Andy Worthington's Blog, page 29

Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners is Bad for Them – and US Security

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

 

I wrote the following article, as “Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners Endangers U.S. National Security,”  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.

The presence of Donald Trump in the White House has been an unmitigated disaster for anyone concerned about the ongoing existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and any notion of justice regarding those held there, or, indeed, those freed from the prison over the years.

For Trump, the notion that there might be anything wrong — or un-American — about imprisoning people forever without any meaningful form of due process clearly doesn’t exist. Since he took office nearly two years ago, only one prisoner has been released, out of the 41 men still held at the prison when Obama took office; and that man, Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi, was only released, and transferred to ongoing imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, because of a plea deal he agreed to in his military commission trial proceedings back in 2014. 

Trump, clearly, has no desire to meaningfully continue the parole-type process — the Periodic Review Boards — that Barack Obama initiated to release lower-level prisoners who could demonstrate that they didn’t pose a threat to the U.S. Indeed, his contempt for the process is such that he has shut down any possibility of the two men whose release was approved by Obama’s PRBs, but who didn’t get released before Obama left office, being freed by shutting down the State Department office that dealt with resettlements — the office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure.

This was a move that also prevents three other men approved for release by an earlier review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, from being freed, but it also has wider ramifications, as the envoy’s office not only negotiated the release of prisoners (especially to third countries, when they couldn’t be safely repatriated), but also monitored released prisoners — benevolently, to try to ensure that they were being treated well, but also less benevolently, to try to ensure that no one released might end up doing anything to harm the U.S. or its interests.

We first reported the problems with the demise of the envoy’s office back in April 2017, and are pleased that it resurfaced again last week in a McClatchy Newspapers report by Carol Rosenberg, the indefatigable reporter who has been covering Guantánamo for the Miami Herald since the prison first opened, nearly 17 years ago.

Rosenberg’s article, “Trump closed an office that tracked ex-Gitmo inmates. Now we don’t know where some went,” began by focusing on the case of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a troubled Syrian ex-prisoner who was re-settled in Uruguay four years ago, but then persistently sought to escape his new home. As Rosenberg explained, at Guantánamo “he was an incessant irritant to his American jailers — a committed hunger striker who underwent painful forced feedings to protest his detention without charge,” while in Uruguay he “never really settled, unlike the other five former detainees who were sent there with him. He organized protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Montevideo and resumed his hunger strikes there to protest separation from his family.”

Lee Wolosky, the second of Obama’s two envoys, told Rosenberg, “We worked pretty hard to make sure that he stayed in Uruguay in the Obama administration.” However, throughout that time, “Dhiab found his way to Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela and at one point on a flight to South Africa, only to be sent back to Uruguay through U.S. intervention.” In 2017, after Obama left office, “he also used a forged passport to fly to Morocco, which returned him to Uruguay.”

Jose Gonzalez, an “executive adviser to Uruguay’s Interior Minister,” told McClatchy that, for his latest escape, Dhiab “walked across the Uruguay-Brazilian border, took a bus to Sao Paolo and caught a flight to Turkey. The Turkish Embassy in Washington said a search of Interior Ministry records found no evidence that he had arrived there.” Since then, however, he “has been detected in south central Turkey where he has slipped in and out of the rebel held Idlib province, controlled by the al-Qaida affiliate al Nusra Front, according to a Syrian diplomatic source, citing Syrian intelligence.” It was also explained that his mother “is receiving medical care in Turkey.”

In one telling anecdote, Wolosky explained why Donald Trump’s dismissive attitude to the office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure was so troubling. He “said he had been receiving phone calls from foreign envoys and other concerned people — even though he left government at the close of the Obama administration — because ‘they have no one to talk to in the U.S. government.’” 

He described the disappearance of Dhiab as “particularly worrisome,” noting, “He was not only damaged but he was someone who I thought was dangerous.” 

That remains to be seen, as it always seemed to me that Dhiab, whose case I have studied closely for many years, was more of a threat to himself than anyone else, but at least his situation seems to have awakened some people within the Trump administration to the threat posed by shutting down the envoy’s office.

An aide at the House Foreign Affairs Committee anonymously told McClatchy that Syria was “the worst place for an angry [former detainee] to turn up.” U.S. intelligence and State Department officials, meanwhile, “would not discuss Dhiab’s whereabouts,” although a spokesperson, Alexander Vagg, said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently instructed the Counterterrorism Bureau to start addressing “any issues stemming from the arrangements made between the Obama administration and foreign partners regarding the resettlement of former Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

Other problems with the closure of the envoy’s office

While George W. Bush had few meaningful deals involving security issues that were put in place for former prisoners, the Obama administration “took a different approach to detainee transfers,” as Carol Rosenberg described it, adding that Obama and his officials “negotiated deals with 30 countries to take in men who could not be sent to their home countries because of domestic instability or poor human rights records, generally in small numbers and with specifically fashioned social welfare arrangements.” As Rosenberg also put it, “Terms of the deals have never been made public but Obama administration officials said the host countries would provide housing, living stipends and language classes if necessary to help them adapt. As a rule, the host countries agreed to not provide them travel documents for their first two years.”

As Rosenberg also explained, “By the time Trump took office, the State Department special envoy office had sent 142 men to 30 nations for rehabilitation, resettlement or safe haven — and another 52 back to their homelands. Most of the resettled captives went to Europe, Africa and Persian Gulf nations.”

However, after Trump became president, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson closed the envoy’s office and “assigned the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs to handle any problems that arose in the transfers” — a move that House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), called “ineffective,” according to the committee aide who spoke to Rosenberg. Then, as she put it, “deals with some third countries began to unravel.”

In April, as reported here, here, here, here and here, Senegal repatriated two former prisoners from Libya who had been taken in two years previously, “declaring,” as McClatchy put it, that “it was done with its obligation to host them.”

As I had noted, one of the two men, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (aka Omar Mohammed Khalifh, but described by McClatchy as Awad Khalifa), was desperately afraid of being repatriated. On return, the two men vanished, and Khalifa’s attorney, Ramzi Kassem, said that “efforts to locate Khalifa through ‘the United Nations and other entities’ have failed.” Kassem added, as McClatchy put it, that, “Had Khalifa known he could be forcibly returned to Libya [he] would have refused to leave Guantánamo in April 2016.” As Kassem put it, “As horrible as Guantánamo is, and it is horrible, my client has good reason to fear that Libya would be even worse.”

In May, following a Washington Post article, we reported how 23 men released from Guantánamo in 2016 but sent to the United Arab Emirates, where they were supposed to be put through a rehabilitation program, have instead “disappeared into what their American attorneys now believe to be a detention setting,” as McClatchy put it. Gary Thompson, an attorney “who has tried to check on his client, Ravil Mingazov, an ethnic Tatar from Russia and a former Red Army ballet dancer who fled his homeland in 2000 and was captured in Pakistan two years later,” told McClatchy, “They’re incommunicado.” Thompson explained how Mingazov, despite being approved for release, had “feared persecution as a Muslim if he returned to his homeland,” but, as he added, “Of course our current State Department could not care less and our own country is checked out. That leaves Ravil and these other detainees entirely at the mercy of the UAE government.” 

Lawyers for all 23 men sent a letter to the UAE’s foreign minister in Abu Dhabi in February, urging the men to be allowed “to safely rebuild their lives in the UAE.” However, they have not received a reply.

McClatchy also had updates that we didn’t know about. Five former prisoners were sent to Kazakhstan in December 2014, but only two are left. Their lawyers told McClatchy that they “felt isolated with no prospects for assimilation in the non-Arabic speaking society,” and although one of the five, a Yemeni, “died of kidney failure from a longstanding illness soon after he arrived,” two Tunisians “relocated to Mauritania with the assistance of the International Red Cross” after the Guantánamo envoy’s office was closed, as attorney Mark Denbeaux, who represented one of the men, explained. Carol Rosenberg added that State Department officials “would not comment on whether they were even aware of the transfer.”

Carol Rosenberg also noted that only four out of a total of eight prisoners sent to Slovakia by the Obama administration between 2010 and 2014 “are believed to still be there but the government did not respond to emails asking how many left and where they went,” while the State Department “likewise declined to discuss individual detainee transfer cases.”

One of the eight, Rafiq Alhami (described by McClatchy as Rafik al Hami), “returned to his native Tunisia in a repatriation that was worked [out] with the Obama administration,” as I discussed at the time. Once there, however, he “fell into a deep depression and disappeared,” according to Mark Denbeaux, who was also his attorney. He then reportedly ended up in Syria, where he was killed. 

Fortunately, as Carol Rosenberg explained, “not every deal had a bad ending.”

As she explained, the Obama administration “sent 18 former Uighur prisoners — former Chinese citizens whom a federal court found unlawfully detained by the U.S. military — across the globe to get them out of Guantánamo. Six were sent to the East Pacific nation of Palau, and moved on to Turkey with advance notice to the State Department. Two left El Salvador in 2013, also likely for Turkey, with notice to the United States.”

Dan Fried, the first of the Guantánamo envoys, said that “when he negotiated the Uighur transfers the Bush administration had ‘already conceded’ they were held unlawfully so there was no legal need to restrict their movements.” However, with the other deals, as he put it, “one of the downsides of abolishing the Gitmo office is there was nobody in the State Department assigned to actually follow up. It may have sounded like a good idea to somebody. But who’s in charge of contacting, liaising the governments to find out what’s going on?”

One final story concerns the Yemeni Abdul Malik Wahab al-Rahabi, who was sent to Montenegro in June 2016, five months after another Yemeni was sent there. He “described it as ‘a beautiful, beautiful’ welcoming country, so much so that they helped him bring his wife and teenage daughter to join him,” but “the language was too hard for his daughter, making it impossible for her to further her education. And his wife missed the company of fellow Arabic speakers.”

The two-year stipend and housing provided by the government of Montenegro was running out, al-Rahabi told McClatchy, adding that he couldn’t find a job. As McClatchy put it, “He had hoped to make a living by selling artwork he took with him from Guantánamo, but his Twitter marketing campaign didn’t work out.” He then arranged to move to Sudan, and, once an agreement was in place, “Montenegro brought me this travel document for refugees. Like a passport, you know,” he said by phone from Sudan. “I said, please make sure to ask the United States if there is no problem with me if I travel. I don’t want to go to Guantánamo or another prison.”

As McClatchy described it, al-Rahabi said that the government of Montenegro “notified the U.S. Embassy, which did not object, and then bought tickets for his family,” adding, “They traveled to Khartoum via Istanbul in a journey that he described as both scary and thrilling. It was his first unshackled flight in nearly two decades, one where he could both look out a window and listen.” 

“I was afraid maybe in the airport they would refuse, tell me no. But they gave me a visa for me and my daughter and my wife,” al-Rahabi said. In Sudan, he added, “he has found other Yemenis who can’t go home to the civil war torn nation.”

He also said, “Life here is so difficult,” and explained that “he has yet to find work — or sell the art he took from Cuba to the Balkans to Northeast Africa.” However, as he also said, “it is good for another side for me and my family. Same language, same culture, it’s easy to get close with the people, buy something, go there and there and speak with everyone.”

In contrast to al-Rahabi’s openness and fundamental optimism, Carol Rosenberg noted, “Neither Trump State Department officials nor U.S. intelligence would comment on whether they were aware of the move.”

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.

Broken Britain: UN Rightly Condemns Eight Years of Tory Austerity, But the Labour Party Is No Saviour; Try Extinction Rebellion Instead

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.

 

Britain, is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed — and also deeply divided. Philip Alston, an Australian-born human rights lawyer, and the UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has highlighted both these problems in his newly-issued report on the impact of eight years of savage austerity policies by the Tory government.

Alston pulls no punches. After spending two weeks travelling the length and breadth of the UK, and meeting people at the sharp end of austerity, as well as meeting government ministers, Alston notes how, in “the world’s fifth largest economy”, it “seems patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty. This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in foodbanks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the Government to appoint a Minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard of levels of loneliness and isolation.”

Alston also explains how, during his visit, “I have talked with people who depend on food banks and charities for their next meal, who are sleeping on friends’ couches because they are homeless and don’t have a safe place for their children to sleep, who have sold sex for money or shelter, children who are growing up in poverty unsure of their future, young people who feel gangs are the only way out of destitution, and people with disabilities who are being told they need to go back to work or lose support, against their doctor’s orders.” 

He adds, “In the area of poverty-related policy, the evidence points to the conclusion that the driving force has not been economic but rather a commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering … Key elements of the post-war Beveridge social contract are being overturned.”

This ideological drive is something all decent people have been appalled by over the last eight years, and Alston unerringly captures its cruelty, writing that “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instill discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping with today’s world, and elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest levels of British society.”

Alston also provides compelling statistics about the broken and divided Britain he visited, stating, “14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials. The widely respected Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7% rise in child poverty between 2015 and 2022, and various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%. For almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.”

The government, however, refuses to see the truth. As Alston notes, “The country’s most respected charitable groups, its leading think tanks, its parliamentary committees, independent authorities like the National Audit Office, and many others, have all drawn attention to the dramatic decline in the fortunes of the least well off in this country. But through it all, one actor has stubbornly resisted seeing the situation for what it is. The Government has remained determinedly in a state of denial. Even while devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland are frantically trying to devise ways to ‘mitigate’, or in other words counteract, at least the worst features of the Government’s benefits policy, Ministers insisted to me that all is well and running according to plan.”

At a press conference in London on Friday, Alston explained how the UK “was in breach of four UN human rights agreements relating to women, children, disabled people and economic and social rights”, as the Guardian described it. 

In a powerful comment, he stated that, “If you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place.” 

If you haven’t read the full report, I encourage you to do so. In further detailed analysis, Alston decries the implementation of Universal Credit, with its five-week delay in payments, “which actually often takes up to 12 weeks”, and which “pushes many who may already be in crisis into debt, rent arrears, and serious hardship, requiring them to sacrifice food or heat.” He also attacks the widespread use of sanctions, and the dangers of the “digital welfare state” emerging in the UK, and provides copious examples to explain how “[t]he costs of austerity have fallen disproportionately upon the poor, women, racial and ethnic minorities [including asylum seekers, who ‘are banned from working and limited to a derisory level of support that guarantees they will live in poverty’], children, single parents, and people with disabilities.”

So where’s the antidote to the horrors identified by Phillip Alston? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be that there isn’t one. Alston makes a number of recommendations that the government will ignore, and while he also identifies Brexit as a source of dangerously increased levels of poverty if it goes ahead, the entire Brexit fiasco is another reflection of the bitter divisions in Britain today, a suicidal delusion manifested in part as a reflexive response to austerity, which was then manipulated by the right-wing media into a proto-fascistic isolationism and contempt for “the other” (whether that is the EU or immigrants and the concept of immigration in general) that has savagely transformed Britain for the worse in the two years and five months since the EU referendum, and that continues to mean that — sadly, tragically — many of those most affected by austerity are unaware of how it is their own Tory government that is responsible for their misery.

Alston also identifies how “local authorities, especially in England, which perform vital roles in providing a real social safety net have been gutted by a series of government policies”, adding, “Libraries have closed in record numbers, community and youth centers have been shrunk and underfunded, public spaces and buildings including parks and recreation centers have been sold off.”

Councils’ betrayals, the Tidemill campaign and Extinction Rebellion

This is all true, but, unfortunately, councils are doing themselves no favours when it comes to their response to the Tory cuts. Instead of fighting back, they have caved in, so that, in London, for example, Labour councils in particular are leading the way in demolishing their own housing estates, working with private developers — or housing associations, former social housing providers now behaving increasingly like private developers — to tear down existing housing and to build new developments under the pretence that it is some sort of necessity when that is completely untrue. 

In fact, the councils are destroying people’s homes, instead of refurbishing them, to make big profits for building companies and developers, all the while lying and spinning about the need for new “social” or “affordable” homes, when the reality is that they are complicit in removing people from their homes and destroying them because the land they are on is worth more to cynical developers than the existing homes for which tenants have dutifully paid their rents for years or even for decades.

In the London Borough of Lewisham, where I live, this betrayal and hypocrisy is playing out over a block of flats in Deptford, Reginald House, and a community garden next door, the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, that Lewisham Council — 100% Labour-controlled — want to destroy, with the developer Peabody, for one of the many unnecessary and over-priced housing developments that are a blight on the capital. I’ve been involved in the struggle to save the garden for over a year, including playing a major role in the two-month occupation, during September and October, that only came to an end with the violent eviction of the garden three weeks ago.

The council has, since then, spent nearly £750,000 paying the bailiffs’ company that violently evicted the garden on October 29 to guard it from the local community for 24 hours a day, an endeavour that is spectacularly failing to win hearts and minds in Deptford. What we learned from our experience is that the only way to take on the self-serving elites who lord it over us — whether they work for corporations, or for central or local government — is direct action, and as Lewisham Council tries to work out how to proceed to the next step of its ill-conceived plans — destroying the 74 trees in the garden that have grown up over 20 years, and that significantly mitigate the horrendous effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street — it is apparent that our aims coincide with those of a new movement, Extinction Rebellion (also see Facebook and Twitter – and here for those outside the UK).

Extinction Rebellion is dedicated to the environment, and to mass non-violent direct action to change the political status quo, largely on the basis that, unless we change our ways immediately, we have a maximum of 12 years until an environmental cataclysm is irreversible. Last week, Extinction Rebellion activists engaged in various forms of mass protest outside government buildings, leading to numerous arrests, and today they blocked five bridges in central London, also leading to arrests. If the chainsaws come for Tidemill’s trees, we’re pretty sure that Extinction Rebellion activists will also be there — and in significant numbers. 

Lewisham Council and Peabody should wake up now, and change their plans immediately, just as the Tory government should wake up to the horrendous damage their austerity policies have been causing for the last eight and a half years, and also change course.

I’m not holding my breath that either will happen, but I am happy to pledge my support to Extinction Rebellion, and their wonderfully principled resistance to the fruits of our elites’ truly hideous and suicidal greed and self-absorption.

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.

Just Updated: Parts 4-6 of My Six-Part Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List

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

 

Last month, I published an article linking to the first three parts of my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which I had just updated, and I’ve now updated the fourth, fifth and sixth parts — Part Four (covering prisoners with the Internment Serial Numbers 497-661), Part Five (covering prisoner numbers 662-928) and Part Six (covering prisoner numbers 929-10029). The six parts of the prisoner list provide details of all 779 prisoners held by the US military at Guantánamo since the prison opened, with references to where they appear in the 2,232 articles I have written about Guantánamo over the last ten and a half years, and where their stories are told in my book The Guantánamo Files.

As I explained in my article last month, my book, published in 2007, was the result of over a year’s research and writing — as a full-time unpaid freelance researcher and author — in which I told the stories of the majority of the men held at Guantánamo, analyzing where they were captured, telling their stories, and, as I put it,  “demonstrat[ing] how few of them seem to have had any genuine connection to al-Qaeda or any form of international terrorism, and how they were overwhelmingly either just foot soldiers in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that preceded the 9/11 attacks, or, in many cases, civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, cynically picked off by officials or warlords looking to make some money off the US’s commitment to paying bounty payments for any Muslim who could be passed off as a ‘terror suspect.’”

Today the shameful prison at Guantánamo Bay — where 40 men continue to be held, mostly without charge or trial or anything resembling due process — has been open for 6,152 days — 6,152 days in what I described last month as a prison “set up to be beyond the reach of the rule of US law, where men could be — and were — tortured and subjected to human experimentation; where nine men have died, and where there is still no end in sight for this legal, moral and ethical abomination”, because of Donald Trump’s vileness and stupidity.

In updating the prisoner list, for the first time since October 2016, I was reminded of quite how long Guantánamo has been with us, and quite how long I have been researching and writing about it. I first created the prisoner list almost ten years ago, in March 2009, in the first few months of Barack Obama’s presidency, when it still seemed possible that he would be true to his word, and would close it within a year of taking office.

That promise never came true, of course, which was not only a black mark against Obama, but also an opportunity for Donald Trump to claim the prison as his own, and to openly declare his intention to keep it open and to fulfill that malevolent intent, because, shamefully, no one can be released from Guantánamo unless the president — or Congress — wants them to be released, a situation that fundamentally demonstrates how outrageously unjust the prison is.

My thanks to everyone taking an interest in my work on Guantánamo over the last 12 and a half years. In an effort to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, I’m planning to write a series of individual articles about the 40 men still held, so if you’re an attorney who represents any of them, and you’d like to help me provide updates on their stories, please get in touch. Otherwise, I hope these updates are helpful. 

If you appreciate what I’m doing, please do feel free to make donation to support my work, which is almost entirely dependent on the generosity of benefactors like you.

With thanks for your support as ever,

Andy Worthington

London

November 14, 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, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Celebrating 550 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

Please feel free to make a donation to support my photo-journalism via ‘The State of London’, for which I receive no funding and am reliant on your support.

 

Yesterday marked 550 days since I began posting a photo a day on Facebook from the tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken on daily journeys by bike around London, beginning in May 2012, and I’d like to thank the thousands of people following the project on the dedicated pages on Facebook and Twitter, as well as on my own Facebook and Twitter pages. I’m very grateful that my photos, my subject matter and my commentary have struck a chord with so many people. 

You can see all the Facebook photos here, and there’s an embryonic website here, which I’m hoping to work on soon.

I started posting a photo a day on Facebook on May 11, 2017, and I chose that date because it was the fifth anniversary of when my photo-journalism project began, as an antidote to a major illness and too many years sitting at a computer writing about Guantánamo without taking exercise. I’ve been cycling as long as I can remember (I think I started when I was four years old), but I had let it slip as a regular pastime for some time until 2012, when I started cycling around my local neighbourhood in south east London, often with my son Tyler, until eventually, on May 11, I decided that I would formalise my renewed enthusiasm by cycling around the capital taking photos of whatever interested me as an actual project.

I can’t recall quite when the name ‘The State of London’ occurred to me, but I’m very pleased to have come up with it, because it suggests an interest in the material state of London (which I have), as well as its notional status as a state within a state — the city itself as distinct from the rest of the UK, which is also a concept that interests me, both as an alternative to Brexit Britain, and as the capital in revolt, turning on its leech-like oppressors, which was another aspect of ‘the State of London’ that appealed to me when it first occurred to me.

As the project has developed, it has become a manifestation of my pet topics and obsessions, with the cynical and unprincipled assault on council estates, and the priapic forests of “luxury” tower blocks rising up everywhere being a particular focus, and an alarming indicator that the latest phase of capitalism in the UK is fundamentally cannibalistic. Much of my work over the last 550 days has involved recording estates before they’re demolished, and watching the relentless rise of “luxury” developments, all the time wondering under what circumstances this monstrous bubble of greed, designed primarily to appeal to foreign investors, will collapse. Some of the photos that have moved me the most involve what I often term “the London clearances”, as can be seen most recently here and here.

I’d say that the eyes with which I’ve been gazing on the capital on my thousands of miles of cycle rides over the last six and a half years are fundamentally political, although I’m also temperamentally drawn to the decaying, the forgotten and the abandoned, and I’m also an enthusiast for the changing weather and the changing seasons (which, in part, reflects the joy with which I have embarked on bike rides in all types of weather), loving light and shadows, clouds and rain, as well as the city’s trees, parks and other green spaces, and its lifeblood, the River Thames, as well as the rivers and canals that feed into it.

Given that I live in south east London, that’s the area that features the most in my work overall, but I am drawn relentlessly to east London, and have also cycled extensively through south west London, as well as the City and the West End (the EC and WC postcodes), as well as other central postcodes (W1, in particular, but also N1 and NW1). It took me nearly two and half years to visit everyone of the 120 postcodes that make up the capital’s central postcodes (along with some of the outer boroughs), and I’m pleased that, to date, I have posted photos from 112 of these postcodes.

Back in September, when I wrote about ‘The State of London’ after 500 days, I was stumbling towards some sort of explanation of how my relentless cycling through the capital over six and a half years has led to me somehow embodying the capital. I’m still struggling to define this relationship, in which I have come to “know” much of London physically, mentally and emotionally, as though it is a huge body I inhabit, or as if its layout is part of my brain, and I’ll keep trying to come up with a more precise definition, but, for now, thanks for joining my journey.

For 2019, I’m definitely planning an exhibition, working with someone close to me, and I’m also thinking about crowdfunding a book, so I hope you’ll stay involved, and please do get in touch if you can help out in any way, or if any of my proposals above are of interest.

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

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

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

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

Video: I Discuss the Tidemill Eviction, the Broken ‘Regeneration’ Industry and Sadiq Khan’s Stealthy Elimination of Social Rents

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

On Saturday, I was interviewed about the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, and broader issues relating to the housing ‘regeneration’ industry after a rally at City Hall, ‘No Demolition Without Permission’, that was set up primarily for tenants of council estates facing demolition, who have not been given ballots on the future of their homes, despite it having been official Labour Party policy since last September. One of the 34 estates affected is Reginald House in Deptford, a block of 16 structurally sound council flats, which the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign is determined to save, along with the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden.

The 15-minute video, posted below, was shot by Bob Robertson of Ladywell Labour Party, who I first met earlier this year, when I was on a Saturday stall in Deptford Market with other Tidemill campaigners, spreading the word about the need to preserve the precious and irreplaceable community garden and the 16 structurally sound council flats of Reginald House, next door, and for Lewisham Council and the developer, Peabody, to go back to the drawing board, and to work with the community on new plans for the Tidemill site, which includes the old Tidemill primary school as well as the garden and the flats.

Bob was very supportive, and spoke frankly about efforts within the Labour Party in Lewisham to shift the political focus away from the corporate-focused ‘regeneration’ frenzy that took place under Steve Bullock — and that we are now seeing replicated under the new Mayor Damien Egan, and his Cabinet, including the Member for Housing Paul Bell — but he acknowledged, of course, that it is an uphill struggle to change those in charge, even though the membership of the party is more solidly left-leaning than it has been for some time because of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader three years ago.

We spent some time discussing an interview, which he wanted to undertake to help Labour Party members in Lewisham understand what is wrong with the council’s housing policy — and, in general, the housing policy of London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan — and this video, posted below, is the result.

In it, I discussed the violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden last Monday, and how unacceptable that was under any circumstances, and I also spoke about campaigners’ disappointment with the council for never having engaged with the local community in any meaningful sense regarding alternative plans for the Tidemill site that would spare the garden and Reginald House. The destruction of Reginald House, I can only conclude, is part of a stealthy and unprincipled London-wide effort, backed by Sadiq Khan, to do away with homes at social rents altogether, to replace them with new homes let at ‘London Affordable Rent’, which in Lewisham is 63% higher than social rents. 

I also discussed how, although Lewisham Council is bragging about providing over 50% ‘social housing’ at Tidemill, that’s a lie, because although 104 of the 209 new builds at Tidemill fit some definition of ‘social homes’ — but at ‘London Affordable Rent’ rather than at social rents — Tidemill is twinned with Amersham Vale, where 120 homes are planned, only 20% of which will be ‘social housing’ (again, ‘London Affordable Rent’), with 81 of the 120 homes for private sale, to add to the 51 for private sale at Tidemill. That means that the percentage of ‘social homes’ across both sites is just 39%.

I also discussed the council’s extremely dubious claims, via Cllr. Joe Dromey, that the decanted residents of Reginald House will have ‘like for like’ social rents guaranteed for life, and that they and all the tenants on the new Tidemill development will have guaranteed lifetime tenancies, when no such tenancies have existed since they were abolished by Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago. I also pointed out how there is a howling silence from the council whenever I have mentioned that, if they’re offering ‘like for like’ rents to Reginald House tenants, who don’t want to have their homes destroyed, then the logical position to take is not to bother knocking their homes down in the first place.

I also spoke about the significance of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden on two fronts — as an important community green space, and as a barrier to the horrendous pollution in nearby Deptford Church Street — and why Cllr. Paul Bell’s statement, during a radio interview, that it wasn’t Kew Gardens was so condescending, and in conclusion I also mentioned how outrageous it was that the council evicted the garden so violently while an appeal is ongoing — an appeal that we submitted after a judge turned down our request for a judicial review on October 17.

I hope you have time to watch the interview, and will share it if you find it useful.

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

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

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

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

Video: The Peaceful Occupation and Violent Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Today marks six days since the violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, which campaigners, myself included, had been occupying for two months to prevent its destruction by Lewisham Council for a housing development — one that could be built elsewhere in the borough if the will existed to do so.

Throughout the occupation, and for many years before it, we have endlessly tried to impress on the council that it is unacceptable to destroy the garden, a vital community green space, and a hugely significant environmental asset, which mitigates the worst effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street, which regularly reaches six times the World Health Organisation’s recommended safety levels, and that it is also unacceptable to destroy Reginald House, a block of 16 structurally sound council flats next door. The council, however, has never shown any interest whatsoever in engaging with us or in listening to our demands for them to go back to the drawing board, and to come up with new plans that spare the garden and the flats.

Unusually, I haven’t published anything here on my website for five days, since I posted my immediate impressions of the eviction the day after, in an article entitled, The Violent Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden: Lewisham Councillors Make Sure They Will Never Be Welcome in Deptford Again.

It’s fair to say, I believe, that myself and other campaigners have been struggling to cope with the fallout from Monday’s violence. We have no intentions of giving up, of course, but we’ve all been emotionally drained, so as I continue to recover I’m posting below, via YouTube, a 12-minute film of the occupation and the eviction made by the Peckham-based Rainbow Collective, which, at the time of writing, has had nearly 4,000 views on Facebook.

As I explained when I shared it on Facebook:

Director Hannan Majid came to the garden shortly after the occupation on August 29, and spoke to campaigner Heather Gilmore, and he also covered the joyful carnival procession from the garden to Fordham Park in New Cross on September 1 for Party in the Park, the amazing community festival that, this year, focused on the housing crisis. Hannan also spoke to Diann Gerson, a resident of Reginald House … who spoke movingly about the brutal destruction of community on the part of the council.

This footage is juxtaposed with footage from the eviction, with Heather and other campaigners (myself and garden supporter Captain Rizz, who was one of a handful of people in the garden when it was stormed by the bailiffs) expressing shock at the council-hired bailiffs’ violence. Hannan also allowed me to explain — in a way that the mainstream media weren’t interested in covering on the day — how the council could have found an alternative site for new housing to avoid destroying the priceless garden, why the development is not being undertaken to provide new social housing, but, instead, is designed to make profits for the developer Peabody, for the building contractors, and the demolition company that will be paid to destroy Reginald House, and why the council’s determination to destroy it is part of a London-wide effort, sanctioned by London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, to do away with existing council homes at social rent — a policy that, if it is not challenged robustly, will lead to an epidemic of council estate destruction across the capital.

In the last five days, while the Tidemill occupiers have been struggling to come to terms with last Monday’s violence, the cowards and bullies in the council who set a bunch of thugs on the occupants of the garden at 6am on a Monday morning have been engaged in a social media offensive, primarily on Twitter, in an attempt to justify unleashing such violence on an occupation that, for two months, had occupied the garden peacefully.

Many local people are not fooled, however. One of those woken at 6am to be confronted by the council-sponsored violence posted a video of footage taken from her home directly opposite the garden that has been watched over 7,000 times, and wrote perceptively in text accompanying the video:

There is no doubt in my mind that the council have not thought through the impact of this violent and badly-managed eviction on local residents and how they will manage the continued presence of County Enforcement thugs right in the heart of the community they have just assaulted.

I watched with a growing crowd of people as these hired thugs dragged people out of the garden. I watched them smash down a children’s tree house inside while people involved in building the garden cried outside. Many of these thugs kept their faces covered – one guy’s mask was a sinister grinning skeleton. I know it’s Halloween but is this really appropriate attire for a bailiff? I saw them mocking and laughing at us from behind the line of police protection. I saw them pushing and shoving people. And now I have to see them from my window every day, patrolling the street in front of the garden, to ‘protect’ this patch of green land. Their dogs bark all night and their floodlight shines through the thin blind in my bedroom, so that my sleep is disturbed. I go outside in the morning and see them, still there. It sickens my heart.

This eye-witness then ended her commentary with the most pertinent question of all for Lewisham Council to think about: “What will happen when they start to cut the trees down, in full view of the community?”

That may be several months off, with the likelihood being that the council will continue to throw taxpayers’ money at the weird bailiffs who resemble some kind of invading army, paying them to continue guarding the garden from the people of Deptford until our legal challenge against the council’s plans is exhausted (our ongoing appeal against a decision by a judge not to accept a judicial review, which, astonishingly, was in place when the eviction took place), but it seems clear that the council hasn’t thought about how they are going to get away with the actual destruction of the garden.

And so, in conclusion, may I, yet again, remind the council, on behalf of the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, that there is a viable solution: go back to the drawing board and come up with new plans, working with the community, that spare the garden and Reginald House, and that deliver truly affordable homes at social rent on the old school site, and, if necessary, on other sites in the borough.

Don’t believe them when they say it isn’t possible, and watch out for further information from us as we demonstrate exactly why their protestations of powerlessness, and of needing to be in bed with developers like Peabody are untrue, and designed solely to mask their own lack of vision and imagination.

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 Violent Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden: Lewisham Councillors Make Sure They Will Never Be Welcome in Deptford Again

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Yesterday was one of the most harrowing days of my life, as the jackboot of authority stamped with shocking violence on the occupiers of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a beautiful community garden and environmental asset in Deptford, evicting it prior to its intended destruction.

No one from Lewisham Council, which initiated the destruction, showed up yesterday; instead, their hired goons — 130 bailiffs from County, a Bexley-based company — arrived at dawn and sent their shock troops into the garden, wearing masks and screaming at the occupants who had stayed overnight to resist the invasion, and violently evicting them.

I missed the initial text to supporters, and was only alerted at 6.30am when Heather Gilmore, one of the most prominent campaigners, with whom I’ve been working closely since the occupation began two months ago, called and left the following message: “Please come down now. The eviction has started. It’s really nasty. It’s horrible.”

After gulping down a quick coffee, I cycled down to Deptford from my home in Brockley, arriving around 7am to find a wall of bailiffs all along the perimeter fence on Reginald Road, protected by a line of police, and numerous campaigners and local people on the other side of the road, many visibly shocked by the violence.

Almost immediately, I witnessed one of the occupiers, a young woman who has been involved with the garden for the last year, being brutally pulled down from the top of the main fence, leaving just one occupant inside — a brave young eco-warrior who had climbed high up in one of the garden’s tallest trees, just behind the main entrance, which had been fortified since the garden was first occupied on August 29, via a treehouse and a separate platform above it.

A tense stand-off followed for several hours, as the bailiffs climbed up the tree to try to bring her down, alarming the garden’s defenders because they were doing so without the kind of specialised equipment — a cherry picker, for example — that is needed when dealing with people high up in trees. When we tried to urge the police to act, they claimed that they were there merely to prevent a breach of the peace, and that the bailiffs had everything under control; a deranged position to take when so many of the bailiffs were so clearly dangerously aggressive. Eventually, I believe, our entreaties encouraged the bailiffs to back off, leaving the lone occupier alone until she finally decided, after at least eight hours in the tree, that she would come down voluntarily.

Throughout this time, occupiers kept trying to storm the fence, leading to numerous scuffles, some of which involved campaigners being assaulted, and it was also noticeable that the bailiffs continued to provoke the garden’s exiled defenders, using chainsaws to cut down the tree houses, and also to destroy some of the structures in the garden — a beautiful shed designed by one of the occupiers and built entirely from scavenged materials, which myself and others had enthusiastically identified as a template for providing homes for the homeless if any will to do so existed politically, and, most horribly, the garden’s original tree house, built between its two magnificent Indian bean trees, which, although it had recently been a home to occupiers, had, from the time of the garden’s creation 20 years ago when it was part of the Tidemill primary school, been the focal point for the activities of local children.

By late afternoon, when we drifted away to lick our wounds and to reassure each other that this was not the end of the resistance, but just the beginning, the bailiffs had turned our beautiful community garden into a wreck — with their vehicles parked up by the entrance and amongst the trees, with huge floodlights installed, and with the wreckage of the structures and of tents lying around like the detritus of conquest. They don’t care, of course, as all but one of the 74 trees in the garden is marked for destruction in the coming months.

As we left, however, we couldn’t help wondering quite how much money Lewisham Council is spending on its brutal and premature actions. We already knew that they have spent nearly £1,000,000 on a private security firm — with dogs — to guard the old Tidemill school site over the last two years, replacing the guardians who had previously been in the school and who first opened up the garden as a community asset after the school moved to a new site in 2012, but now we were obliged to reflect on how much money the council spent on the eviction, and the small fortune they are intending to spend guarding it in the coming months.

What’s particularly insulting about all of this is that they didn’t need to evict the garden yesterday, and they also looked contemptuous of the law for doing so, because the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign crowdfunded an application for a judicial review, and although that was turned down on October 17, we submitted an appeal just a week before the eviction, meaning that the council evicted us while a legal process was ongoing. They could have left us alone until that process was complete, but instead they wanted to prove a point, to establish how brutal they could be in taking back their land, and to stick two fingers up to the legal process of appealing decisions in the High Court while doing so.

For Lewisham Council, then, yesterday was a day when they showed their contempt for the local community in Deptford, for the importance of preserving a precious green space in an area woefully short of green spaces, for the garden’s crucial role as a shield against the horrendous pollution in nearby Deptford Church Street, and for the law, when all campaigners and residents of Reginald House next door (a block of 16 structurally sound council flats that the council also wants to destroy) have been asking for over the last ten years has been for them to go back to the drawing board, to spare the garden and Reginald House, and to work with the local community on alternative plans for homes at social rent at Tidemill, and, if necessary, to build some of the homes planned for Tidemill at other sites — Amersham Vale, for example, a site in New Cross that the council stealthily twinned with Tidemill, where 80% of the plan homes will be for private sale, or Besson Street, a long-vacant site, also in New Cross, where they have plans to enter into a partnership with a private developer to build homes for market rent.

The council could and should have taken a stand against Peabody, instead of caving in to the imperious demands of the social housing provider that has, in recent years, turned into an aggressive developer, largely indistinguishable from private developers who see London only as a place where profit trumps the real needs of real people every time, and poorer social housing tenants are an obstacle to their greed.

I anticipate that my conclusion, which I shouted through a loudhailer on several occasions yesterday, will find considerable resonance throughout Deptford in the weeks and months to come: that those responsible for the shocking violence at Tidemill yesterday — Lewisham’s Mayor, Damien Egan, Paul Bell, and the three councillors in New Cross ward, where Tidemill stands (Joe Dromey, Brenda Daces and Paul Maslin, each elected by only around 1 in 5 of those eligible to vote in May’s council elections) will no longer be welcome to set foot in Deptford again.

* * * * *

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

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. Since August 2018 he has been 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.

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.

500 Days Since the Grenfell Tower Fire, The Four Fathers Release New Single ‘Grenfell’, Remembering Those Who Died, and Calling for Those Responsible to be Held Accountable

Listen to the single here on Bandcamp, and please buy it as a download. All takings will be donated to Grenfell charities. The recording was produced by acclaimed musician and producer Charlie Hart, who also plays accordion on it.

Exactly 500 days ago, Britain changed in a way that has haunted me ever since, as 71 people died in an inferno that engulfed Grenfell Tower, a tower block in west London (one other survivor died in January this year, taking the death toll to 72).

This was a disaster that should never have happened, and that only occurred because those responsible for the structural integrity of the tower, and the safety of its residents, had decided that cost-cutting and profiteering was more important than people’s lives.

Those responsible include the Tory government, which failed to enforce recommendations after the Lakanal tower fire in Peckham in 2009, and actively worked to cut “red tape” when it came to housing regulations, Kensington and Chelsea Council, which abdicated responsibility for its tenants, handing their safety over to Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), an organisation that, although responsible for all of the borough’s social housing (consisting of more than 10,000 homes) repeatedly ignored explicit warnings by tenants’ representatives that they were living in a potential deathtrap.

As I explained in an article I published just after the fire, drawing on the exemplary work of the Grenfell Action Group, run by concerned residents:

On November 20, 2016, under a photo of a tower block on fire and the heading, ‘KCTMO – Playing with fire!’, a representative of the Grenfell Action Group wrote, “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the  KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders. We believe that the KCTMO are an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia who have no business to be charged with the responsibility of  looking after the every day management of large scale social housing estates and that their sordid collusion with the RBKC Council is a recipe for a future major disaster.”

Those responsible for the deaths in Grenfell Tower also include the many players in the building industry and the ‘regeneration’ industry who accepted that there was any kind of rational explanation for highly flammable cladding to be applied to tower blocks, and whose actions, combined with those of all the other bodies above, conspired to turn a building with structural integrity into an inferno over the course of a few short and deadly hours in the middle of the night on June 14, 2017.

The Grenfell Tower fire changed my life. As a social housing resident, I had seen my existence devalued over the last 20 years, as almost the entire British political establishment prioritised homeowners over those who would rather live in a country that prioritises genuinely low-cost, safe and secure rented accommodation for all who want it. However, it wasn’t until Grenfell that the awful truth dawned: that those in charge of our safety have such contempt for us that our very lives are disposable.

I wrote ‘Grenfell’ last summer, and we have been playing it live on a regular basis ever since, its mournful reggae lament an insistent cry for those whose lives were so “needlessly lost” not to be forgotten, and for “those who only count the profit not the human cost” to be held accountable.

YOU CAN LISTEN TO IT, AND/OR BUY IT BELOW:

Grenfell by The Four Fathers

A video of three members of the band playing the song with beatboxer The Wiz-RD was made by a visiting German TV crew a year ago, which has been viewed several thousand times, and another video of us playing it at a Summer Solstice party in the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a community garden in Deptford that I’ve been fighting to save with other campaigners, (and occupying since August to prevent its destruction) is here.

The Grenfell disaster led to me becoming the narrator of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a documentary film about the destruction of council estates, and residents’ resistance to the destruction of their homes, and also to becoming more prominent as a housing activist — hence my involvement in the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign mentioned above.

For the survivors of the Grenfell disaster, however, justice remains elusive. Although an official inquiry is underway, few, if any, expect it to hold anyone accountable, and the ongoing contempt for those in social housing — and, I should add, for anyone but those making money out of housing developments — is such that flammable cladding is still in place on almost all the buildings clad in similar material. As The Construction Index website reports today, “Sixteen months after the Grenfell Tower fire, just 39 of the 457 high-rise buildings around England with similar flammable cladding systems have been made safe.”

The article further explains that, “Of the 457 flammable towers, 157 are social sector residential buildings, managed by local authorities or housing associations; and 291 are private sector buildings – of which 201 are private residential, 28 are hotels, and 62 are student accommodation. Nine are publicly-owned buildings, comprising hospitals and schools.” However, “urgent remediation work has been completed on just 8.5%.”

In addition, many survivors are still waiting to be re-housed. Just three weeks ago, the Independent reported that, although “[n]early £30m has been spent on hotel rooms for survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire,” in “59 bed and breakfasts and hostels”, and that a further £4.9m has been spent on temporary housing, “more than 150 households” of survivors “are still waiting to move into a permanent home.”

The North Kensington Law Centre, which has been helping a number of former Grenfell residents, told the Independent that “council officers were pressuring traumatised residents to accept housing that overlooked” the burnt-out tower, adding that one particular woman “was coerced into accepting a property that did not have any flooring”, and “was told she had to accept the offer by 10am the next morning or she would be classified as intentionally homeless.”

This news was followed by further shocking news – that, as the Guardian described it, “Toxins that may have long-term health implications for the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, and thousands of people who live and work nearby, have been identified in the preliminary findings of a study led by one of the world’s leading toxicology experts”, Professor Anna Stec, whose findings “prompted her to privately urge Public Health England (PHE), the Department of Health, the police and Kensington and Chelsea Council to organise a range of tests to ensure any potential health risks can be properly assessed.” In briefings to senior health agency staff, Prof. Stec “said she had found ‘huge concentrations’ of potential carcinogens in the dust and soil around the tower in west London, and in burned debris that had fallen from the tower.”

As the long quest for justice continues, I hope you find that the song has some resonance for you, and that you’ll buy it as a download, and share it if you do.

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. Since August 2018 he has been 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.

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 Full Horror of the Tideway Super-Sewer Excavations at Deptford Creek and the Clear Need for All Housing Developments, Including Tidemill, to be Stopped

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

In Deptford, in south east London, the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign that I’m part of is involved in a significant struggle against three aspects of the current housing crisis that are a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere in the capital and across the country, and that cry out for concerted resistance.

The first is the destruction of precious green space for a housing project that could easily be built elsewhere. The second is the destruction of structurally sound council housing, as part of the proposed development, that has no purpose except to do away with genuine social housing, and to replace it with a new form of allegedly affordable social housing that, in fact, is considerably more expensive and offers fewer protections for tenants. The third involves issues of pollution and environmental degradation that are already at crisis pint, and that will only get considerably worse if councils’ and developers’ mania for ‘regeneration’ continues unchecked.

On this third point, the work of campaigners — who have been occupying the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden since August 29, to prevent its destruction — has successfully enabled large numbers of people to understand that the garden (created 20 years ago as a beautiful landscaped garden for the local primary school, and leased to representatives on the local community for the last six years, since the school closed and moved to a new site) is an important bulwark against the horrendous pollution on the nearby A2 and also on Deptford Church Street, a dual carriageway that is one of two main routes to Greenwich and that also provides access to the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

Science researchers have established that pollution levels, which regularly reach six times the World Health Organisation’s safety limits on these roads, are mitigated by the garden’s canopy of mature and semi-mature trees. This alone is a compelling reason why the garden shouldn’t be destroyed, and, of course, if the destruction goes ahead, the environmental degradation will only increase, via the destruction of the garden, the pointless and polluting demolition of the council flats of Reginald House, and the pollution involved in turning the former site of the garden and the flats (and the site of the school, where the flats for private sale will be built) into a building site for four years.

In addition, environmental degradation is not unique to the Tidemill site. On nearby Creekside, pollution levels have been increasing alarmingly in recent years because of an orgy of riverside developments on both sides of Deptford Creek — in the London Borough of Greenwich as well as in Lewisham, where five new housing developments have been rising up over the last few years — two on the Norman Road side of the river, in Greenwich (Caledonian Point and Babbage Point – check out the architects’ hype here and here), and three others on the Deptford side: at Union Wharf, where a couple of monstrous towers are currently rising up, at Kent Wharf, and at what used to be Faircharm, a collection of artists’ studios whose owners cynically preferred to profit off new housing instead — with some studio space added on as a kind of afterthought (and check this Crosswhatfields article for information about the traffic pollution that resulted from just this one development).

Not satisfied with this priapic, polluting overkill, developers now want to add more forests of towers — on the Greenwich side at Saxon Wharf, and on the Deptford side at Sun Wharf, and around the Laban Centre. Closer to Tidemill, developers also want to raise towers of inappropriate housing just across Deptford Church Street from the Tidemill garden, opposite the Birds Nest pub, at One Creekside. 

For this site, however, which involves the destruction of more trees that help to mitigate the effects of pollution, the environmental degradation has been laid bare, in an official Air Quality Assessment, which, as the Crosswhatfields blog has exposed, “recommends that a filtration system will have to be supplied to all first floor and above spaces in the new development and that [the developer] Bluecroft should advise future occupants to avoid opening their windows during high pollution episodes, i.e. every morning and evening during the commuter run.”

Again, these facts alone should stop this development in its tracks, but if these arguments still aren’t persuasive enough, then have a look at what’s happening just across Deptford Creek at the site of the Tideway super-sewer. 

This huge and essential project to upgrade London’s aging sewage system — still largely based on the phenomenal engineering of Sir Joseph Bazelgette in the late 19th century, but now struggling to cope with the sewage requirements of an increased population — will be adding so conspicuously to the environmental disaster area that is east Deptford (and west Greenwich) that, it seems to me, the only sensible solution is to stop all other developments until it is complete.

The recently circulated notes from the ‘Greenwich Pumping Station & Deptford Church Street Community Liaison Working Group’, regarding the Tideway project, make clear how, environmentally, east Deptford (and west Greenwich) will be unable to cope with anything beyond the building work required for the super-sewer. The facts are so shocking that I genuinely recalled in horror when I first read them. 

After a meeting on October 2, the working group explained that three aspects of super-sewer development are in place that will profoundly affect the quality of life of everyone near the site, and will also have serious repercussions for the infrastructure required to support the building projects envisaged at Tidemill and at One Creekside.

Firstly, from November 2018 until 2021, the northern lane of Deptford Church Street will be closed to traffic, “so that Tideway engineers can build an interception chamber and connecting tunnel to the original sewer, built by Joseph Bazalgette, that runs under [Deptford] Church Street.” It is difficult to under-estimate the traffic chaos this will unleash, which will no doubt create a state of almost permanent gridlock on Deptford Church Street.

Secondly, from November 2018, for somewhere between nine weeks and three months, an “acoustic shed” 230 feet (70 metres) tall will be built over the shaft at the Greenwich site, just across the river from Creekside. This “will be built through the night from 01:00 to 05:00,” because “it is close to the DLR track and cannot be built during the daytime when the DLR is in operation, because of risk to the travelling public of falling steel girders or tools.” The working group added that the engineers “claim the usual level of outdoor night-time background noise is 61dB and that the level at the construction site is expected to be 67dB (the sound of a passing car, 7.6 metres or 25 feet away, travelling at 65mph).” They also concede that “there will be light pollution”, because the site “will be very brightly light.” This is set to be so disruptive that the working group stressed that residents of the Crossfields Estate nearest the site “can ask for support to minimise the disruption, such as black-out blinds or curtains.”

The working group added that the acoustic shed “is designed to reduce tunnelling machinery noise”, because, “when tunnelling starts in 2019, it will happen for 24 hours a day, for two and half years.” As they explain, this tunnel will “connect the shaft at the Greenwich Pumping Station to the one in Deptford Church Street.” Running 70 metres (230 feet) below the lawn of Farrer House, it will be 25 feet (7.7 metres) in diameter – as wide as the Channel Tunnel.

Finally, the working group added that, “When the tunnelling starts the spoil will be taken away by trucks and by barges. At the Greenwich Pumping Station there will be 110 trucks a day arriving empty and leaving full via Norman Road and Greenwich High Road. The site can only accommodate 6 trucks at once. To manage the number of trucks there is a plan to have a waiting area in Greenwich High Road, similar to the one outside Frankham House in Deptford Church Street”, right next to Tidemill, which is the reason that Deptford Church Street will be turned into a single-file gridlocked nightmare for most of the next three years.

If, like me, you can’t see how it’s possible for the Tidemill site and One Creekside also to be turned into building sites during this extraordinary sewage engineering episode, then I hope you’ll let Lewisham Council know that, frankly, they have taken leave of their senses.

And if you think it’s just the Tidemill and Creekside areas that will be affected, please also consider that the biggest housing project of the lot, the monstrous 3,500-home project to turn King Henry VIII’s Royal Dockyard at Convoys Wharf into a slice of Dubai-on-Thames, is also scheduled to begin during this period, a monstrous and ill-conceived project that, even without these other disruptions, would overload the capacity of all the roads that lead to the project (again, the A2 and Deptford Church Street, but also Evelyn Street and Creek Road and the smaller roads leading to the site) to cope with yet another endless cavalcade of construction lorries.

With the super-sewer project causing such disruption, it really does seem like it’s time for the entire ‘regeneration’ juggernaut in Deptford to be derailed for at least the next three years — and, preferably, on a permanent basis, with the council urged to consider refurbishment rather than demolition on sites like Reginald House, and to only consider new housing if it is undertaken on a basis that is as environmentally low-impact as possible. This, however, is something for which the current corporate-led racket of housing development has shown absolutely no interest, preferring instead to sacrifice people’s health and the wider environment in their endless quest for profits.

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. Since August 2018 he has been 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.

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.

Karen Greenberg on Brett Kavanaugh, and How Guantánamo is Poisoning US Law

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.

 

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

In the 21 months since Donald Trump became president, it has become increasingly difficult for those of us who care about the necessity of closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay to keep this burning injustice in the public eye. 

Journalists who care have tried hard to find ways to not let Guantánamo be forgotten, and one of those journalists is Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, and the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, published in 2010.

Karen and I first got to know each other in the George W. Bush years, when my book The Guantánamo Files was published. She screened ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,’ the documentary film I co-directed, in New York in 2009, and has been a panelist on several occasions in the panel discussions Tom Wilner and I organize every January, on the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, at the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C.

In her latest article, for TomDispatch, which we’re cross-posting below, Karen has written in forensic detail about the profoundly troubling ramifications of Brett Kavanaugh’s recent confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. When Kavanaugh was nominated by Donald Trump, back in July, I wrote a article entitled, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court Nomination, Has a Dangerous Track Record of Defending Guantánamo and Unfettered Executive Power, in which I focused on his role as an appeals court judge responsible for gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners after the Supreme Court granted them constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus right in June 2012 in Boumediene v. Bush. 

Karen adds another troubling dimension to Kavanaugh’s story, which I hadn’t realized. As she puts it, “In July 2001, he had been hired as an associate by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and, in 2003, he became assistant to the president and White House staff secretary where he may, among other things, have had a hand in the development of the Bush administration’s war on terror policies.”

Having focused on how Republicans and the White House suppressed millions of pages of documents relating to Kavanaugh in his Judiciary Committee hearings — just one way in which the hearings were a sham — Karen adds that “Guantánamo could be said to have created the template for that quasi-courtroom in Washington and the various deviations from normal investigation, law, and procedure that it followed.” As she proceeds to explain, “For observers of that island prison, the Kavanaugh hearings ring an all-too-familiar bell. For nearly a decade and a half now, such quasi-courtrooms have been the essence of ‘justice’ at that prison camp, as one sham hearing after another has been held. Periodic ‘reviews’ of the very legitimacy of holding detainees in an offshore prison beyond the reach of American justice that had no analog in the American legal system — Combatant Status Review Tribunals under George Bush and Periodic Review Boards under Barack Obama — were introduced simply to justify the continued incarceration of prisoners there. The only goal of such hearings, it appeared, was to avoid the requirements of established protections on the U.S. mainland like due process.”

There’s much more in Karen’s article about the unsuitability of Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court justice, and I hope you have time to read the whole article, and will share it if you find it useful.

Justice Derailed: Brett Kavanaugh and the Echoes of Gitmo

By Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch, October 14, 2018

Amid the emotional hubbub over the predictable confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, there has been a largely overlooked casualty: the American judiciary. It’s not the end result alone — his addition to the highest bench in the land where he will sit for life — that promises to damage the country, but the unprofessional, procedurally irresponsible way his circus-like hearings were held that dealt a blow to the possibilities for justice in America, a blow from which it may prove hard to recover.

Senator Susan Collins acknowledged the damage the hearings wrought, even if she misunderstood the cause. Delivering her massively disappointing decision to vote yes on Kavanaugh, Collins reflected on what she saw as the passion that overrode the presumption of innocence and expressed “worry” that such behavior would lead to “a lack of public faith in the judiciary.” Though wrong in blaming the Democrats for those passions, her conclusion was otherwise spot on. This confirmation has underscored and enhanced the fragility of justice in America, at least as a reflection of law, decency, honesty, transparency, and fairness.

Surprising as this derailment of justice might have seemed, it echoed (and may, in fact, have reflected) another long-unspooling twenty-first-century American degradation of justice. The proceedings created to try those terrorism suspects locked away in the offshore detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, pivoted away from many of the country’s legal and moral principles (a subject to which I’ll return).

But as a prelude to understanding the harm that the Kavanaugh confirmation process caused, think for a moment about the fundamental premises underlying the Supreme Court and so the American judiciary. The Founding Fathers envisioned it as a body chaired by judges whose professional responsibility was, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, to be “faithful guardians of the Constitution.” Toward that end, the Court was to stand independent from politics and the other two branches of government. That idea of judicial independence was, in the oft-quoted words of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, “one of the crown jewels of our system of government.”

It’s apparent that both Kavanaugh and the committee before which he testified betrayed the goals of justice laid out in that foundational period by violating several major elements of judicial reasoning and procedure. In the process, they helped introduce Gitmo-style justice to the American legal system. Below are four ways in which the committee compromised longstanding aspects of American jurisprudence and justice.

A Quasi-Courtroom

Through it all, both supporters and opponents of Kavanaugh claimed that his congressional hearings did not constitute the equivalent of a courthouse. Not true. Throughout those proceedings, the Senate was, in fact, turned into a quasi-courthouse in which legislators could pick and choose just which kinds of procedures they cared to use, while conveniently banishing or ignoring others.

Think of those hearings as a conveniently watered-down version of a trial in which court procedures were invoked if they aided Kavanaugh, even as — for anything that might have harmed him — exceptions were made and regular procedures ignored. For example, Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona prosecutor appointed to question the judge and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, by the all-male Republicans on the commission eager to duck questioning a woman, would be a prosecutor in name only. Her time was curtailed to five minutes for each senator whose place she took and when it was Kavanaugh’s turn, she was simply shoved aside by the same male senators eager to rant in his favor. Nor, of course, was there anything faintly resembling an impartial judge to oversee Mitchell’s behavior (or anyone else’s for that matter) or protect the witnesses, as there is in every courtroom in the United States. Such a mock courtroom both raised and violated not only the very idea of a fair trial but a fair process of any sort.

The Evidence, Missing in Action

One hoped-for result of a trial is the bringing of facts into the open so that justice can prevail. At no point in the Kavanaugh hearings was there even the semblance of an agreed upon set of facts, no less a coherent way to present them. Quite the opposite, they started and ended with a headlong dash away from the facts. Their undermining began in classic fashion when committee Republicans (in conjunction with the White House) agreed to withhold millions of documents relating to the judge and his work as a government lawyer in the White House during George W. Bush’s presidency. In July 2001, he had been hired as an associate by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and, in 2003, he became assistant to the president and White House staff secretary where he may, among other things, have had a hand in the development of the Bush administration’s war on terror policies.

And that was just how those hearings began. In addition, of course, when it came to Kavanaugh’s seemingly grim record with women, the accusations of Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, publicly alleging inappropriate sexual behavior on his part, were ignored by the committee. Not a witness was called on the subject. Similarly, the bevy of statements that might have corroborated his exploits as a binge drinker in high school and college (as well as whether he ever blacked out from drunkenness) were tossed into the garbage pile of unexamined information.

A long overdue FBI investigation of charges against him, finally carried out at the request of Senator Jeff Flake (but under the watchful eye of the White House), proved a distinctly truncated affair that failed to seriously address the idea of establishing facts as a basis for decision-making. The FBI took the single week allotted to it, reportedly interviewed only nine witnesses, and issued a 46-page report. Compare this to a New Yorker magazine investigation of just the claims of Deborah Ramirez for which its journalists interviewed “between 50 and 100” people. As its co-author, award-winning investigative journalist Jane Mayer, commented, “The one thing I know from investigative reporting … the one thing that makes a difference is time. It takes a while to find the right people to talk to and to talk to them enough that you feel that you’ve gotten the truth from them and to find any kind of documentary evidence that you can. It just takes time.” But time is precisely what the Judiciary and the White House did not allow.

And don’t forget the importance of a perception of thoroughness and fairness. As former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara put it, “[A]t the end of the day, if there is no further corroboration found with respect to these allegations, then Brett Kavanaugh gets confirmed to the bench. It will be better for him, it will be better for people’s respect for the court, it will be better for people’s respect of the process if they had done more rather than less …”

But a thorough investigation was obviously not what the powers-that-be wanted. As White House Counsel Don McGahn reportedly told the President, “a wide-ranging inquiry” into allegations about the judge’s sexual misconduct would be “potentially disastrous.”

Lack of Transparency

Consider the matter of transparency (or the lack of it) as a grim partner to the withholding, burying, or ignoring of evidence. Given a president who has himself dismissed transparency out of hand — whether in terms of tax returns, election interference, or other subjects — it should have been no surprise that the FBI’s thoroughly inadequate report was not even made public. It was the equivalent of secret testimony. Nor are there evidently any plans to reveal its contents. That final act of secrecy only underscored the White House’s defiance when it came to withholding the vast trove of documentation on Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House. Senator Lindsey Graham caught the mood of the moment perfectly when he stated that he had no plans to read the FBI’s report. It was obvious to him that the contents would be a foregone conclusion and that he could rely on others to tell him about it. Apparently, he already knew what he thought.

Lack of Accountability

How many times did we have to hear that the nominee should not be held accountable for what he did as a young man? But what about Kavanaugh’s endless — to put it politely — misstatements of fact? As numerous media sites and tweets pointed out, he seemed to lie repeatedly during the hearings. “Senators on the Judiciary Committee had to know they were being lied to,” wrote Eric Alterman of the Nation, “since the lies were continuously highlighted on Twitter.” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the hearings a “farrago of evasions and outright lies.” And Kavanaugh refused to give his stamp of approval to the FBI investigation, even as he was reportedly pursuing classmates behind the scenes to silence them about the allegations against him.

Had the committee cared to do anything about them, examples of his dissembling were abundantly obvious. He insisted, for instance, that he had not been an excessive drinker. Who cared that the New York Times published excerpts from a 1983 letter of his suggesting that the guests at a beach house where he and his friends were planning to party should “warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us.” So, too, Kavanaugh’s college roommate, James Roche, attested to Kavanaugh’s heavy drinking in those years. Yet another report mentioned Kavanaugh’s involvement in passing around a girl for sex. He also insisted that he and Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexually assaulting her, had not hung out in the same circles in high school, even though one of the friends he referred to on his list of “[brew]skis,” dated her. And, of course, his on-the-spot definitions of the phrases “Devil’s Triangle” and “boofed” in his high school yearbook as not relating to sex, seemingly obvious falsehoods, were never explored by the committee.

And so it went in those hearings, when it came to even a semblance of classic legal proceedings involving evidence, transparency, or accountability. Take, for instance, Kavanaugh’s answers about his time in the Bush White House. He told the Judiciary Committee that he had not been part of any discussions about the detention policies of that administration, a category that included both Guantánamo and the administration’s notorious “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It’s hard, however, to imagine him closing his eyes as memos that we know existed on detention, surveillance, and torture came across his desk on their way to his boss, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. In fact, as New Yorker correspondent Amy Davidson Sorkin has written, individuals then at the White House claim that Kavanaugh was in at least one heated debate over the way in which the Supreme Court would assess the administration’s unprecedented detention policies.

As it happened, however, whenever they could, the committee’s Republican majority chose never to hold him accountable for more or less anything and if, by chance, facts did come to light, despite multiple attempts to hide or suppress them, they were simply dismissed, often flippantly.

The Gitmo Template

For some of us, at least, this kind of denial of justice in America is nothing new. If you were following the war on terror all these years, such a wholesale willingness to compromise the very essence of justice has long seemed like a dangerous trend in clear view. Under the circumstances, it should have been no surprise that Brett Kavanaugh came out of the Bush White House and that the former president supported him vocally throughout the entire confirmation process.

In fact, Guantánamo could be said to have created the template for that quasi-courtroom in Washington and the various deviations from normal investigation, law, and procedure that it followed. For observers of that island prison, the Kavanaugh hearings ring an all-too-familiar bell. For nearly a decade and a half now, such quasi-courtrooms have been the essence of “justice” at that prison camp, as one sham hearing after another has been held. Periodic “reviews” of the very legitimacy of holding detainees in an offshore prison beyond the reach of American justice that had no analog in the American legal system — Combatant Status Review Tribunals under George Bush and Periodic Review Boards under Barack Obama — were introduced simply to justify the continued incarceration of prisoners there. The only goal of such hearings, it appeared, was to avoid the requirements of established protections on the U.S. mainland like due process.

Meanwhile, in Gitmo’s military commissions, as in the Kavanaugh hearings, a central, impartial, independent authority was missing. They are overseen by judges without the power and command of those in the federal court system. Instead, as was true with the White House during the Kavanaugh hearings, the command influence of the Pentagon — and at times the CIA — has hovered over Gitmo’s hearings from day one.

The credentials of the latest judge there, Marine Colonel Keith Parrella, named to the position in August, have only underscored a perpetual lack of regard for professional standards. Parrella, who has had no experience in capital cases, will be overseeing future hearings for the still-untried alleged co-conspirators of the September 11th attacks, who, 17 years later, face the death penalty. Nor has time been allotted, as the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg has pointed out, for the new judge to digest six years’ worth of motions or 20,000 pages of transcripts. No matter. It’s no more of a problem than not absorbing or dealing with the Kavanaugh evidence was to the White House or the Senate Judiciary Committee. Compromised professional standards and procedures, the calling card of Guantánamo’s attempts to adjudicate justice, are now clearly making the move to the mainland.

Inside Gitmo’s quasi-courtrooms, violations of longstanding procedure occur on a regular basis. For example, attorney-client privilege has been upended on numerous occasions over many years. Hidden government surveillance devices have been used to spy on detainee lawyers and their conversations with their clients, as in the case of Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri. So, too, the government urge to withhold witness testimony, apparent in the Kavanaugh hearings, echoes Guantánamo where the very idea of a fair trial has long seemed inconceivable to experts. As at the Judiciary Committee in recent weeks, excluded evidence has been a commonplace feature of Gitmo’s military commissions. Lawyers for the detainees are regularly ignored in their attempts to present potentially crucial material, as in the case of Ammar al-Baluchi, especially when it relates to the torture and mistreatment of detainees while in custody.

Since President Trump took office, the military commissions system has only strengthened prohibitions that block the defendants’ lawyers from access to witnesses and documents. This year, lawyers for the five detainees accused of conspiring in the attacks of 9/11 were informed that they had been prohibited from investigating the role that CIA officials and associates played in the brutal interrogation of their clients, testimony that is, they maintain, crucial to their defense strategies, particularly for the death penalty phase of the trial. In fact, at Gitmo, burying the facts has meant, in essence, burying prisoners alive. As defense attorney Joseph Margulies recently wrote about his client, Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, the government has continually bypassed legal process, preferring to detain Zubaydah forever in silence rather than afford him a trial and the presentation of evidence.

As with all that repressed documentation on Kavanaugh’s White House years, at Gitmo the government has regularly insisted on keeping facts secret. In this spirit, to keep the record clear of hard information about its torture practices, the CIA ordered the destruction of 92 tapes showing some of its grim interrogation sessions. (Even the 6,000-page Senate report on those interrogations has been classified and so largely kept from the public, while the Trump administration has tried to bury it further by rounding up existing copies from the agencies that had them in their possession.)

Without a proper judge, and minus valuable evidence, without any appetite for transparency or accountability, the Gitmo proceedings and the issues that haunt them have been reduced to a kind of invisibility. They are now sham events (just as the Kavanaugh hearings and investigation proved to be). Most of those paying attention have long since concluded that, as criminal defense attorney Joshua Dratel put it, “The reliability and legitimacy of verdicts is completely undermined by secret proceedings.” So, too, may history judge Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the bench in proceedings in which secrecy, as well as withheld or intentionally ignored evidence, prevailed.

The Constitution put a condition on the granting of lifetime positions to justices: “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” While the good behavior of now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will forever be in question, more important may be the wound that his confirmation hearings inflicted on an American belief in the possibility of justice in this country.

Guantánamo’s tainting of justice should, from early on, have served as a warning. Instead, it seems to have become a template for “justice” in the nation’s capital. The 2007 Manual for Military Commissions ominously included in its preamble the prediction that “this Manual will have an historic impact for our military and our country.”

And so, as the Kavanaugh confirmation process suggests, it did. It’s hard to imagine a more telling event than the rise to the Supreme Court of a White House lawyer present at the creation of many of those Gitmo policies. Under the circumstances, it should hardly surprise anyone that the road to his confirmation displayed many of the legal aberrations launched during the Bush era. As the Gitmo story illustrates, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation was not the first nail in the coffin of justice in America — and sadly, it’s unlikely to be the last.

Karen J. Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State . She also wrote The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days . Fordham Law students Daniel Humphrey, Raina Duggirala, and Claudia Bennett helped with the research for this piece.

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

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. Since August 2018 he has been 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.

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