Andy Worthington's Blog, page 31

Ten Years Since the Global Financial Crash of 2008, We’ve Been Screwed by Austerity, and Now The Predators Want Our Homes

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

 

Yesterday, September 15, marked the 10th anniversary of the day the new world order that started under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and continued under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, blew up spectacularly when the banking giant Lehman Brothers went bust, precipitating a global economic crash that was the worst since the Great Depression of 1929.

The crash came about because investment banks like Lehman Brothers had been involved in risky, toxic deals that should never have been legal, primarily involving “sub-prime mortgages” — lending money to buy homes to people who couldn’t afford them, and then packaging those toxic debts up in other complex financial packages.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers, with debts of $613bn, started a domino-like collapse through the entire financial sector, which had previously thought of itself as infallible, and had been supported in this absurd notion by politicians and economists.

In response, governments spent billions bailing out the banks, while everyone else suffered. No senior banking executive faced prosecution for their crimes, but individuals lost money, businesses folded, unemployment was rife, and the easy credit on which so many people depended dried up. Immediately after the crash, it was at least obvious that others were suffering too — building sites across London, for example, lay abandoned, and even the rich felt the squeeze, but salvation, in the UK at least, was soon at hand when the Tories, with the support of the Liberal Democrats, were able to form a government after the general election in May 2010, and immediately set about creating a new narrative — that the problem was government spending, not bankers’ crimes, and that the solution was to cut public spending.

The resultant ‘age of austerity’, a savage regime of relentless cuts to public services, has come to define Britain under the Tories, and it has been a profoundly cruel and miserable experience. In the bonfire of the state provision of services, almost nothing has been spared — except MPs’ salaries, of course, parts of the UK’s military and other right-wing causes. Even the police have faced cuts (surely an illl-advised move for a would-be authoritarian state tightening the screws on society as a whole), but most of the burden has fallen on the poorer members of society — the jobless (cynically portrayed as work-shy scroungers, despite there being a void where meaningful jobs should be), the disabled (subjected to cynical and savage cuts that have led to numerous suicides), the young (via the axing of youth services and the tripling of university tuition fees), and the old (via cuts to care and the NHS).

Throughout this carnage, meanwhile, the rich and the super-rich have been pampered and their growing wealth facilitated, ensuring that the gap between the rich and the poor has become a chasm. In addition, the Tories have also lavished insane amounts on money on vanity projects — the Olympics in 2012 (a £9bn exercise in jingoism) and the £15bn Crossrail project, making sure that no corner of the capital is immune to the predatory behaviour of housing developers and the whole sordid business of estate agents and the middlemen that comes with it.

And in fact, housing has become the replacement for the dodgy investment business that collapsed in 2008. Everyone, after all, needs a roof over their heads, and so the political establishment has continued to bolster the housing bubble that began under Tony Blair, and that largely replaced all other meaningful activity in the UK economy, so that the UK has become a nation of ‘buy-to-let’ landlords, personally screwing individuals one home at a time, and has also presided over a relentless boom in high-rise, ‘luxury’ tower blocks largely aimed at foreign investors.

Meanwhile, those in social housing are having their homes destroyed, as councils, responding to further government cuts, have identified their own housing estates as a lucrative source of plunder. Having run their estates down for decades, councils are now insisting that they cannot afford to refurbish their own estates (a lie that is comprehensively refuted by Architects for Social Housing) and are hooking up with private developers to demolish their estates and to build new developments from which the majority of residents — tenants and leaseholders (those who believed Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ dream) — are excluded.

In other cases, councils are working with housing associations to effect the same destruction, as housing associations — formerly social housing providers — have adapted to the government-led squeeze on their finances by largely becoming indistinguishable from private developers, replacing existing social tenancies and social rents with higher rents, largely unfettered service charges and less secure tenancies.

Unchecked, this devastation — which in the capital might accurately be described as ‘the London clearances’ — will lead to tens of thousands of people (or more) being priced out of their neighbourhoods, or even out of the capital altogether, and variations on these themes are also taking place up and down the country, as shady international finance organisations — those bankrolling developments — gorge cannibalistically on the social rented homes that, within living memory, seemed secure — as, of course, they should have, because who would have expected that tenants who paid their rent on time, and who lived in structurally sound buildings, would be made homeless and dispossessed because a cabal of unprincipled politicians and bureaucrats, including their own social landlords, see nothing but pound signs when they look at their inconvenient bodies and their inconvenient homes obstructing their ability to make profits.

Throughout this whole depressing period of modern British history, the unrest has typically been far too muted. In the early years of resurgent Tory rule, there were vibrant student protests, and the Occupy movement with its clever seizure of public space, but for the most part efforts at resistance have been too small and fragmented to become much of a movement. On housing, finally, it may be that this is about to change. After all, when everyone who rents — half the population — is either being fleeced in private rented accommodation, or is being threatened with having their homes knocked down, or re-categorized so they too can be fleeced like those paying private rents, a reckoning may be coming.

Certainly, the Grenfell Tower fire last June was a galvanising disaster, when 72 people died because those responsible for them — from central government to local government to the management company responsible for their homes, to the entire industry involved in refurbishment — prioritised profiteering and cost-cutting above their safety. The anger around Grenfell has not gone away and has radiated from the powerful community response in north Kensington across London and across the country.

From this righteous and indignant anger, it seems to me, a movement can arise that finally challenges the juggernaut of dispossession, but people have to be prepared not only to fight, but also to build alliances to ensure that those in power realise that they are hopelessly outnumbered.

Will it happen? I can’t say for sure, but I take heart that change is possible from the Grenfell community, from the people of Haringey, who successfully defeated the largest proposed cleansing project to date, a £2bn deal between the Labour council and the rapacious international property developers Lendlease, and because, in Lewisham, where I live, I’m part of the occupation of a community garden to protect it from the bulldozers of my own Labour-controlled council, and from Peabody, once a renowned philanthropic social housing provider, but now behaving like a grubby private developer. Please check out our struggle, and, if you like what you see, please get involved.

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.

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

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

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 4: Can You Help Me Raise $1600 (£1200) to Support My Guantánamo Work, My Activism and My Creativity?

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $1,600 (£1,200) I’m still trying to raise (from my initial $2,500 target) to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s twelve and a half years since I began working full-time researching and writing about the prison at Guantánamo Bay that the Bush administration established exactly four months after the 9/11 attacks, and from the beginning, I must confess, I did it — perhaps stupidly — because it seemed like the right thing to do rather than because anyone was paying me to do so.

In the years since, I have sometimes been paid by mainstream or alternative media outlets, but not generally on any basis I could rely on to pay the bills. Instead, with the encouragement of American friends, I began, around nine years ago, asking you, my readers, to support my work, and ever since, every three months, I come to you, cap in hand, to ask you, if you like what I’m doing, to please make a donation to support me if you’re in a position to do so.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.

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

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

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

In these many years of writing about Guantánamo, I’ve written over 2,200 articles about the prison and the men held there, and have campaigned relentlessly for Guantánamo’s closure, sometimes focusing on specific prisoners — the British residents Binyam Mohamed and Shaker Aamer, in particular — and, since 2012, through the Close Guantánamo campaign that I established with the US attorney Tom Wilner.

In much of the mainstream media world, it’s considered unacceptable to be a journalist and an activist, because of a notion that journalism should somehow be objective, and allow both sides of a story to be told, but with Guantánamo I established very clearly through my 14 months of research and writing about the men held there, the circumstances of their capture and the brutal and often grotesque ways which they were treated, that those who established the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror” didn’t deserve to be heard, as they had spent years controlling the narrative and lying endlessly about how Guantánamo held “the worst of the worst” (when only a few percent of the 779 men held there by the military since 2002 can realistically be regarded as having had any connection with terrorism), and about how the US was within its rights to deprive human beings of all rights, to torture them, and to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, when that, of course, is never acceptable under any circumstances.

I actually think that journalism’s cherished objectivity is dangerously counter-productive, watering down outrage, when so many of the problems we face in the US, in the UK, and around the world need to be exposed and need to have people encouraged to act rather than simply to reflect.

I continue to do what I can to keep Guantánamo in the public eye. I’m currently, for example, in the process of updating my six-part Guantánamo prisoner list, which provides links to everything I’ve ever written about all the prisoners, and I’m about to embark on a series of articles telling the stories of the 40 men still held, largely forgotten in the US, and effectively the personal prisoners of the vile Donald Trump, who, in his ignorance, thinks it is both useful and appropriate to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial, when it is in fact an affront to all the values that the US claims to hold dear.

I also, when time allows, work on other topics, for which I am also grateful for donations — on Britain’s housing crisis, which threatens to become an epidemic of social cleansing without concerted actions now, my London photojournalism project ‘The State of London‘ and my music with my band The Four Fathers.

If you can help out at all, with a donation however small or large, it will be very greatly appreciated. Thanks as ever for your support. Because my work is reader-funded, it’s true to say that I really can’t do what I do without it.

Andy Worthington

London

September 13, 2018

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

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

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.

The Bitter Legacy of 9/11, on its 17th Anniversary: Endless War, Guantánamo, Brexit, Trump and the Paranoid Security State

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.

 

17 years ago today, on September 11, 2001, the world changed forever. In the wake of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan, decimating al-Qaeda and toppling the Taliban, but staying on to lose hearts and minds in an apparently unending occupation in which we are still mired.

Within three months, Tony Blair was imprisoning foreign-born “terror suspects” without charge or trial in the UK, and exactly four months after the attacks, the Bush administration opened Guantánamo, its showcase prison for what happens when a vengeful nation led by belligerent ideologues historically fixated with the exercise of unfettered executive power and disdain for domestic and international laws and treaties rounds people up without competent battlefield reviews, instigates torture and embraces indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial on an industrial scale.

Two and a half years after 9/11, the Bush administration’s ideological “crazies,” aided and abetted by Tony Blair, compounded the Afghan quagmire by invading Iraq on the basis of lies, endorsing regime change over the rights of sovereign nations not to be invaded without good reason, and confirming 9/11 as the conduit for endless war — a dream for the military-industrial complex’s bureaucrats and arms manufacturers, and the growing mercenary armies of the west, but a disaster for everyone else.

The state of endless war is a giant insatiable leech on America’s economy, and has turned the countries of the west into paranoid security states, obsessed with terrorist attacks, but never admitting, or, perhaps, even being able to comprehend, that it is our warmongering and the corporate exploitation of the rest of the world that caused this state of profound unease in the first place.

Very few people are actually killed by terrorists, but our governments and our media have whipped us into a permanent state of fear, as an easy way of holding on to power, savagely corroding our collective sense of well-being, achieved through a long struggle to establish generally safe civil societies through the establishment of a welfare state (a process that largely took place from the 1870s until the 1980s, and that was particular powerful in the decades after the Second World War), and helping to turn us into isolated materialists, imprisoned as much as liberated by the great technological advancements of our times.

Surveillance is everywhere, via CCTV cameras in our streets, and, primarily, through our mobile phones and our computers, which have facilitated the endless digital hoovering up of information about all of us — where we are, and what we’re doing. Most of this is designed to help to sell us things we rarely need, but it has also removed much of the liberation of lives conducted without perpetual state scrutiny, and it is clear too that some unscrupulous operators on the right and the far right have been analyzing us on an unprecedented scale in order to manipulate us politically.

Our wars also have a darker undercurrent. Everywhere we go we have created refugees or desperate economic migrants — in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in Libya and Syria, the latest victims of our governments’ thirst for perpetual war. In 2015, a mass exodus of refugees and migrants to Europe (and, to a lesser extent, North America), unprecedented in most of our lifetimes, and driven in particular by the brutal destruction of Syria, was met not with sympathy or empathy, but with a growing hostility, fuelled by the right-wing media and by the Islamophobia fostered since 9/11, and stirred up relentlessly by those capitalizing on the state of fear that we are bombarded with on a permanent basis.

In the UK, the timing was disastrous, as the refugee crisis and Islamophobia, combined with perceptions of unfettered immigration from within the EU, helped to swing the EU referendum that David Cameron should never have called into a victory for bitter, backwards-looking isolationists, while in the US the same WASP hysteria led to the election of Donald Trump, an inarticulate white supremacist thug who, to tens of millions of Americans, was perceived as speaking their language. an absurdity matched in the UK by the personality cults of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson — privileged overlords one and all, whose perception as “men of the people” shows only how, in times of great uncertainty, people are susceptible to the allure of dangerous authoritarian figures.

Not all our woes, of course, stem from 9/11. The other pivotal event of the last 17 years was the global economic crash, whose trigger was the collapse of the criminal banking company Lehman Brothers almost exactly ten years ago, on September 15, 2008. In the fallout from that crash, triggered by complex financial transactions that very clearly ought to have been illegal, the full horror of the corruption and emptiness of the modern world, centred on turbo-charged profiteering and greed, was briefly glimpsed, but no revolution — velvet or otherwise — followed. Instead, the British government, under the Tories, pioneered a savage and unending age of austerity, an effort to exterminate public spending — the bedrock of civil society — that is heartbreakingly damaging to the lives of millions, but that, in a broken electoral system in which we can’t seem to get rid of the Tories, continues to make life harder and harder for all but the rich and, especially, the global super-rich.

I’ll be writing more about this in a few days, on the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, because, as much as 9/11 brought forth permanent war and permanent paranoia at home, it is the ghost of the 2008 crash that haunts us most powerfully.

After the 2008 crash, the banks, saved through the transfer of colossal amounts of money from taxpayers, via our obliging political masters, the financial world remade itself, a Frankenstein’s Monster that, in an effort to resume its insatiable greed, has now turned its attention to housing, cannibalistically devouring its own populations, as is happening in the UK with, on the one hand, a Blade Runner dystopia of endless but unaffordable tower blocks rising up everywhere, and, on the other, concerted efforts to destroy genuinely affordable rented housing — social housing — through the destruction of council estates, and the breathtakingly cynical re-classification of housing as “affordable” when it is fundamentally the very opposite.

We are Through the Looking Glass, my friends, in a world of greed, fear and ever-rising inequality, and it is up to us to come together to find new ways to challenge the bitter legacies of 9/11 and the global economic crash of 2008.

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.

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

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

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 1: Please Help Me Raise $2500 (£2000) As I Update My Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List and Start an Important New Guantánamo Project

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

 

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work as an independent journalist and activist (and, if it’s of interest, as a photographer and musician) — working primarily on Guantánamo, but also, and especially right now, on social justice issues in the UK.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.

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

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

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

Guantánamo has been the driver of my life as a writer and campaigner for 13 years, and nine years ago I realized — or was prevailed upon by American friends to realize — that, with no institutional backing, and with paid freelance work infrequent and unreliable, I needed to ask people who read my work and supported it to also support it financially if they were able.

At the time it seemed intrusive to me, but as the years have passed it has become clear that the old mainstream media model of full-time jobs in journalism, involving print media paid for by advertising, is in decline (or, if it does survive, is often terminally untrustworthy), and that those people filling the gaps — citizen journalists like me, if you will, and all those people crowdfunding their work through various means — need supporters like you to help us out financially.

If you need any background, my Guantánamo work is a journey that started in 2005 with me getting enraged that the Bush administration refused to tell the world who was at Guantánamo, and that, from 2006-07, after the Pentagon lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit and was forced to release the prisoners’ names and 8,000 pages of supporting documentation, led to me researching and telling the prisoners’ stories in my book The Guantánamo Files, conclusively demonstrating how the Bush administration’s post-9/11 detention program was about as brutal and inept as imaginable, with very, very few of the men brought to Guantánamo having any involvement whatsoever in terrorism.

In May 2007, I started writing articles about Guantánamo here on my website, and I was soon writing and publishing articles every day. Over the last 12 years I’ve written and published over 2,200 articles about Guantánamo here on AndyWorthington.co.uk, and although I write slightly less frequently about Guantánamo now (I wrote 55 articles in the first six months of this year, for example), I promise that I will continue to write about it until it is finally closed.

That looks unlikely with Donald Trump in charge, but the blunt truth is, as it always has been, that every day Guantánamo remains open is a source of shame for anyone who respects the law, and who recognizes that there are no circumstances in which indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is acceptable, just as there are no circumstances in which the use of torture is acceptable.

To coincide with my fundraiser, I’m currently updating my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which lists all the prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and provides references to their stories in The Guantánamo Files, and in those 2,200+ articles I’ve written about Guantánamo over the last eleven years. I first created the list in 2009, and have since updated it six times, most recently in October 2016.

I’m also planning to embark on a major new Guantánamo project, profiling, in a series of 38 individual articles, the stories of the 40 prisoners still held (the discrepancy is because two of the men still held don’t want any media attention whatsoever). As you can imagine, I’m sure, this will be quite an undertaking, so your support will be greatly appreciated.

For anyone interested in my other work, I’ve also been stepping up my involvement in housing issues in the UK. This has always been present, because my work is only really possible because I live in social housing (not for profit housing), but I was particularly galvanized last year by the entirely preventable Grenfell Tower fire in west London, in which 72 people died, because those responsible for their safety sacrificed them for profits and cost-cutting, and I’m currently part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a community garden in Deptford, in south east London, that the local council and developers want to destroy to make new and generally unaffordable housing — also knocking down 16 perfectly sound flats as part of the package.

My photography and my music are also extremely tied in to this work to resist an epidemic of social cleansing that is sweeping the capital (and the country as a whole), which I regard as a crucial struggle in Britain today, and from which there is no easy escape, as both Tory and Labour councils are enthusiasts for the destruction of council estates.

I hope some of the above is of interest. As ever, it’s true to say that I really can’t do what I do without you.

Andy Worthington

London

September 10, 2018

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

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

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.

Andy Worthington: An Archive of Articles About Guantánamo, My UK Housing Activism, Photography and Music – Part 24, January to June 2018

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.

 

This article is the 24th in an ongoing series of articles listing all my work in chronological order. It’s a project I began in January 2010, when I put together the first chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the 3,000+ articles I have published since I first began publishing articles here in May 2007, which, otherwise, are not available in chronological order in any readily accessible form.

I receive no institutional funding for my work, and so, if you appreciate what I do as a reader-funded journalist and activist, please consider making a donation via the Paypal ‘Donate’ button above. Any amount, however large or small, will be very gratefully received — and if you are able to become a regular monthly sustainer, that would be particularly appreciated. To do so, please tick the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and fill in the amount you wish to donate every month.

As I note every time I put together a chronological list of my articles, my mission, as it has been since my research in 2006-07, for my book The Guantánamo Files, first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions.

To these, I must now add a fifth aim: to seek justice for those released from Guantánamo, as one of the most baleful aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency, when it comes to Guantánamo, is the cavalier and irresponsible manner in which he has shut down the office of the envoy for Guantánamo closure, established under Barack Obama, which not only dealt with the resettlement of prisoners (something that, shamefully, doesn’t interest Trump in the slightest), but also, crucially, monitored released prisoners, particularly those resettled in third countries, because it was regarded as unsafe to send them back to their home countries. In the first six months of this year, one of the saddest stories was of two Libyan men resettled in Senegal, who, two years later, were then sent back to Libya, where they disappeared, a violation of their rights that would probably have been prevented if the envoy’s office had remained open.

Sadly, this was not the only disappointment in this period. After my annual visit to join other campaigners in calling for Guantánamo’s closure on the anniversary of its opening (the 16th anniversary, on January 11), when I launched a new photo campaign calling for the prison’s closure via the Close Guantánamo campaign I established on the 10th anniversary of its opening, with the US attorney Tom Wilner, Trump issued an executive order formally keeping Guantánamo open, an act of stunningly vindictive pointlessness that is, sadly, all too typical of this most wretched of presidents.

The struggle, however, continues, and in June I marked 6,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence, and was delighted when former prisoner Shaker Aamer agreed to take part.

Back in my home country, I continued to be involved in housing activism, primarily to try to stop the twin epidemics of unchecked greed and social cleansing that are making life so hard for so many poorer Londoners — and their counterparts up and down the country — as council estates are cynically destroyed, with the collusion of local politicians (who, more often than not, are members of the Labour Party), to make way for new and generally unaffordable housing, and empty towers of “luxury” housing, primarily for foreign investors, which continue to transform the capital in a futuristic and dystopian manner.

I continue to be deeply affected by the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire last June, when 72 people died because those responsible for their safety chose profiteering and cost-cutting over prioritising residents’ safety, and I also scrutinised the dubious record of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who stealthily approved the destruction of 34 estates despite having promised that no more estates would be destroyed without residents being balloted.

I also continued to focus on the activities of the council in my home borough of Lewisham, via the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ campaign I established last year, organising another gig to fundraise for campaigning, and getting more involved in protest music — specifically around housing issues — with my band The Four Fathers, and I also continued to post a photo a day in my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’ on Facebook and Twitter, drawing from the photos that I’ve been taking in all London’s 120 postcodes on daily bike rides over the last six years, which I hope you’ll have time to look at, if you haven’t seen them already.

I hope the various strands of my life as a reader-funded journalist, campaigner, photographer and musician are of interest to you, and that you’ll find the list below to be useful, and will consider making a donation to support my work if you can. My next quarterly fundraiser begins next week, when I’ll also be marking the 17th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, one of two events this century, along with the fallout from the global economic crash ten years ago, that changed the world forever in horrendous ways that are not always well understood — but both of which have led, in various ways, to a rise of racism and xenophobia, the Brexit vote in the UK, and the rise of Donald Trump.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part 24, January to June 2018

January 2018

[image error]1. Guantánamo: Andy Worthington’s Top Five Enthusiasms for 2018

2. Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: 16 Years of Guantánamo: My Eighth Successive January Visit to the US to Call for the Closure of the Prison on the Anniversary of Its Opening

3. Guantánamo campaigns: Please Write to the Guantánamo Prisoners, Forgotten Under Donald Trump

4. Guantánamo anniversary: No More Guantánamo! Rights Groups Meet at White House to Demand the Closure of the Prison on the 16th Anniversary of Its Opening

5. Guantánamo campaigns: Guantánamo Has Been Open 5,845 Days on Jan. 11: Please Join the New Close Guantánamo Campaign – Take a Photo With a Poster And Send It To Us

6. Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Telling Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo: My Report on an Inspiring 24 Hours of Protest and Resistance in Washington, D.C. on the 16th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening

7. Guantánamo, US courts: As Guantánamo Enters Its 17th Year of Operations, Lawyers Hit Trump with Lawsuit Stating That His Blanket Refusal to Release Anyone Amounts to Arbitrary Detention

8. Photos, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Photos: Telling Trump to Close Guantánamo – The White House protest, Jan. 11, 2018

9. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: On 16th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo, Andy Worthington Tears Into Donald Trump for His Failure to Close the Prison, and His Defense of Endless Imprisonment Without Charge or Trial

10. Photos, US protest, Donald Trump: Photos: This is NOT the Face of America – Resistance to Donald Trump on the Women’s March in New York, Jan. 20, 2018

11. Closing Guantánamo: British MPs Urge Donald Trump and Senate Committees to Close Guantánamo

12. Video, Guantánamo anniversary, US visit: Video: Andy Worthington Discusses “Guantánamo, Torture and the Trump Agenda” with Carl Dix at Revolution Books in Harlem, Jan. 16, 2018

13. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: Leak Reveals How, In Counter-Productive, Backwards Move, Donald Trump Plans to Issue New Executive Order Keeping Guantánamo Open

14. Guantánamo, US courts: Good News: Court Orders Trump Administration to Explain Its Position on Guantánamo After A Year of Shocking Inaction

15. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: The Hideous Pointlessness of Donald Trump’s Executive Order Keeping Guantánamo Open

February 2018

16. Guantánamo, comics: Comic Book Star: My Role in a Comic Explaining Why Guantánamo is Such a Bad Idea, and Why It Must Be Closed

17. George W. Bush, Guantánamo, torture: Exactly 16 Years Ago, George W. Bush Opened the Floodgates to Torture at Guantánamo

18. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: Will Donald Trump Actually Close Guantánamo?

19. Radio, George W. Bush, Guantánamo, torture: Radio: My Discussion with Scott Horton About the Shameful Rehabilitation of George W. Bush, As I Recall His 2002 Memo Authorizing Torture

20. Guantánamo art: Reviewing the Guantánamo Art Show in New York That Dared to Show Prisoners As Human Beings, and Led to a Pentagon Clampdown

21. Guantánamo, torture: Guantánamo Lawyers Urge International Criminal Court to Investigate US Torture Program

22. Abu Ghraib, torture, US courts: Stunning Victory as US Court Rules That Contractors’ Treatment of Prisoners at Abu Ghraib Constituted “Torture, War Crimes, and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment”

23. Guantánamo, United Nations: UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Condemns US Treatment of Ammar Al-Baluchi at Guantánamo, Says All Prisoners Arbitrarily Detained

March 2018

24. Guantánamo, military commissions: Ahmed Al-Darbi: Still Held, the Guantánamo Prisoner Who Was Supposed to Have Been Sent Home Two Weeks Ago

25. Guantánamo, military commissions: The Complete Collapse of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri’s Military Commission Trial at Guantánamo

26. Guantánamo: Trapped in Guantánamo: Haroon Gul, a Case of Mistaken Identity Silenced By Donald Trump

27. Guantánamo, US courts: In Guantánamo Habeas Corpus Case, Lawyers Insist That Trump’s Stated Intention of Not Releasing Any Prisoners Renders Their Imprisonment “Perpetual” — and Illegal

28. CIA, torture: The Torture Trail of Gina Haspel Makes Her Unsuitable to be Director of the CIA

29. Guantánamo, accountability: Why Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Mustn’t Be Destroyed

30. Abu Zubaydah, Guantánamo, torture: 16 Years Ago, the US Captured Abu Zubaydah, First Official Victim of the Post-9/11 Torture Program, Still Held at Guantánamo Without Charge or Trial

April 2018

31. Life after Guantánamo: Betrayal: Senegal Prepares to Send Two Former Guantánamo Prisoners Back to Libya, Where They Face Imprisonment, Torture and Even Execution

32. Radio, Guantánamo: Radio: Perpetual Imprisonment at Guantánamo – Andy Worthington Interviewed by Linda Olson-Osterlund on Portland’s KBOO FM

33. Life after Guantánamo: Update on Senegal’s Dire Determination to Send Back to Libya Two Former Guantánamo Prisoners Granted Humanitarian Asylum in 2016

34. Guantánamo, military commissions: A Devastating Condemnation of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions by Palestinian-American Journalist P. Leila Barghouty

35. Life after Guantánamo: Sad Confirmation that Second Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Resettled in Senegal Has Been Forcibly Returned to Libya, Where His Life Is At Risk

36. Life after Guantánamo: WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Salem Gherebi’s Letter Explaining Why He Voluntarily Returned to Libya from Senegal Despite the Danger in Doing So

37. Guantánamo media: A New Media Milestone: 3,000 Articles Published (Including 2,200 on Guantánamo) Since I Began Writing Online as an Independent Journalist and Activist in 2007

38. Guantánamo art: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Discusses Prison Artwork with the BBC, While Lawyers for “High-Value Detainee” Demand His Right to Continue Making Art

39. Life after Guantánamo: As Two Former Guantánamo Prisoners Disappear in Libya After Repatriation from Asylum in Senegal, There Are Fears for 150 Others Resettled in Third Countries

40. Guantánamo, torture, US courts: Lawyers for Guantánamo Torture Victim Mohammed Al-Qahtani Urge Court to Enable Mental Health Assessment and Possible Repatriation to Saudi Arabia

41. Torture, US enemy combatants: Ali Al-Marri, Held and Tortured on US Soil, Accuses FBI Agents of Involvement in His Torture

May 2018

42. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: With Transfer of Ahmed Al-Darbi to Saudi Arabia, Guantánamo’s Population Drops to 40; No New Arrivals on Horizon

43. Life after Guantánamo: Life After Guantánamo: In Morocco, Younous Chekkouri’s Struggle to Rebuild His Life

44. CIA, torture, UK accountability: Torture on Trial in the US Senate, as the UK Government Unreservedly Apologizes for Its Role in Libyan Rendition

45. Guantánamo media: Ten Years After His Release From Guantánamo, Sami al-Hajj Publishes His Compelling Memoir, ‘Prisoner 345,’ Free Via Al-Jazeera

46. Guantánamo media: The Horrors of Guantánamo Eloquently Explained By A High School Teacher to Readers of Teen Vogue

47. Guantánamo, military commissions: No Justice at Guantánamo: The Release of Ahmed Al-Darbi, and Moazzam Begg’s Reflections

June 2018

48. Life after Guantánamo: Guantánamo Scandal: The Released Prisoners Languishing in Secretive Detention in the UAE

49. Accountability for torture: European Court of Human Rights Condemns Romania and Lithuania for CIA “Black Sites” Where Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri Were Tortured

50. Guantánamo campaigns: June 15 Marks 6,000 Days of Guantánamo: Join Us in Telling Donald Trump, “Not One Day More!”

51. Deaths at Guantánamo: Remembering Guantánamo’s Dead, 12 Years After the Three Notorious Alleged Suicides of June 2006

52. Guantánamo, Supreme Court: It’s Ten Years Since the Supreme Court Granted Habeas Corpus Rights to the Guantánamo Prisoners, a Legal Triumph Until a Lower Court Took Them Away

53. Guantánamo campaigns: Today Marks 6,000 Days of Guantánamo: Rights Groups, Concerned Citizens and Former Prisoner Shaker Aamer Urge Donald Trump to Close It

54. United Nations, torture: Today is the 20th Anniversary of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture: Will the Torture and the Impunity Ever Stop?

55. Guantánamo, Periodic Review Boards: No Escape from Guantánamo: An Update on the Periodic Review Boards

An archive of UK-related articles, January to June 2018

January to March 2018

1. Housing crisis: Haringey Leader Claire Kober’s Resignation Ought to Signal an End to Labour’s Frenzy of Council Estate Destruction, But 70 Labour Leaders Disagree

2. Protest music: Shouts Interview: Andy Worthington of The Four Fathers Discusses the Importance of Protest Music with Halldór Bjarnason

3. Grenfell Tower fire, protest music: Over 1,200 Views for The Four Fathers’ ‘Grenfell’ Video, Remembering Those Whose Lives Were Lost, and Calling for Those Responsible to be Held Accountable

4. Housing crisis: Two New London Screenings of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, Documentary Opposing the Destruction of Council Estates, in Hackney Wick and Walthamstow on February 20 and 24

5. Protest music, housing crisis: My Band The Four Fathers Launch A Year of Political Gigs in Walthamstow This Saturday, In A Protest Against Another Divisive Private Development

6. Terrorism:
7. London photos: Celebrating 300 Days of My Photo Project, ‘The State of London’

8. Grenfell Tower fire, United Nations: Nine Months After the Entirely Preventable Grenfell Tower Fire, UN Housing Rapporteur Says UK Government May Have Breached Residents’ Human Rights

9. Save the NHS: My Gratitude to the NHS, Seven Years After I Developed A Rare Blood Disease and Nearly Lost Two Toes

10. Housing crisis: Launching A Crowdfunder to Support a UK Tour of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the New Documentary Film About the Threat to Social Housing, Which I Narrate

11. Music, theatre: You’ve Never Heard Anything Like This Before: BAC Beatbox Academy’s Exhilarating ‘Frankenstein’ Show at Battersea Arts Centre

April to June 2018

12. Protest music: Protest Music: Forthcoming Gigs by Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers, April to June 2018

13. Housing crisis: The 34 Estates Approved for Destruction By Sadiq Khan Despite Promising No More Demolitions Without Residents’ Ballots

14. Housing crisis: A Defence of Social Housing in a Resolutely Hostile Political Environment

15. Council elections, housing crisis: Britain’s Broken Democracy: Tories Become UKIP, Media Ignores Labour Gains, Labour Continues Estate Demolitions

16. London photos: Celebrating One Year of My Photo Project ‘The State of London’; Now For An Exhibition and a Book!

17. Grenfell Tower fire: Grenfell Campaigners Mark Eleven Months Since the Disaster That Killed 71, As MPs Debate the Government’s Response

18. Photos, Grenfell Tower fire: Photos: The Powerful Grenfell Protest Outside Parliament, May 14, 2018, and Updates About Safety Concerns

19. Grenfell Tower fire: Video: Eddie Daffarn, Who Foresaw the Grenfell Tower Fire, Interviewed by Channel 4 News as the Official Inquiry Begins

20. Protest music: Protest Music Now: My Interview with London Student Magazine Artefact as Lead Singer of The Four Fathers

21. Grenfell Tower fire, protest music: 2,000 Views of The Four Fathers’ Video ‘Grenfell’, Remembering Those Who Died and Calling for Those Responsible to be Held Accountable

22. Battle of the Beanfield, Stonehenge, civil liberties: It’s 33 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield: Is It Now Ancient History, in a UK Obsessed with Housing Exploitation and Nationalist Isolation?

23. Grenfell Tower fire: Grenfell One Year On: How Can We Feel Safe in a Country That Regards Everyone in Social Housing as Inferior?

24. Photos, Grenfell Tower fire: Photos: Grenfell 1st Anniversary – The Silent Walk and the Solidarity March

25. London photos: Celebrating 400 Days of My Photo Project ‘The State of London’

26. Stonehenge, civil liberties: Thoughts on Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice 2018: Has the Dominant Materialism Killed Some Magic in the World?

27. Brexit: Basketcase Britain: Two Years After the EU Referendum, the Tories Are Still Clueless and Racism Is Still Rampant

28. Grenfell Tower fire: Grenfell and the Social Housing Crisis: How Kensington and Chelsea Council Behaved Like “A Property Developer Masquerading as a Local Authority”

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.

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.

Party in the Park, New Cross and Deptford 2018: Sun, Solidarity and the Struggle Against Social Cleansing

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

 

Welcome to Party in the Park 2018, in Fordham Park, New Cross. No fences, no huge metal walls, no entrance fee, no security checks — and no trouble. This was the community in solidarity, proving triumphantly that an open festival is infinitely preferable to the securitised fortresses that play such a divisive role in so many of London’s parks these days (see the big money festivals that, behind their soaring metal walls, take over much of London’s parkland every summer, and the debacle of the recent Lambeth Country Show, for example).

This was the fourth Party in the Park, after events in 2013, 2014 and 2016, but it wasn’t just the brilliant sunshine that made it such a great day, or the music from dozens of great performers (and with my band The Four Fathers honoured to take part). It was that thing I mentioned above. Solidarity.

The theme of the festival was housing, and housing is at the heart of the problems we face on all fronts in the never-ending “age of austerity” imposed by the Tories since 2010, with ongoing cuts to all the services that are essential for a civil society to flourish, and with a relentless onslaught of greed on a key essential of life — housing.

No offence to home-owners, but this was primarily a day for the half of the population that either faces exorbitant, unchecked private rents, or, for those living in social housing, the destruction of their homes and their replacement with more expensive rents — Sadiq Khan’s London Affordable Rent, in particular, which is £3,000 a year more expensive then social rent, an extra £60 a week that many hard-working families simply don’t have — or shared ownership scams, in which tenants buy a share of the house (say 25%), paying rent on the rest, but don’t realistically own anything until they own 100% of the property, and lose everything if they run into any kind of financial trouble.

At the heart of Party in the Park was the joyous carnival procession that came from the Old Tidemill Garden in Deptford, a wonderful community space that was occupied just three days before the festival to prevent Lewisham Council from boarding it up prior to its destruction as part of plans to re-develop the site of the old Tidemill primary school. The plans also involve the destruction of 16 council flats in Reginald House, a block next to the garden. 80% of the residents don’t want their homes to be knocked down, but the council has never asked them what they want.

The garden used to be part of the school. It was designed by teachers, parents and the schoolchildren in the early 90s, and was leased to the community when the school moved into new premises. For six years, it has been a safe and magical playground for kids, a community space for reflection — or for gardening — and, increasingly since last September, when the council decided to proceed with their long-cherished plans to destroy it, a place for the community to come together in musical events, film screenings, political debates, a Jamaican Independence party, arts and crafts workshops, and much more.

Campaigners have spent years urging the council to go back to the drawing board, and to come up with new plans for the old school site that spare the garden and Reginald House. It’s perfectly possible, but the council aren’t interested.

Instead, the community received notification that the lease was coming to an end on August 29. The timing was unfortunate for the council. The day before, campaigners had submitted evidence for a judicial review that was made possible through a crowdfunding campaign. So, with the very legality of the council’s proposals up in the air, campaigners decided to occupy the garden, notifying the council that it was legally squatted.

Since then, there’s been coverage on the BBC, and other media outlets, and the struggle is all over social media, so when the procession arrived at the park it brought the struggle to the party, and found a huge and loving response.

A key feature of the day was Tent City, featuring panel discussions about the struggles against social cleansing, including residents from Reginald House and Achilles Street, right by Fordham Park, which Lewisham Council also wants to destroy, and speakers from Cressingham Gardens, which Lambeth Council wants to destroy, and the Northwold Estate in Clapton, where campaigners recently forced Guinness, a housing association, to back down from plans to demolish the estate. There were also other housing activists from the parts of London affected by the social cleansing that is a plague in the political system — Southwark, for example, and Haringey.

Northwold residents’ struggle against Guinness was a reminder that housing associations are also a big part of the problem. Just as councils, strapped for cash by the Tory government, have been getting into bed with developers and then forgetting what their obligations to their communities are supposed to be, so housing associations, which largely took on the housing role of councils after Margaret Thatcher began selling off council homes in 1980, have been responding to government cuts by becoming private developers first, and social housing providers second. Like councils, and like the whole building establishment, they have accepted that selling private housing must subsidise rented properties, but are also embracing higher rents, and are deeply implicated in the shared ownership scam.

The developer at Tidemill is Peabody. It was Family Mosaic, but they were swallowed up by Peabody in an orgy of mergers amongst the big housing associations, which are getting ever more bloated and corporate and unaccountable. Peabody likes to recall its philanthropic origins, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to see that role fulfilled at all in its myriad projects across London, not least of which is their proposed destruction and rebranding of the Thamesmead Estate in south east London. Peabody have not, to date, been targeted by campaigners for their role in the Tidemill debacle, but they should be. 

At Tent City, there was another panel discussion about housing futures, including Community Land Trusts, and there were also several workshops on the housing theme, but everywhere you went on Saturday, whenever people were talking politics, housing was never far away, at the centre of our collective precarity, the grim truth never far away that far too many people are struggling to make ends meet, that private rents are out of control, that unaffordable towers with their ghost owners and other housing developments, some for the more affluent wage-earners, are still rising up everywhere, that the enthusiasm for estate destruction is an epidemic, and that everyone in social housing is at risk.

Something is happening in Deptford and New Cross. It’s echoed across London, because everywhere people are being screwed for the roof over their heads, and green spaces are sacrificed for the crazed pollution of housing developments. 

At the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth I watched for months as the first of the estate’s huge Brutalist blocks was demolished. It took so long because it was so well made. Its destruction was wanton vandalism — for profit. And estate demolition is not just a mechanism for social cleansing, it’s also environmentally insane, but it’s happening everywhere. In Tower Hamlets, half of the architecturally acclaimed Robin Hood Gardens estate has just been demolished. Its replacement, Blackwall Reach, doesn’t look like it will last 25 years.

However, resistance is happening everywhere. 

In north Kensington, where the skeleton of Grenfell Tower still stands as a horrific statement about how those in social housing were abandoned to their deaths by those responsible for their safety. 

In Haringey, where a £2bn partnership with rapacious international property developers Lendlease was recently overturned. 

And across the capital, in Lambeth, in Southwark, in Westminster, in borough after borough, residents and their supporters are resisting an epidemic of social cleansing. In ‘The Death of the Council Home?’, a powerful and moving BBC Inside Out feature on the destruction of council estates, broadcast last night, rapper and spoken word artist George the Poet, who grew up on a council estate and emphatically has empathy with those living in social housing, laid bare the scale of the crisis, discovering, from councils themselves, that 118 estates across London are undergoing or facing regeneration, and that over 30,000 residents will be affected — most likely forced to move out of the area, as they are priced out of the new developments replacing their homes. 

Right now, the most urgent struggle is in Deptford, where Lewisham Council and Peabody are itching to destroy the Old Tidemill Garden — and the flats of Reginald House next door. Please join us in saving them! As George the Poet says in his inspiring closing words, “Redevelopment doesn’t have to end this way, with former tenants displaced, neighbourhoods gentrified. Redevelopment could actually empower communities, but for that to happen we need to ensure this beautiful city doesn’t lock out the very people who make it what it is. These council properties are our homes, and we have to fight for them, before the day comes when we wake up, and there’s none left.”

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.

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.

41 Attorneys from the Cincinnati Area Call on Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Last week, 41 attorneys from the Cincinnati area, in Ohio, wrote a column for the Cincinnati Enquirer calling for Donald Trump to close Guantánamo. Founded in 1841, the paper is the last surviving daily newspaper in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, and is traditionally regarded as a a conservative, Republican-leaning newspaper.

Nevertheless, on August 26 it gave space to the 41 lawyers, including some who have represented Guantánamo prisoners over the 16 long years of the prison’s history, for them to argue that the 41 men still held at Guantánamo should either be freed or charged and tried in federal court.

It’s a position that I agree with, as regular readers will know, and it’s reassuring to see so many lawyers come together to make such a definitive statement in the face of Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that the prison is, as the lawyers describe it, “a great shame that hangs over the American legal system.”

Imagine if, across the country, thousands and thousands of lawyers got together to repeat this message, and to send it out through regional and national media.

I’d love to see it happen, and the lawyers themselves close their column by stating, “Join us in calling on bar associations, elected officials and fellow citizens in closing this awful stain on our legal system and our country,” but in the meantime I’m delighted to cross-post their article, in the hope that it gets out to interested parties who may have missed it. 

The article notes that, because the US Constitution applies at Guantánamo, the men should be freed or tried, because “[o]ne bedrock principle of due process is that extended detention without affording a trial for the individual is illegal.”

However, as they also make clear, the trial system established at Guantánamo — the military commissions — is irredeemably broken, as the experiences of one of their number, Rick Kammen, lay bare. Kammen worked on the commissions as a defense lawyer until he was obliged to resign because, fundamentally, the government was spying on the defense teams, and there was no effective way of challenging them.

I hope you have time to read the article, and will share it if you find it persuasive — and if you can help with getting or lawyers on board, let’s do it! If 41 lawyers can do this in Cincinnati, one for each prisoner still held, we surely ought to be able to get 5,000 lawyers across the country to say to Donald Trump, “No more! Close Guantánamo now!” — or perhaps, more appropriately, 6,081 lawyers, one for each day Guantánamo has been open.

Due process: Guantánamo detainees should be released

By Robert Newman and Michael O’Hara, the Cincinnati Enquirer, August 26, 2018

There is a great shame that hangs over the American legal system: the injustice of the Guantánamo detainees. Today, 41 Muslim men remain at Guantánamo. Thirteen have cases in the military commission system. The remainder have been held for up to 16 years without charges filed against them. Five of these have been cleared for transfer, meaning that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies have agreed that they pose no security threat. Many of the 41 detainees have been tortured at either CIA “black sites” or at Guantánamo itself.

President George W. Bush released 532 detainees by the end of his second term, and President Barack Obama released 197 and sought to close Guantánamo, but was prevented by congressional action. Nine detainees have died since the prison opened, several by suicide. Now President Donald Trump has vowed that he would “absolutely authorize” torture techniques such as waterboarding on the grounds that terrorism suspects “deserve it,” and that he would fill Guantánamo back up with “bad dudes.”

Since the United States claims Guantánamo Bay pursuant to a 1903 lease authorizing a naval station and coaling station which later became a “perpetual lease,” the U.S. Constitution extends to this property and its inhabitants. One bedrock principle of due process is that extended detention without affording a trial for the individual is illegal.Sixteen years is beyond any shred of due process. Even a year cannot be justified. For this reason, all 41 detainees should be released.

Yet there are other reasons for the releasing of the detainees. Two of them, Toffiq Al-Bihani and Abdul Latif Nasser have been approved for transfer to other countries who are willing to receive them. Their continued detention is senseless and punitive.

Twenty-eight of the detainees have not even been charged. How can someone be imprisoned with no trial, no judgment of guilt and no charges? Such conduct by our government and military courts utterly betrays the constitutional promise of due process. Honoring this fundamental principle would demand immediate release of these unconstitutionally detained individuals.

Some commentators have suggested the that military commissions should be allowed to continue and that some or all of the detainees should be tried before these commissions. A criminal defense attorney from Indianapolis, Richard Kammen, spent nine years assisting with the defense of Abdul Rahim Al-Nashiri, a Guantánamo detainee charged with involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole. Al-Nashiri was charged in 2003. He has yet to be tried.

At the 2018 Kentucky Bar Annual Convention, Kammen described how it became impossible to provide meaningful legal representation due to restrictions imposed by the military commissions that offend the principles of due process we as Americans take for granted. He described how guards confiscate privileged legal materials from the cells of the detainees and how the military prosecutors read defense counsel’s correspondence to their clients.

The commander of the prosecution issued an order requiring military officials to review all legal correspondence between defense counsel and their clients, and counsel who refuse would not be allowed to visit their clients. Kammen and his colleagues discovered that the rooms in which defense counsel had been meeting with their clients for years were wired with microphones disguised as smoke detectors.

The government also intruded into defense counsels’ emails. In 2013, it was discovered that the FBI had recruited an informant on a defense legal team. When the military judge prohibited Kammen and his legal team from informing their client of concerns about attorney-client confidentiality on grounds that would result in disclosing classified information, Kammen decided that he could not ethically continue to represent his client, as he was prevented by our government and the military courts from providing constitutionally adequate representation. Thus, he was ethically compelled to withdraw.

Moreover, these same military commissions have denied detainees any effective opportunity to challenge the government’s use of detainees’ confessions that were obtained through torture and “enhanced interrogation” methods that would never survive scrutiny in any court in the United States. Counsel for detainees have been denied access to evidence relating to the circumstances under which confessions were obtained.

The government and military commissions have done this under the shadowy rubric “national security” or protection of “classified information.” Everything about the conduct of these military commissions is antithetical to the fundamental principles of the right to effective assistance of counsel and to a fair trial, rights that have long since been embedded in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to our Constitution.

It should be obvious to any lawyer or jurist that trials comporting with due process are not possible with military commissions. To the extent that the government can provide any justification for detaining anyone, those people should be brought to American soil and tried in federal courts. The government is reluctant to do this because of the scrutiny that would necessarily focus on statements obtained from the detainees by the most brutal forms of interrogation yet devised.

This is not American justice. This is not America. We are lawyers, and we are deeply offended by the injustices of Guantánamo. Join us in calling on bar associations, elected officials and fellow citizens in closing this awful stain on our legal system and our country.

This column was jointly written by the following 41 Cincinnati-area attorneys: Robert B. Newman; Michael J. O’Hara; Timothy M. Burke; Nora Dean Burke; Louis H. Sirkin; Nicholas J. DiNardo; John L. Heilbrun; William R. Gallagher; Joseph J. Dehner; Maurice O. White; Alphonse A. Gerhardstein; Richard Ganulin; Stephen R. Felson; Marc D. Mezibov; Kathleen M. Brinkman; Lisa T. Meeks; Elizabeth Asbury Newman; John Woliver; Richard Boydston; Elizabeth A. McCord; John D. Holshuh, Jr.; Sherri Goren Slovin; Phyllis G. Bossin; Barbara J. Howard; Peter L. Cassady; Michael T. Mann; David S. Mann; William A. DeCenso; Erin M. Heidrich; Mark W. Napier; Noel M. Morgan; Matthew W. Fellerhoff; Amanda R. Toole; Joseph H. Feldhaus; Lucian J. Bernard; Terence D. Bazeley; Carrie H. Dettmer Slye; Carla L. Leader; Danielle C. Colliver; Elaine J. Fink; James B. Robinson; and Amy L. Detisch.

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.

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

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

Why We’ve Occupied the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford to Prevent Lewisham Council’s Demolition Plans

On Tuesday evening (August 28), campaigners occupied the Old Tidemill Garden on Reginald Road in Deptford, London SE8 to prevent Lewisham Council from taking it back on the Wednesday morning (August 29), and boarding it up prior to its planned destruction as part of the proposed re-development of the site of the old Tidemill Primary School.

The garden is a much-loved community space, and was developed by teachers, parents and pupils from the school around 25 years ago. When the school closed, to be replaced by a new academy, the garden was leased to the local community, but now the council wants it back, to destroy it, and the 16 council flats of Reginald House next door, in order to build new housing with the housing association Peabody, the majority of which will be for private sale.

For many years, campaigners have been working to urge Lewisham Council to re-draw its plans to re-develop the old school site, which, astonishingly, were first proposed ten years ago. The campaigners have relentlessly pointed out that increasing the density of the development on the old school site will allow the council and Peabody to save the garden and Reginald House, but they’re simply not interested in engaging with the local community, or with the residents of Reginald House. 80% of residents do not want to lose their homes but have not been offered a ballot, despite Jeremy Corbyn’s promise last autumn that all proposed demolitions should involve ballots, a position since endorsed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

I first came across the garden in 2013, when guardians were on the old school site, who regularly opened up the gardens during events designed to involve the local community. And while I have always been interested in struggles to save housing and community spaces from developers of all kinds — chronicling, for example, protest movements including the road protest movements of the 1990s in my books Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield — and I care deeply about the destruction of social housing as a social housing resident, I wasn’t actively involved in campaigning until the Grenfell Tower fire happened last year — although regular readers will know that my archive of housing-related issues goes back to 2010.

The entirely preventable Grenfell disaster, in which 72 people died, revealed fundamentally how those with power and authority — and mortgages — treat those in social housing as second-class citizens, and with such contempt that our very lives can be in danger as a result, and in the fallout from the disaster I went to a powerful public meeting held by ASH (Architects for Social Housing), whose work on refurbishment and resistance, as opposed to compliance and estate destruction I came to admire greatly, also meeting filmmaker Nikita Woolfe and becoming the narrator for her documentary ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates and residents’ resistance.

In September last year, I also became aware of the Lewisham struggles, when I attended a screening of ‘Dispossession’ at the New Cross Learning Centre, organised by residents of the Achilles Street estate, which Lewisham Council also wants to destroy. I then met Tidemill campaigner Heather Gilmore while passing by the Old Tidemill Garden on my bike, and, after Lewisham Council officially approved its plans to re-develop the site, I was soon involved in campaigning, setting up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a fighting motto, and a Facebook page to bring together the various Lewisham housing campaigns. I also put on a number of fundraising nights featuring live music, which are ongoing, with the next event being at the Birds Nest in Deptford on Sunday September 16.

This year, the garden has hosted numerous community events — a fun day before the council elections in May, at which we also held a hustings that put the heat on local councillor Joe Dromey, the son of Harriet Harman and a cheerleader for the development, a Summer Solstice party, a Jamaican Independence Day on August 4, and numerous other events that have demonstrated what the council doesn’t want to acknowledge — that the community can create beauty and solidarity in an autonomous community space that deserves far better than being levelled for more housing that will not address local housing needs. Campaigners have also staged numerous protests outside the council’s headquarters in Catford and outside consultations in Deptford.

In a press release sent out after the occupation took place which I worked on with other campaigners, we pointed out that, as well as legally squatting the site to prevent it being taken back, we have also taken on a solicitor, Richard Buxton, who, the day before the occupation, “filed papers for a Judicial Review of the Council’s September 2017 planning decision. Although the judge declined to give an order to stop the Council taking back the garden today [August 29], the court ‘expects’ the Council to refrain from any action until at least 4th September, when the merits of the case will be considered to determine whether a future court date can be set for the case to be heard.”

We recently reached our target of £10,600 to fund the application for a judicial review, but are trying to raise extra funds, so if you can help out at all, please visit this crowdfunding page and make a donation.

As the press release further explained:

The Save Reginald, Save Tidemill campaign says that Tidemill Wildlife Garden is a vital local green space and an important educational and environmental resource as well as being a venue for culturally diverse events run by the local community.

Demolition means the mature trees and shrubs and the wildlife habitat they provide for birds, bats, insects and amphibians will all be destroyed. The 70+ mature trees on the site have been proved to play an active role in mitigating the worst effects of pollution in nearby Deptford Church Street, a GLA Air Quality Focus Area, where carbon emissions exceed EU limits by over 50%.

Campaigners maintain there is no meaningful mitigation for this destruction of trees and wildlife. The Council’s plans for the site will result in a net loss of green space in the area that will be replaced by a “glorified path” a quarter of the current garden’s size that would be open 24/7, and small private gardens accessible only to new residents.

Supporters of the Save Reginald, Save Tidemill campaign include a cross-party group of GLA members. Len Duvall, GLA Assembly Member for Lewisham & Greenwich (also Leader of the London Assembly Labour Group and Chair of the GLA Labour Party), said: “I am not against building more homes in Lewisham; indeed I am supportive of more social rented housing. What I do take issue with is the cavalier way in which the housing crisis is being used to justify the disposal of open green space in the borough.”

To support the campaign, please come down to Deptford and New Cross tomorrow. A carnival procession will be leaving the garden around 12 noon to snake its way through Deptford Market to Fordham Park in New Cross, where the community festival Party in the Park is taking place, whose focus is on the housing crisis. Or come to the garden anytime, and sign up to take part in the occupation. Any time you can help, in the daytime or by staying overnight, will be very helpful.

The festival features music on several stages (including my band The Four Fathers playing a set of rock and roots reggae protest music about housing from 1.15 to 1.45pm on the Wango Riley Stage), and, from 2 to 6pm, Tent City, an area given over to panel discussions and workshops about housing. I’m chairing the first panel discussion from 2 to 3pm, which looks at struggles against social cleansing in Lewisham and elsewhere, featuring Diann Gerson and Heather Gilmore from Save Reginald Save Tidemill, Martin Williams of the Achilles Stop and Listen Campaign, Anne E. Cooper of the Save Cressingham campaign in Lambeth, Emily Jost of the We Saved Northwold campaign in Clapton, where Guinness’s demolition plans have been successfully resisted, and Paul Watt, professor of urban studies at Birkbeck, and a member of Demolition Watch.

The second panel, at 4.30pm, ‘Tenant Empowerment and what can be achieved via collaboration’, should also be very worthwhile.

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.

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

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

Guantánamo Judge Bans So-Called “Clean Team” Evidence in 9/11 Trial, Then Resigns

[image error] Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

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.

Last Friday, August 17, a ruling of potentially huge significance took place at Guantánamo in pre-trial hearings for the proposed trial by military commission of the five men accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, who include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. All five men have been held at Guantánamo since September 2006, and, before that, were held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for up to three and a half years. 

Yesterday, just ten days later, the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, 67, who has been the judge on the case since the men were arraigned in May 2012, announced that he will retire on September 30 and named Marine Col. Keith A. Parrella, 44, to replace him. Giving notice of his intention, he stated, “I will leave active duty after 38 years. To be clear, this was my decision and not impacted by any outside influence from any source.”

Astonishingly, it is ten and half years since the US government first filed charges against the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks in the military commission trial system, which had been ill-advisedly dragged from the history books by Dick Cheney and his lawyer David Addington in November 2001, but had been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The commissions were subsequently revived with Congressional backing, but struggled to establish any legitimacy throughout the rest of Bush’s presidency.

The Obama administration put the commissions on hold after Barack Obama took office in January 2009, but unwisely revived them in November 2009, despite Congress and the administration being warned — by critics, including some of Obama’s own officials — that the war crimes prosecuted in the commissions, focused particularly on providing material support for terrorism and some other charges, would be overturned on appeal, as they had been invented as war crimes by Congress, and were not internationally recognised (although, crucially, they were recognized as crimes in federal court).

In a series of embarrassing results, the convictions against two of the three men convicted under George W. Bush — Salim Hamdan and David Hicks — were overturned, and, in several rulings since 2013, most of the charges against the third man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who was given a life sentence in November 2008 after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense — have also been quashed.

Five convictions took place under Obama, although all involved plea deals, and their legitimacy too has generally been called into question or overturned.

In the trials that are ongoing, a further complication has come to light, not involving the legitimacy or otherwise of war crimes, but involving the use of torture, and the seeming impossibility of successfully prosecuting prisoners who have been tortured.

This should have been obvious to the Bush administration officials who authorized the use of torture after 9/11, specifically in the network of “black sites” that the CIA established in countries including Thailand, Poland, Lithuania and Romania, but it took official years to understand how much they had damaged the possibility of any successful judicial outcome. When they did, they attempted to remedy it by sending in so-called “clean teams” of FBI agents to interrogate them without using torture, and with the intention of getting the men in question to repeat the statements they had made under torture in a non-coercive situation.

To the government’s disappointment, these are the statements that, last Friday, Judge Pohl ruled could not be used by prosecutors. 

As Charlie Savage explained for the New York Times, “The decision brought to a head a long-running and potentially irreconcilable tension in the case: Defense lawyers say they need to thoroughly investigate the torture of their clients at the hands of the CIA for there to be a fair death penalty trial. But the government says there is a national security imperative to keep certain facts related to that period — like the identities of CIA personnel who worked at certain prisons — secret.”

Savage stated that the FBI’s “clean team” agents “did not know what the detainees had previously said,” which strikes me as unlikely, although, even if it were the case, lawyers for the men subjected to CIA torture have always had strength in their argument that, as Savage put it, “the lingering effects of their clients’ previous torture tainted those interrogation sessions, too.”

As Savage proceeded to explain, “To make that case, defense lawyers said they needed to investigate what had happened to their clients in CIA custody independently of restrictions the government imposed on their ability to speak to potential witnesses, including forbidding them from directly approaching agency personnel.” 

Savage added that prosecutors had “offered summaries of what guards and doctors had seen and done, saying that was sufficient,” but that Judge Pohl disagreed, stating, in a 36-page ruling, that those summaries “were not an adequate substitute,” as Savage described it, also noting that, “While he upheld the rules the government imposed on the defense lawyers’ ability to investigate the CIA in general, he also suppressed the FBI statements as evidence because the rules were too restrictive for a fair fight over their admissibility.”

In his ruling, he explained that the summaries “will not provide the defense with substantially the same ability to investigate, prepare and litigate motions to suppress the FBI clean team statements” because the restrictions on defense lawyers’ ability to talk to witnesses “will not allow the defense to develop the particularity and nuance necessary to present a rich and vivid account of the 3-4 year period in CIA custody the defense alleges constituted coercion.”

As a result, he refused to allow the government to “introduce any FBI clean team statement from any of the accused for any purpose.”

On August 23, prosecutors asked Judge Pohl to reconsider his ban, calling the results of the FBI interrogations “their most potent evidence,” as Carol Rosenberg described it for the Miami Herald. 

In an 81-page appeal, prosecutors claimed, “The statements made by the accused to the FBI constitute acknowledgments of guilt and responsibility for the largest act of terrorism in the history of the United States, which resulted in the deaths of 2,976 innocent people. Each of the confessions is many pages in length, with each of the accused painting detailed accountings of the plot, their interactions with the hijackers and other co-conspirators, and their own specific participation in the offenses, despite the five accused being thousands of miles away at the culmination of the plot with the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Nevertheless, James Connell, who represents Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five accused, hailed Judge Pohl’s ruling, and stated, “Witnesses are the foundation of the American criminal justice system. If the government prohibits the defense from investigating witnesses, the proceeding becomes more like a play than a trial.”

Providing further detail about the wrangling over access to witnesses, Charlie Savage stated that Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the commissions’ chief prosecutor, and his team “had argued that the law permitted some concessions to national security imperatives in such a case, while playing up how much information the government had turned over in discovery about the black-site program, including summaries about what agency employees and contractors who served as guards, doctors and interrogators at the prisons saw and did.” He added, “Most of those people are described using code names.”

As Savage also explained, “After providing that information, the prosecution told defense lawyers last year that they were not allowed to directly approach people they believed might be such witnesses or to travel to countries they believed might have hosted prisons to ask questions.” Instead, prosecutors insisted, “the defense has to go through the government to request interviews,” and “the government in turn approaches witnesses and asks if they want to talk to defense lawyers while also telling them what they can and cannot discuss.”

As Col. Pohl noted, what this meant in practice was that “only a few of the dozens of witnesses the defense asked to speak with agreed to talk under those conditions,” a clearly unsatisfactory situation that, added to the fundamentally dubious nature of the “clean team” interrogations, means that we at “Close Guantánamo” hope that Col. Pohl’s ban survives his departure. 

The sad truth about this trial, and the few others underway at Guantánamo — although they all appear trapped in interminable pre-trial hearings — is that the only viable venue for terrorism trials is in federal court, a conclusion that the Obama administration should have reached instead of, firstly, re-introducing the notion of both federal court trials and military commissions in November 2009, and, secondly, subsequently bowing to scaremongering, and withdrawing the proposal to hold the 9/11 trial in a federal court in New York.

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.

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.

A Beautiful Article About Love by Former Guantánamo Prisoner Mansoor Adayfi: Please Read It and Then Donate to Support Him

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