Labour Party

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

 

On December 18, Lewisham Council narrowly avoided a humiliating defeat regarding its bitterly contested plans for the Tidemill development site in Deptford, when the Constituency Labour Party General Committee almost passed a powerful motion tabled by member Bill Jefferies. The final vote was 24:24 with the Chair casting the vote that lost it.

Bill Jefferies’ ‘Motion on the Tidemill Gardens Security Operation’ called on Lewisham Council to immediately take four actions in relation to the Tidemill development site:

1) To put a halt on the Tidemill scheme while new plans are developed that meet the needs of residents and people in need of council housing

2) To honour its commitment to ballot council house residents affected by the Tidemill scheme

3) To immediately sever all links with County Enforcement

4) To end the occupation by bailiffs of the Tidemill site now

The Tidemill site consists of the old Tidemill primary school, which closed in 2012, the 16 council flats of Reginald House, which the council wants to destroy, and the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, formerly part of the school, which the council also wants to destroy.

The proposals to destroy the garden and the flats have been bitterly contested. The garden was an autonomous community space for six years prior to its occupation, for two months in September and October, which ended with its violent eviction on October 29, by bailiffs with the notorious County Enforcement firm.

The occupation, by members of the local community and supporters from further afield, was undertaken to prevent the council from destroying the garden, and also to highlight the community’s implacable opposition to the proposals to destroy Reginald House. Most of the block’s residents don’t want their homes to be destroyed, but they haven’t been given a ballot by the council.

For six years, the garden’s users and Reginald House residents tried to get councillors to change their minds regarding the Tidemill site, pointing out how vital a green space is in this part of Deptford, how the garden’s canopy mitigates the worst effects of the horrendous pollution in the area, how wrong it is to demolish structurally sound council flats, and how easy it would be to re-draw plans for the site, where 209 homes are planned, either by building homes at greater density on the old school site, or by building some of the proposed homes on a second site, which the council secretly twinned with Tidemill — Amersham Vale in New Cross, where the old Deptford Green secondary school used to stand. The changes are perfectly viable, but the council doesn’t want to know.

It’s also worth noting that another viable site is Besson Street in New Cross, where, astonishingly, the council is proposing to build new homes for market rent with a private developer.

Unfortunately for the council, in the two months since the eviction, opposition to their plans has not gone away. Campaigners have been winning hearts and minds, exposing the unnecessary violence of the eviction, the alienating presence of bailiffs 24 hours a day, the disturbing presence of dogs and the use of floodlights at night, and the extraordinary cost of the eviction and the bailiffs’ presence.

As Bill Jefferies’ motion, noting “the eviction of protestors from Tidemill Garden from the 29th October onwards by ‘County Enforcement’ working on behalf of Lewisham Council”, stated, “According to Corporate Watch a ‘rough but conservative’ estimate of the cost of this scheme is ‘£35,000 per day’ or £245,000 per week or over £1 million per month. This is a wholly inappropriate waste of council resources for a controversial scheme that should be halted immediately.”

As the motion also stated:

This eviction is in order to enact a controversial housing development that promises some new social housing units, but against the wishes of existing tenants, the local community, Len Duvall, head of London Region, Lewisham Deptford CLP. Furthermore it directly contradicts [Lewisham Mayor] Damien Egan’s manifesto pledge to “introduce ballots on any estate regeneration scheme that includes replacing existing homes and back this up with a Residents’ Charter that guarantees all residents the right to remain on their estate, and which guarantees an increase in genuinely affordable housing.”

No such ballot has been held in this instance. It is claimed that this is because agreements had already been made with Peabody. No such agreement can override the expressed democratic wishes of party bodies, members and the electorate. No such agreement can [involve an] open ended commitment of millions of pounds in security payments.

Furthermore County Enforcement is a wholly inappropriate organisation for Lewisham Council to deal with. The founder of County Enforcement, Peter Mooney, is a union buster who, according to the company website, “personally served Arthur Scargill and his fellow union representatives with the injunction that froze the assets of the union and ended the miners’ strike. He also served the union representatives in the disputed move from Fleet `street to Wapping by the Sun newspaper group with the injunction that seized the assets of the Unions that ended the dispute.”

As 2018 ends, the council, deservedly, must be feeling the weight of hostility and dissatisfaction with their recent actions. In response to campaigners’ relentless criticism, Paul Bell, the council’s Cabinet Member for Housing, recently promised to sack County Enforcement and to replace them with another firm, but although the number of bailiffs currently protecting the fenced-off garden from the community has been reduced from its height, when many dozens oa bailiffs were present 24 hours a day, those who are still there are still representatives of County Enforcement.

Is Paul Bell going to resolve this, and, if he does, what does the council propose to do in the new year when, for its wretched and pig-headed plans to proceed, it must cut down all the trees in the garden? In November, Artemis Tree Services, hired by the council to begin chopping down trees, withdrew after just two days when they learned of how politically contentious the plans were — and how campaigners were, and still are pursuing a legal challenge to the council’s plans in the courts.

The council will be hoping that the legal challenge will fail in the new year, but even if it does, any effort by the council to hire a new tree services company looks doomed to fail, and even if a firm of compliant tree-butchers can be found, the uproar and resistance will be immense, with the likelihood not only of further damaging media coverage, but also of renewed opposition from the Constituency Labour Party that, next time around, will, in all probability, not be able to swing the vote the council’s way via the Chair.

It’s time for Lewisham Council to pledge a truly worthy New Year’s resolution — to stop working against the wishes of the local community, and, as Bill Jefferies’ motion proposed, to come up with new plans for Tidemill “that meet the needs of residents and people in need of council housing” and to ballot the residents on Reginald House, as well as getting rid of County Enforcement and immediately ending any bailiff presence at the garden.

Note: Check out my full archive of articles about the Tidemill occupation and eviction here and 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.

The Unending Punishment of Former Guantánamo Prisoner Omar Khadr

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.

 

Canada, contrasting itself with its neighbor to the south, the United States, likes to present itself as a beacon of justice and fairness, and yet, when to comes to the high-profile case of its citizen Omar Khadr, who was held at Guantánamo for nearly ten years, the Canadian government’s behavior has been almost unremittingly appalling.

Khadr was a child — just 15 years old — when, gravely wounded, he was seized by US forces in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan, where he had been taken by his father. However, instead of treating him as a child who was not responsible for his own actions, and rehabilitating him, rather than punishing him, according to the terms of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflicts, which entered into force on February 12, 2002, and to which both the US and Canada are signatories, the US treated him appallingly, and, when Canadian agents were sent to Guantánamo to interview him, they failed to uphold his rights as a Canadian citizen.

The Canadian Supreme Court eventually delivered a powerful ruling regarding the violation of his rights, and, under Justin Trudeau, the government finally made amends for its behavior, paying him $10.5m in Canadian dollars (about $9m in US currency) in July 2017, following similar payments to other victims of Canada’s shameful post-9/11 behavior — a number of Canadian citizens of Syrian origin who were tortured in Syria (and in one case, that of Maher Arar, kidnapped in the US first, and then sent to Syria for torture) with the full collusion of the Canadian authorities.

This decency regarding Omar Khadr only came about after protracted bad treatment by his home government, which refused to press for his release from Guantánamo, and, when he accepted a plea deal in his trial by military commission in October 2010, refused to bring him home promptly under the terms of that deal, which gave him one more year in Guantánamo followed by seven years’ further imprisonment in Canada.

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

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

On his 29th birthday, in September 2015, a judge eased his bail conditions, allowing him to visit his grandparents, and agreeing to have his electronic tag removed, and two years later, on his 31st birthday, he was allowed internet access, although bans remained on his ability to travel freely within Canada, or to meeting his sister Zainab, a controversial figure who, in the past, had expressed support for al-Qaeda. At the time she was reportedly living in Sudan with her fourth husband, but was planning a visit to Canada, but Justice June Ross, who is dealing with his bail conditions on an ongoing basis, “refused to remove restrictions stipulating” that he can “communicate with his sister in English only and in the presence of a court-appointed supervisor, his lawyers or bail supervisor,” as CBC News Edmonton described it.

This was despite the fact that Khadr, in a sworn affidavit, had pointed out, ”I am now an adult and I think independently. Even if the members of my family were to wish to influence my religious or other views, they would not be able to control or influence me in any negative manner.”

Now 32 years old, Khadr applied on December 13 for further changes to his bail conditions, requesting to be allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj (which would require him to be given a passport), and to speak unsupervised with his sister, who is now living in Georgia.

Outside the court, he said, “When I initially asked for bail, I didn’t expect it to take this long. My sentence initially should have ended this past October, but here I am.” He added, “This is not the first time my life has been held in suspension. I am going to continue to fight this injustice and thankfully we have an actual court system that has actual rules and laws.”

He did, however complain that the Canadian government “has put this court in a position where it has to enforce a judgment and a ruling that was derived from torture, the same torture that the Canadian government has apologized for.”

His other long-term lawyer, Nathan Whitling, told Justice Ross, as the Canadian Press described it, that “his client has been a ‘model of compliance’ and should have his bail conditions loosened.” He said to the judge, “There is still no end in sight. Mr. Khadr has now been out on bail so long and has an impeccable record. My goodness, when is this going to end?”

Whitling also pointed out that Khadr’s appeal against his conviction in the US, in which he has pointed out that he only agreed to a plea deal because he could see no other way of ever getting out of Guantánamo, “hasn’t ‘moved a single inch’ while his client has obeyed all the conditions of his release.”

Judge Ross reserved her decision until December 21, stating, “There’s enough unprecedented aspects to this application that I’m going to take some time to think about it.” The Edmonton Journal noted that, in the hearing, she explained that “there were two main issues at play in Khadr’s application to vary bail conditions: deleting five sections pertaining to travel and contact with his older sister Zaynab, and an application to allow his bail to be changed to parole.” The newspaper added, “Federal and provincial Crown prosecutors opposed the changes.”

Judge Ross also “acknowledged that Khadr has successfully reintegrated into the community, and that he has ‘excellent’ reporting habits when it comes to notifying his bail supervisor about changes in residence, employment or travel.” She also pointed out that he had “moved into his own home in 2016, and began living with his wife the next year,” following a marriage that was deliberately kept low-key.

However, the court also received a report submitted by a psychologist who stated that “the conditions on his movement and contact with his sister were ‘exacerbating’ his post-traumatic stress disorder and making it difficult for him to move on with his life.”

However, Judge Ross evidently ignored this assessment, and ultimately turned down Khadr’s requests. As the Associated Press described it, she ruled that there was “no evidence of hardship or conditions that are needlessly onerous,” although she did acknowledge that his feelings about being in what he described as “legal limbo” were “understandable.” The Edmonton Journal added that she “also said her decision is not ‘etched in stone’ and that Khadr’s lawyer could apply to change his bail conditions in the future.”

As the Edmonton Journal described it, “She acknowledged Khadr’s desire to complete the hajj … but said that he as yet has no firm plans to make the journey.” She also that, in future, Khadr “could apply to the court to allow him to apply for a passport to make the trip, which would then be surrendered to his bail supervisor.”

Outside the court, Khadr “declined to comment” on the ruling, while Nathan Whitling “said they would review the application and consider their next steps.”

Over half his lifetime since the fateful day that he ended up in US custody in July 2002, Omar Khadr’s long journey to freedom still has no end in sight. If the eight years of his sentence are over, why do Canadian officials continue to impose so many obstacles to his ability to live freely and to travel freely?

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.

Why the Conviction of the Stansted 15, on Terrorism-Related Charges, Must Be Overturned

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As someone who has spent the last 13 years working to end imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo, it has always been chilling to see these institutional crimes echoed in the UK. Under Tony Blair, foreign-born, alleged terror suspects were held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence, while other foreign nationals, and British nationals too, also regarded as terror suspects, were subjected to a form of house arrest, also on the basis of secret evidence, under what were known as “control orders.”

Unfortunately, throughout this period, the use of immigration detention was also on the rise. As the Guardian explained in an article in October based on a survey of its history, “The power to detain was created in the 1971 Immigration Act – however, it was not until the Labour government under Tony Blair that the detention estate expanded to become what it is today. In 2000, detention centres could hold 475 people, with another 200 or so held under immigration powers in prisons. Capacity has now expanded to about 3,500 spaces.”

The Guardian article noted that “[m]ore than 27,000 people were detained in 2017, according to the most recent figures”, adding, “Detention is now a significant part of the UK’s immigration enforcement efforts, but locking up immigrants without a time limit is a relatively recent phenomenon.”

As the Guardian article proceeded to explain, “The UK is the only country in Europe with no statutory time limit on detention. While most are held for days or weeks, the Guardian survey uncovered several cases where a detainee was held in excess of two years. Indefinite detention has been a key criticism of UK immigration policy. In 2015, the first ever parliamentary inquiry called for a 28-day time limit on detention. The Guardian survey found the vast majority of detainees are not told how long they will be held for or when they will be deported. The Shaw report [a report for Parliament in January 2016 by Stephen Shaw, who produced a follow-up report this summer] found that more than half of detainees were ultimately released back into the community, posing questions about the use of taxpayers’ money to pursue lengthy periods of detention.”

Shockingly, since the Tories came to power in May 2010, aided by the Liberal Democrats, one figure in particular has been at the forefront of government-driven racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia — Theresa May, who was home secretary for six years before becoming Prime Minister after the EU referendum in July 2016. I wrote in detail about her multi-faceted bigotry in an article at the time, entitled, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration.

Since that time, of course, the government’s racism and xenophobia has only increased as a result of the Brexit vote, and the Tory Party’s rightward drift and its desire to be seen as being tough on immigration. What has also, shockingly, been revealed, is Theresa May’s central role in the creation of the UK as a “hostile environment” for immigrants, and the Windrush scandal, when, disturbingly, immigrants who came from the Caribbean as children in the 1950s, but whose papers were lost, were forcibly repatriated.

In a major article in August, ‘Hostile environment: anatomy of a policy disaster’, the Guardian explained how, in 2012, May told the Daily Telegraph that her aim “was to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration”, and how that subsequently ended up with the Windrush disaster. Succinctly explaining the scale of the disaster, Rob Whiteman, the head of the UK Border Agency from 2011 to 2013, asked, rhetorically, “What on earth went wrong that British citizens who have been here for 50 years and have rights to be here are being deported?”

While activists have regularly protested about the “hostile environment”, with, for example, regular protests outside Yarl’s Wood, the only detention centre for women, where, earlier this year, detainees went on a hunger strike to protest about the conditions of their detention, in March 2017, 15 activists — who became known as the Stansted 15 — “took non-violent direct action” at Stansted Airport “to prevent the deportation of 60 people on a charter flight bound for Ghana and Nigeria”, as Amnesty International explained, adding that their actions prevented the flight from leaving, and that, “Of the 60 individuals due to have been deported, ten are currently pursuing asylum claims in the UK, and at least one has since been granted permission to remain in the UK.”

Initially, as Amnesty International added, the Stansted 15 “were charged with aggravated trespass, but four months later this was changed to ‘endangering safety at aerodromes’ — a serious terrorism-related charge which can lead to a life sentence.”

Their two-month trial at Chelmsford Crown Court began on October 1, and last week, on December 10 — ironically, Human Rights Day, making the 70th anniversary of the UN’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — the defendants were found guilty.

Responding to the verdict, the Stansted 15 said, “We are guilty of nothing more than intervening to prevent harm. The real crime is the government’s cowardly, inhumane and barely legal deportation flights and the unprecedented use of terror law to crack down on peaceful protest. We must challenge this shocking use of draconian legislation, and continue to demand an immediate end to these secretive deportation charter flights and a full independent public inquiry into the government’s ‘hostile environment’. Justice will not be done until we are exonerated and the Home Office is held to account for the danger it puts people in every single day. It endangers people in dawn raids on their homes, at detention centres and on these brutal flights. The system is out of control. It is unfair, unjust and unlawful and it must be stopped.”

I can only hope that this verdict is overturned on appeal, because it sets a dangerous legal precedent for punishing what, in essence, was a valid response to a policy led by Theresa May that is, fundamentally, morally wrong. Interestingly, the UN has just included the Stansted 15 as “human rights defenders” in their first global survey since 2006 of the way that human rights defenders are treated around the world (see page 493 of the report).

As it currently stands, the sentencing of the Stansted 15 will take place on February 4, and if you can get along to show support, please do. I’ll try and be there, but in the meantime I’m posting a statement made by one of the 15, Ali Tamlit, a member of End Deportations and Plane Stupid, published by the Huffington Post on December 18, which, not coincidentally, was International Migrants’ Day.

I’m Proud To Be One Of The Stansted 15 – This Is Our Story

By Ali Tamlit, Huffington Post, December 18, 2018

Sooner or later, our struggle related to this trial will be over – but the wider struggle against the hostile environment must continue.

On Monday 10 December, two months after the trial began, myself and the 14 other activists that make up the Stansted 15 were convicted of “intentional disruption of an aerodrome in such a way that is likely to endanger the safe operation of the aerodrome”. This is a terror-related charge that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

As we were called into court that morning, I knew we were being found guilty. The direction of the trial and the way the judge’s summary framed things, there was no way we were getting a unanimous acquittal. And so, we sat there holding each other’s hands listening as one by one, we each had our names read out, followed by the word ‘guilty’.

It was a real blow. A few of us were crying. But even so, as the judge asked us to stand, I stood tall because I know that what we did that night was right. We decided to take action back in March 2017 because people’s lives were in danger. We didn’t endanger anyone that night. But the Home Office did: by attempting to force people on to these brutal deportation flights and send them to unsafe places.

Following the verdict, we were all in a state of shock. We mostly stayed in the waiting room of the court, not quite sure what to do next.

While sitting there, a couple of women from the Crossroads Women’s Centre came to say how sorry they were. They were both in the process of applying for asylum and said that if this is how the state treats us – citizens – then how can they expect any better? As we were chatting, I asked about their cases. Both of them had been waiting for seven or eight years. Whilst en route to court one of them had had her claim rejected again. “I’m used to it” she said. “Something like this happens every year at Christmas.”

That short conversation put things in perspective. We had a ten-week trial, but it is nothing compared to the countless people going through the brutal immigration system. Some of us might go to jail, but we will know exactly how long for and we will continue to be supported by thousands of people. But over 30,000 people a year are put in immigration detention centres where they can be held indefinitely and have no idea when they will be released or if they will be deported. We mustn’t forget that it is the people on the frontlines of the ‘hostile environment’ that need our solidarity most and that that is what our action was about.

The day after the verdict we held a demo outside the Home Office. At barely a day’s notice, on a cold December night, over a thousand people came to show their support and rage at both our conviction and the ‘hostile environment’. They stayed for over an hour and a half listening to speeches, and testimonies from people who were due to be on the plane we stopped.

It was an amazing, moving and healing space. As well as a bit weird with so many people wanting to say hello – it felt like we were celebrities. I appreciate the support so much. I just hope this energy can continue and be focused where it is needed most: supporting those on the frontlines and shutting down the border regime.

Today is International Migrants’ Day and at least 16 demonstrations have been called across the UK by Unis Resist Border Controls; standing in solidarity with us, calling for an end to the government’s hostile environment, closing all detention centres and an end to all deportations. There is an amazing energy around at the moment. Not just because of our case and its implications for wider protest movements, but also in response to the Windrush scandal and a growing presence of the far-right on our streets. For anyone who’s wondering what to do, my suggestion is to look around your local area. There are countless migrant support groups that need people to help out, if you have a spare room you could host a destitute asylum seeker, and if you want to take or support direct action, then look for campaign groups or find help from a training collective to help start one.

Our journey with this trial continues in February when we are sentenced. We are calling for people to come down to Chelmsford Crown court to show support and outrage at the use of anti-terror law on protestors. We’ve also got a crowdfunder and petition to help with our campaign.

Sooner or later, our struggle related to this trial will be over. However, the wider struggle against charter flights, the hostile environment and against borders must continue. This is where I hope people can direct the majority of their energy. We took this action to respond to people’s calls for solidarity and justice. Until radical changes happen, those calls will continue. And it’s down to all of us to answer.

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.

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

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On December 9, I published an article marking the 4th anniversary of the publication of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, a five-year, $40 million project that demonstrated that torture was “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees”, that the interrogations “were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others,” that the CIA made “inaccurate claims” about the “effectiveness” of the programme in an attempt to justify it and that it “led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases,” as I explained in an article at the time for Al-Jazeera.

With peoples’ minds still, hopefully, focused on questions of accountability, I also wanted to flag up that December 11 marked the 10th anniversary of an earlier report, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s ‘Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody,’ released on December 11, 2008, that, rather than focusing on the CIA, specifically exposed wrongdoing at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

The bipartisan report, issued by the committee’s chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, and its senior Republican, Sen. John McCain, runs to 232 pages, with a 29-page executive summary, and was based on a two-year investigation. In the course of its investigations the committee “reviewed more than 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents, including detention and interrogation policies, memoranda, electronic communications, training manuals, and the results of previous investigations into detainee abuse,” The committee also “interviewed over 70 individuals in connection with its inquiry,” mostly DoD, but also DoJ and FBI, “issued two subpoenas and held two hearings to take testimony from subpoenaed witnesses,” sent “written questions to more than 200 individuals,” and also “held public hearings on June 17, 2008 and September 25, 2008,” the transcripts of which, running to 380 pages, can be found here.

As I explained in an article at the time the report was published, ‘Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes?’, its conclusions were that the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody in the “war on terror” was “the direct result of policies authorized or implemented by senior officials within the [Bush] administration, including President George W. Bush, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former legal counsel (and [then] chief of staff) David Addington, and former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II.”

As I also explained, “Since the scandal of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq broke in April 2004, over a dozen investigations have identified problems concerning the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, but until now no official report has gazed up the chain of command to blame senior officials for authorizing torture and instigating abusive policies, and the Bush administration has been able to maintain, as it did in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, that any abuse was the result of the rogue activities of ‘a few bad apples.’”

That position, as I pointed out, was “now untenable,” because, as the report stated, “The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”

As I also explained in my article, although the report contained little new information, the report was “damning in its revelation of how senior officials sought out and approved the reverse engineering of techniques taught in the US military’s SERE schools (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) for use on prisoners captured in the ‘war on terror.’”

I also explained how the authors laid out “a compelling timeline for the introduction of these techniques, beginning with a crucial memorandum issued by President Bush on February 7, 2002,” whose significance I have flagged up on several occasions. “This,” I added, “stated that the protections of the Geneva Conventions, which, the authors note, ‘would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment,’ did not apply to prisoners seized in the ‘war on terror.’” The report added that “the decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e. legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in US custody.”

I added, “Having established the President’s role as the initial facilitator of abuse, the report then implicates those directly responsible for implementing the torture of prisoners, explaining how Haynes began soliciting advice from the agency responsible for SERE techniques in December 2001, and how Addington, Justice Department legal adviser John Yoo and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales attempted to redefine torture in the notorious ‘Torture Memo’ of August 2002, which claimed that the pain endured ‘must be equivalent to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.’”

The authors also noted how Donald Rumsfeld “approved the use of SERE techniques at Guantánamo in December 2002 (after Haynes had consulted with other senior officials), and explain how the techniques migrated to Afghanistan in January 2003, and were implemented in Iraq by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of coalition forces, in September 2003.”

“Even so,” I added, “the report is not without its faults. The authors carefully refrain from ever using the words ‘torture’ or ‘war crimes,’ which is a considerable semantic achievement, but one that does little to foster a belief that the officials involved will one day be held accountable for their crimes. They also, curiously, omit all mention of Vice President Dick Cheney, and ignore the importance of the presidential order of November 2001, which authorized the capture and indefinite detention of ‘enemy combatants’ and established the Military Commission trial system, even though the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman has established that Cheney played a significant role in this and all the other crucial documents that led to the torture and abuse of detainees.”

As with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report, no one has yet been held to account for the crimes exposed in this report, but I contend that it remains important to maintain awareness of them in the hope that one day accountability will be regarded as a necessity, hence this article marking the 10th anniversary of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s detainee treatment report.

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.