Andy Worthington's Blog, page 35

Remembering Guantánamo’s Dead, 12 Years After the Three Notorious Alleged Suicides of June 2006

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Today, as we approach a terrible milestone in Guantánamo’s history — the 6,000th day of the prison’s existence, this coming Friday, June 15 — we also have reason to reflect on those who were neither released from the prison, nor are still held — the nine men who have died there since the prison opened, 5,995 days ago today.

On June 10, 2006 — exactly 12 years ago — the world was rocked by news of the first three of these deaths at Guantánamo: of Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi who was just 17 when he was seized in Afghanistan in December 2001, of Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi, and of Ali al-Salami, a Yemeni.

The three men were long-term hunger strikers, and as such had been a thorn in the side of the authorities, encouraging others to join them in refusing food. Was this enough of them to be killed? Perhaps so. The official story is that they killed themselves in a suicide pact, their deaths, as Guantánamo’s commander, Adm. Harry Harris Jr., ill-advisedly claimed at the time, “an act of asymmetrical warfare against us,” and “not an act of desperation.”

I commemorate the men’s deaths every year, as they remain significant, and they otherwise tend to have become forgotten, remembered only by the likes of writer and retired psychologist Jeffrey Kaye, and former US Staff Sergeant Joe Hickman.

Hickman is the leading witness in a case against the US military that has never been allowed to proceed — on which alleges that the three men did not kill themselves sin a suicide pact, but were killed. Hickman’s testimony, as the head of the guard watch in the prison’s towers, is that the story of the men’s deaths emerged only after vehicles that he had seen coming to and from a remote site — a secret facility he and other guards dubbed “Camp No,” had brought back what he presumed were their bodies, already dead, from that location, where they had either been deliberately killed, or had been accidentally killed as part of a torture session that went too far.

Hickman’s recollections, and his assessment of what happened on the night of June 9-10, 2006, was the main driver of lawyer and journalist Scott Horton’s article “The Guantánamo Suicides,” published in Harper’s Magazine in January 2010, which caused a stir — and won a journalism award — but which was never adequately followed up on, and which also received undue criticism from other media outlets.

And yet the gist of Hickman’s recollections remains a powerful rebuke to the official story, and has become part of a narrative amongst alternative US media that make a point of investigating the actions of their government. Just days ago, for example, the AllGov website recalled the alleged “suicides” in a story about Harris (recently nominated as ambassador to South Korea by Donald Trump), noting how, although he had “quickly declared the deaths to be suicides … an investigation by Harper’s magazine cast considerable doubt on that verdict, pointing out the near simultaneous times of death while held separately; the improbability of the prisoners’ ability to kill themselves in the manner described (stuff rags down their throats, and then climb up on a counter and hang themselves); and bruises and other injuries suffered by the prisoners. The article suggested that the three were killed during a torture/interrogation session held in a secret part of the base.”

In revisiting the deaths this year, I also came across a well-written article in Newsweek from January 2015, “To Live and Die in Gitmo,” by Alexander Nazaryan, published to coincide with the publication of Hickman’s book, Murder At Camp Delta.

Nazaryan provided the following helpful profiles of the three men who died:

Mana Shaman Allabardi al-Tabi (588) was a Saudi national who joined a religious charity called Tablighi Jamaat, which was believed to have links to Al-Qaeda. On January 17, 2002, “detainee was captured with four other individuals who were dressed in burkas trying to avoid capture” as he was leaving the Pakistani city of Bannu, on the border with Afghanistan, his Department of Defense file reads. On March 8, 2002, he was handed over to American forces and shipped to Guantánamo Bay, where he was described as “belligerent, argumentative, harassing, and very aggressive”—and useless when it came to intelligence about Al-Qaeda. He was cleared to be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention.”

Yasser Talal al-Zahrani (093), also Saudi, was the son of a prominent government official. Jihad tugged at him in the early summer of 2001, when he had finished the 11th grade. “After sitting at home for approximately two months and hearing that sheiks from neighboring towns were saying jihad in Afghanistan was a religious duty, [al-Zahrani] decided to travel to Afghanistan,” his Pentagon file says. He went to Pakistan, then Afghanistan. Instead of starting his senior year of high school, he learned at a Taliban training center how to use a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a Makarov pistol. He served as “a fighter on the front lines of [the Battle of Kunduz]” during the American invasion of Afghanistan, where he was captured by the Northern Alliance. Al-Zahrani was turned over to American forces on December 29, 2001. His intelligence value was also minimal.

Ali Abdullah Ahmed (693) was a Yemeni who, according to his Department of Defense record, was “a street vendor who sold clothing…and was prompted to travel to Pakistan to receive [a religious] education upon hearing God’s calling.” He was captured at a safe house in Faisalabad that was alleged to be under the control of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be one of Osama bin Laden’s top officers. Branded by the Pentagon as “a mid-to-high-level Al-Qaeda” operative, Ahmed arrived in Cuba on June 19, 2002. Later, government investigators realized there was “no credible information” tying him to terrorism. But this wasn’t the Palookaville slammer: If you tell the world, as the Pentagon did, that your island prison is home to “the worst of the worst,” you won’t want to advertise your errors and hyperboles. So they kept Ahmed.

Nazaryan also noted, aptly, “Much of what happens at Guantánamo, why it happens and who orders it to happen lurks in the shadowy realm of ‘unknown unknowns,’ in the famous formulation of former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,” and, in the course of describing Hickman’s journey from Staff Sergeant to key witness in a thwarted prosecution, also revisited the investigation into the deaths by the Seton Hall Law School, published just before Scott Horton’s Harper’s article, which forensically took apart the official NCIS investigation, noting, in particular:

There is no explanation of how each of the detainees, much less all three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell — a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation.

The season of death

The deaths of the three men on the night of June 9-10, 2016 are not the only suspicious deaths at this time of year. I reported at the time about the alleged suicides of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi, on my 30, 2017, and Muhammad Salih (aka al-Hanashi), a Yemeni, on June 1, 2009, and I have since written about their cases, but for many years now — probably more years than he cares to remember — Jeffrey Kaye has investigated their cases, reaching the conclusion that the story of their suicides is “unlikely,” as he explains in his book, Cover-up at Guantánamo: The NCIS Investigation into the “Suicides” of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri.

These are not the only deaths at Guantánamo, and not the only suspicious deaths either. In September 2012, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who had serious mental health problems, died, reportedly by committing suicide — although, again, serious doubts have been expressed about the official narrative, and, as I explained at the time, in an article entitled, Obama, the Courts and Congress Are All Responsible for the Latest Death at Guantánamo, his death was not just a problem involving the military at Guantánamo; it also involved failures by all three branches of the US government in relation to his case. As I stated at the time:

I felt sick when I heard the news: that the man who died at Guantánamo … was Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni. I had been aware of his case for six years, and had followed it closely. He had been cleared for release under President Bush (in December 2006) and under President Obama (as a result of the Guantánamo Review Task Force’s deliberations in 2009). He had also had his habeas corpus petition granted in a US court, but, disgracefully, he had not been freed.

Instead of being released, Adnan Latif was failed by all three branches of the US government. President Obama was content to allow him to rot in Guantánamo, having announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane in December 2009. That ban was still in place when Latif died, and had been put in place largely because of pressure from Congress.

Also to blame are the D.C. Circuit Court and the Supreme Court. Latif had his habeas corpus petition granted in July 2010, but then the D.C. Circuit Court moved the goalposts, ordering the lower court judges to give the government’s alleged evidence — however obviously inadequate — the presumption of accuracy. Latif’s case came before the D.C. Circuit Court in October 2011, when two of the three judges — Judges Janice Rogers Brown and Karen LeCraft Henderson — reversed his successful habeas petition, and only Judge David Tatel dissented, noting that there was no reason for his colleagues to assume that the government’s intelligence report about Latif, made at the time of his capture, was accurate, as it was “produced in the fog of war, by a clandestine method that we know almost nothing about.” In addition, Judge Tatel noted that it was “hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court’s command,” in 2008’s Boumediene v. Bush ruling, granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, that the habeas review process be “meaningful.”

Despite this, when the Supreme Court had the opportunity to take back control of the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas petitions in June this year, through a number of appeals, including one by Latif, they refused.

Before Latif, Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a profound case of mistaken identity — an Afghan who had actually helped significant individuals opposed to the Taliban and al-Qaeda escape from an Afghan prison — died of cancer in December 2007, and I wrote about the US government’s callous refusal to investigate his story (as they also did in numerous other cases) in a front-page story for the New York Times in February 2008, which I wrote with Carlotta Gall, entitled, Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S.

in February 2011 an Afghan, Awal Gul, died after taking exercise, and in May 2011 another Afghan, known as Inayatullah (although that was not his real name, which was Hajji Nassim, and he too appeared to be a case of mistaken identity) also died, reportedly by committing suicide. Like Latif, he too had profound mental health issues, which were largely — and, in the end, fatally — ignored by authorities.

In closing, while reminding readers that Jeffrey Kaye has uncovered evidence that there were other deaths shortly after prisoners’ arrival at Guantánamo that have never been properly investigated, and marveling, frankly, that no one has died at the prison since Latif in September 2012, I’d like to point out that prisoners will, at any time, begin dying of age-related illnesses at Guantánamo unless we can find a way to get Donald Trump to shut it down, and, with that in my mind, I do urge you to get involved in our campaign to mark the 6,000th day of Guantánamo’s existence on June 15.

Note: For further information, see: Second anniversary of triple suicide at Guantánamo (in 2008), Murders at Guantánamo: The Cover-Up Continues (in 2010), The Season of Death at Guantánamo (in 2013), New Evidence Casts Doubt on US Claims that Three Guantánamo Deaths in 2006 Were Suicides (in 2014), Remembering the Season of Death at Guantánamo (in 2015) Remembering Guantánamo’s Dead (in 2016), and, last year, Another Sad, Forgotten Anniversary for Guantánamo’s Dead. On the third anniversary of the men’s deaths, in 2009, I produced a report about hunger strikes and the strikers’ devastating weight loss in Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation, and in 2011 I cross-posted a detailed defense of Scott Horton by the psychologist Jeff Kaye.

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 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.

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

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.

Next Friday, June 15, 2018, is a bleak day for anyone who cares about justice and the rule of law, because the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where men are, for the most part, held indefinitely without charge or trial, will have been open for 6,000 days; or, to put it another way, 16 years, five months and four days. We hope you will join us in making some noise to mark this sad milestone in America’s modern history.

All year we’ve been running the Gitmo Clock, which counts, in real time, how long Guantánamo has been open, and in connection with that, we’ve made posters available every 25 days showing how long the prison has been open, and inviting suporters of Guantánamo’s closure to take photos with them, and to send them to us. The poster for 6,000 days is here. Please print it off, take a photo with it, ask your family and friends to do the same, and send the photos to us. We will add them to the photos we’ve been publishing all year, which can be found here. 

How long is 6,000 days?

To give you some idea of how long 6,000 days is, try to remember what you were doing on January 11, 2002, when the prison opened. Perhaps you weren’t yet born, or perhaps, like me, you have sons or daughters who were just toddlers when those first photos of orange-clad, sensorily-deprived prisoners kneeling in the Caribbean sun as US soldiers barked orders at them were first released. My son is now 18 years old — nearly 18 and a half, in fact — but he was just two when Guantánamo opened.

For anyone 16 and under, Guantánamo has been open their whole lives, and, in addition, for Americans and other NATO members like the UK, our countries have also, unacceptably, been at war for their entire lives, mired in an unwinnable situation in Afghanistan, in which, as the author Anand Gopal explained to me several years ago, the US actually snatched defeat from the jaws of victory back in 2002, when the Taliban fell and al-Qaeda were decimated, but the US stayed on, out of its depth and played by whichever dubious lawlords succeeded in persuading them that they were their best friends.

I have been intimately involved in the Guantánamo story, researching and writing about it on an almost daily basis, for over 12 years now, beginning in March 2006. At the time, the prison had been open for less than 2,000 days. That milestone was reached on June 3, 2006, just days before one of the most shocking episodes in Guantánamo’s long and sordid history — the deaths of three prisoners, which the authorities described as a triple suicide, and “an act of asymmetrical warfare,” but which other parties, including former US military personnel who served on the base at the time, regard as probable homicides.

President Obama, who took office in January 2009 promising to close Guantánamo within a year, had already been in office for over a year when, still open, the prison marked its 3,000th day of operations, on March 29, 2010. 4,000 days also took place on Obama’s watch, on December 23, 2012, just three days after my son’s 13th birthday, and 5,000 days, on August 20, 2014. 

Play this game yourself, if you like, and see what you can remember when — and then imagine being held in Guantánamo for all this time, without even being able to see any of your family members, even if they could get out to Guantánamo, because no Guantánamo prisoner has ever been allowed a family visit, unlike those convicted of the most horrendous crimes on the US mainland.

Remember too that the total length of World War I and World War II was just 3,757 days (1,564 days plus 2,193 days), and yet the “war on terror” declared by the administration of George W. Bush, of which Guantánamo is a key component, has now been ongoing for over 6,100 days, with no sign that those with power and influence in the US have any intention of acknowledging that a war cannot go on forever, and that it must be bounded in some way by time and place. 

After 9/11, the Bush administration effectively declared the entire world to be a battleground in an endless war, an outrageous proposal, and yet one which Obama endorsed with his extra-judicial drone assassinations in countries with which the US was not at war, and one which, of course, Donald Trump has also been free to interpret as he wishes.

Why Guantánamo must be closed

Conceived in the heat of vengeance following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was, from the beginning, a dangerous aberration, turning its back on centuries of laws and treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners. 

In countries that, like the US, claim to respect the rule of law, there are only two ways to deprive someone of their liberty — either as a criminal suspect, to be changed and tried without undue delay, or as a prisoner of war, taken off a battlefield, who can be held unmolested until the end of hostilities under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.

At Guantánamo, however, the US invented a third category of prisoner — “enemy combatants,” who had no rights whatsoever, and were taken to Guantánamo, a US naval base on Cuba, so that they would be beyond the reach of the US courts, and so that the US authorities could do what they wanted with them. 

In February 2002, George W. Bush issued a presidential memo specifically depriving them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and, sadly, for the next two years and four months, there was nothing to protect them from the torture and abuse that the US authorities implemented, and which they also practiced in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, where, eventually, the Abu Ghraib scandal surfaced to provide an insight into what the “war on terror” really meant. 

Over the years, lawyers fought back against the black hole that Guantánamo was at its founding, securing access to the prisoners after taking a case all the way to the Supreme Court to establish, in Rasul v Bush in June 2004, that, because the prisoners had no way of challenging the basis of their detention if they claimed to have been wrongly detained, they had habeas corpus rights; the right to challenge the basis of their imprisonment before a judge. The arrival of attorneys in the fall of 2004 finally punctured the veil of secrecy that had, to that date, enabled torture and abuse to take place with relative impunity.

However, despite the promise of the Rasul ruling, the struggle to secure meaningful rights for the prisoners was eventually derailed. First, Congress passed legislation intended to strip the prisoners of their newly granted habeas rights. It then took until June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, for the Supreme Court to issue a second habeas ruling, concluding that Congress had erred, and granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

That ruling led to a brief period in which the law actually applied at Guantánamo, and 38 prisoners had their habeas corpus petitions approved by judges, who impartially assessed the evidence, and concluded that the government had failed to make a case that they were involved with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Along the away, the judges often exposed what objective research into the prison had firmly established — that the basis for rounding up prisoners and sending them to Guantánamo was horribly flawed, with no one actually caught “on the battlefield,” as the US alleged, and with the majority seized by the US’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when the US was offering substantial bounty payments (around $5,000 a head, a huge amount of money in Afghanistan and Pakistan) for anyone who could be packaged up as al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects. 

Screening by the US in Afghanistan, where all the prisoners were processed, was almost non-existent, so when the prisoners arrived at Guantánamo, very little was known about almost all of them, and when they then failed to respond to questioning about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, because, in many cases, they had no information to provide, they were regarded as being terrorists trained to resist interrogation, and were then subjected to torture or other abuse designed to “break” them. This process, in turn, led to countless false statements being made, which fill the formerly classified military files that were released by WikiLeaks in 2011, for which I was a media partner.

Although there was a brief flowering of justice with regard to Guantánamo for a few years after the Boumediene ruling, politically motivated judges in the appeals court in Washington, D.C. responded by changing the rules and eventually gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners by insisting that any information presented by the government had to be presumptively regarded as accurate.

Since 2010, no prisoner has been freed from Guantánamo as a result of a habeas corpus petition, and, with the law shut down yet again, prisoners have only been released at the whim of the president, or of Congress, and, in a few cases, through plea deals in the otherwise broken military commission trial system set up under the Bush administration to try prisoners at Guantánamo.

President Obama faced unprincipled opposition from Republican lawmakers over Guantánamo, but he responded by generally sitting on his hands, establishing himself as unwilling to spend political capital overcoming their opposition. He did, however, set up two review processes to assess the prisoners’ cases, which, although they had no legal power, ended up in 196 prisoners being released on his watch, compared to 532 under George W. Bush. Crucially, however, he left Guantánamo open for his successor to deal with as he saw fit. 

41 men were still held at Guantánamo when Donald Trump took office, and Trump has shown no interest in releasing anyone, forcefully demonstrating how, fundamentally, Guantánamo remains a lawless place, where prisoners can only be freed if the president wants them freed. Although five of the 41 men he inherited from Obama were approved for release by the previous president’s review processes, and although only nine men are facing or have faced trials, Trump has, to date, released only one man, a Saudi sent back to ongoing imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, whose transfer out of the prison was only possible because of a plea deal he agreed in 2014.

With the doors of Guantánamo sealed shut by Donald Trump and a Republican majority in Congress, it would be enormously helpful if everyone concerned with justice and the rule of law joined us in saying to Donald Trump, on the 6,000th day of Guantánamo’s existence, “Not One Day More!”

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 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.

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

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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.

 

In two devastating rulings on May 31, the European Court of Human Rights found that the actions of the Romanian and Lithuanian governments, when they hosted CIA “black sites” as part of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 torture program, and held, respectively, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, who have both been held at Guantánamo since September 2006, breached key articles of the European Convention on Human Rights; specifically, Article 3, prohibiting the use of torture, Article 5 on the right to liberty and security, Article 8 on respect for private life, and Article 13 on the right to an effective legal remedy.

The full rulings can be found here: Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania and Al-Nashiri v. Romania.

In the case of al-Nashiri, who faces a capital trial in Guantánamo’s military commission trial system, as the alleged mastermind of the bombing of USS Cole in 2000, in which 17 US sailors died, the Court also found that the Romanian government had denied him the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the ECHR, and had “exposed him to a ‘flagrant denial of justice’ on his transfer to the US,” as Deutsche Welle described it, adding that the judges insisted that the Romanian government should “seek assurances from the US that al-Nashiri would not be sentenced to the death penalty, which in Europe is outlawed.” Abu Zubaydah, it should be noted, has never been charged with anything, even though the torture program was initially created for him after his capture in a house raid in Pakistan in March 2002. At the time, the US authorities regarded him as a senior figure in Al-Qaeda, although they subsequently abandoned that position.

The Court also ordered Lithuania and Romania to pay €100,000 ($117,000) to each man, echoing the amounts the Court ordered Poland to pay to them when similar rulings were issued in 2014, as I wrote about here and here.

Responding the news, Human Rights Watch also pointed out how the Court had also “highlighted the serious deficiencies in the national investigations” by the Romanian and Lithuanian governments, and “urged both countries to conclude their investigations into their involvement in the rendition program without delay and to identify and punish relevant officials.”

Nadim Houry, the terrorism/counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch, said, “The European Court’s rulings highlight that European officials have never faced the music for facilitating the CIA’s illegal torture and rendition program. The lack of accountability, mirrored in the US with the approval of an official involved in the rendition program as the new CIA director, leaves the door open for a return to these illegal practices.”

As Human Rights Watch also noted:

The European Court gave short shrift to the investigations and related diplomatic efforts by Lithuania and Romania over its role in these cases. The Lithuanian prosecutor-general’s office opened a criminal investigation in January 2010 following a parliamentary inquiry that confirmed the existence of two black sites and that Lithuanian airports and airspace had been used for CIA-related flights. One year later, the case was abruptly closed for lack of evidence.

Following the release of the US Senate summary of the still classified 6,700-page report documenting the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the prosecutor general’s office claims to have sent a formal request for legal assistance to US authorities. In April 2015, it announced it was reopening its investigation, which remains ongoing.

Romania opened a criminal investigation in 2012 following a complaint by al-Nashiri but it is still pending and no information has been made public. A parliamentary inquiry that began in December 2005 and concluded in March 2007, found no evidence of a secret CIA prison, illegal prisoner transfers, or Romanian involvement in the CIA’s program. The European Court raised concerns in paragraph 651 of its judgment that the delay in the investigation meant that crucial flight data had been erased.

As Human Rights Watch also noted:

Romania and Lithuania are not the only European countries implicated in the CIA renditions program. The European Court has already condemned Poland for its role in the rendition, detention, and torture of both of these men, Macedonia for its involvement in the CIA’s abduction and illegal transfer of Khaled Al-Masri, a German citizen, and Italy for its role in the abduction of Hassan Mustapha Osama Nasr, an Egyptian cleric better known as Abu Omar, to Egypt.

There is also credible evidence from the United Nations, the European Parliament, and Council of Europe that many other European countries – including Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK – were involved to various degrees. The UK recently made a formal apology to two Libyan nationals in whose rendition it was involved, and Sweden has apologized to and compensated two Egyptian nationals for its involvement in their rendition.

Of these, only Italy has prosecuted anyone in relation to the program – convicting two Italians and, in absentia, 23 US agents for abducting the Egyptian cleric.

In a briefing paper, Helen Duffy, one of Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers, after noting that “Lithuania was the last European state to allow the CIA to operate such a centre on its territory from 2005 to 2006, and one of an estimated 57 states to have participated in the ERP” (the extraordinary rendition and torture programme), pointed that, although the judgment “focused on Lithuanian responsibility … in an unusually long and detailed judgment the Court also provided a comprehensive review of the facts in relation to our client’s case, and ERP in general. As such, it makes an important contribution to the historical record in an area that the Court noted remains ‘shrouded in secrecy.’”

I made my own contribution to piercing that shroud of secrecy in 2009, when I was the lead writer of a UN report into the US’s post-9/11 secret detention program, and I’m delighted that these rulings have been delivered by the European Court of Human Rights, especially as the US, under Donald Trump, has taken such a backwards step on torture with the confirmation as CIA Director of Gina Haspel, who was in charge of the first CIA “black site” in Thailand towards the end of its existence in late 2002, when both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were held there.

Back in 2014, when the European Court of Human Rights condemned the Polish government for its involvement with the CIA “black site” on is soil, it was, of course, impossible not to be struck by how the US itself was as determined to obstruct justice as the European Court was in exposing crimes that America had absolutely no justification in trying to hide.

Four years later, the contrast between the European Court’s exposure of injustice and lawlessness, and the US’s ongoing obstruction is even more pronounced, and urgently needs addressing.

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 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 Scandal: The Released Prisoners Languishing in Secretive Detention in the UAE

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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.

There’s been some disturbing news, via the Washington Post, about former Guantánamo prisoners who were resettled in the United Arab Emirates, between November 2015 and January 2017, after being unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by high-level US government review processes. 

23 men in total were sent to the UAE — five Yemenis in November 2015, 12 Yemenis and three Afghans in August 2016, and another Afghan, a Russian and another Yemeni in January 2017, just before President Obama left office, as he scrambled to release as many prisoners approved for release by his own review processes as possible before Donald Trump took office. 

All were resettled in a third country because the entire US establishment refused to contemplate releasing Yemenis to their home country because of the security situation there, because Congress had, additionally, refused to allow any more Afghan prisoners to be repatriated, and because, in the case of the Russian, it was not considered safe for him to be sent home. 

For the Washington Post, Missy Ryan reported that, despite being unanimously approved for release, because of assessments that they did not pose any kind of significant threat to the US, the men “have disappeared from public view, largely cut off from the outside world since their transfer to a secretive rehabilitation program run by the United Arab Emirates,” adding that they “have had limited contact with their families, some for more than two years, and have not been told when they might be released,” according to their relatives, their attorneys, and current and former US officials who spoke to the Post.

As Missy Ryan explained, “Their uncertain fate exposes the limits of the United States’ ability to track and safeguard inmates resettled overseas” as part of efforts to close the prison, and “highlights the consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to close a State Department office tasked with overseeing Guantánamo matters” — the office of the envoy for Guantánamo closure, which existed from 2013 until the end of Obama’s presidency, and organized the resettlement of former prisoners, as well as monitoring those released.

Just two months ago, the consequences of Trump’s actions were starkly revealed when two former prisoners resettled in Senegal were repatriated to Libya, where they subsequently disappeared into the custody of a militia associated with grave human rights abuses. One of the men had wanted to return to Libya, but the other emphatically did not, and yet, under Trump, the US government no longer has any practical involvement in monitoring former prisoners or making any kind of representation on their behalf. 

Regarding the 23 men sent to the UAE, Missy Ryan stated that, in interviews with attorneys for 19 of the former prisoners, the Post “found that few, if any, of the 23 men transferred to the UAE between 2015 and 2017 have been released, despite what attorneys said were informal assurances that they would be out within about a year.”

At the time of the men’s release, the circumstances of their resettlement were unclear, but it is alarming to hear that they were supposed to be held for “about a year” after their transfer, because they had already gone through rigorous review processes in the US to establish that it was safe for them to be freed, not for them to be transferred to another form of imprisonment. We cannot stress enough how disappointing we find this seemingly endless refusal to actually release men no longer regarded as posing a significant threat to the US. 

And yet, in the Post’s words, the rehabilitation program in the UAE, “[l]ike a well-known program in Saudi Arabia,” was “designed to ensure that prisoners weren’t radicalized,” as well as ensuring that they “could adapt to outside life.” 

Missy Ryan noted that one of the Afghans, Haji Wali Mohammed, an Afghan citizen who had been “held at Guantánamo for 14 years before he boarded a plane in January 2017 and prepared to begin what his attorney was informed would be a temporary rehabilitation program in the UAE,” has become “very hopeless” after more than 16 months at the UAE-run center, according to his son, Abdul Musawer, who has occasionally been allowed to speak with his father by phone. 

From his home in Afghanistan, Abdul Musawer said, “The U.S. government said my father would be freely living with his family, but they lied.”

The Post noted that “some of the men transferred to the UAE report satisfactory conditions and appear to be progressing through a program granting prisoners greater liberties over time,” but that “others remain under restrictions and express mounting distress.”

Lawyers and family members stated that “some of the men have not been permitted to use the Internet or go outside,” adding that “[p]eriodic phone calls to family members are typically limited to five minutes, and are sometimes cut off if the conversation veers into politics or conditions at the center.”

In the case of Ravil Mingazov, the Russian, who was resettled in the UAE in January 2017, his mother, Zukhra Valiulina, said that, in a recent call to his family, he “suggested that conditions were worse than at Guantánamo.” In a phone interview, Valiulina said that her son said, bluntly, “Mama, this is a prison.”

In the case of Obaidullah, an Afghan once put forward for a military commission trial under George W. Bush, whose military lawyers then traveled to Afghanistan to establish that the government had no case against him whatsoever, his civilian attorney, Anne Richardson, explained that his family “was able to visit him early in his time in the UAE,” after his transfer in August 2016, but that “subsequently he was out of touch with his family for more than a year.”

Richardson said, “This seems like indefinite detention all over again,” and Missy Ryan noted that, although prisoners at Guantánamo are quite severely cut off from the outside world, “the U.S. military has allowed periodic visits by lawyers and the Red Cross, and provided certain information to the media. Not so in the UAE.”

Establishing detailed information about conditions in the UAE has generally been quite difficult. Some attorneys said that “their former clients have reported satisfactory conditions to their families, possibly because they are in the later stages of the program,” and some of the former prisoners “have received multiple visits from family members.” Ryan also noted that “UAE authorities have provided visas and money for other families.” It is not known how or why some prisoners are being treated better than others.

As Ryan also explained, however, “No matter the conditions, nearly everything about the UAE program remains secret, even its location. Attorneys and relatives of the men say at least some have reportedly been moved to a new site in recent months.” 

The Post also noted that UAE officials refused to respond to requests for information about the former prisoners, and a State Department spokeswoman only provided a woolly hope that the former prisoners “would be integrated into their new countries.”

Some of the attorneys have said that “they have been unable to get even basic information” about their former clients. As the Post explained, “In letters this year to the State Department and the UAE’s Foreign Ministry, several lawyers requested the men be visited by their families and the Red Cross. They also asked for a time frame for their release and ‘clarity on the rights they will have.’” They added that previous entreaties “have either been met with silence or with contradictory instructions.”

The Post also explained that “Rep. Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, blamed the Trump administration for shutting down the State Department’s Guantánamo office, which negotiated the transfer agreements and followed up on resettled detainees.” As Rep. Engel said, “The U.S. government made commitments to protect our security and the rights of former detainees. On both counts, the administration is utterly failing to meet its responsibilities.”

That is undoubtedly true, and former envoys Daniel Fried and Lee Wolosky have been critical of the Trump administration’s position, as we explained in an article in April last year, Shutting the Door on Guantánamo: The Significance of Donald Trump’s Failure to Appoint New Guantánamo Envoys. More recently, after the Libya fiasco, both men spoke out about how Trump’s position was dangerous for national security, as well as being diplomatically disastrous — see here and here.

Attorneys for the former prisoners told the Post that “they were never permitted to see the agreements but were told by the State Department that the men would cycle through the UAE program and gradually be granted greater freedoms, at first inside and then outside the facility.” 

Gary Thompson, who represented Ravil Mingazov, and previously “represented another Guantánamo prisoner who went through the Saudi program before being released,” said, “We felt that, because this was the established practice, this was great. However, weeks became months and months became over a year. It started to slip away, and then calls to his family became very brief and sounded funny. We just can’t figure out what’s happening.”

Former officials told the Post that the UAE, a close U.S. ally, “agreed to take the detainees and establish the rehabilitation center as a favor to President Barack Obama,” but those who worked on the transfers said that “the extended detention in the UAE violates the spirit of that arrangement.” 

One former official said, “It is one thing to put the guys in a rehab program, or otherwise evaluate them for a short period, but this seems like the UAE is imprisoning them on behalf of the U.S. government. That wasn’t the deal and isn’t right.”

Other former officials apparently “voiced confidence” that the UAE authorities “would make appropriate judgments about the inmates’ readiness to be released,” but as I stressed above, these are men whose appropriateness for release had already been established by high-level US government review processes, and it simply shouldn’t be the case that the UAE is imposing yet another obstacle in a seemingly never-ending set of obstacles to the men ever being granted freedom. 

Previously, I have compared getting released from Guantánamo to being let out of an airlock — but only into another airlock — with this process repeated apparently ad infinitum. It is unjust and unfair, and it should be brought to an end with all the men released and allowed to start the process of rebuilding their lives. 

Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, explained, as the Post described it, that “U.S. law did not impose any obligations on the government once detainees were no longer in its custody.” As he said, “Once we cut ties, there really aren’t remedies under U.S. law.”

Gary Thompson added that “the situation was even more frustrating than Guantánamo.” As he described it, “Before, we could at least file a petition for habeas corpus, we could at least get on a plane and go to Guantánamo. We at least had procedures, even if they were kangaroo procedures. This is deeply frustrating because there is no process.”

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 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.

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?

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

 

Please also note that my books The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, dealing with the topics discussed in this article, are still in print and available to buy from me. And please also feel free to check out the music of my band The Four Fathers.

For anyone attuned to the currents of modern British history, today, June 1, has a baleful resonance.

33 years ago, on June 1, 1985, the full weight of the state — Margaret Thatcher’s state — descended on a convoy of vehicles in a field in Wiltshire, in a one-sided confrontation in which around 420 travellers — New Age travellers, as they were sometimes referred to at the time — were attacked with serious and almost entirely unprovoked violence by 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD, armed with truncheons and riot shields. 

The violence that took place that day was witnessed by few media outlets, most of which had been told to stay away, as the state prepared to deal with the latest “enemy within,” so designated by Margaret Thatcher, drunk on power, who, over the previous year, had dealt a crippling blow to Britain’s mining industry, and was now sending her paramilitarised police force out to Wiltshire to do the same to a small group of anarchists, self-styled modern gypsies, green activists and peace protestors. 

The state’s excuse for the violence of June 1, 1985 was that the convoy was travelling to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th free festival in the fields opposite the ancient sun temple, and had ignored an injunction preventing them from doing so.

The Stonehenge Free Festival, started in the first flush of widespread counter-cultural dissent in the UK in the early 1970s, which also saw a civil servant prankster, Bill ‘Ubi’ Dwyer, set up the Windsor Free Festival in the Queen’s backyard, had grown throughout the late 70s and into the 80s from its humble origins as the brainchild of another eccentric individual, Wally Hope, into a month-long anarchic gathering, attracting tens of thousands of people, the centrepiece of a season of free festivals that was an alternative economy for the core members of the travelling community.

Although the festivals’ alleged desecration of Stonehenge and its surroundings was Margaret Thatcher’s excuse for decommissioning the convoy with such violence on June 1, 1985, there were other, more significant reasons that the establishment, for the most part, didn’t want to discuss: the fact that the travellers’ movement consisted largely of young people who had bought old vehicles cheaply and had taken to the road because of chronic unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain; the fact that the travellers’ very existence provided a potent challenge to long-standing notions of land ownership in the UK; and the inconvenient truth that the travellers were also engaged in challenging the British state’s approach to militarism and the environment. 

In the early 80s, a contingent of travellers — the Peace Convoy — had supported the women of Greenham Common, who set up a permanent women’s peace camp to oppose Thatcher’s plans to allow the US to establish a cruise missile base on UK soil, at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire. At the same time, a second peace camp was also established at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, where plans were announced for a second cruise missile base. In the summer of 1984, travellers joined that peace camp, creating the Rainbow Village, consisting of a mixture of environmental activists, travellers and Quakers. Environmentalism, alternative energy and opposition to nuclear power were also key elements of the ethos of the time, widely embraced by the travellers.

Thatcher recognised that the state couldn’t be seen to inflict mass physical violence on the women of Greenham Common, but the peace camp at Molesworth included men, and so, on February 6, 1985, 1,500 troops, the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history (symbolically led by the defense secretary Michael Heseltine) evicted the camp. The travellers were subsequently harried from site to site across southern England until the final showdown at the Beanfield. 

Traumatised, and with their homes — their vehicles — destroyed, the Stonehenge convoy never recovered from the Beanfield, and an annual militarised exclusion zone around Stonehenge prevented the revival of the free festival, but elsewhere Thatcher underestimated the counter-cultural spirit of 1980s Britain, as a new recreational drug, Ecstasy, arrived on the scene, fuelling a brand-new youth movement, the rave scene, which rapidly began attracting millions of people to illegal parties in warehouses and fields across the country, in defiance of new laws passed after the Beanfield, in the Public Order Act of 1986, which were designed to impose restrictions on “public assemblies.”

Raves and road protests

Prevented from travelling freely around the country, would-be dissenters also came up with a creative response that the state never foresaw. Instead of travelling around, which was fraught with problems, they stayed in one place, targetting road expansion projects that were characterised as an assault on the spirit of the land, and setting up protest camps, beginning with Twyford Down in 1992, where an extension to the M3 was planned, and, in many ways, culminating in 1996 with massive resistance to the nine miles of the A34 Newbury bypass in Berkshire. Along the way, there was huge resistance to the M11 Link Road in east London, which destroyed numerous streets and public spaces, and although almost all the resistance movements failed to prevent the new roads from being built, the government largely abandoned its road expansion plans in November 1995, cancelling 300 planned projects.

As dissent grew, the remains of the traveller movement mixed with the rave scene, creating hybrid events that culminated in the symbolic revival of the Stonehenge spirit at Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire over the Whit bank holiday weekend in May 1992, a counter-cultural melting pot attended by tens of thousands of people. 

The road protest movement also drew from the rave scene’s energy, with such notable creations as Reclaim the Streets, which took back roads as public spaces, and, on one memorable occasion in July 1996, occupied the M41 motorway in west London, with activists drilling holes in the tarmac and planting trees.

The response to Castlemorton in particular was the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which further clamped down on trespass and the right of assembly. The heavy-handed legislation, which, notoriously, gave the police powers to shut down events featuring music “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”, undermined the rave scene, and, more depressingly, legitimised its wholesale commercialisation, leading to what Vice magazine, in an article on the Beanfield in 2015, described as paving the way for “your V Festivals, ‘Morning Gloryville’ raves and nightclubs that charge £20 on the door and £5 for a bottle of water.” 

Nevertheless, dissent remained wilfully unstifled, as the anti-globalisation movement, which arose in response to the rise of transnational capitalism, and, of course, brought people together across national borders, became the focus for riotous dissent in the late 90s, with one notorious day of action, the Global Carnival Against Capital, on Friday June 18, 1999 (also known as J18), seeing the mass occupation of the City of London alongside other events around the world.

However, by 2001, unfortunately, the tide was turning. In Genoa, in July 2001, Italian police murdered a protestor, and just two months later, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the human rights and civil liberties landscape enormously, effectively neutering violent or threatening dissent of any kind, and providing cover not only for an enforced culture of general obedience, but also for the creation of a cynical climate of fear, endlessly reinforced via the compliant mainstream media.

The shallow, materialistic new world order

With the quelling of dissent, the main preoccupation of the new cross-party power establishments in the West, including, in particular, the Labour Party in the UK (the New Labour government of Tony Blair) was to rewrite the basis of existence in what, in many ways, must be seen as the ultimate fulfilment of Margaret Thatcher’s dream: one with a neutered underclass, with everything done as much as possible to enable the rich to get richer, and with shallow materialism and greed as the drivers of the economy, and the only arbiters of value and success in society as a whole. 

From when travellers broke out of the despair of working class unemployment in the 1980s, this blunt new world of rapacious capitalism has not only reinforced joblessness, it has also involved seizing people’s homes through economic strangulation or actual physical destruction, creating a housing bubble that has now been in existence, propped up by successive governments and the banks, for 20 years, with only one minor blip following the global financial crash of 2008, when criminal bankers crashed the economy, and had to be bailed out by their victims.

Accompanying the strangling of individuals via rents and mortgages, the establishment is also physically destroying social housing, levelling council estates to replace them with unaffordable properties bought up by foreign investors, and determined to keep the poorer half of society so suppressed and so economically challenged that they can’t even think about unrest, let alone engage in it.

And, accompanying this economic rape, the establishment has also been engaged, for most of the time since the last exuberance of widespread dissent in the 1990s, with efforts to exterminate any notion of class consciousness, replacing it instead with misplaced anger at the EU, and dangerous hostility towards immigrants. 

The result has been disturbingly successful — the EU referendum in June 2016, in which a small majority of those who could be bothered to vote called for us to leave the EU in a referendum that was only advisory but that has since been treated as “the will of the people” by deranged isolationist Tories and the mostly complicit mainstream media. Predictably, accompanying this result, the UK has also seen an attendant rise in racism and xenophobia. 

Every EU national I meet has been subjected to abuse — verbal or otherwise — since the referendum, and the isolationist vitriol seems to know no limits. Islamophobia, ever-present since 9/11, remains ramped up, permanently reinforced by the media, traditional racism is ever-prevalent through the general flint-heartedness towards the victims of the greatest humanitarian crisis in our lifetimes — a tsunami of refugees, mostly created by our own foreign policy decisions, and our ever-rapacious economic exploitation of weaker economies — and even skin colour is no longer a barrier to prejudice, with Eastern Europeans targeted just as ruthlessly as traditional non-white victims of racism. 

Racism has never been even vaguely suppressed, but 33 years ago, at the time of the travellers’ movement, the free festival scene and the Battle of the Beanfield, there were major cultural movements against it, as well for women’s rights, and for gay rights as well, and I regard the progress made on all three fronts as the three great achievements in the lifetimes of those of us who grew up between the late 60s and the 1980s. 

At the time of punk, we were also listening to militant roots reggae music, and British reggae bands like Steel Pulse and Misty in Roots were very much part of the festival scene, just as dub music became, essentially, part of the very DNA of the music of the counter-culture.

I wouldn’t want to say that all music has subsequently been neutered, but much of it has, sadly, as materialism, wealth and status have become the dominant cultural indicators of success. Although it’s invigorating to see a grime artist like Stormzy challenge the government for its inaction regarding last June’s Grenfell Tower fire at this year’s Brit Awards, in general it’s fair to say, I think, that consumption has replaced revolt, and selfishness has replaced solidarity.

From today’s perspective, not only do free mass gatherings now seem inconceivable, as the festival season gets underway, with its multitude of commercial festivals for those with money (often literally taking place in fortresses erected specifically to keep everyone else out), but resistance to the type of exclusion that prompted people to get on the road in the 70s and 80s also seems remote, even as those in social housing have their homes knocked down, and more and more people are forced into the arms of private landlords, who are free to exploit them with almost no restraints whatsoever on their greed or their behaviour.

Rise up!

Surely something of the spirit of dissent still exists, to rise up if the current culture of ever-increasing inequality and class cleansing continues, as it seems certain to do if it continues to meet no resistance. For decades, we fought back, tooth and nail, against our exploiters and our destroyers — oppressors from the ruling class in our own country, and from those who, like Margaret Thatcher, despised the working class, without being so gullible that we would divert our energy onto invented enemies from elsewhere. Nothing has fundamentally changed, except we have been encouraged to forget ourselves, and to look everywhere except where we should to see who is responsible for the state of the world, and the increasingly parlous state of the UK. 

Can we wake up, and soon? I certainly hope so. As Shelley wrote in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, written in 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre, in which 15 people were killed by the state:

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many — they are few!

If you haven’t yet seen it, do watch ‘Operation Solstice’, the 1991 documentary about the Battle of the Beanfield, and the subsequent trial, directed by Gareth Morris and Neil Goodwin:

Note: For more on the Beanfield, see my 2009 article for the Guardian, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield, and my accompanying article, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, which provides excerpts from The Battle of the Beanfield. Also see The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, a prominent traveller who died six years ago, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society, Radio: On Eve of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, Andy Worthington Discusses the Battle of the Beanfield and Dissent in the UK, It’s 28 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Crushed Travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield, Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers, It’s 29 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield, and the World Has Changed Immeasurably, It’s 30 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Trashed the Travellers’ Movement at the Battle of the Beanfield, It’s Now 31 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield: Where is the Spirit of Dissent in the UK Today? and, most recently, Never Trust the Tories: It’s 32 Years Today Since the Intolerable Brutality of the Battle of the Beanfield.

For my previous reflections on Stonehenge and the summer solstice from 2008 to 2015, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart, Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice: On the 28th Anniversary of the Last Free Festival, Check Out “Festivals Britannia”, Memories of Youth and the Need for Dissent on the 29th Anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival, 30 Years On from the Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Where is the Spirit of Dissent?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice, 30 Years After the Battle of the Beanfield and Summer Solstice 2017: Reflections on Free Festivals and the Pagan Year 33 Years After the Last Stonehenge Festival.

Also see my article on Margaret Thatcher’s death, “Kindness is Better than Greed”: Photos, and a Response to Margaret Thatcher on the Day of Her Funeral.

[image error]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 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.

2,000 Views of The Four Fathers’ Video ‘Grenfell’, Remembering Those Who Died and Calling for Those Responsible to be Held Accountable

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Today is 350 days since the defining UK-based horror story of 2017 — the fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in north Kensington, in west London, on June 14, 2017, killing 71 people, and leading to the death of a 72nd person this January. You can find profiles of all 72 victims here.

Last summer, I wrote a song about the fire for my band The Four Fathers, lamenting those whose lives were so “needlessly lost”, and calling for those responsible — “those who only count the profit not the human cost” — to be held accountable. We first played it live, at a benefit gig for a housing campaign in Tottenham, in September, recorded it with a German TV crew at the end of October, and released the video in December, and we have continued to play it live across the capital and elsewhere, making a small contribution to the effort to refuse to allow those responsible for the disaster to move on without a serious change in the culture that allowed it to happen. 

That culture — cost-cutting in the search for profits, rather than ensuring the safety of tenants and leaseholders — came from central government, from Kensington and Chelsea Council, from the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which had taken over the management of all the borough’s social housing, and from the various contractors involved in the lethal refurbishment of the tower, when its structural integrity was fatally undermined.

Yesterday, we reached something of a milestone with the video, reaching 2,000 views on YouTube and Facebook. If you haven’t yet heard the song, do check it out, and please share it if you appreciate its sentiments. We are finally planning to record it in a studio soon — and hope that will enable its message to get out to a wider audience. 

For the video, see below (and you can find it on Facebook here):

As for accountability, the official inquiry into the fire, set up by Theresa May, only began last week, and has, to date, focused its attention not only those responsible for the fire, but on the heart of its impact — the lives of those who died, delivered in profoundly affecting testimony by the survivors. For detailed daily reports by the Guardian, see Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five, Day Six and the final day of tributes today.

For a country still riven by issues of race and class, and with the lamentable recent upsurge in anti-immigrant sentiment, the tributes have shown the wonderfully rich and caring lives of so many of the victims — real people, not statistics in lazy, biased reports that try to tar anyone in social housing as inferior to owner-occupiers, and, generally, as some sort of criminal underclass. 

The Grenfell tenants’ stories reveal them as being mostly recent arrivals to the UK, over the last 30 years, but the details of those stories also puncture the groundless anti-immigrant sentiment that has been aggressively promoted by right-wing politicians and a compliant or complacent media since well before the run-up to the EU referendum two years ago, and which has remained fundamentally unchallenged ever since, even though it is both inaccurate and offensive. Here were hard-working, decent people, many of them not provided with any assistance from the state, but renting from leaseholders who had bought flats in the tower under Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ legislation.

Unfortunately, not everyone under scrutiny has seen fit to attend the inquiry to hear the tributes. Representatives of the council have turned up, but survivors have complained that government ministers and executives of the companies involved in the tower’s refurbishment have failed to show up.

As the Guardian described it, “The housing secretary, James Brokenshire, and the housing minister, Dominic Raab, have been absent and have no plans to attend the inquiry. The same is true of Nick Hurd, the Home Office minister who is the main government contact for survivors and families and friends of the victims. Executives from Rydon, the company that refurbished the tower with combustible cladding, are not coming. Neither are those from the cost consultant Artelia, which was involved in ‘value engineering’ by cutting costs.”

Sid-Ali Atmani, who lived on the 15th floor, said, “If they came to listen to the bereaved, about how they lived, their families, their children and education they will have some feeling of empathy. They have been looking at things professionally and politically. If they came they would see it emotionally. They have missed an opportunity. This is the most important part of the inquiry in terms of understanding what really went wrong.”

Rydon and Artelia have sent lawyers to the inquiry, with a spokesman for Rydon saying that the company “did not want there to be any risk that we would contribute to moving the media focus away from the victims, the survivors, the bereaved and their friends and relatives”, and Artelia saying that “it was not thought appropriate to send executives”, but Chris Imafidon, who worked as a mentor to children at Grenfell, disagreed with their position.

“They would see the fruits of their labour if they came,” he said. “It would show them the impact of what they worked hard on. Some of them would probably feel they needed to resign. None of them have seen these people or know they have nephews, nieces and grandchildren. They could see the emotion, the widows, the orphans, and understand why the inquiry is happening. No matter how hard-hearted you are you will empathise and that human feeling could affect how you interact with the inquiry.”

As the inquiry continues, we need to hear more from those responsible about their understanding of the gravity of what took place, and how their behaviour needs to change. As I describe it in ‘Grenfell’: 

The tragedy of Grenfell

Where all the warnings were ignored

Is that our neo-liberal leaders

Dispensed with safety needs

And so the tower was refurbished

But in a way so deeply flawed

That they created an inferno

In the crucible of their greed

Note: To show solidarity with the Grenfell survivors, and the victims of the fire, please come along, if you can, on Saturday June 16, to ‘One year on: Justice for Grenfell Solidarity March’, organised by Justice4Grenfell and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) which runs from 12 noon to 4pm outside 10 Downing Street.

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 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.

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

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A few months ago, I was delighted to be approached by Pavel Troughton, a student at London College of Communication (LCC), part of the University of the Arts London (UAL), who was writing an article about protest music for the student magazine Artefact. I promoted it at the time via social media, but I never got round to commenting on it here, so I thought now would be a good time, as my band The Four Fathers continue to play protest music, and to try to gauge what interest there is, or isn’t, in music that challenges the political realities of modern life, via the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ gigs I’ve been organising, our appearances with bands like the Commie Faggots, who play theatrical singalong protest music, and our recordings, available via Bandcamp.

I met Pavel Troughton at a cafe near my home in Brockley, south east London, and we had a wide-ranging discussion about the role of protest music today, which is of great interest to me, as I grew up at a significant time for protest music, as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s, not only following punk bands, post-punk bands and the Two-Tone movement, but also drawing on protest music from the 60s and early 70s as well. 

In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and with the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s so comparatively recent, it was difficult not to be politicised at that time. Some of the punks pretended to be apolitical, but really that was an affectation. Of course, many musicians only pretended to be political to get laid or get rich (or both), as had also been true in the 60s and early 70s (does anyone really think the colossally materialistic hornbag Mick Jagger genuinely had any interest in being a ‘Street Fighting Man’, for example?), but political engagement and counter-cultural impulses were genuine in this period, and elements of that effortlessly survived into the 90s, when, after Margaret Thatcher’s eventual fall from grace, John Major struggled to maintain control of a country in which dissent was widespread, via the iconoclastic hedonism of the rave scene and the extraordinary pagan and anarchic energy of the road protest movement. For more on the above, feel free to check out my books Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, which have chapters on this period in modern British history.

The biggest change, as I have frequently lamented over the last 20 years, came in 1997, with the election of Tony Blair and the start of the ‘New Labour’ project, which pretended to be of the people but was actually an old-fashioned project of corporate expansion and the creation of individual wealth that would, for the most part, have made Margaret Thatcher proud. And while the anti-globalisation movement was big at the end of the 90s, mass disruptive dissent was largely seen off by the clampdowns of the ”war on terror”, cynically imposed as a method of societal control after 9/11, while the corporations worked assiduously to remove politics from what passed for western culture, with the result that we can be left asking what has happened to protest music in general.

Troughton spoke to me about two of my recent songs — ‘Grenfell’, about the entirely preventable fire in west London last June, in which I lament those who lost their lives and call for those responsible — “those who only count the profit not the human cost” — to be held accountable, and ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, about Brexit. A video of ’Grenfell’ is available here on YouTube and here on Facebook, and it currently has nearly 2,000 views. ‘I Want My Country Back’ is becoming a live favourite, but we haven’t recorded either song in a studio yet, although we hope to do so soon.

I was also pleased to be able to talk to Troughton about Lowkey, the British Iraqi rapper, based in the Grenfell area, who has refused to be co-opted by the mainstream media, and has cultivated his own extraordinary following independently. His powerful song ‘Ghosts of Grenfell’, with its equally powerful video, has had nearly 450,000 views on YouTube, and over 1.3m views on Facebook. 

Troughton also spoke to Anamik Saha, a lecturer at Goldsmith’s College, who pointed out that we also need to reflect on music that is political not necessarily though its explicit content, but through its context. He cites grime music as an example. As Troughton puts it, “this music is angry and is often about violence and money”, but “Saha argues that it’s these very traits which define the sound as political”, stating, “It’s the sound itself and how it represents rebellion and resistance or at least the voice of the marginalised.” 

Nevertheless, when Stormzy used his position to deliver a very public rebuke to Theresa May and the Tory government for their treatment of the Grenfell survivors at the Brit Awards show in February, his freestyling diatribe was, essentially, a piece of extremely high-profile protest music, and he then followed this up by encouraging his followers to sign a petition to the government urging additional members from the local community to be appointed to the official inquiry, which led to the petition being successful, and Theresa May being obliged to bow to to the community’s demands. 

I was also pleased to be able to explain to Troughton how, as he put it, I thought there had been “a big shift in mood, musically, politically and racially” in the US since Donald Trump became president, and mentioned to him how, when I I was in the States the night before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, “I had these friends that put together this organisation called ‘Refuse Fascism’, about what they perceive is the threat of Donald Trump and of Mike Pence. The ‘Refuse Fascism’ organisation put on a concert with a load of New York’s top jazz musicians.” I explained that “the majority of those musicians weren’t white”, and how “I could see that they knew what it meant to have a white racist in the White House.”

As Troughton described it, “Just like that, a sombre atmosphere descended across the country. The jazz musicians Worthington mentioned couldn’t have been a better metaphor for the rest of society. This is even more evident when looking at the size of the list of the musicians who refused to perform at the President’s inauguration. From Kiss to Kanye West, musicians were mirroring the thoughts of the people who were generally rejecting the new President, granted from the more left side of the spectrum politically.“

He added, “This throwback of racism doesn’t stop in America. It’s sad to say that we too in the United Kingdom have opted out of our self-made problems by blaming international immigrants. Worthington wrote the satirical song ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back).’” He explained that I pointed out that, “Since the 1980s communities around the UK have been treated with contempt by the government”, and he added, “Worthington understands that these people have a right to be angry but this anger was then directed at foreigners coming into the country, because immigration rates have risen over the past years, whereas the anger should have been directed at the government”, whose neo-liberal policies and the cynical austerity programme implemented after the global financial crash of 2008 are actually responsible for the poor jobs, the unemployment and the poverty that are at the root of so many people’s discontent.

Troughton also spoke to me about the influence of smartphones and social media on activism and political awareness. I told him, “We live in a very atomised, diverted time, everyone’s got a phone, you don’t have to be bored anymore.” As Houghton put it, “This means people are less worried about what is happening around them, leaving the decision making to a very [small] group of people. This produces a younger generation following social media idols who glamorise wealth over promoting a positive message.” As I put it, “I think a lot of the thrust of popular culture is about materialism and getting rich and that really isn’t going to change the world.”

Troughton added, “You only have to have a look at the charts to see this. Particularly the trap scene coming out of Atlanta, these guys are showing wealth and status unlike any other. Tirhakah Love describes this attitude in hip-hop as nihilistic. This is the music of influence right now breaking streaming records constantly. Just look at ‘Numb’ by 21 Savage with the lyrics, ‘Numb the pain with the money.’ 64 million streams on Spotify alone.”

I also spoke to Troughton about what he called “a story of the reality of the music business, perhaps a blockade in the way of true political and cultural reflection”, explaining how friends of mine in the US, the Bronx-based rappers and spoken word artists the Peace Poets, wrote a song called ‘I Can’t Breathe’ after the killing, by police, of Eric Garner, a black man living on Staten Island.

‘I Can’t Breathe’ became a huge grassroots anthem against police brutality, as the Black Lives Matter movement took off, and I was told that Beyoncé picked up on it, and was intending to sample it, and to use it in a song. But then, on July 7, 2016, a lone black gunman, Micah Xavier Johnson, shot and killed five police officers and wounded nine others, and suddenly the Black Lives Matter movement was cynically tarnished, and Beyoncé dropped her plans because, as I put it, “suddenly it became politically contentious.” 

I added, “I used this example because it’s indicative of the power that the corporate music world has. Don’t do anything contentious because it will affect the money they’re all making.”

In general, I remain disappointed that so much of what passes for music culture in the UK — and generally throughout the West — is so devoid of political content. I’m enthusiastic about underground movements that don’t shy away from political engagement, either explicitly or as part of a general contextualised response to, say, poverty and police harassment, although I do worry about the ever-present temptation that the promise of wealth offers, which, in general, makes it increasingly hard for artists to “keep it real”, however much they pretend that this is not the case.

Do get in touch if you’re interested in discussing any of the above further, if you’d like to book The Four Fathers for a gig, and/or if you’re interested in putting on political gigs in general, featuring a variety of artists.

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 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.

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

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At the start of this month, Donald Trump transferred his first prisoner out of Guantánamo, the Saudi citizen Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated as part of a plea deal arranged in his military commission proceedings in February 2014. However, he did not return home a free man, as, in his homeland, he will serve the remainder of a 13-year sentence agreed in his plea deal.

As I explained in an article at the time, “Under the terms of that plea deal, al-Darbi acknowledged his role in an-Qaeda attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen’s coast in 2002, and was required to testify against other prisoners at Guantánamo as part of their military commission trials, which he did last summer, and was supposed to be released on February 20 this year. However, February 20 came and went, and al-Darbi wasn’t released, a situation that threatened to undermine the credibility of the military commission plea deals.”

Al-Darbi’s transfer saved the only functioning part of the otherwise broken military commission trial system, which is incapable of delivering justice in an actual trial, given that the men in question, although accused of serious crimes, were lavishly subjected to torture over a number of years, and the use of torture, to be blunt, fundamentally undermines any possibility of a fair and just trial.

Looked at another way, al-Darbi’s transfer also highlighted the glaring injustice of Guantánamo, something that has actually been apparent since the dying days of the administration of George W. Bush, when Salim Hamdan, a hapless driver for Osama bin Laden, was freed after the military judge in his military commission trial, recognizing that he had no operational role whatsoever in Al-Qaeda, gave him a short sentence that included time served, and that led to his repatriation in November 2008.

When he was sentenced, I wrote, in an article entitled, Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo, that, “If one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers gets a sentence of seven years and one month in total (five and a half years plus the 19 months of his imprisonment before he was charged) … it is surely now inconceivable that those who planned the whole post-9/11 detention policy can … continue to hold any of the 130 or so prisoners in Guantánamo who have not been cleared [for release], and who are not scheduled to face a trial by Military Commission, beyond the end of the year.” I added, “With this sentence, it appears that the death knell has just been sounded for the whole malign Guantánamo project.”

That was, in hindsight, absurdly optimistic, despite being unerringly logical, because logic has no place at Guantánamo.

What happened instead was that, in fits and starts, and with little evident enthusiasm for tackling decisively the chronic injustice of Guantánamo, despite promising to close it, President Obama undertook two high-level government review processes and released nearly 200 men, leaving 41 men still held under Donald Trump. With al-Darbi’s transfer, that number has dropped to 40, with nine men still involved in the military commission trail system, five approved for release but still held, and 26 others in that limbo of ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial that is so disturbingly emblematic of the US’s post-9/11 flight from the accepted norms of detention and justice.

Reflecting on al-Darbi’s transfer a week after it took place, the British citizen and former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg wrote an insightful column for Middle East Eye that I’m cross-posting below because it captures other aspects of the injustice of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” in general. Begg was imprisoned alongside al-Darbi in Afghanistan, and specifically at Bagram, the former Soviet site that became the US’s main prison, a horrendously brutal environment in which at least ten prisoners were killed.

It was there that Begg met Omar Khadr, the Canadian child prisoner, and Damien Corsetti, the guard whose nickname was “Monster” and the “King of Torture.” Corsetti was, eventually, one of a handful of guards court-martialed for “dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person,” not only at Bagram, but also at Abu Ghraib, and the case against him was based primarily on al-Darbi’s allegations about what Corsetti said and did to him.

A military jury found him not guilty, and Corsetti was later apologetic about his role in the “war on terror,” but in truth, as Moazzam Begg notes, he “was a low-ranking officer who was part of a far greater machine that didn’t only justify torture — it revelled in it.” Corsetti was a Specialist, serving in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion under Lt. Carolyn Wood. She introduced the use of torture techniques on the prisoners in a bid to improve intelligence, and on her watch at least two prisoners died, but those ideas did not originate with her, but higher up the chain of command, — with Donald Rumsfeld and Guantánamo commander Geoffrey Miller — and in fact Wood’s work was so well received by her superiors that she and her team were transferred to Abu Ghraib, where they were implicated in the scandal that became public in April 2004. Nevertheless. Wood was awarded two Bronze Stars by the military for the “services” she provided in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Begg didn’t get to meet al-Darbi in Guantánamo, but he makes the valid point that, despite “having undergone 16 years of torture, the time [he] served will not count” against his sentence, as he is not due for release until 2027. He also notes what I mentioned above, and have been mentioning since the sentencing of Salim Hamdan in 2008 — that “those who have not been charged with a crime in over 16 years remain imprisoned indefinitely,” while “those who plead guilty to crimes go home.”

Begg also notes that “his crimes had little, if anything, to do with the US,” which is correct with regards to the attack on a French oil tanker, but it doesn’t absolve him of responsibility of that crime, if he was indeed involved in it. What it does show, however, is how, in the general lawlessness of the “war on terror,” the US had little or no regard for traditional jurisdictions. Al-Darbi, on this basis, should have been prosecuted in France, and in the case of Hambali, a “high-value detainee” allegedly responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Bali in 2002, in which 202 people died, primarily Australian tourists. Hambali should have ended up either in Australian or Indonesian custody, but instead the US kidnapped him with Thai support in 2003, so that they could torture him in a CIA “black site.” Shamefully, it remains uncertain if Hambali will ever face prosecution.

I hope you have time to read Moazzam Begg’s article, and will share it if you find it useful.

The ludicrous notion of justice in Guantánamo

By Moazzam Begg, Middle East Eye, May 11, 2018

The first prisoner released on Donald Trump’s watch has been repatriated to Saudi Arabia to serve the remainder of his term. The years of torture he endured in Guantánamo will not count towards this sentence.

In February last year, I sat down to have lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Birmingham with three men. They were lawyers in the US military involved with the Office of Military Commissions’ Guantánamo Bay defence team for Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi national imprisoned in the detention camp since 2002.

The military lawyers had come to discuss their client’s case, and whether anything I knew could help him. The last time I saw Darbi was at the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan in the summer of 2002, before he was shipped off to Cuba.

The Bagram prison was originally a warehouse built by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Markings and writings in Russian were still visible around the building. The striking thing about seeing US soldiers everywhere was the realisation that Afghanistan, among the poorest nations on earth, was occupied by the strongest nations on earth. And yet, both were to fail, militarily and morally.

Buried alive in a mass grave

Just before Darbi arrived, I remember meeting an Afghan prisoner called Sharif. Walking, talking or even looking in the “wrong” direction meant being disciplined — which included being hooded and shackled to the top of a door, where we remained suspended for several hours, or even days. Nonetheless, Sharif and I managed to speak, using our newly discovered talent for ventriloquism-like conversations, so that our lips were not seen to move.

Sharif told me how his father had been buried alive in a mass grave by the Soviet army, right here in Bagram. After having encountered American brutality himself, however, he still hadn’t decided who he despised more.

Sharif was released shortly afterwards, but the influx of new prisoners continued on almost a daily basis. One prisoner I couldn’t forget was Darbi.

On the day I first saw him, he was being dragged about by soldiers as they screamed abuse at him and made him pile up crates of water bottles, with his hands and legs shackled. He didn’t react, except to do as he was told. But, no sooner than he’d managed to assemble a stack of crates high enough, the soldiers kicked them down and made him do it again. This went on for hours, until he was exhausted and taken back to his cell for a short rest. Soon enough, they were back again to repeat the process. This was Darbi’s introduction to the US military system. Far more was to follow.

Drained, exhausted and depressed

Darbi and I had initially been in separate cells, but I could usually see what was happening in adjacent cells. Our communal cages were divided by only rolls of razor wire, as armed guards patrolled both in front and behind. Darbi was eventually moved to my cell, which I was sharing at the time with Canadian teen Omar Khadr. Despite suffering horrific gunshot injuries and being a child, Khadr was put through the same procedure as Darbi. Although Khadr’s treatment was shocking and inexcusable, I understood what caused their hatred: He was accused of killing a US soldier.

Darbi, on the other hand, was captured in Azerbaijan after being accused of involvement in the bombing of a French-owned, Malaysian-registered oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, in which one crew member was killed. The dead man wasn’t an American.

Mistreatment of prisoners was usually justified based on a concoction of half-truths and exaggerations. Soldiers told me that Darbi was a Saudi special forces operative who’d gone rogue and joined al-Qaeda.

When I first arrived at Bagram, prisoners were not permitted any movement. We literally had to sit or lie on the floor all day. After some discussions, I managed to convince the guards to allow us 30 minutes of daily exercise. Watching Darbi during exercise time, I remember forming a rather low opinion of Saudi special forces — until he told me the rumours were untrue. He’d served in the Saudi National Guard for a short term and left.

Darbi was often taken for interrogation and would return, like most of us, drained, exhausted and depressed. He told me that one of the interrogators had removed his own trousers and threatened to rape him.

‘King of torture’

When able, I would strike up conversation with soldiers, mainly to try and engage and educate them, so that they could see our humanity. One of these soldiers was an interrogator who, I later learned, was an Italian-American nicknamed “Monster” and “king of torture”. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the interrogator Darbi was talking about.

The sounds of screaming — both prisoners and interrogators — would often reverberate around the prison, but I’d never assumed that this thoughtful, easygoing soldier was one of them. Damien Corsetti would pass my cell and speak to me about history, politics, religion and beyond. He even gave me a book I still have, Joseph Heller’s classic antiwar novel, Catch 22. He was quite cordial with me, but he wasn’t involved in my interrogations.

Years later, Corsetti was brought up on charges of dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person in Bagram and Abu Ghraib, Iraq, where he was redeployed.

Shortly after my release from Guantánamo, I was approached by Corsetti’s lawyers, asking if I’d be a character witness for him. I wrote about this strange request in the New York Times. Corsetti was eventually found not guilty and later joined the Iraq Veterans Against the War. His testimony is featured alongside my own in the Oscar-winning documentary ‘Taxi to the Dark Side.’

In truth, Corsetti was a low-ranking officer who was part of a far greater machine that didn’t only justify torture — it revelled in it.

Plea bargaining

As for Darbi, I never saw him again after Bagram, but I remained in contact with his family and lawyers after I was released. In 2012, under the farcical Guantánamo military commissions process, Darbi was charged with involvement in the oil tanker attack and, in 2014, as part of a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty. His deal included giving witness testimony against some of the remaining 40 Guantánamo prisoners.

In return, Darbi was given a 13-year sentence — but despite having undergone 16 years of torture, the time he’s served will not count. Instead, he has to serve the remainder of his sentence in a prison in Saudi Arabia, where he was finally repatriated last week. He’s due for release in 2027.

I don’t know what became of the evidence I gave to the lawyers about the abuse he endured, but Darbi’s case exposes the ludicrous notion of justice that operates in Guantánamo.

Firstly, his crimes had little, if anything, to do with the US. Secondly, those who have not been charged with a crime in over 16 years remain imprisoned indefinitely; those who plead guilty to crimes go home. This has been the case with the majority of those who pled guilty.

As Darbi said in a statement to his lawyer: “No one should remain at Guantánamo without a trial. There is no justice in that.”

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 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.

No Justice at Guantánamo: The Release of Ahmed Al-Darbi and Moazzam Begg’s Reflections

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.

 

At the start of this month, Donald Trump transferred his first prisoner out of Guantánamo, the Saudi citizen Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated as part of a plea deal arranged in his military commission proceedings in February 2014. However, he did not return home a free man, as, in his homeland, he will serve the remainder of a 13-year sentence agreed in his plea deal.

As I explained in an article at the time, “Under the terms of that plea deal, al-Darbi acknowledged his role in an-Qaeda attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen’s coast in 2002, and was required to testify against other prisoners at Guantánamo as part of their military commission trials, which he did last summer, and was supposed to be released on February 20 this year. However, February 20 came and went, and al-Darbi wasn’t released, a situation that threatened to undermine the credibility of the military commission plea deals.”

Al-Darbi’s transfer saved the only functioning part of the otherwise broken military commission trial system, which is incapable of delivering justice in an actual trial, given that the men in question, although accused of serious crimes, were lavishly subjected to torture over a number of years, and the use of torture, to be blunt, fundamentally undermines any possibility of a fair and just trial.

Looked at another way, al-Darbi’s transfer also highlighted the glaring injustice of Guantánamo, something that has actually been apparent since the dying days of the administration of George W. Bush, when Salim Hamdan, a hapless driver for Osama bin Laden, was freed after the military judge in his military commission trial, recognizing that he had no operational role whatsoever in Al-Qaeda, gave him a short sentence that included time served, and that led to his repatriation in November 2008.

When he was sentenced, I wrote, in an article entitled, Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo, that, “If one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers gets a sentence of seven years and one month in total (five and a half years plus the 19 months of his imprisonment before he was charged) … it is surely now inconceivable that those who planned the whole post-9/11 detention policy can … continue to hold any of the 130 or so prisoners in Guantánamo who have not been cleared [for release], and who are not scheduled to face a trial by Military Commission, beyond the end of the year.” I added, “With this sentence, it appears that the death knell has just been sounded for the whole malign Guantánamo project.”

That was, in hindsight, absurdly optimistic, despite being unerringly logical, because logic has no place at Guantánamo.

What happened instead was that, in fits and starts, and with little evident enthusiasm for tackling decisively the chronic injustice of Guantánamo, despite promising to close it, President Obama undertook two high-level government review processes and released nearly 200 men, leaving 41 men still held under Donald Trump. With al-Darbi’s transfer, that number has dropped to 40, with nine men still involved in the military commission trail system, five approved for release but still held, and 26 others in that limbo of ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial that is so disturbingly emblematic of the US’s post-9/11 flight from the accepted norms of detention and justice.

Reflecting on al-Darbi’s transfer a week after it took place, the British citizen and former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg wrote an insightful column for Middle East Eye that I’m cross-posting below because it captures other aspects of the injustice of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” in general. Begg was imprisoned alongside al-Darbi in Afghanistan, and specifically at Bagram, the former Soviet site that became the US’s main prison, a horrendously brutal environment in which at least ten prisoners were killed.

It was there that Begg met Omar Khadr, the Canadian child prisoner, and Damien Corsetti, the guard whose nickname was “Monster” and the “King of Torture.” Corsetti was, eventually, one of a handful of guards court-martialed for “dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person,” not only at Bagram, but also at Abu Ghraib, and the case against him was based primarily on al-Darbi’s allegations about what Corsetti said and did to him.

A military jury found him not guilty, and Corsetti was later apologetic about his role in the “war on terror,” but in truth, as Moazzam Begg notes, he “was a low-ranking officer who was part of a far greater machine that didn’t only justify torture — it revelled in it.” Corsetti was a Specialist, serving in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion under Lt. Carolyn Wood. She introduced the use of torture techniques on the prisoners in a bid to improve intelligence, and on her watch at least two prisoners died, but those ideas did not originate with her, but higher up the chain of command, — with Donald Rumsfeld and Guantánamo commander Geoffrey Miller — and in fact Wood’s work was so well received by her superiors that she and her team were transferred to Abu Ghraib, where they were implicated in the scandal that became public in April 2004. Nevertheless. Wood was awarded two Bronze Stars by the military for the “services” she provided in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Begg didn’t get to meet al-Darbi in Guantánamo, but he makes the valid point that, despite “having undergone 16 years of torture, the time [he] served will not count” against his sentence, an the is not due for release until 2027. He also notes what I mentioned above, and have been mentioning since the sentencing of Salim Hamdan in 2008 — that “those who have not been charged with a crime in over 16 years remain imprisoned indefinitely,” while “those who plead guilty to crimes go home.”

Begg also notes that “his crimes had little, if anything, to do with the US,” which is correct with regards to the attack on a French oil tanker, but it doesn’t absolve him of responsibility of that crime, if he was indeed involved in it. What it does show, however, is how, in the general lawlessness of the “war on terror,” the US had little or no regard for traditional jurisdictions. Al-Darbi, on this basis, should have been prosecuted in France, and in the case of Hambali, a “high-value detainee” allegedly responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Bali in 2002, in which 202 people died, primarily Australian tourists. Hambali should have ended up either in Australian or Indonesian custody, but instead the US kidnapped him with Thai support in 2003, so that they could torture him in a CIA “black site.” Shamefully, it remains uncertain if Hambali will ever face prosecution.

I hope you have time to read Moazzam Begg’s article, and will share it if you find it useful.

The ludicrous notion of justice in Guantánamo

By Moazzam Begg, Middle East Eye, May 11, 2018

The first prisoner released on Donald Trump’s watch has been repatriated to Saudi Arabia to serve the remainder of his term. The years of torture he endured in Guantánamo will not count towards this sentence.

In February last year, I sat down to have lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Birmingham with three men. They were lawyers in the US military involved with the Office of Military Commissions’ Guantánamo Bay defence team for Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi national imprisoned in the detention camp since 2002.

The military lawyers had come to discuss their client’s case, and whether anything I knew could help him. The last time I saw Darbi was at the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan in the summer of 2002, before he was shipped off to Cuba.

The Bagram prison was originally a warehouse built by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Markings and writings in Russian were still visible around the building. The striking thing about seeing US soldiers everywhere was the realisation that Afghanistan, among the poorest nations on earth, was occupied by the strongest nations on earth. And yet, both were to fail, militarily and morally.

Buried alive in a mass grave

Just before Darbi arrived, I remember meeting an Afghan prisoner called Sharif. Walking, talking or even looking in the “wrong” direction meant being disciplined — which included being hooded and shackled to the top of a door, where we remained suspended for several hours, or even days. Nonetheless, Sharif and I managed to speak, using our newly discovered talent for ventriloquism-like conversations, so that our lips were not seen to move.

Sharif told me how his father had been buried alive in a mass grave by the Soviet army, right here in Bagram. After having encountered American brutality himself, however, he still hadn’t decided who he despised more.

Sharif was released shortly afterwards, but the influx of new prisoners continued on almost a daily basis. One prisoner I couldn’t forget was Darbi.

On the day I first saw him, he was being dragged about by soldiers as they screamed abuse at him and made him pile up crates of water bottles, with his hands and legs shackled. He didn’t react, except to do as he was told. But, no sooner than he’d managed to assemble a stack of crates high enough, the soldiers kicked them down and made him do it again. This went on for hours, until he was exhausted and taken back to his cell for a short rest. Soon enough, they were back again to repeat the process. This was Darbi’s introduction to the US military system. Far more was to follow.

Drained, exhausted and depressed

Darbi and I had initially been in separate cells, but I could usually see what was happening in adjacent cells. Our communal cages were divided by only rolls of razor wire, as armed guards patrolled both in front and behind. Darbi was eventually moved to my cell, which I was sharing at the time with Canadian teen Omar Khadr. Despite suffering horrific gunshot injuries and being a child, Khadr was put through the same procedure as Darbi. Although Khadr’s treatment was shocking and inexcusable, I understood what caused their hatred: He was accused of killing a US soldier.

Darbi, on the other hand, was captured in Azerbaijan after being accused of involvement in the bombing of a French-owned, Malaysian-registered oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, in which one crew member was killed. The dead man wasn’t an American.

Mistreatment of prisoners was usually justified based on a concoction of half-truths and exaggerations. Soldiers told me that Darbi was a Saudi special forces operative who’d gone rogue and joined al-Qaeda.

When I first arrived at Bagram, prisoners were not permitted any movement. We literally had to sit or lie on the floor all day. After some discussions, I managed to convince the guards to allow us 30 minutes of daily exercise. Watching Darbi during exercise time, I remember forming a rather low opinion of Saudi special forces — until he told me the rumours were untrue. He’d served in the Saudi National Guard for a short term and left.

Darbi was often taken for interrogation and would return, like most of us, drained, exhausted and depressed. He told me that one of the interrogators had removed his own trousers and threatened to rape him.

‘King of torture’

When able, I would strike up conversation with soldiers, mainly to try and engage and educate them, so that they could see our humanity. One of these soldiers was an interrogator who, I later learned, was an Italian-American nicknamed “Monster” and “king of torture”. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the interrogator Darbi was talking about.

The sounds of screaming — both prisoners and interrogators — would often reverberate around the prison, but I’d never assumed that this thoughtful, easygoing soldier was one of them. Damien Corsetti would pass my cell and speak to me about history, politics, religion and beyond. He even gave me a book I still have, Joseph Heller’s classic antiwar novel, Catch 22. He was quite cordial with me, but he wasn’t involved in my interrogations.

Years later, Corsetti was brought up on charges of dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person in Bagram and Abu Ghraib, Iraq, where he was redeployed.

Shortly after my release from Guantánamo, I was approached by Corsetti’s lawyers, asking if I’d be a character witness for him. I wrote about this strange request in the New York Times. Corsetti was eventually found not guilty and later joined the Iraq Veterans Against the War. His testimony is featured alongside my own in the Oscar-winning documentary ‘Taxi to the Dark Side.’

In truth, Corsetti was a low-ranking officer who was part of a far greater machine that didn’t only justify torture — it revelled in it.

Plea bargaining

As for Darbi, I never saw him again after Bagram, but I remained in contact with his family and lawyers after I was released. In 2012, under the farcical Guantánamo military commissions process, Darbi was charged with involvement in the oil tanker attack and, in 2014, as part of a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty. His deal included giving witness testimony against some of the remaining 40 Guantánamo prisoners.

In return, Darbi was given a 13-year sentence — but despite having undergone 16 years of torture, the time he’s served will not count. Instead, he has to serve the remainder of his sentence in a prison in Saudi Arabia, where he was finally repatriated last week. He’s due for release in 2027.

I don’t know what became of the evidence I gave to the lawyers about the abuse he endured, but Darbi’s case exposes the ludicrous notion of justice that operates in Guantánamo.

Firstly, his crimes had little, if anything, to do with the US. Secondly, those who have not been charged with a crime in over 16 years remain imprisoned indefinitely; those who plead guilty to crimes go home. This has been the case with the majority of those who pled guilty.

As Darbi said in a statement to his lawyer: “No one should remain at Guantánamo without a trial. There is no justice in that.”

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 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.

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

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

 

This has been a significant week for the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire last June, when 72 people died in a disaster that should never have happened. On Monday, the official inquiry began, with survivors’ testimony that has been taking place all week after the inquiry’s chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, called the fire “the single greatest tragedy to befall [London] since the second world war”, and “pledged that survivors’ testimony would be treated as ‘integral evidence’ in proceedings which could run into 2020”, as the Guardian described it.

The Guardian’s detailed coverage of the hearings this week is here — Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four and Day Five — and, from the beginning, the testimony was extraordinarily powerful.

As the Guardian described it, “Marcio Gomes, the father of Logan Gomes, the disaster’s youngest victim who was stillborn after his mother went into a coma, showed the several hundred gathered survivors, support workers, lawyers and journalists an ultrasound scan of his son and told them how he had been left ‘broken.’”

He said, “I held my son in my arms, wishing, praying for any kind of miracle that he would open his eyes, move, make a sound. As we know that never happened. You don’t know what you are made of until you are broken,” he added, hugging his wife, and stating, “Without her strength and courage I would not be here.”

The family of Mohamed “Saber” Neda, a Kabul-born chauffeur who had feld the Taliban, and had lived on the top floor of Grenfell Tower since 1999, played “a harrowing recording of his last phone message as the fire took hold.” In Dari, he said, “Goodbye. We are now leaving this world. Goodbye. I hope I haven’t disappointed you. Goodbye to all.”

The Guardian also noted how “[t]he family of Mary Mendy, originally from Gambia, and her daughter, Khadija Saye, showed a short BBC film of Khadija at home in Grenfell talking about her art. She was a celebrated photographer who had exhibited at the Venice Biennale before she and her mother perished.” In a statement read out by a solicitor, the family stated, “The pain is unbearable. There are no words to describe the emptiness that’s in our hearts.”

Also clear from the hearings, as was made clear when profiles of all 72 victims of the fire were published by the Guardian two weeks ago, is how most of them were not white, and most were immigrants, examples of the incredible melting pot that modern London is, a vibrant patchwork of races and cultures that is the compete antithesis of the narrow, bigoted anti-immigrant view that the Brexit campaign so sadly brandished and continues to brandish as some sort of barometer of modern Britain, when it is no such thing, and is, at most, the bitter view of a minority of the population; a large minority perhaps, but nothing like an overwhelming majority of the UK population as a whole.

Also worth noting is how, in the demonisation of those living in social housing, which inevitably followed the fire, from those who love to look down on the working class, there was little recognition that, because of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ policy, it isn’t even possible to pretend coherently that all those who live in social housing are an underclass, as all manner of people, including middle class and professional people, sub-let flats as part of the reality of a greedy, over-heated housing market rigorously maintained by central government and the banks.

For another account of the week’s hearings, see Simon Hattenstone’s article, with its description of “the most incredible array of people, their journeys and achievements”, here.

Eddie Daffarn interviewed by Channel 4 News

On the day the inquiry began, Channel 4 News also broadcast a powerful interview with Eddie Daffarn, who lived on the 16th floor of Grenfell Tower, and who “wrote a blog post predicting the Grenfell Tower fire seven months before it happened”, as Channel 4 described it.

Daffarn was one of the founders, researchers and writers of the Grenfell Action Group website, which forensically analysed the failings of Kensington and Chelsea Council and Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), the management company that had taken over all of the borough’s social housing, and, indeed, warned of the fire seven months before it happened.

As the disaster unfolded last June, and I began researching it, one article in particular leapt out at me. Dated November 20, 2016, the article, ‘KCTMO – Playing with fire!’, featured a photo of a tower block on fire, and the following prescient and damning words:

It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders. We believe that the KCTMO are an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia who have no business to be charged with the responsibility of looking after the every day management of large scale social housing estates and that their sordid collusion with the RBKC Council is a recipe for a future major disaster.

Unfortunately, the Grenfell Action Group have reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation.

It is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar high density residential property is the most likely reason that those who wield power at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to justice!

As I stated at the time, in my article, Deaths Foretold at Grenfell Tower: Let This Be The Moment We The People Say “No More” to the Greed That Killed Residents, “There is much more in the blog post — and in other posts dating back to 2013 — to demonstrate the repeated and persistent dereliction of duty on the part of the KCTMO regarding the safety of tenants, and it is important that these problems are not allowed to be swept under the carpet by the government, as happened with the recommendations that followed the last major London tower block fire, at Lakanal House in Camberwell, in 2009, when six people died.”

Below, via YouTube, is Jon Snow’s interview with Eddie Daffarn, his first since the fire. As he explains, “Grenfell was totally avoidable … If the council, and if the TMO had treated us with a modicum of respect and humanity, Grenfell would have been avoided.”

In a wide-ranging interview, he also demands transparency on the part of those managing tower blocks (the opposite of the behaviour of the KCTMO), expresses concerns that so many other tower blocks are still clad in the insanely flammable material that caused the fire at Grenfell to become an inferno, and explained how the council and KCTMO saw their social housing as a gold mine, because of the value of the land and its development potential, and how, as a result, their sole preoccupation was to get rid of residents, and, very specifically, not to keep them safe.

He calls for accountability, and also calls for an urgent change in the culture surrounding social housing, which views residents as work-shy criminals, when, in fact, as he asserts powerfully, the people of Grenfell have been revealed as both eloquent and hard-working, and that is true in general of people who live in social housing.

I do hope you have time to watch the interview, and will share it if you find it useful. The Grenfell Action Group’s work has been essential in exposing the truth about Kensington and Chelsea Council, Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, and the culture of the building industry and, lest we forget, the actions of the red tape-shredding central government that allowed Grenfell to happen, and it informed my song ‘Grenfell’, performed here with my band The Four Fathers and beatboxer The Wiz-RD, in which I lament those whose lives were so needlessly lost, and call for those responsible, those “who only count the profit not the human cost”, to be held accountable.

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 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.