Andy Worthington's Blog, page 28

Remembering Judge John J. Gibbons, The Man Who Brought Habeas Corpus to 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  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.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are saddened to hear of the death, at the age of 94, of Judge John J. Gibbons, who was one of the signatories to our initial mission statement when we first launched “Close Guantánamo” on January 11, 2012, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison. Appointed in 1970 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, by Richard Nixon, he served on that court for 20 years, the last three as Chief Judge. While at the court, he authored more than 800 opinions.

When he left the bench, Judge Gibbons became a Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey, and also rejoined the firm he had been part of prior to becoming a judge, which become known as Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione in 1997, and then Gibbons P.C. in 2007.

Although he was a Republican, and, as Chris Hedges noted in a New York Times profile in February 2004, “his politics tend[ed] to veer to the conservative,” he was also “at once an insider and an outsider,” something of a “gadfly” at his largely corporate firm, where he was “one of the state’s leading crusaders against the death penalty.” He had, he told Hedges, “always been outraged by the use of the death penalty,” which was why his firm “filed ‘friend of the court’ briefs in almost every death penalty case in New Jersey.”

As he said, “It is horrible that in a civilized country the arbitrary imposition of revenge continues to exist. This does not exist in any other industrialized democracy in the world. We are completely out of step. We should be ashamed.”

As Hedges also noted, the law for Judge Gibbons was “not partisan.” It was “not about choosing those we do not like, or do like, and then determining if they receive full legal rights.” As he said, “Sometimes the people we represent have committed heinous crimes. We are often not very popular for the work we do, but our job is to make sure the law applies to everyone. Unpopular people need representation. They frequently present the most interesting and challenging legal questions.”

For those taking an interest in Guantánamo, Judge Gibbons needs to be remembered for having made sure that the crucial notion that the law applies to everyone, and cannot be applied selectively, also applied to the prisoners at Guantánamo.

Judge Gibbons argued for the Guantánamo prisoners in Rasul v. Bush, a ground-breaking case named after the British prisoner Shafiq Rasul. This case came before the Supreme Court in 2004, and led to the most significant manifestation of the reach of the law at Guantánamo, when the Supreme Court ruled on June 28, 2004 that the Guantánamo prisoners had habeas corpus rights; in other words, that they had the right to ask a judge to rule impartially on the basis of their imprisonment, which, until that point, had been considered unreviewable by the Bush administration.

That ruling, crucially, pierced the veil of secrecy that had shrouded Guantánamo for the first two and half years of its existence, allowing prisoners, with impunity, to be tortured and subjected to other forms of abuse, by allowing attorneys to visit the base and to take on clients to represent in court.

Unfortunately, Congress was then prevailed upon by the Bush administration to pass new laws taking away the prisoners’ habeas rights, and it was not until June 2008 that the Supreme Court again considered their cases, this time rebuking Congress for having acted unconstitutionally, and confirming that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights.

That ruling, Boumediene v. Bush, in June 2008, led to around three dozen prisoners having their releases approved by judges, who ruled that the government had failed to establish that the men in question had any meaningful connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Unfortunately, Boumediene was then fatally and cynically undermined by politically motivated judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., who, in a series of rulings from 2009 to 2011, ended up requiring the lower court judges to regard everything submitted by the government, however risible, as presumptively accurate, thereby, sadly, gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners.

Outrageously, those rulings have not been overturned, and the Supreme Court has persistently refused to revisit the Guantánamo litigation, thereby allowing the D.C. Circuit Court to have thoroughly undermined Boumediene, and to have effectively set detainee policy themselves.

For us, it is profoundly sad that Judge Gibbons died, 14 and a half years after the Rasul ruling, with Guantánamo still open, and with men held there who are still effectively deprived of the legal remedy that he did so much to guarantee them back in 2004. And that, fundamentally, is a sad indictment of America today.

Below we’re cross-posting parts of an interview with Judge Gibbons that ran in the the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel magazine in 2005, the year after Rasul, in which he explained what had happened in the litigation, and why it was so important.

Excerpts from a 2005 interview with Judge John J. Gibbons

Editor: How did you come to be among the lawyers representing the detainees that are incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay?

Gibbons: Shearman & Sterling’s Washington office filed petitions for habeas corpus on behalf of a number of Kuwaiti citizens, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed on behalf of some nationals of other countries. When those petitions were filed, a number of organizations, including a group of former federal judges, filed amicus curiae briefs in support of a grant for certiorari. I was among the judges and acted as spokesman for them. The briefs dealt with a broad cross section of cases supporting our position. They discussed Korematsu v. United States, which dealt with the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, and Mr. Korematsu filed our amicus brief. William Rogers acted as spokesman for a group of former diplomats. The amici even included a group of Members of Parliament who were interested in the rights of British detainees. When certiorari was granted, the two groups representing the petitioners asked me to help with the Supreme Court briefs and to argue the case.

Editor: Can you give our readers an overview of the United States Supreme Court determination in Rasul v. Bush?

Gibbons: The government had managed to convince the lower courts that there was no federal court jurisdiction to consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a non-citizen detained in a country over which the U.S. exercised no jurisdiction or control. The circuit court of appeals decision was a straightforward syllogism, with a major premise stating that an applicant can only get habeas corpus if detained in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States. The minor premise was that non-citizens outside the United States do not have Constitutional rights, and the conclusion, therefore, was that the courts could do nothing.

Both premises were false. The language in the habeas corpus statute referring to detention in violation of the Constitution was not put in that statute until the 1870s to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. The other part of the statute, which dates from well before the Bill of Rights was adopted, says nothing about Constitutional rights. It says that habeas corpus exists to determine the legality of detention simpliciter. All that has ever been required is federal detention. The government’s fall-back position was that the United States writ does not extend to Guantánamo Bay, which, it argued, is under Cuban sovereignty. The Supreme Court rejected this argument.

Editor: And access to counsel?

Gibbons: The Supreme Court implicitly recognized that the detainees had the right to counsel, but when the case was remanded to the district court, the government took the position that counsel had to have secret security clearance and that the matter was so delicate that anything counsel was told had to be turned over to the government. The government was not very good at facilitating clearance, and it took four months for me to receive clearance.

The detainees had no process for a determination of their status. Shortly after the Rasul decision, the government put in place a status review procedure which is conducted for each detainee annually [the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, expertly dissected here by a former official involved in implementing them]. However, the detainees can have a military representative but not a lawyer. There is no question that this process does not satisfy due process or the requirements of the Geneva Conventions or customary international law. That is the issue now pending in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia [as part of the litigation that needed up back at the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush].

Editor: What is the status of the detainees?

Gibbons: If they are not military, they are civilians. There is a provision in the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of civilian detainees, and the government has refused to apply it. The government takes the position that American courts cannot enforce the Geneva Conventions because they are not self-executing treaties and no implementing legislation has been passed. That is not a very strong argument. Recently an amicus curiae brief was filed in the DC Circuit on behalf of the World Organization for Human Rights which lays out U.S. obligations to enforce the Geneva Conventions and other provisions of international law.

Editor: To what extent are the non-United States citizens entitled to protections guaranteed by the United States Constitution?

Gibbons: These rights are afforded to people and not just citizens. The due process clause says people. The distinction between citizens and non-citizens was decided in a 1990 case, United States v. Verdugo, in which the Supreme Court held that in a trial within the U.S. the government could use evidence obtained in Mexico in compliance with Mexican law but without a warrant authorized by a federal court against a Mexican citizen. The government contends that this decision means that no non-citizen has any rights under the Constitution.

Editor: What is your response to those who say that terrorists do not deserve the same rights afforded to others?

Gibbons: For starters, I am not certain that the connection of these detainees to terrorism holds up. Many of them were apprehended far away from places where American troops are engaged in combat. Indeed, some of them were captured by bounty hunters. It is for a court of law to determine whether there is a legitimate reason for detaining them. The idea that their status can be determined solely by military personnel with no legal training and in the absence of any attempt to investigate the facts is preposterous.

Editor: Is it possible to adhere to the rule of law and win the war on terrorism?

Gibbons: Certainly. The “war on terrorism” is a term of indefinite meaning. On the one hand, the Executive Branch takes the position that it is a war and that therefore the Commander-in-Chief’s powers are not curtailed. On the other hand, the Administration argues that it is not a war when it comes to protections specifically applicable to war, such as the Geneva Conventions. The rule of law is required for everyone’s protection. After all, if they can do this to the Guantánamo detainees, they can do it to me.

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 4: Still Seeking $2200 (£1750) to Support My Guantánamo Work, My Housing Activism, Music and Photography

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,200 (£1,750) I’m still trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration, and/or my housing activism, photography and music.

 

Dear friends and supporters, and any engaged passers-by,

It’s nearly 13 years since I started working full-time as an independent journalist researching and writing about Guantánamo, and working to get the prison closed down. In that time, I’ve been employed by various media and human rights organizations, and have also been fortunate to have the support of a few prominent human rights-supporting individuals, but I have also become — most significantly, I think — a reader-funded journalist, activist and creator.

Over the years, there have been times when Guantánamo has slipped off the radar — for nearly three years under President Obama, between 2010 and 2013, when Congress conspired to make it difficult for him to release prisoners, and he responded by sitting on his hands rathe than spending politics capital overcoming lawmakers’ obstruction, and, of course, in the nearly two years since Donald Trump became president.

Because Trump has effectively sealed the prison shut, refusing to release anyone, it has become increasingly difficult to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, although I have been doing my best to keep focusing on it. I’m currently working on profiles of the remaining 40 prisoners, in the run-up to the 17th anniversary of the opening of the prison, on January 11, when I will, as usual, be visiting the US to campaign for the prison’s closure — a visit for which your support will be very helpful — and I’m also looking into finding a way to focus on the rights of former prisoners, many of whom have ended up in extremely vulnerable positions because Donald Trump closed down the US government office that dealt with re-settlements, and monitored prisoners after their release.

With more time on my hands, I’ve diversified into other topics — in particular, getting involved in housing activism in the UK. I’ve long taken an interest in the housing crisis in the UK, and especially the cynical destruction of council estates to enable builders and developers to make huge profits, and this interest intensified after the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, when 72 people died because those responsible for their safety prioritised cost-cutting and profiteering over their very lives. I then became the narrator of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a documentary about the destruction of council estates and residents’ resistance, and also became involved in the defence of a wonderful community garden in Deptford, in south east London, where, for two months from the end of August, I became part of the permanent occupation of the garden to prevent its destruction by Lewisham Council, for an unacceptable new housing project. Although we were violently evicted six weeks ago, the resistance continues, as does my general involvement in seeking to permanently derail the social cleansing and unacceptable profiteering of the entire housing ‘regeneration’ industry.

If this work interests you, you’re welcome to donate to support me, as I have no other backing to enable me to do it. The same also goes for my photography — specifically, ‘The State of London’ photo-journalism project that I began six and half years ago (after a serious illness and during one of those Guantánamo lulls). This has also been an entirely self-generated project, for which I have received no backing, and, again, any support will be greatly appreciated (and if you like my photography, do keep an eye out for a crowd-funding project for a book that I hope to launch next year).

And finally, if you appreciate my musical endeavors, you’re welcome to support that, because, as with so much creative work these days, opportunities to generate income through photography and music have been severely curtailed by the domination of the internet, where the tendency, sadly, is for profits to be siphoned away from creators to the tech companies. The recordings of my band The Four Fathers are available here on Bandcamp, where, if you like, you can buy our music on CD or as downloads.

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

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

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

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

With thanks, as ever, for your support. Whether you can make a donation or not, please do bear in mind that everything I do only has any meaning because of your interest in it.

Andy Worthington

London

December 13, 2018

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.

It’s Human Rights Day – and Day One of My Quarterly Fundraiser, In Which I’m Trying to Raise $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work

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

 

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work as an independent journalist, activist and commentator, working to try and secure the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

Today seems to be a particularly appropriate time to launch my latest fundraiser, as it is Human Rights Day, marking the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations. That was exactly 70 years ago, on December 10, 1948, when, in response to the horrors of the Second World War, “representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world” created the UDHR “as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations”, which set out, for the first time, “fundamental human rights to be universally protected”, as the UN explains on its website.

Human rights are central to the problems of Guantánamo — a place intended to be beyond the each of the US courts, where men and boys seized in the “war on terror” that the US declared in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were imprisoned without any rights whatsoever, held neither as criminal suspects, to be charged and tried, or as prisoners of war, and subjected to torture an other forms of abuse, contravening Article 5 of the UDHR — “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” — as well as Articles 9 and 10: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile” and “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”

If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to uphold human rights for everyone — and not, as the US has been doing since 9/11, declaring that human rights don’t apply to foreign-born Muslims seized in the “war on terror” — please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.

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

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

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

Nearly two years into Donald Trump’s residency, it remains difficult to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, in part because so many other problems created by Trump demand attention, and in part because his very enthusiasm of keeping Guantánamo open means that he has effectively sealed it shut, and as a result most of the mainstream media has, ironically, been content to forget about it.

The significance of Human Rights Day hopefully reminds all of us about why we can’t let Donald Trump succeed. With your support I intend to do all I can to renew my focus on the stories of the remaining 40 prisoners, to highlight how, with the exception of the nine men who are facing or have faced trials, the rest continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, even when, as in some cases, their ongoing imprisonment is based on nothing more than their attitude since they have been in US custody, rather than on what they were supposed to have done to justify their imprisonment in the first place.

With your help I’ll be following on from what I’ve been doing since my last fundraiser — updating my definitive six-part Guantánamo prisoner list, focusing on prisoners past and present, supporting new writing by a former prisoner, and continuing to show how long Guantánamo has been open and to call for its closure via the Gitmo Clock and a photo campaign on the Close Guantanamo website that I run — by writing new articles, seeking out further media coverage, and planning new campaigns. I’ll also be visiting the US for the 17th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo (on January 11), a trip for which your financial support will be very helpful.

I’m aware that my work on Guantánamo — which has taken up so much of my life for the last 12 years — is what attracts most of the vital financial support that you, my readers, give me, and I’m eternally grateful for your support.

However, if you are interested in any of my other work I’m more than happy for you to support that as well — my housing activism, for example, which has been taking up a considerable amount of my time since my last fundraiser in September, as I was part of the two-month occupation of a community garden in south east London, where I live, to prevent its destruction for a new housing scheme that could and should be built elsewhere. The garden is an extraordinary environmental and social asset, and is flanked by a block of structurally sound council flats that the council and the developers also want to destroy, without any kind of compelling reason, and the entire resistance (which also involved our occupation being violently evicted six weeks ago) has become a kind of microcosm of environmental issues and the UK housing crisis in general that has resonated way beyond its immediate geographical location.

I also continue to cycle around London taking photos in all of the capital’s 120 postcodes for my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, for which I receive no institutional backing, and I also continue to write and perform songs with my band The Four Fathers that also reflect my general concerns, and which, again, as with so many creative endeavors these days, is reliant on the generosity of supporters to be viable.

I hope some of the above is of interest. As always, what’s most important for me to say is that I really can’t do what I do without you.

Andy Worthington

London

December 10, 2018

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.

It’s Four Years Since the Executive Summary of the Senate Torture Report Was Published: Where’s the Full Report?

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.

 

Today, December 9, marks four years since the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was published. Although this 500-page document was quite heavily redacted, its release was nevertheless something of a triumph for America’s notion of itself as having a government whose actions are subjected to checks and balances.

The full 6,000-page report, which took five years and $40 million to compile, was approved by nine members on the committee to six on December 13, 2012, and the executive summary was released eight months after the committee voted to release significant parts of the report — key findings and an executive summary.

What was released was devastating for the CIA.

As I explained in an article for Al-Jazeera, entitled, ‘Punishment, not apology after CIA torture report’, which was published the day after the executive summary was published:

[A]lthough some of the gruesome facts about the torture programme were known, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report provides far more. In its “Findings and Conclusions”, for example, the report states: “At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal rehydration’ or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity. The CIA placed detainees in ice water ‘baths’. The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to one detainee that he would only leave in a coffin-shaped box. One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because ‘we can never let the world know what I have done to you’. CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families — to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to ‘cut [a detainee’s] mother’s throat.’”

There are many more examples. The report states: “The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became ‘completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth’. Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad as evolving into a ‘series of near drownings.’”

In addition, “sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours”, and although some “experienced disturbing hallucinations”, in at least two cases the CIA continued its abuse.

As I also explained, the committee also concluded that “torture was ‘not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees’, 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.”

The report also concluded that non-approved techniques were used widely, that “[a]t least 17 detainees were subjected to CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without authorisation from CIA headquarters”, and that “multiple detainees were subjected to techniques that were applied in ways that diverged from the specific authorisation, or were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques by interrogators who had not been authorised to use them.”

The executive summary also provided details about the number of prisoners held by the CIA, and previously unknown information about their cases, establishing that there had been 119 prisoners in total. For years, researchers had tried to establish details about the program, and I had played a part in this as the lead writer of a United Nations report about secret detention that was published in 2010. The original document is here, and my annotated cross-posts of the relevant sections about the US program are here: UN Secret Detention Report (Part One): The CIA’s “High-Value Detainee” Program and Secret Prisons, UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq and UN Secret Detention Report (Part Three): Proxy Detention, Other Countries’ Complicity, and Obama’s Record.

Unfortunately, since the executive summary of the report was published, calls for the full report to be made publicly available have been thwarted, as have calls for any kind of public accountability.

There has, however, been one noticeable victory. Former US military psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who instigated and led the torture program — and were paid $81m for doing so — were taken to court by several former “black site” prisoners — and the family of another “black site” prisoner who was killed — and ended up settling out of court for an undisclosed amount.

This was significant, because the committee had been highly critical of the central role played by Mitchell and Jessen, even though neither of them “had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialised knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”

Unfortunately, while this was a success, a noticeable defeat has been the appointment of Gina Haspel as CIA Director, because she spent some time running the first post-9/11 “black site’ in Thailand, where the torture program was first used, and her appointment sends a horrible message about the unaccountability of the US government — particularly under Donald Trump.

As I have mentioned before, if anyone has a full copy of the torture report, I’m happy for you to send it to me!

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.

Today Guantánamo Has Been Open For 6,175 Days, and on Jan. 1, 2019 It Will Have Been Open for 6,200 Days: Please Join Our Photo Campaign!

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

 

I wrote the following article  for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Today December 7, 2018, the prison at Guantánamo Bay has been open for 6,175 days, or, to put it another way, 16 years, ten months and 26 days.

When it comes to thinking about how long that is, I recall that my son, who turns 19 in two weeks’ time, was just two years old when Guantánamo opened, and I try to imagine being held for all that time without any of the rights and protections that people deprived of their liberty in countries that claim to respect the rule of law normally take for granted — the right not to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, or, if seized in wartime, the right to be held unmolested until a definable end of hostilities.

At Guantánamo, the prisoners were fundamentally stripped of all their rights as human beings, and, despite various efforts to give them rights, that unacceptable position remains fundamentally true. As you read this, here and now, the only way anyone can get out of Guantánamo is at the whim of the president — and this particular president has no interest in releasing anyone at all.

To add to those fundamental rights that were stripped from the prisoners, many others — including the right not to be subjected to torture or other forms of abuse, the right to be allowed family visits, the right to undertake a hunger strike and not to be force-fed, and the right to engage in artistic endeavors — are also hallmarks of the dreadful lawless zone that is Guantánamo.

In the nearly seven years that the Close Guantánamo campaign has existed, we have tried numerous ways to highlight the plight of the men still held. We launched a Gitmo Clock in 2013, during a prison-wide hunger strike, showing how long it took for Barack Obama to resume releasing prisoners after he promised to do so, breaking a period of inactivity on his part, in which almost no one was released from the prison, because Congress had sought to impose restrictions on the release of prisoners.

We re-launched the Gitmo Clock during Obama’s last year left in office, when we also launched a photo project, ‘The Countdown to Close Guantánamo’, when our co-founder Andy Worthington appeared on Democracy Now! with music legend Roger Waters, urging people to take photos with posters showing how long Obama had left in office.

That campaign was quite successful, but since Donald Trump took office, it seems, his toxic presence has made people feel that resistance — at least as far as Guantánamo is concerned — is largely futile. We ran a photo campaign in his first year, ‘Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo’, and this year we revived the Gitmo Clock to show how long Guantánamo has been open, and have been urging people to take photos wth posters that we have made available every 25 days.

In general, however, we would have to admit that there has not been a huge response — with one notable exception: in June, when we marked 6,000 days of the prison’s existence, and dozens of people sent in photos. You can check out all the photos here — and the most recent photos here.

Nevertheless, we’d still like to urge you to get involved — by taking a photo with the 6,175 days poster and sending it to us — and/or by taking a photo with a poster marking the next big date: January 1, 2019, when the prison will have been open for 6,200 days.

If I may, I’d like to leave you with an anecdote explaining why I think it remains important to continue to make a stand about Guantánamo, and to try to let Donald Trump know why his ignorant and insulting enthusiasm for keeping the prison open, and for not releasing anyone — even though 40 men are still held, and only nine of them are facing trials — is so offensive.

During the Vietnam War, so I’m told, an individual stood every night outside the White House with a candle, calling for an end to the war. The individual did this night after night, and eventually a major news outlet sent a reporter down to talk to them. The reporter asked, “Why are you doing this? Surely you know your lone protest won’t change the president’s mind?,” to which the protestor replied, “I’m not doing it to change his mind, I’m doing it so he can’t change mine.”

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

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

Tidemill Solidarity Gig: Come and Celebrate the Resistance at the Birds Nest This Sunday, Dec. 9

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

 

It’s now five weeks since the violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, a wonderful community space and precious environmental asset that was violently evicted by bailiffs from the brutal County Enforcement company, who were hired by Lewisham Council. To show our continued resistance to the council’s plans to destroy the garden — and to celebrate our fighting spirit and our creativity — I’ve organised a gig this Sunday at the Birds Nest, the legendary live music pub just across the road, featuring musicians who played at events in the garden, or who were involved in the occupation. 

Three prominent campaigners with the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign — Heather, Harriet and I — are represented by our bands Ukadelix, the Commie Faggots and the Four Fathers, and many other members of these bands were also involved in events in the garden. I remember one wonderful evening around the fire with Michelle and Angie from Ukadelix, Archie from the Commie Faggots and Richard from The Four Fathers, when, with Angie playing some wonderful basslines, we adopted ‘Love Train’ as the occupation’s anthem. Also present that night — and on many other occasions — was Flaky Jake, accordionist and troubadour, who, I hope, will also be able to make it on Sunday.

Also representing the occupation is Roll Rizz, who brought peace and love to the garden from north London, with his anarcho-tribal punk band Flak (or Flak Punks), and two singer-songwriters who have both written songs about Tidemill, which they’ll be performing — Gordon Robertson and Mark Sampson. And the evening will kick off with Brian Wilkes, visiting from Eastbourne, who played his first ever public set at a previous Tidemill benefit gig at the Birds Nest on September 16.

Also playing are two special guests, who were booked to play before the night became a Tidemill event, and who have graciously got on board with the campaign — Cavalli, anti-fascist hard rockers, and Rob Shuttz, who plays alternative, experimental music.

Meanwhile, in the political arena, Lewisham Council evidently thought the eviction would mark the end of the campaign to save the garden — and the 16 structurally sound council flats of Reginald House next door — but they were sadly mistaken. 

The struggle to save the garden and the flats has been going on for ten years, since the council first proposed it, as part of the re-development of the old Tidemill primary school, and residents of Reginald House (and two other blocks of flats in Giffin Street, initially included in the plans) began opposing it. The school finally closed in 2012, and guardians installed in the old school buildings first opened up the garden and began the campaign to save it. When the council then evicted them, local campaigners, given “meanwhile use” of the garden while the council tried to finalise their plans, continued to try to get the council to change their mind, and to re-draw their plans for the school, the garden and Reginald House, which involved — and still involve — creating around 200 units of new housing. As a result of continued resistance, the proportion of allegedly “affordable” housing was increased, but the council and its development partner, Peabody, obstinately refused to engage with the community about sparing the garden and the flats.

As a result, when the council brought the lease of the garden to an end on August 29, campaigners — myself included — occupied it instead of handing it back, and gained widespread support from the many local people who had used it and loved it over the years — either in the 14 years after its creation in 1998 as a visionary garden for the school, or in its subsequent six years in community hands, as a retreat, or for gardening, or for cultural events. Ironically, after September 2017, when the council finally approved its plans for the re-development of the site with Peabody, more and more people were drawn to the garden, with all manner of events taking place, so that by the time of the occupation the council had no idea of what a powerful autonomous community space it had become.

I’m not sure we’ve even begun to tell all these stories yet, largely because those with stories to tell have largely been traumatised by the eviction and its aftermath, with the garden for the last six weeks guarded by bailiffs, fenced off as though it’s some kind of dangerous animal, and with the ever-present fear that the destruction of the trees will begin at any time (although when tree-fellers were sent in, they soon withdrew from their contract, stating, ”Artemis Tree Services have heard the voices of the Lewisham people and have decided to remove ourselves from the Tidemill project.”

For Lewisham Council, the Tidemill project has turned into a disaster. They have spectacularly failed to win hearts and minds via the insanely expensive, violent and alienating eviction and the subsequent presence of bailiffs 24 hours a day (with, to date, £1m spent on guarding the old school for the last two years, and over £1m spent on the eviction and the last six weeks of guarding the garden from the local community), they obviously have no idea how to recruit another tree services company to cut down the trees (who are prepared to ignore Artemis’ principled refusal to engage in such a toxic project), and they are also mired in controversy regarding the dismissal of CEO Ian Thomas, who was appointed just six months ago, and whose dismissal looks like the result of chronic insecurity on the part of the Mayor, Damien Egan, or racism for the coterie of white men who run the council, or because Thomas had exposed shady goings-on in a council that has a poor record on transparency, and is currently looking suspicious regarding its plans for the re-development of Catford town centre.

So the struggle continues — on many fronts — and I hope to see you on Sunday to celebrate the continued resistance!

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.

Remembering Those Murdered by the US in the “War on Terror”

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

 

In the long quest for justice for the victims of the US’s “war on terror,” Guantánamo — the main focus of my work for the last 13 years, where men are held indefinitely without charge or trial, and where the use of torture was widespread in its early years — is not, by any means, the only venue for crimes that should shock the consciences of all decent people.

At Guantánamo, nine men died between 2006 and 2012, and many of those deaths are regarded as suspicious, but they are not the only deaths in US custody.

Several reports have sought to assess how many prisoners have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with researcher John Sifton establishing in May 2009 that, at that time, “approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during US interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.” The majority of these deaths were in Iraq, but, back in July 2009, I published an article, When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan, in which I sought to establish quite how many deaths had occurred in Afghanistan.

In that article, I reported two acknowledged deaths in the US prison at Bagram airbase — of Dilawar, a taxi driver whose story is the focus of the bleak but riveting documentary ‘Taxi to the Dark Side,’ and Mullah Habibullah. Former prisoners also reported four additional murders at Bagram, although, to the best of my knowledge, none of these allegations have been investigated. Four more murders were reported at various other locations, and another took place in a CIA “black site” outside Kabul, known as the “Salt Pit,” where, as I put it, quoting from a Washington Post article by Dana Priest, who first broke the story, “in November 2002, a recently-promoted CIA officer, who had been put in charge of the facility, in the absence of any senior personnel who were willing to take the job, ‘ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets.’ Following their orders, the guards then dragged him around the floor before putting him in his cell, where he died of hypothermia during the night.”

As I proceeded to explain, “According to a senior US official, he then ‘disappeared from the face of the earth’: he was hastily buried in an unmarked grave, his family was never notified of his death, and the CIA officer in charge of the prison was promoted. The US authorities, meanwhile, showed no willingness to investigate the case further. ‘He was probably associated with people who were associated with al-Qaeda,’ one official said, even though nothing was known about him at the time of his death, apart from the fact that he was captured in Pakistan with some other Afghans.”

It took until March 2010 for this prisoner to be named — as Gul Rahman, in an Associated Press report that Jane Mayer subsequently discussed for the New Yorker, and then silence descended again until he surfaced in the unclassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, released almost exactly four years ago, on December 9, 2014, which explained how CIA records showed that he had been subjected to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment,” and “was also subjected to nudity, ’hard takedowns,’ facial slap and dietary manipulation.” An internal CIA review and autopsy assessed that Rahman “likely died from hypothermia,” but no one responsible was punished. In fact, the official in charge of the prison at the time of Gul Rahman’s death was indeed promoted.

In April 2016, as I explained in an article at the time, “US District Court Senior Judge Justin Quackenbush, in Spokane, Washington State, allowed a lawsuit to proceed against James Mitchell and John ‘Bruce’ Jessen, the psychologists who designed and implemented the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program,” on behalf of Gul Rahman and two other victims of the torture program, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, who survived their ordeals in CIA-run “black sites.”

That case proceeded into 2017, as I explained here and here, but just when it looked as though Mitchell and Jessen, who were paid $81m for implementing and running the torture program, would be tried, they settled out of court, for an undisclosed sum, with Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman.

While this was a significant result, it was, of course perceived as something of a let-down for those who wanted to see US government representatives on trial for their role in the torture program. Now, however, via the ACLU, Gul Rahman’s family is suing the CIA “to determine what the agency did with his body”, as the ACLU explained in a press release on November 29.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in the District Court in Washington, D.C., and noted that it “seeks to compel the CIA to turn over records concerning Rahman’s body, including information about the location of the body, and any procedures, protocols, or guidelines to be followed in the event of a CIA detainee’s death while in US custody,” also noting that the CIA has still “not officially informed Rahman’s family of his death, nor returned his body to his family.”

Hajira Hematyara, who is Gul Rahman’s daughter and a teacher in a village near Kabul, said, “I have faith that people in America will know the right thing for their government to do is to tell me and my family what happened to my father’s body. Only then will we be able to do right by my father and give him a proper funeral.”

ACLU National Security Project Staff Attorney Dror Ladin added, “No grieving family should be forced to wait 16 years to have a funeral. The CIA can’t hide Mr. Rahman’s body forever, and it’s long past time for the agency to come clean.”

The ACLU also filed a second lawsuit against the CIA “seeking information about the agency’s efforts to influence public opinion in support of Gina Haspel’s Senate confirmation as CIA director.” This lawsuit “hones in on the CIA’s campaign to shape public opinion in favor of Haspel’s nomination as director of the agency and her potential conflict of interest in controlling the classification of information related to her personal role in prisoner torture and abuse.”

As Dror Ladin said, “The CIA led an unprecedented propaganda campaign to disseminate favorable information about Gina Haspel while refusing to disclose information about her role in torture and destruction of evidence. That’s sadly consistent with the CIA’s well-documented attempts to cover up the agency’s crimes, no matter the cost to victims and their families, or to our democratic institutions. But the victims and their families can’t forget, and the public can’t afford to forget either. This country still needs to continue to reckon with the consequences of torture.”

The ACLU added that it was asking the court “to order the CIA to disclose records revealing, among other information, Haspel’s classification authority over information about her own role in torture; any agency consideration of possible resulting conflicts of interest; communications between current and former CIA personnel, journalists, former CIA employees, and public relations firms; decisions to promote coverage deemed favorable of Haspel; and communications from CIA staff to the White House.”

Both lawsuits were filed under the Freedom of Information Act after the CIA failed to produce records in response to requests, and, tying both cases together neatly, Dror Ladin wrote an article whose opening paragraphs summarise the importance — and the intertwined nature — of both cases:

In November 2002, the CIA tortured Gul Rahman to death in a secret prison in Afghanistan. Sixteen years later, Rahman’s family is still desperately trying to find out what the CIA did to his body.

To date, the CIA has told his loved ones nothing, and his daughter cannot even give her father a decent burial.

That same month, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a CIA black site in Thailand. Sixteen years later, Haspel has been promoted to CIA director by President Trump, while Nashiri remains “one of the most damaged victims of torture” a psychiatric expert has ever seen.

To date, the CIA has told the American public nothing about Haspel’s role in the agency’s torture program — even as it waged an unprecedented propaganda campaign on her behalf to win her Senate confirmation. Even a CIA spokesman confirmed that under the Trump administration, the agency pushed harder than usual to get the American public to accept the CIA’s favored choice for director. And now that Haspel has been installed at the top, she is effectively in control of whether her own record of torture remains secret.

The common thread linking the continued suffering of Rahman’s family and the CIA’s efforts to whitewash Haspel’s history is the agency’s use of extreme secrecy to avoid accountability for its shameful and illegal torture program.

Dror Ladin’s article continued:

Ever since the torture program began, the CIA has desperately tried to cover up its crimes, no matter the cost to victims and their families — and to our democratic institutions.

Central to the CIA’s discussions about its very first prisoner was a plan to ensure that their crimes would never come to light. In a July 2002 cable, CIA personnel revealed that if the prisoner died under torture, they would cremate the body of the prisoner. That would eliminate the evidence.

But the torturers were worried that, if the prisoner survived, he might one day reveal what the CIA had done to him. So they demanded “reasonable assurances” that the prisoner “will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” CIA headquarters readily agreed that the prisoner “will never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others.”

In short, to hide its crimes, the CIA decided that the people it tortured would be “disappeared” — a tactic made infamous by murderous dictatorships around the world. But the agency could not make all its victims vanish, and over the years, the other parts of the government — including the courts and Congress — started to examine the CIA’s crimes. At that point, the CIA doubled down on secrecy, endangering our democratic system of checks and balances.

When some survivors sued their torturers in federal court, the CIA tried to get the cases dismissed by arguing that courts couldn’t even handle considering the claims of torture victims without revealing “state secrets.” Unfortunately, judges largely gave in to these tactics. As a result, our courts were diminished in their vital role as a check on executive power and a means of accountability.

And when it came time for the Senate to consider Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel to be CIA director, the agency again used secrecy to subvert the process. The CIA ensured that the public confirmation hearings almost entirely hid her role in torture.

Instead of allowing the public to consider Haspel’s actual record, the CIA instead pushed what several senators described as a “superficial narrative” that did “a great disservice to the American people.” Without “meaningful declassification” of Haspel’s actions, the senators wrote, the Senate could not “properly fulfill its constitutional obligation to ‘advise and consent.’”

Back in 2009, I ended my article about the murders in Afghanistan by quoting from retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who had explained to MSNBC in April 2009, on the day that President Obama had visited CIA headquarters, rather disgracefully praising the agency for upholding US values and ideals, “We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.”

That remains as true today as it was nine years ago, but as the search for accountability continues, the situation is now much worse than it was then, with Gina Haspel so deviously installed as CIA Director.

* * * * *

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’s Self-Inflicted Woes Increase: Chaos Over Tidemill Eviction Costs, and the Sacking of CEO Ian Thomas

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.

 

What a disgrace Lewisham Council are. With Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaigners and numerous local people putting the council under ever-increasing pressure to explain how much money has been squandered on the eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden a month ago, the subsequent cost of maintaining a security presence 24 hours a day (which we believe, on the advice of Corporate Watch, to be around £1m), and why they are still not interested in an alternative plan for the site that will spare the garden and Reginald House and do something to salvage their increasingly tattered credibility, they responded, as a FOI request revealed that £105,188 had been spent on the eviction alone, by using that as an opportunity to blame campaigners for it.

The council issued a press release (helpfully posted here by the Deptford Dame), in which Cllr. Paul Bell, the Cabinet Member for Housing, after complaining about campaigners and members of the Old Tidemill Garden Group occupying the garden, stated, with a cynical use of the Labour Party’s tagline under Jeremy Corbyn (“for the many, not the few”), “Our housebuilding programme is for the many, not the few, and we won’t let the actions of a small number of people stop us providing decent, secure, social housing for those who need it.”

At the same time as issuing the press release, the council also launched a video, ‘No Place Like Home’ (and a page on their website), dealing with homelessness and the council’s alleged dedication to providing new housing, with the tagline, ‘Why Lewisham Council is making social and truly affordable housing a priority.’

Below, I’ll analyse what it actually means when the council talks about “decent, secure, social housing” and “social and truly affordable housing”, but first of all I’d like to also report back on last night’s council meeting at the council’s headquarters in Catford, where the shame and disgrace continued with a heavy-handed security presence, which was a fundamentally hysterical response by the council to a heated protest outside a meeting in New Cross several weeks ago attended by Mayor Damien Egan, and Tidemill councillors Joe Dromey and Brenda Dacres.

The heavy-handed security led, in turn, to numerous Lewisham residents, myself included. being prevented from attending the meeting, while, inside, there was dismay, expressed through booing, from Tidemill campaigners as the Mayor and Cabinet wheeled out the full 20-minute version of their ‘No Place Like Home’ video (as part of their ongoing suggestion that Tidemill campaigners are opposed to new housing), and even more vocal complaining from black residents, seeking answers as to why the council’s new CEO, Ian Thomas, a black man who was appointed to the new job five months ago, has been sacked by Damien Egan. For more details on the council meeting’s descent into chaos, check out by Bridie Witton.

Black campaigners were also very vocal at the recent New Cross meeting, at which Damien Egan showed a stunning inability to fulfil the leadership qualities required in a Mayor, and while the council has been as silent on addressing Ian Thomas’s dismissal publicly, as they have about visiting and communicating with anyone living around the Tidemill site, with its often unfriendly bailiffs, permanently barking dogs, floodlights and relentless disruption, Private Eye recently stepped in to provide an explanation, noting, in its ‘Rotten Boroughs’ column:

Lewisham Council has lost its well-regarded chief executive, Ian Thomas, after just five months in the job because, say insiders, the borough’s mayor since May, Damien “Ego” Egan, resented the chief exec’s popularity and high profile.

Thomas, one of a handful of senior black local government officers to have run a London borough, was previously at Rotherham, where he helped turn round the children’s services department, on its knees after the town’s child sexual exploitation scandal. “He was a breath of fresh air”, wrote a local blogger. “Gutted”, said one education campaigner, citing Thomas’s “belief in transparency and accountability … it’s a real loss for parents.” But Thomas’s relationship with Egan deteriorated beyond repair. “It was like dicks at dawn”, said one council officer.

Furthermore, on the same day that the council launched its counter-attacks on the Tidemill campaign via its saccharine video extolling its commitment to building new alleged social housing, the News Shopper reported that Sadiq Khan had told Lewisham Council that “an application for 393 flats in Deptford with only 10 per cent affordable housing goes against London-wide planning regulations.” As the News Shopper proceeded to explain:

The proposals would see a five, 26 and 30-storey building with 393 one, two and three-bed apartments, retail and office floorspace, and an extension to the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance on the derelict site in Copperas Street.

The Mayor of London’s report outlined that while redevelopment of the site was supported, the affordable housing offer was unacceptable and did not comply with the London Plan.

“The offer of 10 per cent, made up of 100 per cent shared ownership, is wholly unacceptable,” the report explains.

To correct the lies and spin emanating from the council, I’d like to take this opportunity to confirm that the Tidemill campaign, of which I am a representative, has never opposed building new social housing. On the contrary, although we have sought to save the garden, because of its hugely important role mitigating the horrendous pollution levels in Deptford, and its role as a green community space in an inner-city area desperate in need of a beautiful community space (and not the bits of bland lawn proposed by the developers for the new site), we have also always been committed to saving social housing, beginning with the 16 structurally sound council flats of Reginald House, next to the garden, whose destruction is also part of the council’s plans for the re-development of the Tidemill site, along with the garden and the old Tidemill primary school. 80% of the residents of Reginald House have told the council and the GLA that they don’t want their homes destroyed, but the council isn’t interesting in giving them a ballot even though it has been official Labour Party policy for over a year.

We have, not coincidentally, also always supported the Achilles Street Stop and Listen Campaign in New Cross, which seeks to prevent 87 homes and associated shops on an estate by Fordham Park in New Cross from being destroyed for a cynical new development, as well as supporting Catford Against Social Cleansing, which is fighting proposals to destroy Catford shopping centre and Milford Towers, the estate above it, Heathside and Lethbridge estates, currently almost completely destroyed by Peabody for their Parkside development, and the Excalibur estate of prefabs in Catford, which is also currently being destroyed.

Since the proposals for Tidemill were first mooted ten years ago, campaigners — including some of the long-suffering residents of Reginald House — have worked relentlessly to persuade the council, and its development partners, Family Mosaic, which merged with Peabody last year, and the private company Sherrygreen Homes (whose role remains opaque), to build on the school site but to find another site for the homes proposed for the garden and Reginald House.

What the council and Peabody try never to reveal is that, when the proposals for Tidemill were approved last year, the site was secretly twinned with Amersham Vale, the site of the old Deptford Green school in Deptford, where the construction of 120 new homes has been approved, although 81 of those homes will be for private sale, with just 15 for shared ownership and 24 for rent. This contrasts with Tidemill, where 196 new homes are planned — 51 for private sale, 41 for shared ownership, and 104 for rent.

New homes that cannot — must not — be built on the Tidemill garden and by erasing Reginald House can, if they are not able to be added to the plans for the Tidemill school site, be added to the Amersham Vale plans, or built elsewhere in the borough — at Besson Street, for example, also in New Cross, a long-vacant site where existing social housing was demolished, and where the council, shamefully, is currently entering into a partnership with Grainger plc to build 232 new homes planned for the site, with 65% at market rents, and 35% at ‘London Living Rent’, a new innovation by Sadiq Khan that is 136% higher than current social rents.

The Amersham Vale plans also reveal, quite bluntly, Lewisham Council’s lies when it comes to Tidemill. In the press release issued this week, Paul Bell is quoted as stating that the Council’s housing programme “will deliver over 1,000 new social homes over the next four years with 117 due to be available for social rent at Tidemill. Overall, redevelopment of Tidemill and surrounding areas will provide 209 new homes, 54% of which will be social.”

Where to begin? The 117 new homes are actually 104, because 13 are replacements for the rented flats to be demolished in Reginald House (where there are also three leaseholders), and, moreover, it is simply wrong to claim that “54% of the homes will be social.”

Firstly, the figures don’t add up. 117 out of 209 is 56% or 104 out of 196 is 53%, but much more crucially these are not accurate figures because they fail to take into account the Amersham Vale site, with which Tidemill is twinned. On both sites, the proportion of properties for private sale is 42%, with 18% for shared ownership, and just 40% for rent.

Moreover, while campaigners support the creation of new social housing, Lewisham Council also fails to mention that its alleged support for social housing is not what most people would regard as social housing at all. In all its plans, the total number of new homes at social rent is zero. Yes, you read that right.

When Lewisham Council extols its commitment to building new social homes, it is talking about building homes for ‘London Affordable Rent’, an innovation of London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, which, in Lewisham, according the council’s own figures, is 63% higher than social rent. So these 104 trumpeted new homes that are being used to stealthily subsidise private sales at Amersham Vale, that have led to the violent eviction of the Tidemill garden and, to date, £1m spent in hiring private security guards for the Tidemill school for two years and now another £1.1m for evicting and guarding the garden, are not even social homes at all, but are the stealthy replacement for social rents, which Sadiq Khan and Labour councils all seem to have quietly agreed will be the new lowest rents available, even though an extra £3,000 a year is money that numerous hard-working lower-paid families simply don’t have. For more on this, see Video: I Discuss the Tidemill Eviction, the Broken ‘Regeneration’ Industry and Sadiq Khan’s Stealthy Elimination of Social Rents.

Just last week I published an article, The Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and the Mainstream Media’s Inadequacy in Reporting Stories About “Social Homes” and “Affordable Rents”, urging the mainstream media to pay attention to this disgraceful sleight of hand when it comes to redefining social rents, but in general, I’m sure readers will agree, the mainstream media is useless when it comes to actually analysing what is going on.

The answer to all the chaos discussed above? Well, as ever, Lewisham Council needs to scrap the Tidemill plans, save the garden and Reginald House and go back to the drawing board, working with the local community on new plans that deliver homes at genuine social rents. The council also needs to discuss publicly what happened to Ian Thomas, and it is also becoming increasingly obvious that Damien Egan should resign.

In the longer run, the entire Mayor and Cabinet system should be dissolved, as it is horribly autocratic (as Paul Bell himself recognised when he stood for in the Mayoral election in May), and the council also needs to push for proportional presentation in council elections. A system in which just 20% of the registered electorate votes for a Party (Labour) that ends up with 100% of the councillors is both grotesquely unfair and also, as is increasingly evident, profoundly damaging for any notions of democracy and accountability. Lewisham Council behaves like the worst kind of autocratic one-party state, and this deplorable situation needs to be brought to an end as swiftly as possible.

* * * * *

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.

Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Boards: The Escape Route Shut Down by Donald Trump

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Anyone paying close attention to the prison at Guantánamo Bay will know that its continued existence, nearly 17 years after it first opened, is largely down to the success of some wildly inaccurate claims that were made about it when its malevolent business first began — claims that it held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, who were all captured on the battlefield.

In fact, as my research, and that of other researchers has shown, very few of the 779 men held by the US military at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002 can realistically be described as having had any meaningful involvement with al-Qaeda or the Taliban; perhaps just 3 percent, and certainly less than 5 percent. No one was captured on the battlefield, and the majority were either foot soldiers for the Taliban in an inter-Muslim civil war that predated 9/11, or civilians swept up in ill-advised dragnets. Many, if not most of those who ended up at Guantánamo were sold to the US by their Afghan and Pakistani allies for bounty payments, which averaged $5,000 a head, a huge amount of money in that part of the world.

Just 40 men are still held at Guantánamo, after George W. Bush released 532 men, and Barack Obama released 196. Nine men died, one was transferred to the US, to face a trial in which he was successfully prosecuted, and one more was reluctantly released by Donald Trump, or, rather, was transferred back to Saudi Arabia for ongoing imprisonment, as part of a plea deal negotiated in his military commission trial proceedings in 2014.

Driven by his own racism, and by what appears to be his complete absorption of the false narrative about the prison holding “the worst of the worst,” Donald Trump, sadly, has no desire to release anyone from Guantánamo under any circumstances, and unfortunately the prison is such a fundamentally lawless place that, if the president doesn’t want to release them, there is no other mechanism by which they can be freed.

During the Obama presidency, when Barack Obama faced cynical resistance from the Republican Party to the release of prisoners, he set up a parole-type review process, the Periodic Review Boards, to assess whether prisoners could convincingly express contrition for their supposed crimes (regardless of whether or not they actually took place), and could also demonstrate a coherent plan for a peaceful post-Guantánamo existence.

That process, which involved senior officials from the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, led to recommendations that 38 prisoners should be released (36 of whom were freed before Obama left office), while 26 others had their ongoing imprisonment approved (of the 40 men still held, nine others are facing trials, while five were approved for release under Obama, but were still held when he left the White House).

When Donald Trump took office, some of those advising him sought to have the PRB process shut down, but it is still in existence, although it is noticeable that not a single prisoner has been approved for release since Trump moved into the White House, and it is, unfortunately, impossible not to conclude that this is because the process has, essentially, been made toothless because of Trump’s publicly stated opposition to the notion of releasing anyone from Guantánamo under any circumstances.

I last wrote about the PRBs five months ago, when one of the 26 men still subjected to review by the PRBs has been waiting 16 months — since February 2017 — for the outcome of his latest review to be announced. Five months later, there has still been no decision, strengthening the conclusion reached by Wells Dixon of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights in June. Speaking to Jessica Schulberg of the Huffington Post, Dixon said that it was “unlikely that the PRB has failed to reach a consensus after 16 months of deliberating.” He speculated that the prisoner was “approved for transfer by the board,” but there ha[d] then been an objection, and the principals committee ha[d] not met to resolve that objection — or ha[d] met but ha[d] not resolved it.”

This would make sense, because, to anyone not blinded by a Trump-like blanket antipathy towards all the prisoners, the man in question, Omar al-Rammah (aka Zakaria al-Baidany), a Yemeni, does not pose a threat to the US, and never did.

Prisoners frozen out by the PRBs: Omar al-Rammah and Moath al-Alwi

Al-Rammah (ISN 1017) was seized in Georgia, in 2002, and, at the time of his previous PRB, in July 2016, I noted how “the US authorities admitted that they had no information establishing that he was anything more than a low-level facilitator working with Muslim freedom fighters in Chechnya.” However, although it was noted that he has been “moderately compliant” at Guantánamo, it was also noted that he “has refused to cooperate with US personnel and probably retains an extremist mindset.” Heartbreakingly, it was also noted that he has not been able to contact his family since his initial capture in April 2002, with his civilian attorney, Beth Jacob, explaining that his “last conversation with his mother was in 2002 from Georgia, when she told him to come home.”

It is on these grounds — of a suggestion that he might have “an extremist mindset” — that, it seems likely, someone reviewing al-Rammah’s case refused to approve his release, while others involved were prepared to let him go. Then again, it could have been because, as the military summary of evidence against him stated, he “has little formal education and has not articulated any plans or hopes for his life after release, suggesting that he lacks the social and vocational skills to support himself without comprehensive assistance,” a situation exacerbated by the fact that he has been unable to contact his family.

Unfortunately, al-Rammah seems to have been essentially forgotten, and his next opportunity to seek his release in person — via a video link from Guantánamo to a secure military facility on the US mainland — will be in 2020, as full reviews take place every three years.

Since I last wrote about the PRBs, another prisoner seems to have been left in limbo by the process — Moath al-Alwi (aka Muaz al-Alawi), another Yemeni, who latest PRB was in March (see the submissions here by his attorney Beth Jacob and by his personal representative, assigned to him by the military).

A talented artist, who spent all his time minding his own business and making model ships from discarded materials until the military, cruelly, prevented him from doing so, al-Alwi (ISN 028) historically fought back against the authorities at Guantánamo though hunger strikes, but was generally regarded as “compliant” by the authorities. Moreover, it has never been suggested that he had any involvement with terrorism, having only ever been a foot soldier for the Taliban. As with al-Rammah, it seems reasonable to assume that, although some of those involved in the PRB process have recommended him for release, someone else has decided that he should still be held, and, as a result, al-Alwi is caught between decisions, and will be fundamentally forgotten about until, in his case, 2021, when his next full review take place.

As the reviews page for the PRBs reveals, five other men have had full reviews, and had their requests to be released, turned down since my last article about the PRBs in June.

The military’s reasoning, unfortunately, for the most part reflects long-established opinions about the men in question, with, in some cases, it seems, little room for any kind of progress in the years to come.

Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah

First up was Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah (ISN 1463), whose case was reviewed on June 19. A well-known figure in Yemen, al-Hilah was a businessman, who also worked for the Yemeni government, until he was kidnapped in Egypt and flown to Guantánamo after being held and tortured in various CIA “black sites.”

For his PRB, his lawyer explained that he wants only to be reunited with his family, and also included statements testing to his good character and his lack of religious extremism from various high-profile Yemeni government contacts. His lawyer ended up stating, “Abdul Salam lived openly. He was prosperous, had a family, thriving businesses, an influential public position as a leader of his tribe, and the prospect of a promising political career. He was moderately religious but not an extremist. Photographs of him taken before he was thrown into prison show a man in a business suit, with close-cropped hair and a short beard. He was ambitious for political and business success. He was proud of his position as head of his family and head of his tribe. He loved his country. The accusations against him make no sense.”

Nevertheless, on July 19, his request to have his release approved was turned down, with the board members claiming that his ongoing imprisonment remains necessary because of his “extensive and prolonged facilitation of extremist travel, to include for Al-Qaeda members.” The board also claimed that he “continues to refuse to acknowledge or accept responsibility for his actions, instead claiming that all of his activities were solely at the behest of the Yemeni Government,” and also claimed that “very little changed from [his] initial hearing with respect to how [he] participated in the PRB and the lack of reliable information presented regarding [his] future threat or any change in mindset’; in other words, a stalemate between how al-Helah presents himself, and how the US authorities see him.

Mohammed al-Qahtani

On July 24, Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63), who was alleged to be the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, and who is the only person whose torture was openly acknowledged by a high-ranking US official, had his latest PRB, at which his lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York, and Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, appealed to the board to approve his release based on his severe mental health problems. As they noted, “Mohammed al-Qahtani was last before this Board for a full hearing in June 2016. That hearing was the first occasion for the outside world to learn that he suffered from schizophrenia, and that he had suffered from that condition for years before he found himself at Guantánamo.”

The revelations of al-Qahtani’s long-standing schizophrenia failed to impress the board in 2016, although in April this year his lawyer sought to persuade Judge Rosemary Collyer, of the District Court in Washington, D.C., to act on his behalf, as I explained in an article at the time, entitled, Lawyers for Guantánamo Torture Victim Mohammed Al-Qahtani Urge Court to Enable Mental Health Assessment and Possible Repatriation to Saudi Arabia.

Judge Collyer has not yet ruled on the submission, but his review board had no hesitation in approving his ongoing imprisonment on August 23, rather shamefully noting their “inability to assess [his] current mindset due to his continued refusal to respond to questions from the Board regarding his reasons for traveling to Afghanistan and ensuing activities,” and then suggesting that this “lack of information prevented the Board from understanding how and to what extent his psychiatric condition contributed to his decisions during that time,” instead of recognizing that his mental health problems might be the basis for his inability to explain himself.

Instead of accepting this fully, the board members recommended al-Qahtani to “continue to engage with the treating Guantánamo Bay mental health officials,” also commending him for his “recognition of his mental health diagnoses,” and encouraging him “to be more forthcoming with the Board in future reviews and to cooperate with mental health officials.”

Haroon al-Afghani

Next up was Haroon al-Afghani (ISN 3148), aka Haroon Gul, whose case was reviewed on August 9. As I explained in an article in March, Trapped in Guantánamo: Haroon Gul, a Case of Mistaken Identity Silenced By Donald Trump, al-Afghani, one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo in 2007, who didn’t have any legal representation until 2016, when Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve began to represent him, trying to persuade the authorities that “the bright-eyed, chatty young man” she met was a case of mistaken identity.

For his latest PRB, Sullivan-Bennis submitted a letter in which she stated, “I am proud to say that Haroon has used his decade in US custody as wisely as one could: he learns. You have seen multiple hundred-page business proposals ranging from a honey bee farm to a bakery; now Haroon has focused his attention and time on the worthy topic of the education system in Afghanistan. Haroon is fully capable of supporting himself post-release, with five languages and a keen sense of entrepreneurship under his belt; it goes without saying that Reprieve will be behind him every step of the way, making his transition easier, as we have for so many before him through our UN-funded Life after Guantánamo project. His family remains ready and available to assist him, in the unlikely event that he requires their support, as their statements make clear. Haroon is inarguably one of the most politically informed and socially liberal men in Guantánamo today and I see no indication that his behavior or statements over the last decade contradict that assertion. If this review is intended to be a true evaluation of the threat he poses today, as opposed to [a] forum for confession to all of the allegations that the government believes to be true, I see no reason that this hearing would not result in a positive determination.”

Unfortunately, on September 10, the board members approved al-Afghani’s ongoing imprisonment, essentially ignoring Sullivan-Bennis’s hopes by mentioning his alleged “long-term membership and leadership position in Hezb-e-lslami (HIG), extensive time spent fighting Coalition forces and prior associations with al Qaida,” and also mentioning “[c]ontinued questions regarding [his] current mindset and ideology as it relates to HIG, leaving the Board with concerns regarding his susceptibility to recruitment.” The only concession the board members made was to state that they appreciate[d] [his] increased willingness to answer questions and encourage[d] [him] to be more forthright with the Board in future submissions and reviews regarding his role within HIG and al Qaida.”

Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush

Next up was Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (ISN 708), aka Ismail al-Bakush, a Libyan whose review took place on August 21. Unfortunately, Bakush has refused to meet with his personal representative, and also refused legal representation until recently. He is now represented by Shelby Suillivan-Bennis, but she was unable to prepare a statement in time for the PRB.

Bakush himself refused to attend, and so the claims against him — that he “was a Libyan Islamic Fighter Group explosive expert, who trained al-Qa’ida members and probably provided operational support to key al-Qa’ida figures,” and who is also regarded as having “played a greater role in al-Qa’ida operations than he admits” — went unanswered, and on September 20 the board members duly approved his ongoing imprisonment, citing what they alleged to be his “long history of working with the LIFG and al-Qaeda and the fact that he played a significant role in al-Qaeda operations including his role as an explosives expert and trainer,” and his “refusal to engage with his personal representative or to appear and respond to questions from the Board,” which “prevent[ed] the Board from assessing his intentions for the future and whether he has had a change in mindset.”

Saifullah Paracha

The last of the men to have their ongoing imprisonment approved in the last five months is the Pakistani businessman Saifullah Paracha (ISN 1094), whose case was reviewed on September 25, Paracha was subsequently praised by former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi in an article that, at my request, he wrote especially for Close Guantánamo, entitled Saifullah Paracha: The Kind Father, Brother, and Friend for All at Guantánamo, which explained how be befriended and supported everyone he met at Guantánamo, including US guards and officials, and how he is universally admired. Nevertheless, Paracha, who was kidnapped and imprisned in CIA “black sites” before being transferred to Guantánamo, was a successful businessman, but is regarded by the US as having worked with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, even though he has always denied the allegations. In the PRBs, however, admitting guilt is essential as part of the act of contrition that is necessary to be approved for release, and so Paracha’s reviews end up going round in circles, despite, on this occasion, a powerful submission from Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who stated:

Mr. Paracha has endured the last 15-plus years in custody with what can only be described as interminable grace. In the government’s own declassified documents, he is described as one of the, if not the most peaceful of detainees, amassing fewer infractions since capture than there are detainees left in this prison.

Described by GTMO staff as “respectful,” and “polite,” he has made a name for himself as both the prison professor and its indefatigable uncle. He has spent his time, these late years ofhis life, teaching other men how to read, how to speak English, and how to start and run businesses of their own.

More declassified government reports provide support for the assertion that Mr. Paracha holds no extremist views, as he has not espoused a single one in all the years of his captivity.

As far back as thirty years ago, he chose to send all of his children to private Christian schools, eventually encouraging them to move to and be educated in the United States. Years before that, Mr. Paracha petitioned for multiple family members to immigrate to the U.S., where they remain today, each with their own vibrant family. And with the support that family and of Reprieve, if released, Mr. Paracha could quite easily live out the remainder of his years with his loved ones.

No one thinks that Mr. Paracha has “violent extremist” views or wishes for harm to befall America or its people; Mr. Paracha’s own nephew, [name redacted], stood literal feet from the Twin Towers as they fell, his marketing job having been just around the corner.

But all of this information is known and has been for years. What’s different today is that a middle-aged man has become an elderly one, and naturally, with the years of that transition comes increased internal reflection as his time to do so slips by.

It is not outrageous to consider that Mr. Paracha could die in this prison without ever seeing his family again. It is the reality of that sentence that commands the kind of deep analysis of a life lived that I know Mr. Paracha has been performing. I won’t attempt to speak for him, but he is prepared to do so himself today, and I ask only that you listen, keeping at the forefront of your mind the life he has lived these last 15 years.

Nevertheless, the board members again showed no desire to listen, approving his ongoing imprisonment by claiming that his “past involvement in terrorist activities including contact and activities with Usama Bin Laden, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, and other senior Al Qaeda members, facilitating financial transaction and travel, and developing media for Al-Qaeda,” and claiming that his “statements regarding his mindset and potential for reengagement are not credible in light of his continued minimization of his interactions with Al Qaeda. the change in justification for engaging with Al Qaeda, failure to exhibit any remorse for the actions he does acknowledge. and dishonesty in his responses to Board questions.”

Guled Hassan Duran

Just last week, another review took place, in the case of Guleed Hassan Ahmed (ISN 10023), a Somalian prisoner whose correct name is Guled Hassan Duran, although no decision has yet been taken, of course. In a press release, his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights explained how he “has been detained in Guantánamo since 2006, and before that was held in secret CIA detention, where he was denied medical care for serious injuries in order to pressure him to cooperate.”

CCR also explained that he “was captured in 2004 while traveling to Sudan for surgery after being seriously injured by gunfire in a fight with gang members trying to steal his motorcycle,” and criticized his PRB hearing in 2016 as having been “grossly unfair,” because “he was not given adequate time to prepare for the hearing and appeared before the PRB without counsel.”

This time around, he refused to appear on the advice of his lawyers, because of an ongoing habeas corpus case in the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which his lawyers are arguing that his imprisonment “is not sanctioned under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) as informed by the laws of war because he was captured outside of the geographical scope of the government’s detention authority,” and because, “whatever the government’s initial justification for detaining Guled may have been in 2006, that justification has since unraveled.”

For further information, see this letter submitted for Duran’s PRB by his lawyers.

Forthcoming is a PRB for former CIA “black site” prisoner Sanad Ali Yislam Al Kazimi (ISN 1453), on December 4, and, if you want further information about the PRBs, you can also look at the PRBs’ file review page — and, of course, the PRB page on the Close Guantánamo website.

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 Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and the Mainstream Media’s Inadequacy in Reporting Stories About “Social Homes” and “Affordable Rents”

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Today it’s 25 days since the violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, by bailiffs from the brutal Bexley-based firm County Enforcement, employed by Lewisham Council. In the battle for hearts and minds, it seems pretty clear that the council is losing locally — Corporate Watch helped us estimate that the council has been spending at least £35,000 a day guarding the garden from the community since the eviction, meaning that they have now spent close to £750,000, and everything about this hideously costly exercise continues to alienate local people — the presence of weird bailiffs 24 hours a day, as well as the daunting militarised atmosphere around the garden, the permanent barking of dogs, the floodlights at night, the vehicles parked up in the garden and the sporadic destruction of the structures built during its two-month occupation by its defenders.

And the antagonism was ramped up this week by the arrival of tree-killers hired by the council, from Artemis Tree Services, who began enraging campaigners by starting to cut down trees, even though we had had it reported from the council that the trees wouldn’t begin to be cut down until after our legal challenge against the council was concluded. Yes, you read that right. The council evicted the garden while an outstanding legal challenge was underway — our appeal against a decision by a judge to turn down our application of our judicial review of the legality of the council’s plans.

This also, of course, should have been a pretty compelling reason for the council not to evict the garden’s occupiers until after the legal process was complete, but they clearly wanted to make a point about their “ownership” of the garden — one that, to date, has cost them £750,000, and, in addition, has been a disastrous piece of PR.

Today, the disastrous nature of the eviction was made clear when Artemis Tree Services withdrew from their contract. As campaigner Ruby Radburn noted earlier today, “Good news! I’ve just spoken to Aaron the contracts manager from Artemis Tree Services and they have pulled out of the job, without pay, for ethical reasons. They weren’t aware of the campaign or the ongoing legal case and now that they are, they are not willing to do the job. Please spread the word and thank them for doing the right thing.”

Three and a half weeks after the eviction, the mainstream media have, of course, moved on from Deptford. Although they reported on the initial occupation, at the end of August, it was difficult in general to secure any further interest from them until the eviction two months later, and since then, of course, they have moved on.

Unfortunately, however, what they have mostly left behind is the lingering smell of lazy journalism. On the day of the eviction, campaigners, myself included, spoke to the mainstream media, in the hope of putting our case across, but while there was significant interest, most of what was broadcast was inadequate. For the main news broadcasts we were sidelined, while Cllr. Paul Bell, Lewisham Council’s Cabinet Member for Housing, who was interviewed by the BBC and ITV, was allowed to make a number of fraudulent claims about providing more social housing that went unchallenged, because, sadly, the mainstream media appear, in general, to be unwilling to spend any time finding out what is actually going on with ‘regeneration’ across London, and to interrogate those implementing it accordingly.

Regular readers will know that the new “social homes” promised by Lewisham Council for the Tidemill site are nothing like existing “social homes”, as they will be built for ‘London Affordable Rent’, which, in Lewisham, is 63% higher than social rents. The implementation of this new rent level appears to be, in fact, a stealthy attempt by London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan to do away with social rents altogether, replacing them with ‘London Affordable Rent’, even though an untold number of hard-working Londoners in lower-paid jobs don’t have an extra £3,000 a year to pay for their rent. Most alarmingly, and almost completely unappreciated by journalists, is that, unless it is fundamentally challenged, the introduction of ‘London Affordable Rent’ will be used to justify a tsunami of estate demolitions across the capital, led by Labour councils.

Reginald House, next to the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, is a clear example of this new policy. This block of 16 maisonettes is structurally sound, and had a new roof installed just three years ago, but the council and Peabody, the developers of the Tidemill site, are determined to destroy it. Despite the fact that ballots for residents whose homes face demolition has been Labour Party policy since Jeremy Corbyn announced it at last year’s Labour Party conference, Lewisham Council has refused to give the residents of Reginald House a ballot, even though 80% of them have told both the council and the GLA that they don’t want their homes destroyed.

It is also worth noting that Sadiq Khan also stealthily approved the destruction of Reginald House, while he was consulting about implementing ballots, along with 33 other estates across the capital, as Green Party co-leader and GLA representative Sian Berry exposed earlier this year.

The council is promising that all residents of Reginald House will be re-housed in the new development, at “like for like” rents for life, but no written contract confirming this has been revealed, and, in addition, if that’s the case, why bother knocking the block down instead of simply, and less expensively refurbishing it? The answer has to be that the driver of its destruction is because the ‘regeneration’ industry has no interest in refurbishment, and is only interested in getting rid of existing council housing.

Sadly, councils like Lewisham seem idiotically content to asset-strip themselves, as inadequate pimps for bigger fish in the housing game — specifically the developers, building contractors and demolition companies who have guaranteed profits that they demand to have fulfilled, and in the case of the latter, the only way their profiteering can exist is if sound homes are destroyed for profit; in this case, the estimated £800,000 that a demolition contractor will be paid to demolish Reginald House.

Journalists also fail to investigate Lewisham Council’s claims about the provision of new housing at Tidemill, allowing distorters of the truth like Paul Bell to claim that the majority of the homes that the council and Peabody will be delivering at Tidemill, if their plans go ahead, will be “social homes.”

In fact, although 209 new homes are planned, and the number of homes for private sale is comparatively low (51), the rest shouldn’t be described as social homes without that statement being properly qualified. 41 of the new homes, for example, are for shared ownership, an overpriced rental scam designed to fool tenants into thinking that they part-own their properties, when, in reality, they own nothing until they have bought their property outright, because, if they ever default on their payments, they lose not only their home but also all the money they have invested in part-owning it.

The rest — 104 — are the “social homes” identified above, which should never be allowed to be described as such without a robust analysis of what type of rents apply.

In addition, what is even more alarming is that journalists have also failed to pick up on the fact that Lewisham Council is hiding the fact that they stealthily twinned the Tidemill development with another development in New Cross, Amersham Vale, on the sire of the old Deptford Green secondary school, where Peabody has been given approval to build 120 new homes, of which 81 will be for private sale, with just 15 for shared ownership and 24 for rent. Across both sites, therefore, the number of homes for rent at a rate that can be described as “social” but only with a proviso is just 43%.

And throughout all this missing analysis by journalists is another way of putting things that is genuinely attention-grabbing, and for good reason: in the proposed developments taking place at Tidemill and Amersham Vale, the number of homes at social rent will be zero.

Moreover, this is a deplorable situation that is being replicated in other developments across the capital, with hardly any journalists noticing the effort to eradicate social rent, and to ask what it means to replace social rents with ‘London Affordable Rent.’ Journalists are also failing to properly investigate the second alleged “affordable” rent introduced by Sadiq Khan — ‘London Living Rent’, a rent level for higher earners priced out of the mortgage market, with a complicated ‘rent to buy’ sub-text, which, in Lewisham, is 136% higher than social rents.

When councillors like those in Lewisham are allowed to talk of social rents without being asked whether those rents are £95.54 (for a 2-bed flat at social rent), £152.73 (for a 2-bed flat at ‘London Affordable Rent’) or £225.46 (for a 2-bed flat at ‘London Living Rent’), it is fair to point out that mainstream journalists are failing to do their job. And when no one at all points out that the number of new homes at social rent will be zero, it is clear that the public are being hoodwinked, and that, by and large, mainstream media journalists are betraying their supposed obligation to seek out the truth, and to report it fairly.

A massive developer-led scam is ongoing, with the full collusion of councils and the Mayor of London, and yet we aren’t hearing anything about it, and when a beautiful community garden like Tidemill gets destroyed, instead of having the rationale for that robustly analysed, a councillor like Paul Bell gets given an unchallenged platform to spread his lies and distortions about what Lewisham Council is actually involved in at Tidemill — which is profiteering for developers and building contractors, and showing nothing but sustained contempt for the local community.

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.