Andy Worthington's Blog, page 36

The Horrors of Guantánamo Eloquently Explained By A High School Teacher to Readers of Teen Vogue

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

 

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

Last week, a powerful and eloquent condemnation of the prison at Guantánamo Bay was published in Teen Vogue. As a lawyer friend explained, “For the past couple of years, Teen Vogue has been doing a fantastic job reporting on political and social issues — their election and Muslim ban coverage was and is excellent.”

The article, which we’re cross-posting below in the hope of reaching a slightly different audience, was written by Dan Norland, a high school history teacher who knows how to talk to young people, and who, like Teen Vogue’s editors, understands that young people are often much more capable of critical, open-minded thought than their elders — something I perceived in relation to Guantánamo many years ago, as discussed in my 2011 article, The 11-Year Old American Girl Who Knows More About Guantánamo Than Most US Lawmakers.

Dan is not only a high school teacher; he also helped two former Guantánamo prisoners — two Algerians kidnapped in Bosnia in 2002 in connection with a completely non-existent terrorist plot — write a searing account of their imprisonment and torture, Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo, which was published last year, and for which I was delighted to have been asked by the publishers to write a review, which I did.

In my review, I wrote, “Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir are two of the most notorious victims of the U.S.’s post-9/11 program of rendition, torture, and indefinite detention. Kidnapped on groundless suspicions, they are perfectly placed to reflect on the horrors of Guantánamo and the ‘war on terror.’ With a warmth and intelligence sadly lacking in America’s treatment of them, this powerful joint memoir exposes their captors’ cruelty and the Kafkaesque twists and turns of the U.S. government’s efforts to build a case against them.”

in his op-ed, with reference to Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir, Dan Norland concisely explains why Guantánamo is such a shameful, brutal and lawless place, and why it must be closed. Sadly, as he notes, polls indicate that “more than half of Americans are content to continue with business as usual in Guantánamo. For the most part Americans just look away, in part because of the media maelstrom that is the Trump era, and in part because it’s so much easier. Our collective blindness protects us from truths we might not be able to handle and problems too painful to face.”

May 21 marked Guantánamo’s 5,975th day of existence, and on June 15 the prison will have been open for 6,000 days. We’re planning something of a media blitz to mark 6,000 days, and hope you’ll join us by printing off a poster telling Donald Trump how long Guantánamo has been open and urging him to close it, taking a photo with it, and sending it to us. All the photos we’ve received so far this year are here.

Below is Dan Norland’s op-ed. We hope you have time to read it, and that you’ll share it if you appreciate it.

Guantánamo Bay, Explained

By Dan Norland, Teen Vogue, May 16, 2018

“I think all Americans should know what our country has done and to whom.”

In this op-ed, high school history teacher Dan Norland explains why it’s important that young people in the United States understand the significance of Guantánamo Bay. Norland discusses the military base with his students at La Jolla Country Day School in San Diego, California.

“Raise your hand,” I tell my ninth-grade history class, “if you’ve heard of Guantánamo.”

A few hands inch upward, but most of the students keep their hands rooted to their desks. No one has ever talked to them about what the United States did — and is doing — in Guantánamo Bay, in the southeast corner of Cuba.

But it’s a conversation we ought to have. In the months since the Parkland shooting and subsequent displays of activism calling for an end to gun violence, teenagers have been proving that they have the capacity to start stitching together our nation’s broken seams, if only we’ll let them.

So I teach my students about Guantánamo, where the U.S. government has maintained a naval base for decades, against Cuba’s wishes. It’s where, in early 2002, we built a prison for alleged terrorists, and in that year held nearly 800 men and children, all Muslim, ranging from possible 9/11 plotters to goat herders whose neighbors falsely identified them as Al Qaeda members in exchange for a $5,000 bounty from the U.S.

And then I tell them the specific stories of two innocent men who were tortured there.

I met Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir in 2011, a few years after they won their freedom from Guantánamo. A federal judge had reviewed the supposed evidence against them in 2008 and determined that the government had no basis to lock them up. Lakhdar and Mustafa had gotten their day in court, and not long thereafter they were free.

The problem, however, was that getting their day in court took Lakhdar and Mustafa the better part of seven years. They had to take their case, Boumediene v. Bush, all the way to the Supreme Court just to get the right to argue their case before a federal judge. Even though the Constitution grants that right, known as habeas corpus, to everyone detained on American soil, the Bush administration argued that Guantánamo doesn’t count because the facility is technically only rented from the Cuban government.

The government’s attempt to circumvent habeas corpus — to build a prison outside the reach of the law — very nearly succeeded. Had it not been for a law firm’s willingness to spend more than 35,000 hours on Lakhdar and Mustafa’s case — work that would have cost paying clients an estimated $17 million — they would likely still be in Guantánamo. Lakhdar’s eldest daughter would still be writing letters to her wrongly imprisoned father, and his two youngest children would never have been born.

The tragedy of Lakhdar and Mustafa’s case is not just that they were wrongly held for seven years, but also what was done to them during that time. In the early months of Guantánamo, while the prison was still being built, they were held outside in scorpion-infested cages with gym mats to sleep on and buckets to use instead of toilets. Once the prison was built and interrogations began, they were subjected to brutal beatings for refusing to confess to crimes they didn’t commit or to testify against men they didn’t know. They suffered from systematic sleep deprivation — Lakhdar was kept awake for more than two weeks straight — as well as threats of sodomy, assaults on their religion, and the fear, provoked by interrogators, that they would never see their families again. When journalist Jake Tapper of CNN asked Lakhdar in a 2009 interview if he thought he had been tortured, Lakhdar replied, “I don’t think. I’m sure.”

And yet, remarkably, Lakhdar and Mustafa did not let their experience break them. I had the honor of helping them write a book about their ordeal, Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo. Getting to know these men and their stories was moving and deeply inspiring. They somehow endured years of unjust imprisonment and torture, yet never lost the capacity to be fundamentally decent and kind.

I share Lakhdar and Mustafa’s stories with my students in part because I think everyone can learn from their resilience and grace, but also because I think all Americans should know what our country has done and to whom. Whether my students agree with President Donald Trump that Guantánamo should remain open and we should “load it up” with more prisoners is, of course, up to them. But I want them to pay close attention to the facts so they can evaluate the arguments for themselves and arrive at fully informed conclusions. Decisions about the future of human rights in America should not be made by default. We cannot let Guantánamo, and the people we imprison there, go unseen.

Shortly after Witnesses was published in April 2017, Lakhdar was asked in an interview what he wanted readers to take away from his book. “I want Americans to know,” he answered, “that Guantánamo happened not to monsters, but to men.” Days later, I came across his quote on Twitter, followed by this eloquent reply: “WHO F*CKING CARES?”

It’s easy to dismiss that as the heartless rant of a Twitter troll, which it is. But it’s also official U.S. policy: Lakhdar and Mustafa have never received an apology or even an explanation from the American government, let alone compensation. Not a single former detainee has.

Right now, 40 men remain in Guantánamo, “forever prisoners” who may never have a meaningful opportunity to argue their innocence. (One man was released to Saudi Arabia on May 2, months after he was supposed to be resettled under the terms of a plea deal he had signed years before.) Polling suggests that more than half of Americans are content to continue with business as usual in Guantánamo. For the most part Americans just look away, in part because of the media maelstrom that is the Trump era, and in part because it’s so much easier. Our collective blindness protects us from truths we might not be able to handle and problems too painful to face.

It also prevents us from solving them.

We can no longer afford to look away, if ever we could. As engaged citizens in a fragile democracy, we need to be vigilantly, persistently attentive. Perhaps now more than ever, it’s critical that we don’t treat “WHO F*CKING CARES” as a rhetorical question.

I f*cking care. And I hope you do too.

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.

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

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

 

Just over ten years ago, on May 1, 2008, one of the better-known prisoners at Guantánamo, the Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj (aka al-Haj), was freed from the prison ad repatriated to his home country of Sudan. I meant to mark the occasion with an article, but, at the time, I was caught up in issues involving my campaigning for social housing in the UK, and the local government elections that took place on May 3.

Now, however, belatedly, I’m getting round to it, as I want to promote ‘Prisoner 345: My Six Years in Guantánamo,’ Sami’s powerful and emotional account of his capture and imprisonment, which is available for free as a PDF via Al-Jazeera.

Sami’s story was of particular interest during his imprisonment because he was working for Al-Jazeera as a journalist and cameraman at the time of his capture, and his captors quite shamelessly tried to get him to work for them instead — as well as very publicly threatening the Qatar-based channel by imprisoning, without charge or trial, one of their journalists.

I had picked up on Sami’s story while researching my book The Guantánamo Files in 2006, and I described it as follows in a chapter examining the stories of prisoners seized in Pakistan:

One of the most distressing arrests in this period – and a clear example of American bullying – was the capture of Sami al-Hajj, a 32-year old Sudanese cameraman, married with a one-year old child, who was working for al-Jazeera. Despite reservations, al-Hajj had been covering the US-led invasion of Afghanistan since October 2001. His brother said that he was ‘reluctant and nervous about going to the conflict zone, but decided that it would not be his best career interests to turn down such a prestigious assignment.’ After the fall of Kabul, he left for Pakistan with the rest of the al-Jazeera crew, but when, having renewed their visas, they were returning to Afghanistan to cover the inauguration of the new government in December, al-Hajj was singled out and arrested by the Pakistani authorities, at the request of the US authorities. After a visit to al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, Clive Stafford Smith explained that the US military seized al-Hajj ‘because they thought he had filmed the interviews with bin Laden – like so much of the intelligence in the “war on terror,” this proved false.’

As I also explained, his “brutal treatment at the hands of the Americans – in Bagram, Kandahar and Guantánamo – and the authorities’ attempts to persuade him to work for them as an informer,” were described in other chapters of the book.

I then began following and writing about accounts of Sami’s imprisonment by Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve (see here and here), when Sami was on a hunger strike, and focused on a letter he had written in January 2008. I then began working for Reprieve, for a relatively brief period in 208 in which the biggest news was undoubtedly Sami’s release — though that did not come about easily. First of all, the cosmetics firm Lush, which, admirably, provides great support to worthy causes, caused controversy by selling bath bombs featuring photos of Sami and British resident Binyam Mohamed, and also putting photos of them on boards outside branches of their shops, and then, when Repreive’s lawyers were unable to persuade the US authorities to unclassify some vivid drawings Sami did of force-feeding at Guantánamo, Clive Stafford Smith got the British artist Lewis Peake to draw versions of them based on descriptions that the lawyers gave him, producing a powerful set of images that were featured in an Observer article, and in an article on my website, entitled, Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo.

There was a flurry of media activity following Sami’s release (and see my articles here, here, here, here and here), and a rare interview a few months later, but then Sami’s presence in the western media largely went quiet, although he went back at Al-Jazeera, where he was made the director of a newly-created unit, the Public Liberties and Human Rights Center. I last came across him speaking in detail about his experiences in a feature for Al-Jazeera in January 2016, but now he has written a compelling memoir that I hope everyone interested in Guantánamo will read.

It was linked to via an Al-Jazeera article on May 5, but it wasn’t prominently promoted, and, rather shamefully, no other media outlet saw fit to pick up on it, even though Sami was the only journalist held at Guantánamo, and his reminiscences ought therefore to have been both newsworthy and of profound interest. As Clive Stafford Smith notes in a dedication, “To have a brilliant and courageous journalist for a client in Guantánamo Bay was all I could have wished for. Sami’s work from inside the belly of the beast, revealing dark truths the US military would rather have kept well hidden, contributed more to a true understanding of that dreadful place than anything else in the last 15 years. It is well past time that his story should be told at full length.”

So if you’re interested, please download Sami’s book here (for free), and revisit, with him, his capture, his brutal treatment in both Bagram and Kandahar prisons in Afghanistan, and his ordeal in Guantánamo.

The book begins with an overview of Guantánamo, in which these chilling lines leapt out at me (and are followed with some horrendous examples of the medical abuse of prisoners):

The principal architects of the physical and mental torture we lived through in Guantánamo though were the doctors, who excelled at devising new ways to inflict cruelty and pain. They actually told us: “We will torture you until death. But we won’t let you die. You will live in the space between life and death.”

Sami’s pre-capture work is covered in pp. 18-27, and then his capture is dealt with in pp. 28-39. Bagram and Kandahar are featured in pp. 40-72, featuring some shocking tales of abuse — and a death. As Sami stated, “I remember an Afghan prisoner tried to escape one night. They caught him and beat him with agonising blows in one of the rooms, as we sat awake listening to his cries of suffering. Suddenly, they came out, terrified, and a little later they brought out his dead body.” For more on the deaths in US custody in Afghanistan, see my June 2009 article, When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan.

Sami discussed Guantánamo from pp. 73-160, with one revelatory chapter (pp. 85-93) focusing on efforts to persuade Sami to become an informer, and another, heartbreaking chapter (pp. 94-99) focusing on two prisoners whose children died.

Sami also included many reminiscences about his fellow prisoners, delivered a powerful criticism of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), introduced in 2004 and designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants,” who could be imprisoned indefinitely and without rights, and also wrote about the deaths of three prisoners in June 2006, which the authorities described as a triple suicide, although that claim has always been disputed.

He also wrote in detail about the hunger strikes, which he described as “[o]ur weapon in Guantánamo … a potent weapon, a weapon that everyone possessed, a weapon that didn’t need money or power.”

I do hope you have time to read Sami’s account, and will share it if you find it as moving and informative as I did.

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.

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

See my photos on Flickr here! And please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Please also check out ‘Grenfell’ by my band The Four Fathers, and please mark the following date in your diary: Saturday May 16, ‘One year on: Justice for Grenfell Solidarity March’, organised by Justice4Grenfell, starting outside 10 Downing St at noon.

Monday May 14, 2018 marked eleven months since the fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower, in north Kensington, killing over 70 people in an inferno that should never have occurred, and, to mark the occasion, survivors, members of the local community and supporters from across London converged on Parliament as MPs were preparing to debate the government’s response to the disaster, as I discussed in my previous article, Grenfell Campaigners Mark Eleven Months Since the Disaster That Killed 71, As MPs Debate the Government’s Response, written after I had attended the rally in Parliament Square

I also took photos, featuring representatives of survivors’ groups and the local community (including Justice4Grenfell and Grenfell United), which I have just posted to Flickr, so the purpose of this article is to provide a link to the photos, but also to provide some important updates on the Grenfell story that have emerged over the last few days.

The Parliamentary debate was taking place because, after the fire, Theresa May had announced the launch of an official inquiry, but campaigners wanted representatives from the local community to be involved, and launched a petition demanding this from the government, which secured the 100,000 signatures that made it eligible for a Parliamentary debate after grime star Stormzy promoted it to his many followers in February.

Last week, Theresa May attempted to defuse campaigners’ anger by announcing that two additional members would be appointed to the panel for the inquiry, which is only finally beginning its formal assessment of the fire next week. However, as I explained in my article after the rally, “it is by no means certain that this concession will satisfy the community’s demands, because the government has not made clear who these two additional members will be, and how they will be chosen.”

As I also explained, “the speakers also made a point of explaining how, eleven months on from the disaster, they have little reason for believing that the government intends to deliver anything resembling justice to survivors and the local community, primarily because many of the survivors are still living in temporary accommodation. They also made it clear that their concerns are for all the inhabitants of refurbished tower blocks around the country, who are living in fear, because their buildings also have dangerous cladding, just like Grenfell had, and yet no one is in any hurry to spend the money to make their homes safe.”

Theresa May’s £400m “promise”

Yesterday, Theresa May tried to address this latter criticism by promising £400m to remove unsafe cladding from tower blocks around the country, but, again, questions remain — about where the money is coming from, under what circumstances it will be provided, and what will happen if it is not enough.

Peter Apps of Inside Housing, for example, responded with a pertinent tweet in which he asked seven questions of the government:

1. What is the £400m estimate based on? Will the pot of cash be increased if this does not prove sufficient?

2. Will councils and HAs [housing associations] be recompensed for work already carried out, or is it only for outstanding jobs?

3. Where is the £400m coming from, and is it going to be grant or loan funding?

4. What has changed since previous refusals to provide cash?

5. What will happen in private blocks with dangerous cladding?

6. How will ‘dangerous cladding’ be defined?

7. Does this represent an acceptance that deficiencies in building regulations led in part to the cladding being installed?

May herself was quite vague when she announced the provision of the £400m at Prime Minister’s Question Time. As the Guardian described it, she “said it would be wrong if the cost of such cladding work meant housing providers had less money for maintenance.” After stating that “fire services had now checked more than 1,250 high-rises”, in the Guardian’s words, she said, “Councils and housing associations must remove dangerous cladding quickly, but paying for these works must not undermine their ability to do important maintenance and repair work.”

A spokeswoman for Theresa May later clarified that “cladding replacement work was needed on 158 high-rise blocks – defined as being 18 metres or higher – in the social sector in England, and that it had begun on 104 of these.” Referring to privately owned blocks, for which no funding was provided, May’s spokeswoman said the Prime Minister “thought the cost should be met by the landlords”, as the Guardian put it. The spokeswoman said, “This is money for social housing. We expect private building owners to take responsibility for removing and replacing and to not pass the cost on to leaseholders.”

Labour criticised the government for the delay. John Healey, the shadow housing secretary, said, “It’s welcome, but why on earth has it taken the prime minister 11 months to make this commitment? Almost a year on from the Grenfell Tower fire, over 300 other tower blocks have dangerous, Grenfell-type cladding, but only seven have had it replaced.”

Dame Hackitt’s report on building regulations and safety

Today, adding further pressure to the government’s tattered reputation for keeping those living in social housing safe, Dame Judith Hackitt issued a report into building regulations, commissioned by the government after the Grenfell fire.

As the Guardian described it, her report “concluded that indifference and ignorance led to a ‘race to the bottom’ in building safety practices, with cost prioritised over safety”, exactly what campaigners were eloquently and knowledgeably complaining about before the fire happened, when they were shamefully ignored.

The Guardian stated that Dame Hackitt’s report said that “a new standards regulator should be the centrepiece of a reformed system.” and, in further analysis, reported that her recommendations were for “a new building regulations system”, which “should at first focus on buildings of 10 storeys or more.” She added that a “new regulator called the Joint Competent Authority should be made up of local authority building standards, fire and rescue authorities and Health and Safety Executive officials”, which “will be independent of the building owner” and “will approve” — or not — “designs before construction begins.”

“What I want to see happen here is we do not want to have to wait for a tragedy like Grenfell before we apply the full criminal sanctions of the law,” Hackitt said, adding, 

“We have to get to a position where people putting lives at risk by what they’re doing gets picked up at the time and there’s sanctions applied there and then, not in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy like Grenfell. If this had been in place prior to Grenfell, I do not believe the cladding that was put on Grenfell would have got through the system in the first place.”

As the Guardian put it, what happened at Grenfell, owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, was that “the building regulations were checked by RBKC’s own building officers while works were already under way”, with [t]he same thing happen[ing] on dozens of other buildings clad in combustible material nationwide.” 

As well as intending to set up a regulatory system that will deal with these self-certifying short-cuts, Hackitt’s report also called for “tougher penalties for failures”, having “found rates of enforcement action against breaches of building regulations had fallen 75% in the last decade”, although I fail to see how this would be policed.

Most of the above is very commendable, but Hackitt also attracted criticism by refusing, in her report, to call for combustible materials to be banned. “Restricting or prohibiting certain practices will not address the root causes,” she stated, and argued that “there shouldn’t be prescription about what materials could and could not be used”, as the Guardian put it; “instead the onus should be on the ‘construction industry to take responsibility for the delivery of safe buildings rather than looking to others to tell them what is or is not acceptable.’” She added that “it will be important now for industry to show leadership in driving this forward”.

She explained that those involved in the industry “did not bother to read regulations and when they did, they did not understand them”, and added that “concerns were ignored during the building process because ‘the primary motivation is to do things as quickly and cheaply as possible rather than to deliver quality homes’” — a powerful criticism — and that “some builders use the ambiguity of the regulations to ‘game the system.’” She also said that safety in the industry was compromised because people “did not know who was in charge”, becasue “enforcement was patchy”, and because “penalties were so small as to be ineffective.”

However, as well as refusing to ban combustible materials entirely, she also “stopped short of banning controversial desktop studies, which can be used to justify using certain materials without a fire test.” She explained that she wanted them “to be carried out only by qualified people, which she said would effectively stop unregulated fire engineers paid by builders of building owners from declaring systems safe.” However, she also said that the “detailed results of those tests should remain commercially confidential.”

In what appeared to be an add-on, the Guardian noted that that she also said that the new regulatory framework must also address the fact that “residents often go unheard, even when safety issues are identified.”

Responding to the failure to ban combustible cladding entirely, which, to me, seems to make no sense, the Guardian noted how “Grenfell survivors said they were ‘disappointed and saddened’ that the report rejected their calls for a ban on combustible materials.” David Lammy, the Tottenham MP who has been a persistent critic of the government’s failure to deal adequately with the Grenfell aftermath, called the report a “betrayal and a whitewash.” As the Guardian also noted, “Architects, councils and fire experts also condemned the approach.”

Inside Housing noted that the survivors’ group Grenfell United, who met Dame Hackitt and “asked her personally to ban combustible cladding”, eloquently rebuked Dame Hackitt for failing to take their concerns on board. Shahin Sadafi, the chair of Grenfell United, said: “Worrying that a fire like Grenfell could happen again is something that keeps many of us awake at night. When we met Dame Judith Hackitt we asked her for an outright ban on combustable cladding. We are disappointed and saddened that she didn’t listen to us and she didn’t listen to other experts. The cladding on the Grenfell Tower was deemed to be limited combustibility, but it cost 72 lives. It must be banned. We need to hear from government a clear promise that these dangerous materials will never be used on homes again.

Sadafi added, “This isn’t just about cladding – the whole system of building regulation is broken. The industry has too much influence over regulation and testing, desktop studies are totally flawed, profit is valued more than people’s safety and residents are left powerless. All of this must change. This report is a start but we’ve had recommendations before – after the Lakanal House fire [in 2009, in which five people died] and they were ignored – so we’re asking Dame Judith Hackitt to finish the job she has started and make sure this report leads to a serious culture change across the industry. Grenfell United, we will keep fighting until everyone is safe in their homes.”

As the Guardian noted, after the report was published, Dame Hackitt “appeared to contradict her own report and admitted she would in fact support a ban on combustible materials as long as it was alongside the wider reforms she proposed”, and the criticism was also picked up on by the government, with James Brokenshire, the housing secretary, announcing what the Guardian described as “a consultation on a ban in a statement to the House of Commons about plans for new building safety rules that will reduce ‘buck passing’ on projects and require builders to demonstrate they have taken ‘decisive action to reduce building safety risk.’”

It seems to me that a ban on flammable cladding should have been an obvious outcome of the Grenfell fire, and I hope the consultation announced by the government swiftly comes to that conclusion, but, that said, I commend Dame Hackitt for having identified a “‘race to the bottom’ in building safety practices, with cost prioritised over safety.” 

It now remains to be seen how these conclusions can be applied to the official inquiry that begins next week, to correctly identify how responsibility for the deaths at Grenfell rests with central government for deliberately cutting “red tape”, with Kensington and Chelsea Council for its persistent indifference to those in social housing, with the corrupt and incompetent Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation to whom responsibility for the borough’s social housing was devolved, and with contractors who failed to make safety their main priority. And when we’re looking at a culture of indifference, it’s also important to see what took place in government regarding safety standards pre-2010, and what councils in general have been doing for the last ten years or more.

Ultimately, the Grenfell survivors — and those living in social housing in general, and especially in tower blocks — need any and all investigations into the Grenfell fire not only to accept responsibility for what took place, and to make sure it never happens again, but also to recognise that there is a human cost to the establishment’s long-running drive to devalue social housing and those who live in it.

So what also needs to come out of the Grenfell disaster is an official recognition by the establishment (the politicians, the bankers and the housing industry) that we need more genuinely affordable social housing (at social rents, not “affordable” rents that are no such thing), that it must be adequately maintained, and that anything other than this remains a deliberate war by the rich on everyone with less than them — from those in lower-paid jobs, the elderly and the unemployed to those who, while paid well on paper, are spending far too much of their income servicing landlords and banks whose greed is almost entirely unfettered.

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.

Grenfell Campaigners Mark Eleven Months Since the Disaster That Killed 71, As MPs Debate the Government’s Response

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist, and check out ‘Grenfell’ by my band The Four Fathers.

 

Yesterday marked eleven months since the fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower, in north Kensington, killing over 70 people in an inferno that should never have taken place. Flats in tower blocks are designed to resist the onslaught of even a serious fire until the emergency services can arrive, but the cladding which had been applied to the tower, to make it look more attractive, was flammable, and in the process of installing it the structural integrity of the tower had been fatally compromised.

We know this from the warnings published by tenants, the Grenfell Action Group, on their website, but shamefully ignored by Kensington and Chelsea Council, and by the management company responsible for their homes, Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, as I made clear immediately after the fire, in an article entitled, Deaths Foretold at Grenfell Tower: Let This Be The Moment We The People Say “No More” to the Greed That Killed Residents.

We have also had it confirmed, just last week, in a leaked report prepared as part of the Metropolitan Police investigation into the fire, by fire investigation experts BRE Global Ltd., which concluded that “the original concrete building was transformed from a safe structure into a tinderbox by the refurbishment between 2014 and 2016.”

Despite this, the official response to the Grenfell Tower fire is that there is no official response until an inquiry has taken place. The inquiry was first announced 15 days after the fire, on June 29, 2017, when Theresa May also announced that it would be chaired by retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, but the inquiry is not yet underway, and is only starting next week.

However, the choice of judge, the make-up of the inquiry panel, and the terms of reference of the inquiry were all subjected to serious criticism after the inquiry was announced. Matt Wrack, the head of the Fire Brigades Union, said, “Central government has created the housing and fire safety regime and central government must be held to account for any failings in it. Yet the terms of reference signed off by Theresa May appear designed to avoid this.” As the Guardian described it, he “said the inquiry should not focus simply on the actions of a local authority or contractor”, and stated, “It is about the overarching regime, the political climate under which they operate. People across the world are asking how, in the UK, it is possible to apply flammable systems of cladding to residential tower blocks. The risk in Moore-Bick’s terms of reference is that the inquiry is able to avoid probing deeper to examine the regime which allowed these deaths to happen, conveniently taking the spotlight off government ministers and any policies that were or weren’t in place that may have had an impact.”

Concerns about a whitewash of central government’s role in allowing the fire to happen were voiced by local MP Emma Dent Coad, of the Labour Party. She called the terms of reference for the inquiry a “complete betrayal” and said that the community would not have faith in it, because, by not considering social housing, it would “not get to the heart of the problem.” She also said, “We were told ‘no stone would be [left] unturned’ but instead are being presented with a technical assessment which will not get to the heart of the problem: what effects, if any, the lack of investment into social housing had on the refurbishment project.”

For the survivors, a particular bone of contention was the make-up of the inquiry panel, which was regarded as having a lack of diversity, and not representing the community. The led to a petition to the government being launched in November, asking for additional panel members, trusted by the community, to be appointed to the inquiry. The petition gained the 100,000 signatures needed to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate in February, after grime star Stormzy promoted it to his millions of supporters.

Parliament scheduled a debate on the petition to take place on May 14, prior to the start of the official inquiry next week, but perhaps without realising that it marked exactly eleven months since the fire, and so, yesterday, survivors, members of the local community and supporters from across London converged on Parliament to make their feelings known, holding a rally in Parliament Square before the debate began in Westminster Hall, before returning to north Kensington for a Silent Walk from the Methodist church at the foot of Grenfell Tower to Ladbroke Grove station and back. The Silent Walks take place on the 14th of every month, and are a profoundly moving experience, as I appreciated first-hand when I took part in the Silent Walk in December.

Just days before the debate, Theresa May attempted to defuse campaigners’ disappointment with the government’s ongoing failures to treat the Grenfell community and the survivors of the fire with the respect they deserve by announcing that two additional members would be appointed to the inquiry panel. However, as speakers at yesterday’s rally pointed out, it is by no means certain that this concession will satisfy the community’s demands, because the government has not made clear who these two additional members will be, and how they will be chosen.

At yesterday’s rally, the speakers also made a point of explaining how, eleven months on from the disaster, they have little reason for believing that the government intends to deliver anything resembling justice to survivors and the local community, primarily because many of the survivors are still living in temporary accommodation. They also made it clear that their concerns are for all the inhabitants of refurbished tower blocks around the country, who are living in fear, because their buildings also have dangerous cladding, just like Grenfell had, and yet no one is in any hurry to spend the money to make their homes safe.

I arrived at Parliament Square in time to hear from a 19-year old from the Grenfell community speaking about how the disaster politicised him, as is the case with so many others in the vicinity of the tower, and as I stated yesterday, when posting a photo of the rally on Facebook, “Perhaps this politicisation is the only way that those who lost their lives last June will not have died in vain, as the intensity of feeling in the Grenfell community, the solidarity it has created, and the ripples from that anger and solidarity that have emanated from Grenfell across London and around the country continue to create an environment in which those living in social housing, and those marginalised by the establishment, generally on the basis of race, refuse to be treated with contempt by those in positions of power and authority.”

Certainly, the speakers I heard yesterday all echoed this mistrust of the authorities when it comes to delivering justice, and the importance of solidarity amongst those affected — not just in north Kensington, but across the capital and across the UK as a whole. Community organiser Niles Hailstones spoke eloquently about this, as did Moyra Samuels from the Justice4Grenfell campaign, and Natasha Alcock of the survivors’ group Grenfell United, who lived on the 11th floor of Grenfell Tower, and was rescued by firefighters at 4.30am on the day of the fire.

Alcock told the rally, “We don’t want the people who died a year ago to have died in vain. There are also people still living in blocks with this cladding. We want to ensure that people in social housing don’t get treated like we did.” The Guardian explained how Karim Mussilhy, whose uncle died in the fire, also made a similar call. “They should ban the cladding full stop,” Mussilhy said, adding, “We still have death traps out there in London. Let’s make those changes now and give people the assurance they are safe in their homes. Sprinklers need to be added and the cladding removed.”

As the Guardian also explained:

There are 306 residential blocks more than 18 metres in height that are clad in aluminium composite panels similar to those at Grenfell and that have failed government fire tests. The cladding remains in place on 54 social housing blocks and dozens more private apartment towers across England. The cost of replacement has been put as high as £1bn.

The government has said it is the responsibility of landlords to replace failed cladding, but it is keeping this position under review. Many blocks remain untouched because of legal disputes between freeholders and leaseholders over who should pay. The government has ordered a review of building regulations from Dame Judith Hackitt, who is expected to report back this week.

There is widespread concern at Westminster and among survivors that Hackitt will not recommend a ban on the use of combustible cladding and will say materials of “limited combustibility” should still be allowed to be used.

The Guardian also stated that the rally “showcased continued distrust of the authorities among some in the Grenfell community. Speakers described officials as ‘aliens’ and ‘androids’, and the crowd chanted: ‘No justice! No peace!’”

Another speaker I saw, a young Muslim woman called Naima, also pointed out that the majority of the victims in Grenfell Tower were Muslim — an inconvenient truth in a country where sympathy for Muslims has been so damaged by rampant Islamophobia.

I also heard the Labour MP Diane Abbott speak at the rally. As the Huffington Post described it, she “congratulated campaigners on their success in convincing [Theresa] May to include additional panel members, but said it was ‘not enough.’”

“We need to know who they are going to be,” she said, adding, “What made the difference in the Stephen Lawrence inquiry was the actual people who served on the panel. If they just had puppets on the panel that is not going to help anybody.”

She also brought up the class and race issue that the government is doing so much to avoid, saying, “You can talk about the cladding, you can talk about the regulations. But there’s also an attitude to communities that needs to be exposed and needs to be eliminated and I think it’s about those underlying issues about who has power and how they use it that are so important.”

Other MPs also spoke at the rally, and then at the Parliamentary debate. A video of the three-hour debate is here, and a full transcript is here. In addition, Emma Dent Coad has made her speech available here.

The Guardian explained how “MPs debated proposed measures to increase community confidence in the public inquiry. Many voiced concern that parliament and government had already lost the confidence of the Grenfell residents.”

The Guardian added, “David Lammy, who lost two friends in the fire, said 72 households from Grenfell were still living in hotel rooms and 64 remained in temporary accommodation. Referring to the survivors’ campaign for an inquiry panel, he said: ‘I regret that people who are in grief and in so much pain have had to organise and campaign to ensure their voices have been heard. Theresa May talks about burning injustices, but this injustice burned.” He added, “I remind the government of the words of Neville Lawrence [the father of Stephen Lawrence] in 2012: ‘The loss itself combined with the lack of justice means I have not been able to rest all this time.’”

For anyone wanting to know more, I also wholeheartedly recommend the Guardian’s front page feature yesterday, profiling the 71 people who died in the fire.

As I explained when I posted a link to the article on Facebook:

Here are the people who died, the individuals whose lives should not have been lost, vividly, beautifully remembered by their loved ones and friends.

Just a few of the introductions to the profiles are here:

Rania Ibrahim: “Rania did everything fast, as if she knew she was leaving life early”

Fathia Ali Ahmed Alsanousi”: “Her flat was beautiful, always full of people”

Mohamednur ‘Mo’ Tuccu: “He had a way of making you feel like an old friend – welcome and at ease”

Incidentally, the victims were also a cross-section of a modern, international Britain that should be celebrated and not denigrated by the racists trying to dictate our future, although, as the Guardian noted in an article introducing these profiles, while “[t]he makeup of the 71 people who died shows how diverse, open and tolerant Britain has become in the past 30 years (more than half the adult victims had arrived in the country since 1990)”, it is also crucial to remember that “Grenfell was not a microcosm of Britain or London. There were few white-collar workers among the victims and only seven white Britons, indicative of how the disaster disproportionately affected minority ethnic communities.”

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.

Torture on Trial in the US Senate, as the UK Government Unreservedly Apologizes for Its Role in Libyan Rendition

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

 

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

In the last few days, two very different approaches to torture have been on display in the US and the UK.

On Wednesday, the US Senate conducted confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s nomination as the next Director of the CIA, who has attracted widespread criticism since her nomination was announced back in March, for two particularly valid reasons: firstly, because, towards the end of 2002, she was in charge of the CIA’s first post-9/11 “black site” in Thailand, where several “high-value detainees” were held and tortured, and secondly because, in 2005, she was involved in the destruction of videotapes documenting the torture of prisoners, even though a court had ordered the tapes to be preserved.

At the time of her nomination, we signed up to a letter from a number of rights groups opposing her nomination, and also published an article on our website, entitled, The Torture Trail of Gina Haspel Makes Her Unsuitable to be Director of the CIA.

In the run-up to the nomination hearings, on May 7, we were appalled to see Donald Trump tweeting his support for her, stating, “My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!”

Gina Haspel, of course, has “come under fire” not “because she was too tough on Terrorists,” but because she was involved in torture — and Trump’s tweet showed exactly why her nomination shouldn’t proceed, because he evidently equates being “tough on Terrorists” with engaging in torture, even though torture is illegal and its use in the “war on terror” was, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report showed (in the redacted version of the executive summary released in December 2014), horribly brutal, and also produced no information that could not have been obtained through other means (in other words, through non-abusive rapport-building).

On Wednesday in Congress, however, Gina Haspel did nothing to reassure critics that she is fit to lead the CIA. As the Washington Post stated in an editorial, “Gina Haspel fails the test,” “After a 33-year career at the agency, she may be, in many respects, the most qualified person ever nominated to the post, as one Republican senator contended,” but she also has “a dark chapter in her past” — the supervision of the “black site,” and “her subsequent involvement in the destruction of videotapes of that shameful episode.”

The Post’s editorial also stated:

As Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, made clear from the outset, Ms. Haspel needs to clearly repudiate that record. She must confirm that techniques such as waterboarding — now banned by law — were and are unacceptable, and she must make clear that she herself will never again accept orders to carry out acts that so clearly violate American moral standards, even if they are ordered by the president and certified by administration lawyers as legal.

Ms. Haspel did not meet that test. She volunteered that the CIA would not on her watch engage in interrogations; she said she supported the “stricter moral standard” the country had adopted after debating the interrogation program. Pressed by Mr. Warner and several other senators, she eventually said she “would not allow CIA to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal.” What she would not say is that the torture she oversaw was immoral, or that it should not have been done, or that she regretted her own role in it — which, according to senators, included advocating for the program internally.

Gina Haspel’s refusal to condemn the torture program appalled many lawmakers too. As Sen. Kamala Harris explained after the hearing, “Earlier today I asked CIA director nominee Gina Haspel if she believed enhanced interrogation tactics like waterboarding were immoral. It was a yes or no question. She refused to answer.”

More significantly, Sen. John McCain, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement explaining why he would not be backing Gina Haspel’s nomination:

Today, Gina Haspel testified before the Senate and to the country about her qualifications to lead the CIA. This occasion provided an opportunity to provide details about her experience in the CIA, explain her involvement in the so-called enhanced interrogation program during the Bush Administration, and account for the mistakes the country made in torturing detainees held in U.S. custody after the September 11th attacks. Unfortunately, the testimony the American people heard from Ms. Haspel today failed to address these concerns.

Like many Americans, I understand the urgency that drove the decision to resort to so-called enhanced interrogation methods after our country was attacked. I know that those who used enhanced interrogation methods and those who approved them wanted to protect Americans from harm. I appreciate their dilemma and the strain of their duty. But as I have argued many times, the methods we employ to keep our nation safe must be as right and just as the values we aspire to live up to and promote in the world.

I believe Gina Haspel is a patriot who loves our country and has devoted her professional life to its service and defense. However, Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture by Americans is disturbing. Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying. I believe the Senate should exercise its duty of advice and consent and reject this nomination.

In addition, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the CIA torture report was produced, also indicated that she would not support Haspel’s nomination. She wrote, “The torture program was illegal at the time based on international treaties the US is signatory to, including the Convention Against Torture and Geneva Convention, but no one has ever been held accountable. Gina Haspel was intimately involved and should not lead the agency.”

The UK apologizes

In the UK, meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa May issued an unreserved apology on Thursday to Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, Libyans who were kidnapped and rendered to torture in Libya by the CIA after a tip-off from Britain’s intelligence service, MI6, in 2004. As the Guardian explained, Belhaj was subsequently “tortured and sentenced to death” under Col. Gaddafi, whose regime he had opposed, but “was released six years later.” The newspaper also noted that “Boudchar was four and a half months pregnant when she was abducted. She was released shortly before giving birth.”

The couple had fought for an apology from the UK government “for more than six years after papers came to light during the Libyan revolution that revealed the role played by British intelligence officers in their kidnapping,” as the Guardian also explained.

In the House of Commons, watched by Fatima Boudchar and her 13-year-old son Abderrahim, who had traveled to London for the event, the Attorney General, Jeremy Wright, read out Theresa May’s letter, in which she stated, “It is clear that you were both subjected to appalling treatment and that you suffered greatly, not least the affront to the dignity of Ms. Boudchar who was pregnant at the time. The UK government believes your accounts. Neither of you should have been treated in this way. The UK government’s actions contributed to your detention, rendition and suffering. The UK government shared information about you to its international partners. We should have done more to reduce the risk that you would be mistreated. We accept that this was a failing on our part.”

She also wrote, “On behalf of Her Majesty’s government I apologise unreservedly. We are profoundly sorry for the ordeal that you both suffered and our role in it. The UK government has learned many lessons from this period.”

In Istanbul, where Belhaj received a copy of the letter, he said, “The wording of the apology was heartfelt. There was a feeling of concern, an admission of the shortcomings, an expression of unreserved apology, lessons learned, admission of failings and an expression of disappointment towards the international partners that I was handed over to.” Belhaj always made a point of only seeking £1 in damages from the British government, although, when Jeremy Wright read out Theresa May’s letter, he also announced that Boudchar would receive £500,000 compensation for the UK’s role in her kidnapping and rendition.

Sapna Malik, from the law firm Leigh Day, which represented Belhaj and Boudchar, said, “Today’s candid apology from the government helps restore the humanity and dignity so brutally denied to my clients during their ordeal, and is warmly welcomed.”

Cori Crider, who represented the Belhaj family on behalf of the human rights organization Reprieve, called the extent of the government’s apology “unprecedented.” She said, “It’s broader and deeper and more sincere than any apology we have seen from the war on terror.”

We hope that Gina Haspel is paying attention, and also the US lawmakers who are currently weighing up whether or not to approve the nomination, as CIA Director, of someone who has not issued any kind of apology for her involvement in the crime of torture that continues to damage America’s reputation around the world, and also, we believe, to infect its very soul.

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.

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

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

 

Exactly one year ago, I began posting a photo a day on a Facebook page I had just established — ‘The State of London’ —  from my archive of tens of thousands of photos taken of London, in all 120 of the capital’s postcodes, as well as some of the outlying boroughs, that I had built up over the previous five years.

I haven’t advertised ‘The State of London’ via Facebook, which some people suggest is a good way of getting supporters, but I’ve steadily built up a following over the last year of people who like my photo-journalistic take on the capital — photos, often accompanied by short essays, of the good, the bad and the ugly of London in the second decade of this tumultuous century. Someone more objective than me can probably analyse my taste, but I know that I’m bewitched by the light and the changing seasons, that I love catching photos on those outings when I get caught in storms or showers or torrential rain, that I love the river and its tributaries, and London’s canals, that I love the capital’s hills, its park, its trees, and that I also see almost everything with a political eye.

On my endless, restless journeys, I see everything that is happening with the built environment, but when I started in 2012, in the year of the Olympic hype, in which big money was savagely reshaping the Lea valley, I was appalled by the jingoism and empty patriotism, but I didn’t fully comprehend how, in the years that followed, the broken capitalist model that had almost killed itself through 2008’s self-inflicted global economic crash would end up working out that the only way left to guarantee huge and unjustifiable profits for the lazy rich was for the UK establishment, and those who aspire to it, to cannibalistically feed off its own people, through housing.

Everywhere I go, I see phallic new developments — designed to attract foreign investors, and entirely unaffordable for most Londoners — which appal and enrage me, but alongside these new developments I also actively mourn and resist the cynical destruction of council estates to make way for these new private developments, alongside the misappropriation of former industrial land and the sweeping away of existing light industrial sites where huge numbers on Londoners actually work. I have documented many of these destroyed or threatened estates over the years, and will continue to do so — in many way they are, to me, the dark human heart of the project, the revealed face of the oppressor, a counterpoint to the beauty of nature in the capital that runs through all our lives rather than seeking evict, exploit and destroy as our human masters do.

So, in my work, viewers will find the destruction of the Heygate Estate, the Aylesbury Estate (see here and here) and the Elmington Estate (see here and here) in Southwark, the destroyed Myatts Field North, and the threatened Cressingham Gardens and Central Hill estates in Lambeth, the destruction of the Haggerston Estate and the Kingsland Estate and the demolition of the giant Woodberry Down estate in Hackney, the West Hendon fiasco, the Excalibur Estate of prefabs in Lewisham, and the Brutalist Lethbridge Estate on the border with Greenwich, the Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, neglected, worn-down estates in Woolwich, the early stages of the destruction of Thamesmead, the levelling of Canning Town, the averted threat (I hope) to Northumberland Park and Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, and, perhaps most pertinently right now, the destruction of the Brutalist masterpiece Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar (see here, here and here), being destroyed to make way of something far more bland and fundamentally soulless — although that, in a nutshell, is what so much of the cynical destruction of people’s homes involves.

I also direct my gaze at some of the over-priced new developments going up on land that doesn’t involve people’s homes being razed to the ground, and above it all, since June 14 last year, the spectre of Grenfell has hovered, reminding me on a daily basis how those who live in social housing — myself included — are regarded as second-class citizens, whose very lives can be recklessly endangered, or brought to an end in the most gruesome manner possible, in the search for greater profits. See two photos here and here from the monthly Silent Walks for Grenfell, held on the 14th of every month. Details of the next one, on Monday, are here, and I intend to be there.

I launched ‘The State of London’ on Facebook on the fifth anniversary of when I started cycling around London taking photos on a daily basis. I thought I had chosen that date — May 11, 2012 — randomly, but it may be that I was subconsciously balancing two other dates that had dominated my life for the previous six years — September 11, 2001, and January 11, 2002, when the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened. Researching and writing about Guantánamo, and campaigning to get the prison shut, had dominated my life since the spring of 2006, and had, I suspect, contributed, along with a misplaced enthusiasm for alcohol and tobacco, to my developing a rare blood disease in 2011, which manifested itself through a blood clot that led to me almost losing a number of toes, and experiencing, first-hand, what sleep deprivation really is.

When the admirable doctors of the NHS saved my toes, I resolved to get fit. I had already given up alcohol, in 2008, and had given up smoking on the day that I was hospitalised — March 18, 2011 — but it took a year of eating biscuits pretty relentlessly before I realised that getting fit would take some kind of revolutionary change in my life. The bike was the answer. I’ve actually been a cyclist along as I can remember. I think I started when I was four, so I have — ulp! — literally been cycling for over 50 years!

However, my appetite for cycling had dwindled in those years when I was devoted to obsessive human rights work (and my appetite for self-destruction), but when I needed to get fit it was the obvious solution. In the years since, it has become absolutely central to my life. I go out in all types of weather, and I know, very fundamentally, that we should all be out for more of the time that we generally are. We aren’t meant to be cooped up in offices. I also love the freedom of being beyond surveillance (I carry no phone), and of getting lost or, very occasionally, finding places where the machinery of city life doesn’t intrude. It is a liberation, and a crucial counterpoint to the struggles for human rights and social justice that otherwise consume me.

It also made me realise how little of London I actually knew. I knew places I had lived and worked in well — Brixton and parts of south west London, much of south east London, the West End, obviously, and a selection of other places east, north and west — but as the years passed I had ventured to unknown areas less and less, and I was astonished to discover what a Pandora’s Box of delights the city is when you explore the 123 square miles of inner London — and some of the 607 square miles of Greater London — by bike!

Last year I also set up a Twitter account for ‘The State of London’, and there is also a skeletal website for the project, which I set up years ago, but which I haven’t found the time to work on. My ambition for the coming year is to have an exhibition of photos somewhere, and also to publish some sort of book. Obviously, my inclination, as you can easily glean form the above, is for an overview of my work on threatened or destroyed council estates, but I’m really open to any and all suggestions. The positive feedback I’ve had over the last year tells me I’m onto something with my photo-journalism, and I’d like to keep building on it.

For now, though, I’m off out on my bike. See you later!

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.

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

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.

 

Regular readers will know that I have been following the stories of the prisoners held at Guantánamo for over 12 years, first through the 14 months’ research and writing I did for my book The Guantánamo Files (which, I just found out, I completed exactly eleven years ago today!), and then through the nearly 2,200 articles I have written about Guantánamo over the last eleven years.

One story that leapt out at me while researching The Guantánamo Files was that of Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), a Moroccan national who, as I discovered through the transcript of a cursory military review of his case, “strenuously denied having had anything to do with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, whose philosophy he despised” (as I described it in an article in 2016, drawing on an interview with him in February 2016, after his release from Guantánamo in September 2015, that was published by the Associated Press).

The cursory military review was a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), of which hundreds were conducted in 2004 before a tribunal of military officers who were meant to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ designation, on capture, as “enemy combatants’ who could be detained indefinitely without charge or trial.

As I described Younous Chekkouri’s story in The Guantánamo Files:

The elder brother of Redouane Chekhouri (released in 2004), he said that he spent ten years in Pakistan, Yemen and Syria, studying and undertaking humanitarian work, and arrived in Afghanistan in June 2001 with his Algerian wife. He explained that he then established a guest house in Kabul, which was specifically for young Moroccans, because they were not treated well in Afghanistan, and another house outside the city, which was “especially for people who want to look at the sky and the stars and pray and meditate.” While this explanation was unacceptable to his tribunal, who insisted that both houses were connected with military training, he denied the allegations and made the following statement: “In our religion of Islam, it teaches us to forgive other Muslims … And the fighting between Muslims is forbidden. The fighting between Afghans, between themselves lasted for about 20 years. There was no value and no good came out of that fighting.”

Reinforcing this viewpoint, he said that he was not involved with al-Qaeda, and explained that from 1990 onwards, when he first visited Afghanistan, people told him to stay away from Osama bin Laden. He suggested that bin Laden was a double agent working for the Saudi government, and that when he was “stripped out of his Saudi citizenship and exiled from the kingdom” in 1992, he was “shocked that this would be a new game that the Saudi government would be playing with us.” He then expressed surprise that bin Laden became such an important figure in Sudan, wondering how Sudan could “sacrifice a relationship with the world” for him, and condemned his actions after his return to Afghanistan in 1996, in particular the African embassy bombings – in which “a lot of Muslims were victims” – and the attack on the USS Cole.”

As he stated, “In every meeting that happened, people would say that Osama bin Laden is dangerous… I was one of the people that was telling others that Osama bin Laden is a crazy person and that what he does is bad for Islam. How can he be the only person in the world to say that jihad is fighting Americans? How could he just make that up? We were very honest in what we said against bin Laden. For that reason, we received a lot of threats. But that was not important to us.”

As I also stated in The Guantánamo Files:

Explaining the circumstances of his capture, he said that, after 9/11, a decision was made to close both the houses, and he then went to Jalalabad. Having sent his wife to Pakistan, he planned to follow, but when Jalalabad fell he went into the mountains with some other people, stayed in an Afghan village during Ramadan, and was arrested in a market after crossing the Pakistani border, when “somebody saw me and noticed that I was Arabic. He started talking to me and the police interfered and said you shall come with us, so I went with them to the police station.”

In 2016, I wrote that, in the years that followed my initial research into Younous Chekkouri’s case, nothing deterred me from my opinion that he was a man of peace, and in fact I found out two additional pieces of information that confirmed my initial opinion; firstly, that he “was one of the best-behaved prisoners in Guantánamo,” and secondly, that he was also a Sufi Muslim, “whose form of religion,” as the Associated Press described it, accurately, “is viewed with suspicion by extremist groups like IS and al-Qaida.”

Younous Chekkouri today

After his release, he was imprisoned for a while by the Moroccan authorities, but in February this year a court finally cleared him of all charges, and two weeks ago, following up on this important development in his case, the Washington Post provided an update on his story, via Sudarsan Raghavan, who met with him in Safi, the “picturesque port city” where he lives, but where, also, “he remains shackled by constant nightmares, flashbacks and insomnia.” As Raghavan explained, “He takes pills for anxiety, and he has yet to find a job. His future remains so uncertain, his past grips him so tightly, that he often feels as if he hasn’t left the prison where he was held for 14 years.”

“I am still in Gitmo,” he told the reporter.

As Raghavan explained, the victims of the US’s “war on terror,” at Guantánamo and elsewhere, “remain tormented by their experience at the hands of their American interrogators, jailers and guards,” according to activists and psychologists who have worked with them. Raghavan added that many also “carry the stigma associated with being incarcerated as alleged terrorists and have difficulty reintegrating into society.”

Katie Taylor, a deputy director of Reprieve, whose Life After Guantánamo project helps resettle former Guantánamo prisoners, said, “It’s well documented that the US was really focused on psychological elements of torture. Because it was so systemized, it has had a long-term impact on many of the men who underwent it.”

As Raghavan explained, although US officials “accused Chekkouri of being a senior al-Qaeda member and co-founder of a Moroccan Islamist militant group,” he “was never formally charged with a crime or faced trial.” In 2010, he was unanimously approved for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which consisted of representatives of six US security agencies, including the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security,” although, shamefully, it took another five years before he was actually released.

As Raghavan proceeded to explain, when he arrived back in Morocco “on a US military plane,” the Moroccan authorities imprisoned him, for “allegedly forming an extremist militant group,” and sentenced him to five years in prison. Five months later, however, he was released on bail, and in February this year, as I noted above, “he was acquitted of all charges by a Moroccan appeals court.”

Yet today, as Raghavan described it, he “is struggling to rebuild his life.” As Chekkouri himself put it, “Sometimes, when someone feels he’s incapable, he feels as though he’s nothing.”

Revisiting the story of his capture, Raghavan explained that he “was with his Algerian wife, Abla, in Afghanistan when two hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center towers in New York,” and added, “The couple, who he said had been there looking for work with a foreign aid agency, fled the capital, Kabul, as US forces entered the country to oust the Taliban regime and pursue Osama bin Laden. After the couple crossed into Pakistan, locals captured Chekkouri, taking him for one of the many Arab fighters who had joined al-Qaeda,” and handed him over to US forces.”

Raghavan assessed that it was “impossible to independently verify Chekkouri’s account,’ but noted that Reprieve had “vetted his story,” and, according to Katie Taylor, found that “it was very clear he was an economic migrant” in Afghanistan.

Chekkouri proceeded to explain to Raghavan how he “was taken first to a US detention center in the southern city of Kandahar, where he said his American jailers would strip him naked, place a bag over his head and beat him regularly. Some guards, he added, would also tear pages from his Koran.”

He was sent to Guantánamo five months later, where, he said, “his jailers beat his genitals with their shoes,” which “required him to often ask for new underwear because ‘there was so much pain I felt in my genitalia.’” However, as he put it, “his interrogators would offer him underwear only in exchange for confessing that he was an al-Qaeda militant.”

“That,” Chekkouri said, “his voice at times dipping so low that it was barely audible,” as Raghavan put it, “would make me want to kill myself.”

Predictably, the Department of Defense “did not respond to a request for comment” about Chekkouri’s allegations, but Abdelkrim el Manouzi, the former president of the Medical Association for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, who has treated Chekkouri for his psychological problems, described his claims of torture as being “very credible.” As he said, “I don’t think he will ever forget what happened to him.” Chekkouri continues to receive treatment to try to overcome the damage inflicted on him in US custody.

On meeting Chekkouri, Sudarsan Raghavan described the 50-year old as “[s]lim with brown eyes and a wisp of a beard,” noting how he “wore a puffy tan and orange jacket and a blue baseball cap that made him look younger.”

However, he continued to suffer. As Raghavan described it, “The night before, as usual, had been rough, with him tossing and turning, unable to sleep. He had awakened to pain and difficulty breathing, as he did most mornings.” Chekkouri himself described these symptoms as “the lingering effects … of beatings and other physical mistreatment, and of being kept in frigid conditions to deprive him of sleep.”

Raghavan also described how Chekkouri “lives an isolated life, mostly in the apartment he shares with relatives above an alley in a working-class neighborhood,” adding that he “seldom discusses his experience in Guantánamo with family members or neighbors,” because he “fears he won’t be able to control his emotions. Whenever he hears about Guantánamo or sees images, he gets flashbacks.”

“One recurrent image,” as Raghavan described it, “is that of an American woman who called herself Ana,” who “interrogated him for five years, threatening to have him hanged.” As Chekkouri put it, “Until now, I still see her in my nightmares.”

Chekkouri travels to Casablanca, 130 miles north of Safi, for psychiatric treatment once a month. He explained that “some of his friends also are victims of torture who also receive care at the center,” and “counts six other Moroccan ex-Guantánamo inmates among them.”

Abdelkrim el Manouz, the doctor, said, “Most of them are still suffering today.” He also explained how, when Chekkouri first arrived at the center in 2015, “he was grappling with severe anxiety, depression and fear of the future.” Today, he “still suffers from insomnia, nightmares and other malaise, but his condition is ‘no longer as bad as it was.’”

However, “overcoming the psychological and physical scars of Guantanamo ‘can only happen if Younous has the social requirements that will allow him to get back and participate in society,’” Manouzi said, adding, “He needs to work.”

Work, however, is hard to come by for a former Guantánamo prisoner. Chekkouri explained that, even when he was freed from prison in Morocco, “he was under constant surveillance by Morocco’s intelligence and security services.”

His lawyer, Khalid Idrissi, said, “He could not lead a normal life after being let out of jail. He was always living under the pressure that he could be arrested at any moment.”

Making matters worse, his wife Abla divorced him. As Raghavan put it, “She told Chekkouri that he had changed while at Guantánamo, that he was no longer the man she once loved.”

“It was,” Raghavan noted, “a devastating blow.” At Guantánamo, Chekkouri had coped with his imprisonment “by writing love letters to Abla,” in which, as he told the reporter, “he often discussed an imaginary daughter, hoping this would earn some sympathy from his jailers, who read all his correspondence. He called the girl Fatima Zahra.”

Today, as Raghavan noted, Chekkouri “still does not have a job. He considered becoming a clothes trader, but he does not have money to launch a business. After spending much of his adult life in prisons, he has a thin résumé. And his time in Guantánamo is also not a selling point to prospective employers.”

However, a year ago, he remarried, and in January, a month before his acquittal, “he got more reason for hope,” when “[h]is wife gave birth to a daughter,” who he named Fatima Zahra.

Chekkouri told Raghavan that, “when she’s old enough, he will speak to her about his imprisonment,” and will tell her that “they tried to kill my humanity, to kill my heart, but the opposite happened.”

I wish this gentle man the best of luck in healing the wounds of Guantánamo through loving his daughter, and through the love of his wife. I very much hope it all works out for him.

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.

Britain’s Broken Democracy: Tories Become UKIP, Media Ignores Labour Gains, Labour Continues Estate Demolitions

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

 

What a generally dispiriting occasion Thursday’s council elections were. On housing, which is the most pressing issue in the lives of over half the population, there was almost no acknowledgement, from either of the main parties, that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis of affordability and of security of tenure. Labour councils, even those that are actively engaged in demolishing council estates and replacing them with new developments with private developers, from which local people will largely be excluded, were largely undamaged at the polls, while the Tory heartlands generally held firm. 

Pundits observed that UKIP were almost wiped out, with establishment commentators suggesting that this was some sort of triumph of common sense in merrie olde England, whereas the truth is that the post-Brexit Conservative Party under Theresa May has actually become UKIP, and, as a result, the truth is considerably more alarming than lazy pundits suggest. As for Labour, the mainstream media furiously tried to portray their modest gains, and their considerable overall majority of councils and councillors, as some sort of sign of failure, which it very obviously isn’t. Some independent analysts suggested, plausibly, that Remain voters sent a powerful message to the Tories, and to Labour under the hazy, instinctively Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn, that the EU was significant battleground in the elections, but in general the elections played out as a showdown between the two big dogs of English politics, Labour and the Tories, in which overall, there was little change, because, overall, little change is actually possible. In our wretched, complacent first-past-the-post system, very little is actually to play for, and while the damage this inflicts on a broad platform of viewpoints is always apparent in a general election, local elections somehow get far less scrutiny, even though their outcomes are often even more damaging for democracy.

In Lewisham, where I live, for example, 60% of those who voted cast their votes for the Labour Party, but Labour walked off with 100% of the council seats. 

How is that supposed to be fair?

The bigger problem, however, for those of us who see housing as the most pressing political issue (putting aside, for some of us, the constant migraine that is Brexit), is how it was so blithely ignored. For the last 20 years (with a slight wobble after the global economic crash of 2008), we’ve been in a housing bubble artificially maintained by central government and the banks, and since the Tories came to power in 2010 they have used their cynical and opportunistic austerity programme to try to wipe out all social housing, a plan which, if successful, will return us to Victorian levels of poverty and exploitation. The Tories have starved councils of funds to support social housing, leading some of them — and, specifically, Labour councils as well as Tory councils — to knock down their own council estates to provide developers with new opportunities for immense profits, whilst also social cleansing poorer members of their communities out of the area altogether. The Tories then took aim at housing associations, which had been manoeuvred into position to largely take over council housing by Margaret Thatcher, cutting their funding so that the majority of them have become developers instead, increasingly sidelining their commitments to social housing along the way. 

On affordability, there is, simply, no legislative protection to protect private renters from the unfettered greed of landlords, and whilst it’s obvious that the most radical and intelligent solution is a massive, not-for-profit social homebuilding programme, the political consensus is to keep inventing new sticking plasters to try and shore up the whole unwieldy edifice of greed and exploitation. With market rents rising giddyingly, as greed becomes more and more fashionable, politicians and housing providers have found themselves paralysed, first by Boris Johnson’s decision to set “affordable” rents at 80% of market rents — the single biggest Goebbels-style act of outrageous black propaganda in domestic political life — and, since then, through efforts by Sadiq Khan (who became Mayor as a response to the unaffordability of modern London) to set up all manner of sub-divisions of rent — see the attached graph for the figures for Lewisham for ‘London Affordable Rent’ and ‘London Living Rent’ compared to social rent on the one hand, and private rent one the other — that tend to obscure the blunt truth — that social rents of £95.54 for a two-bedroom flat are affordable for the majority of Londoners, who earn less than £20,000 a year, while the ‘London Affordable Rent’ of £152.73 a week, and the ‘London Living Rent’ of £225,46, although less unaffordable than the market rent of £323.08, are not affordable for these ordinary working people, whose concerns are not addressed by the Labour Party politicians who traditionally cared about them.

In Lewisham, where social cleansing is part of the political landscape, I have found as a campaigner that people we meet understand, and are frustrated or angry about it, but when it came to voting many of them either didn’t turn up, or dutifully voted Labour. Admirable resistance was mounted by Andrea Carey Fuller, the Green candidate in New Cross Ward, where most of the current demolition plans are centred, but although she secured nearly a thousand votes, she came in fourth to the three existing Labour councillors, and, as noted above, with just 60% of the vote, Labour secured every single seat in the borough, even squeezing out the Greens in more middle-class neighbourhoods, where, in the past, there were six Green councillors. 

Elsewhere, the disappointments were similar. In Southwark, where the Labour council is the leader in estate demolitions and social cleansing, and the Tories were left with no councillors, council leader Peter John bragged that, “For the first time in history, Southwark is a Tory-free zone”, ignoring the fact that it is impossible to imagine that a Tory council in Southwark could be more destructive of social housing than Labour.

There were successes. Five Green councillors were elected in Lambeth, where the council is competing with Southwark as a destroyer of social housing, and there were, it should be noted, places where Labour’s reputation was not so tattered — in Haringey, for example, where the Labour council’s proposals to enter into an unprecedented deal with Lendlease regarding the borough’s council housing led to a massive grass-roots resistance movement that de-selected councillors supporting the deal, or created an environment in which they de-selected themselves. 

In general, however, the election results have not led to solutions being found in council chambers, but out on the streets and in estates threatened with destruction, where they have been all along, with campaigners who understand the significance of the struggle to prevent an unprecedented epidemic of social cleansing that could easily lead to tens of thousands of Londoners being removed from their homes, and forced out of the areas in which, in many cases, they have lived their whole lives. 

I hope you’ll join the resistance, if you haven’t already.

Those housing figures

At the top of this article, I mentioned housing being the most pressing issue in the lives of over half the population of the UK, and I wanted to make sure I wrote a little more about that statement. It’s based on figures produced by the Resolution Foundation in September 2017, establishing that the number of ‘families’ (which “may be a single person or a couple, along with any dependent children”) in owner-occupied properties is 51.6% of the total — 27% owned outright, with 24.6% in the form of mortgages. The remaining 48.4% of ‘families’ lives in rented accommodation — and the breakdown of those figures is of interest. 

They show that only 13.6% of families live in social housing (7.2% in council housing and  6.4% in housing associations), while 18.4% live in private rented housing, either alone or with others.

The Housing Resolution provide figures dating back to 1961, which establish that the highest percentage of social housing was 27.7% in 1977, while peak home ownership was about 57% in 2003-04.

See the figures in the graphic above for a comparison between 1961 and 2017.

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.

With Transfer of Ahmed Al-Darbi to Saudi Arabia, Guantánamo’s Population Drops to 40; No New Arrivals on Horizon

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.

 

So there was good news on Wednesday, when the Pentagon announced that Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi citizen in Guantánamo, had been repatriated, to serve out the rest of a 13-year sentence that he was given as the result of a plea deal that he agreed in his trial by military commission in February 2014.

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.

Writing about al-Darbi in the New York Times, Charlie Savage noted that, after he “cooperated with investigators,” he “lived apart from the main detainee population,” and added that a court document “jointly prepared by prosecutors and defense lawyers for his sentencing said that his testimony against two other detainees facing tribunal charges was ‘unprecedented in similar counterterrorism prosecutions to date.’”

Charlie Savage also noted that al-Darbi’s transfer was “the first time a detainee has left the wartime prison under President Trump, who vowed to fill it back up but has now instead overseen a reduction in its population.”

In a statement made available to the media by his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, al-Darbi said, “My words will not do justice to what I lived through in these years and to the men I leave behind in prison. No one should remain at Guantánamo without a trial. There is no justice in that.”

These are powerful words, that, I wish, Donald Trump would listen to, but there is no sign that he is capable of understanding why Guantánamo is such a fundamental betrayal of US values, and why it should be closed.

Ahmed al-Darbi’s transfer from Guantánamo leaves 40 men at the prison, and, as the Times stated, “comes as the Trump administration has been struggling to fulfill the president’s strong desire to back up his chest-thumping campaign rhetoric about Guantánamo, even as counterterrorism and security professionals, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have repeatedly argued that other approaches made more practical sense.”

My feeling is that Trump had to be made to understand that he had to honor al-Darbi’s plea deal, breaking through what, otherwise, is his complete antipathy towards releasing anyone from Guantánamo under any circumstances. For example, although five men were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, Trump has shown no sign of wanting to release them, and has undoubtedly been being advised by right-wingers whose opinion, as I know from exchanges with them in the past, is that the review processes were essentially political, and not about efforts to address the fundamentally shambolic nature of the Guantánamo detentions in the first place, while also being aware of security issues.

As the Times described the prison’s history, “George W. Bush’s claims that he could hold people there indefinitely without trial or judicial review and without obeying the Geneva Conventions … turned Guantánamo into a charged symbol around the world of prisoner abuses and American power.” Over time, “court interventions gave prisoners rights to hearings and to humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions, and conditions improved at the prison,” and in his second term in office, Bush even conceded that Guantánamo should be closed, because, as he wrote in his memoir, Decision Points, published in 2010, it “had become a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.”

President Obama, as the Times put it, “significantly winnowed the inmate population without adding new detainees,” and was also blocked by Congress “from bringing several dozen detainees deemed untransferable to a different prison on domestic soil,” while Donald Trump, in contrast, boasted during the election campaign that he would not only keep Guantánamo open, but would also also “load it up with some bad dudes.”

That, however, has not happened, and as the Times explained, although Trump signed an executive order in January directing defense secretary Mattis “to recommend within 90 days a policy about how to handle future detainees, including whether or when to take them to Guantánamo,” and suggested that, “in many cases,” new prisoners would be sent to the prison, everything he has said and done has not, in fact, delivered a policy that involves bringing anyone new to the prison.

As the Times reported, on Wednesday the Pentagon said that Mattis “had provided updated policy guidance about when to propose transferring detainees to Guantánamo ‘should that person present a continuing, significant threat to the security of the United States,’” but “gave few details about the document.” However, other people familiar with it told the Times that “it was several pages long and consisted of screening criteria about what could make a terrorism suspect eligible for Guantánamo detention, without plainly specifying when that option should be preferred over alternative dispositions.”

One person the Times spoke to “portrayed the document as vague, and another said it made no major changes from existing policy.”

Spelling out the US’s recent detention policy involving foreigners allegedly involved in terrorism, the Times explained that “the government has tried to leave lower-level detainees in the hands of allies, while interrogating important captives at an overseas military base or on a naval ship,” and, after questioning, having allies take charge of them, or, as “a fallback option,” prosecuting them in a US federal court.

“Transfer to Guantánamo,” meanwhile, “has been a theoretical last resort.” No new prisoners have been sent to Guantánamo for ten years, and “many national security professionals” regard bringing new prisoners to Guantánamo as “unattractive for several reasons.” One is that it is “extremely expensive,” another reason is that, “in practice, the combination of an interrogation followed by a civilian-court prosecution has successfully garnered critical intelligence while also resulting in convictions and harsh sentences,” and a third reason is that the military commissions have “struggled to get contested cases to trial.”

The Times also pointed out that most discussions about bringing new prisoners to Guantánamo have focused on Islamic State prisoners, like the “two British men who were recently caught in Syria by a Kurdish militia.” Trump, and Obama before him, “contended that the legal authority Congress granted to the executive branch to use military force — like detaining people without trial — against Al Qaeda in 2001, and for the Iraq war in 2002, legitimately extends to the Islamic State,” but the Times point out that “it is not clear that their stance is lawful,” and that “[t]aking Islamic State detainees to Guantánamo would give a court an opportunity to rule that the larger conflict in Iraq and Syria is illegal.”

I leave the final word, for now, to Ramzi Kassem, who urged the US courts to respond positively to a habeas corpus petition submitted by eleven prisoners in January. As the Times described it, he “argued that the legal and security arguments for closing the prison were ‘overwhelming’ and blamed politics for why it has remained open under three presidents.”

“This is the first prisoner transfer under Trump,” he said, “but it may also be the last unless the courts meaningfully check the president’s claimed power to imprison men without charge for as long as he pleases.”

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 196 prisoners released from February 2009 to January 2017 by President Obama, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else – either in print or on the internet – although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 – 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 – 16 Saudis; August 2007 – 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 – 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 – 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 – 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 – 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 – 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 – 2 Algerians; September 2008 – 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 – 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 – 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, 1 Palestinian and 1 Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer); November 2015 — 5 Yemenis to the United Arab Emirates; January 2016 — 2 Yemenis to Ghana; 1 Kuwaiti (Fayiz al-Kandari) and 1 Saudi; 10 Yemenis to Oman; 1 Egyptian to Bosnia and 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; April 2016 — 2 Libyans to Senegal; 9 Yemenis to Saudi Arabia; June 2016 — 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; July 2016 — 1 Tajik and 1 Yemeni to Serbia, 1 Yemeni to Italy; August 2016 — 12 Yemenis and 3 Afghans to the United Arab Emirates (see here and here); October 2016 — 1 Mauritanian (Mohammedou Ould Slahi); December 2016 — 1 Yemeni to Cape Verde; January 2017 — 4 Yemenis to Saudi Arabia; 8 Yemenis and 2 Afghans to Oman; 1 Russian, 1 Afghan and 1 Yemeni to the United Arab Emirates, and 1 Saudi repatriated to Saudi Arabia for continued detention.

A Defence of Social Housing in a Resolutely Hostile Political Environment

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

 

Tomorrow, Londoners will go to the polls to vote in council elections in the capital’s 32 boroughs,and across the UK there will also be elections in 34 metropolitan boroughs, 67 district and borough councils and 17 unitary authorities.

Voting ought to be a simple matter. The Tories, under Theresa May, are spectacularly useless and, wherever possible, cruel. Engaged in an effort to implement Brexit that seems to be destroying them, they are also gasping from one scandal to another — the latest being the Windrush fiasco, initiated by Theresa May, who is, to be blunt, a racist, and this whole racist disaster demonstrates quite how unpleasant they are.

And yet, if you care about fairness and social justice — in the specific context of housing, the biggest issue facing Londoners today, as well as many, many other people around the country — then voting for the Labour Party is not, in general, to be recommended, leaving a giant hole where participation in the democratic process ought to be.

On housing, lamentably, Labour boroughs across the capital — and across the country — are engaged in the mass destruction of their constituents’ homes, via the demolition of council estates, and their replacement with new developments, built by private developers, from which almost all the existing tenants, and even leaseholders (those who bought their homes under the ‘Right to Buy’ policy introduced by Margaret Thatcher) are priced out.

The roll call of Labour councils involved in this destruction is shameful. It began in Southwark, where the Labour-led council, under Peter John, sold, for no profit, the more than 1,000 homes of the Heygate Estate to the rapacious, Australian-based international property developer Lendlease, which has demolished the estate, and is providing just 82 new homes at social rent on its replacement, the underwhelming Elephant Park. Undeterred by massive criticism of its appalling behaviour at the Heygate, the council has followed up with similar destruction on the even larger Aylesbury Estate.

Elsewhere, Lambeth Council is intent on destroying several estates, including two, Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, that are architecturally acclaimed, and for which no rationale beyond profiteering and social cleansing exists to justify their demolition, and Tower Hamlets has done the same with the architecturally-acclaimed Robin Hood Gardens, now half-destroyed, while Hackney Council, meanwhile, is engaged in the complete destruction of the huge Woodberry Down estate, a gem of post-war social housing when it was built, and in Lewisham, where I live, the Labour council is also intent on destroying perfectly sound homes in deals with private developers.

The list goes on and on, with the only real distraction from Labour’s enthusiasm for social cleansing being the terrible disaster at Grenfell Tower last June, when, under a Tory council, over 70 people died in an inferno that was entirely preventable, and which showed, fundamentally, how those in social housing are regarded as second-class citizens by those who rule us.

Of course, most efforts to understand why this epidemic of social cleansing is happening end up with the blame resting squarely on the Tory government of the last eight years — although don’t be fooled; many of these estate demolitions were being discussed by Labour councils before the crash of 2008 and the Tories’ supremely opportunistic embrace of austerity. However, the Tories have massively cut the amount of money available for housing since coming to power in 2010, and this, in turn, so the general narrative goes, has forced councils into deals with private developers.

From the beginning, however, councils failed to stand up to central government, and to stand with their own tenants and leaseholders, and it is impossible not to conclude that, along the way, some councils — and councillors — became overly enamoured of the money swilling around at the international property fairs and conferences they were wooed at by private developers, while other councils and councillors, though representatives of the Labour Party, were happy to engage in social cleansing, squeezing out poorer members of their communities through estate demolitions, while welcoming in those with more money.

Again, it is a fact that, in a state of permanent austerity, the unemployed and the low paid end up costing money rather than providing it to councils in need (via council tax, for example), but, again, no council has ever stood up to central government to point this out, and to suggest that, for example, perhaps all the Labour boroughs in London — currently 21 of 32 — could unite in opposition to the unparalleled destructiveness of the Tories’ policies.

The Tories also cut funding to housing associations, which have taken over much council housing, and the role of councils as social housing providers, since Margaret Thatcher’s time, but housing associations, too, have largely gone the way of councils, enthusiastically embracing a new role as private developers, and, with councils, becoming two sides of the same social cleansing coin.

The current dark farce, when it comes to social housing, is the plethora of different rental systems that have been established over the last eight years. Social rents — those that council tenants and housing association tenants in place before 2010 pay — are around one-third of market rents, which, unfettered and actively promoted by central government and the banks for the last 20 years, are genuinely out of control in the capital.

In Lewisham, where I live, for example (with thanks to Crosswhatfields for the information), the market rent for a two-bedroom flat is £323.08, while social rent is £95.54. Under Boris Johnson, during his eight lamentable years as Mayor of London, one of his great innovations was the criminally inaccurate term “affordable”, for rents set at 80% of market rents; in Lewisham, in other words, £258.46 — and it is this unaffordable “affordable” category of housing that the Tories insisted must apply to all new social tenancies after they took power in 2010.

Since Sadiq Khan became Mayor — swept in, lest we forget, because the housing crisis was the number one concern for Londoners — he has introduced compromises into a market that desperately needs fundamental change. The first compromise, introduced last year, is ’London Affordable Rent’, which is supposed to consist of ”rents for genuinely affordable homes aimed at low-income households.” In Lewisham, ‘London Affordable Rent’ for a two-bedroom flat is £152.73 a week. This year, Khan has introduce another compromise, ‘London Living Rent’, introduced as “a type of affordable housing for middle-income Londoners”, for which a two-bedroom flat in Lewisham costs £225.46 a week.

We all need better than this. The housing bubble, which is now 20 years old, and has — absurdly, shamefully — become the main driver of the economy, needs puncturing, but as no one in a position of power will do that voluntarily, and as it would create a huge negative equity problem if implemented bluntly, the best way to achieve it is for there to be a massive, not-for-profit social homebuilding programme, and while we may hope that this would happen under Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister — and Labour’s housing proposals (Housing for the Many) are worth looking at — at present the Labour councils who are destroying social housing in London and across the country have nothing in common with these aspirations.

So tomorrow, who are we supposed to vote for? Not the Tories, obviously, but nor, in most cases, Labour either. Have a look at this list of councils involved in estate demolitions (34 projects approved by Sadiq Khan despite his claim that there should be no more estate demotions without ballots), and see what you think, and also check out the 17 proposed demolitions that haven’t yet been approved, which I’ll be writing more about soon.

Unless you can establish that a Labour council appears to be behaving quite well on housing — in Islington, for example — or unless they have transformed themselves, as Labour has in Haringey, where a grass-roots movement kicked out the social cleansers, or unless it’s in Kensington and Chelsea, where Labour can reasonably be given a chance to take over from the Tories who presided over the Grenfell disaster, then I can’t endorse supporting them, and would suggest that a vote for the Greens is a much better bet — or, in some cases, a vote for the Lib Dems.

So that’s it — please vote wisely tomorrow, and let’s find a way to return social housing, and genuinely affordable social rents, to where they need to be — at the heart of political life in London and, more widely, in England as a whole. Or, as I described it in a Facebook post earlier today, “We need a massive social homebuilding programme … aimed at providing permanent homes at social rents for anyone who wants them, to restore some necessary sense of justice and fairness to society, to free up economic activity so it’s not all sinking into the deep and unproductive pockets of the rentiers, and so our children can finally have the prospect of a brighter future free of rent servitude.”

Please note: The photo at the top of this article is from my ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’

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.