Andy Worthington's Blog, page 38

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

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

 

Last week, I published an article, Betrayal: Senegal Prepares to Send Two Former Guantánamo Prisoners Back to Libya, Where They Face Imprisonment, Torture and Even Execution, looking at the terrible news that two Libyan nationals were being threatened with deportation to Libya. The two men, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (aka Omar Mohammed Khalifh) and Salem Gherebi (aka Ghereby), were given humanitarian asylum in Senegal two years ago, on the understanding, agreed with the US State Department, that it was permanent, and that they would not, under any circumstances, be returned to Libya, where the security situation was so fraught that it was not possible to guarantee their safety as former Guantánamo prisoners tainted, unfairly, with the stamp of terrorism.

When I published my article, the Senegalese government’s threat was to send the two men back to Libya on April 3, and there were hopes that criticism might stop the plans from going ahead. However, on April 4, the Guantánamo Justice Centre, set up by former prisoners, posted the following update: “Regarding the situation of Omar and Salem previously given refuge in Senegal, we regret to report that eye witnesses have said one of the Guantánamo survivors was transferred today to Tripoli Mitiga Airport.”

On April 5, the New York Times picked up the story. On the ground in Senegal, Dionne Searcey confirmed that Khalifa had “disappeared from his once-guarded apartment in Dakar that now appears abandoned.” The Times added that the Senegalese government had said that Khalifa, identified as Awad Khalifa, “was not being deported.” However, neighbors said Khalifa and Salem Ghereby “were taken away on Tuesday afternoon.” The Times also explained that, hours earlier, “they had told a New York Times reporter visiting the apartment” — Dionne Searcey, presumably — “that they had received handwritten notices that they would be sent to Libya.”

“In Libya, I will have no life, and there’s no security there,” Khalifa had said, adding that, when he told friends that he was being repatriated, “They told me I’m going to my death.”

The Times also explained that Salem Ghereby, “who said he had family in Libya and connections protecting him there, apparently consented to repatriation,” and had “contacted the international human rights organization Reprieve on Thursday from an airport in Tunisia saying he was en route to Libya.” However, “No one had been in touch with him since, and neither the Senegalese nor the American government would disclose the whereabouts of either man.”

Former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who I got to know after his release in 2007, when he appeared in the documentary film about Guantánamo that I co-directed, and went on a UK screening tour with me, told me by email that sources in Libya told him that Ghereby was locked up by a militia force who he and others feared would imprison him. “One insider friend told us they took him to Tripoli Mitiga Airport,” Deghayes told me, adding that for three days his family had not been told where he was, even though two of his children, 16 and 18 years of age, had asked about his whereabouts. Deghayes added that he had spoken to his brother, who said  he had “no idea where to find him.” He also said that the militia holding him were running a notorious prison at the airport, where some people had died, and others, who had survived their imprisonment, sought to bring a case against their captors for the use of torture. 

Deghayes also indicated that, to the best of his knowledge, Omar Khalifa had not been repatriated, but was “locked up in Senegal” and “very likely to be forcibly deported.” He added that the ICRC (the International Committee of the Red Cross) “said that they will search for him and are concerned about him.” He described the situation as “bleak and worrying,” but that “our hopes and thoughts are for them and their families.”

The New York Times article noted that the “murky fate” of the two former prisoners “put a spotlight on the Trump administration’s decision to shutter the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, which monitored resettled detainees and handled diplomatic issues that arose as they embarked on life after detention, seeking to reduce the risk of recidivism.”

Daniel Fried, a former ambassador who was the special envoy during President Obama’s first term in office, said, “We understood that we had an obligation to follow up with the receiving government on the detainees. It sounds great to abolish the office — ‘we are not closing Gitmo, therefore we don’t need a Gitmo closure office, ha-ha, look how clever we are’ — but what you in fact are doing is losing the ability to follow up on these people, which is essential to security.”

The Times also noted that several former officials involved in policies relating to  Guantánamo prisoners, said the US government “should have worked to prevent the movement of any former detainees to Libya because it is a chaotic country with a weak central government and active Islamist militias.” As the Times added, “International law also prevents forcibly sending people to a place where they have a credible fear of abuse.”

The State Department told the Times that it “continues to appropriately address issues that were previously tasked to the Office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure,” adding that it had “reiterated to the government of Senegal our expectation that it will uphold its international obligations” to the two men, but these came across as empty words, because, for specific details, the Times was referred to the Senegalese government.

Lee S. Wolosky, the special envoy in Obama’s second term, who “negotiated the 2016 deal to resettle the two men in Senegal,” told the Times on Thursday that he “had been told by a Senegalese diplomatic official that Mr. Ghereby had left the country but that Mr. Khalifa was not being forcibly deported, though he had been relocated within Senegal.”

It is difficult to know if there is any truth to the relocation story. As the Times noted, “Mr. Khalifa’s cellphone has been turned off since Tuesday, and his lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, said he was worried that the Senegalese government had taken his client into custody and may still intend to follow through on its threat to deport him.”

Kassem said, “Sending Mr. Khalifa to Libya would not only break the promise of safe asylum that both the United States and Senegal made to my client when he was at Guantánamo, but it would also violate the Convention Against Torture. Both Senegal and the United States would be responsible for any harm that would come to my client in Libya.”

Turning to the arrangements for the men’s resettlement in Senegal two years ago, the Times noted that “[r]esettlement agreements typically included a promise by the receiving country not to let former detainees travel abroad for two years,” but that Khalifa, according to Ramzi Kassem, “understood that the resettlement offer was for permanent residency.” The Times added, however, that “officials familiar with such agreements said they are ambiguous about longer-term prospects.”

The Times also explained that, after the men first received notification of the Senegalese government’s intention to deport them, and Ramzi Kassem began to publicize their plight, a phone call from Lee Wolosky to a diplomat “may have helped stop an attempt to deport Mr. Khalifa for now.” He “said his inquiry appeared to bring to the attention of high-level Senegalese officials that mid-level civil servants were trying to send both men to Libya.” Last Sunday, as a result, Omar Baldé, an official with the Senegalese ministry of communications, “said Mr. Khalifa was not going to be deported.”

Nevertheless, when the Times reporter met Khalifa and Ghereby on Tuesday, at Khalifa’s apartment, “both men said they had not been told the deportation was off.” This was when Ghereby was still expressing confidence that “his family ties would probably protect him from violent militias in Libya,” Khalifa, on the other hand, “said he had no such connections and feared for his life.” He also explained that “he was engaged to a Senegalese woman.”

The Times also noted that it was “unclear why Senegalese officials wanted to deport the men,” but suggested it may have been because they “had many complaints about their life in Senegal.” As the Times added, they had repeatedly visited the US Embassy “to air grievances,” including “a desire for larger meals,” and identification papers, “which they had been promised,” and which “would allow them greater flexibility for travel.” Ramzi Kassem also noted that “Khalifa’s requests to the Senegalese authorities for glasses and a better-fitting prosthetic leg took months to be fulfilled,” while Ghereby “said that his wife and children from Libya had not been permitted to stay with him in Senegal.”

Lee Wolosky stressed that “officials in the Obama administration centralized the monitoring of former detainees in a high-level State Department office to prioritize problem-solving and reduce the risk that something would go wrong,” adding that, “By closing his former office and foisting that responsibility on to junior embassy officials around the world, the Trump administration is effectively washing the United States’ hands of the matter.”

As he concluded, “The office should have stayed open. Any catastrophic failures that happen from this point forward are the sole responsibility of the Trump administration.”

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.

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

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

 

Last week, I was delighted to talk to Linda Olson-Osterlund for the morning show, Political Perspectives, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. Linda has been talking to me about Guantánamo for many years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to her. 

The show is available here — and here as an MP3 — and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful. Unfortunately, KBOO had a new telephone system, which didn’t allow foreign calls, and so the first 12 minutes of the show feature some music by Bill Frissell, before Linda introduced me at 12:20, prior to our interview beginning at 15:00.

Linda and I spent the first ten minutes talking about the habeas corpus petition submitted by lawyers for eleven of the remaining 41 prisoners at Guantánamo on January 11, the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison. As I explained in a recent article, the lawyers argued, as a press release by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights put it, that “[Donald] Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’”

CCR’s press release also stated that the lawyers’ filing “argues that continued detention is unconstitutional because any legitimate rationale for initially detaining these men has long since expired; detention now, 16 years into Guantánamo’s operation, is based only on Trump’s raw antipathy towards Guantánamo prisoners – all foreign-born Muslim men – and Muslims more broadly.” The lawyers added that “Donald Trump’s proclamation that he will not release any detainees during his administration reverses the approach and policies of both President Bush and President Obama, who collectively released nearly 750 men.”

As part our discussion, I was pleased to be able to mention a particular bugbear of mine — the Justice Department Civil Division lawyers, some of whom have been in place since the earliest days of Guantánamo under George W. Bush, and who have now spent 16 years solidly resisting any efforts to release prisoners under any circumstances. 

Around 25:00, Linda shifted our attention to what she described as “the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that immigrants facing deportation can be held indefinitely with no hearing on their cases,” a shocking development, although one that is sadly typical of a lamentable hardening of attitudes towards immigrants and minorities under Donald Trump and those who voted from him in America, and in Brexit Britain under Theresa May and the Tories. I was pleased — perhaps that’s not quite the appropriate word — to be able to mention to US listeners the disgraceful situation that emerged in the UK a few years ago when Theresa May, our current Prime Minister, was Home Secretary, when, extrajudicially, she stripped two dual national citizens of their British citizenship while they were in Syria, and then told the US where they were so they could be killed in drone attacks, and I also mentioned the disgrace that is Britain’s open-ended detention system for failed immigration applicants, who can be held indefinitely, in prisons that are a compete betrayal of all fundamental human rights.  

Around 31:00, Linda moved the focus of discussion onto the construction and  destruction taking place at Guantánamo — the new buildings being raised, and the old ones being destroyed, with the latter topic being one I discussed in my recent article, Why Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Mustn’t Be Destroyed.

We also discussed the cost of maintaining the prison at Guantánamo — $441m a year, or, in other words, $10m a year per prisoner, versus the $35,000 a year that it costs to keep a prisoner in a maximum-security prison on the US mainland, and from here we moved into America’s out-of control spending budget, with me saying that it was, essentially, “impossible to imagine that someone could rise to the position of president by declaring that the amount the US spends on military spending is insane.”

At 40:00, Linda followed on by discussing the awakening resistance to the lack of gun control amongst young people, who are sick of a system in which any deranged person with a gun can embark on a massacre in a school (because of the lobbying of the criminally powerful gun lobby), and particularly amongst black girls and young women, who also face the potentially lethal everyday racism of the US, and of particular interest is Naomi Wadler, the 11-year old girl who spoke with remarkable eloquence at the recent D.C. March For Our Lives, and that video is posted below:

There was plenty more in the show, so what are you waiting for? Give it a listen!

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been some time since I last posted about the activities of my band The Four Fathers, so here’s an update following our most recent appearances — at a protest against the proposed redevelopment of Walthamstow’s main square, on February 24, and as part of the Telegraph Hill Festival, with our friends the Commie Faggots, on March 16, a wonderful and very well attended protest music double bill.

Since I last wrote about the band, people have, we’re glad to note, continued to listen to us on Bandcamp (and we’ve even sold a few CDs!), and our video of ‘Grenfell’, the song I wrote after last June’s entirely preventable fire in west London, in which over 70 people died, has now had nearly 1,650 views on YouTube and Facebook.

We’re planning to record it soon, along with our anti-Brexit anthem, ‘I Want My Country Back (From the People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, and we’ve also been working on new material — new songs about the history of the counter-culture, and about so-called “affordable” housing, and a positive anthem about solidarity and resistance — and some covers, with Aswad’s ‘Not Satisfied’ inching closer to a public outing. I was also recently interviewed for an article about protest music in Artefact Magazine, produced by students at London College of Communications, following up on another protest music interview, for the Icelandic website, Shouts!

If you haven’t yet heard it, below, via Bandcamp, is our new album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?‘ Feel free to have a listen, and if you like it please consider buying a CD or buying it as a download.

How Much Is A Life Worth? by The Four Fathers

So below is some information about forthcoming gigs. We hope to see you out and about somewhere over the next few months, and if you would like us to support a worthy cause, and/or to play at a festival, a pub or a party, do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!

This Saturday, April 7, guitarist Richard Clare and I are playing at Protestival, a one-day festival running from 3-10pm at the Crown and Anchor, 15-16 Marine Parade, Eastbourne BN21 3DX. It’s £15 for the day, but the entertainment will be non-stop, so we reckon it’s pretty good value. Dave Randall (ex-guitarist of Faithless) will be there talking about his hit book, ’Sound System’, about protest music, plus street activist Charlie X talking about his long history of silent protests dressed as Charlie Chaplin, and much, much more. Tickets are available from Pebble Records and the Facebook page is here. It’s organised by Eastbourne People’s Assembly, with proceeds going to the Matthew 25 Mission for their work in supporting some of the most vulnerable people in Eastbourne.

On Sunday April 29, bassist Mark Quiney and I are playing in Old Tidemill Garden on Reginald Road, Deptford, London SE8 4RS, the lovely community garden whose destruction — and that of the block of council flats next door — was approved by Lewisham Council last September, and recently confirmed by London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, despite him promising that there would be no further estate destructions without ballots. Grass-roots resistance to this proposed destruction is ongoing, with the council urged to come up with new plans that spare the garden and the flats. Mark and I will be playing (hopefully with members of the all-women ukulele group Ukadelix) as part of a day of short films about the housing crisis — with music — as part of the New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival. The event page is here.

On Monday April 30, I’m also attending a screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a new documentary film about the housing crisis, which I narrate, in Sanford Co-Op, also as part of the New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival. The event page for that is here, and the Facebook page is here.

On Saturday May 12, The Four Fathers are playing at Hither Green Festival World Food and Craft Fair, The Clock Tower Piazza, Des Vignes Drive, London SE13 1PA, which runs from 12.30pm-5pm (map here). This is the opening day of the Hither Green Festival, and we’ll be playing at some point in the afternoon. The Clock Tower is at the heart of a former hospital site converted into housing, near Mountsfield Park, and we played last year with a number of other bands and had a great time. I can also guarantee that there’s a lot of delicious food available from all round the world. 

On Sunday May 13, The Four Fathers are playing a ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ benefit gig (£3 entry) that I’m organising at the New Cross Inn, 323 New Cross Road, London SE14 6AS, which runs from 7-11pm, with the Commie Faggots, Ukadelix, local poet Jazzman John, rapper Asher Baker, 18-year old beatboxer The Wiz-RD (fresh from his role in the 5-star Battersea Arts Centre show ‘Frankenstein’), and the Strawberry Thieves Socialist Choir. ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ is the group I set up in November to provide a focal point for the various campaigns to protect social housing and community space in the London borough of Lewisham, and this is a fundraiser for the campaigns — against the destruction of Achilles Street estate in New Cross, as well as Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald House in Deptford, mentioned above. The first gig, a great night of bands, rappers and spoken word artists, was at the Bird’s Nest in November.

On Friday May 25, The Four Fathers are heading to east London, to Clapton, to play at the Royal Sovereign, 64 Northwold Road, London E5 8RL, with the Commie Faggots, who have a monthly residency there. We’re really looking forward to it! 8pm start, we reckon, but we’ll probably be on more like 9.30 or 10, as our drummer Bren will have to get into town from Surrey and then get his kit halfway across London!

On Saturday May 26, from 3-4.30pm, The Four Fathers are playing at the Arts Cafe, Manor Park, Lewisham, London SE13 5QZ, as part of the Hither Green Festival. We’ve played many times before at this lovely community arts cafe run by Fred and Banu, and look forward to returning for the first time in 2018, as part of a whole line-up of fringe events. Our set is followed by The New Crusaders, playing instrumental versions of the songs of the Crusaders.

On Friday June 8, The Four Fathers are playing at the Chandos, 56 Brockley Rise, London SE23 1LN, as part of the Brockley Max Festival, with beatboxer The Wiz-RD and the Strawberry Thieves Socialist Choir.

And finally, for now, on Saturday June 9, The Four Fathers are playing at Art in the Park in Hilly Fields, London SE4, also as part of the Brockley Max Festival. Music runs all afternoon, and we’re not sure yet when we’ll be playing, but it will, as always, be a great afternoon so long as the rain stays away — and even then, of course, we’d work out how to have a good time anyway!

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.

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

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.

 

Dreadful news from Senegal, where two former Guantánamo prisoners, both from Libya, have been told that their resettlement in the country in April 2016, which they had been led to believe was permanent, is to be brought to a sudden end tomorrow, with their unwilling — and potentially fatal — repatriation to Libya.

For the Intercept, Murtaza Hussain and Glenn Greenwald reported the story on Saturday night, focusing on the story of one of the men, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (aka Omar Mohammed Khalifh), whose release in Senegal was “the by-product of a deal negotiated by his attorneys with the U.S. government.” His lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, a professor at CUNY School of Law in New York, told the Intercept that the agreement “expressly guaranteed that the Libyan would have the right to permanently settle in Senegal and rebuild his life there, rather than be returned to war-torn Libya.”

As the Intercept explained, “In addition to the deteriorating security situation in his home country, Khalifa’s status as a former Guantánamo detainee as well as his tribal background meant that being sent back to his country of origin would mean an almost certain death sentence.”

At the time of the two men’s release, exactly two years ago, Senegalese officials made it clear that neither they nor the Pentagon viewed Khalifa — and Salem Gherebi (aka Ghereby), the other Libyan sent from Guantánamo to Senegal — as a threat. At the time, former prisoner Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born British resident, described Salem as “a friend of mine, married to a Pakistani woman, with two young boys and a daughter,” and “a great personality, kind, learned, generous and humble.” He added, “He taught me a lot inside prison when we were at Camp Five,” a notorious block of isolation cells at Guantánamo. Following his release, his attorney Rick Wilson said that Gherebi “looks forward to being reunited with his family as soon as possible … including a 15-year-old daughter who he’s never met in person,” as the Miami Herald explained, adding, “His wife is Pakistani but she and their three children have been living in Libya with the Gherebi family.”

Confirming at the time of their release that neither man was regarded as a threat by the Senegalese government, Sidiki Kaba, Senegal’s Minister of Justice, said, “These are simply men who we must help because they are African sons who have been tested for years. It is important, under the conditions of American law, that these detainees be able to have access to humanitarian asylum.” He added that “the two were not known to be jihadists.”

In addition, an official statement from the government of Senegal announced at the same time that “the Government of the Republic of Senegal granted today humanitarian asylum to two Libyan nationals, including one disabled, detained without trial for 14 years, even though no charge is held against them,” adding, “This asylum, granted in accordance with the relevant conventions of international humanitarian law, is also part of the tradition of Senegalese hospitality and Islamic solidarity with two African brothers who have expressed the wish to be resettled in Senegal after being granted their liberty.”

When Khalifa was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board (a parole-type process) in 2015, I wrote how the decision brought “freedom within sight for an amputee with numerous other health problems,” who, Omar Deghayes told me in 2010, “was not who the Americans thought he was.”

Deghayes told me, “They call him ‘The General,’ not because of anything he has done, but because he decided that life would be easier for him in Guantánamo if he said yes to every allegation laid against him.” 

I also stated, “Even so, as Deghayes also explained, this cooperation has been futile, as Khalifh has been subjected to appalling ill-treatment, held in a notorious psychiatric block where the use of torture was routine, and denied access to adequate medical attention for the many problems that afflict him, beyond the loss of his leg.”

As Deghayes described it, “He has lost his sight in one eye, has heart problems and high blood pressure, and his remaining leg is mostly made of metal, from an old accident in Libya a long time ago when a wall fell on him. He describes himself as being nothing more than ‘the spare parts of a car.’”

The Intercept also noted that, when the Periodic Review Board panel approved his release, they noted that he has a “significantly compromised health condition” and also commented approvingly on his history of “mediating concerns raised between other detainees and guard staff.”

Last week, however, as the Intercept described it, “the US State Department appears to have abandoned its commitments when releasing Khalifa. A handwritten note in Arabic, delivered to him on Wednesday by Senegalese authorities, informed him that his two years of permitted residency in the country had expired and that he would be deported to Libya on April 3rd.”

As well as putting his life at risk, this letter also “directly contravened assurances given to him by State Department officials when he was released from Guantánamo, promising that he would be allowed to stay in Senegal permanently and not be returned to Libya under any circumstances,” promises that “were made as part of a negotiation between Khalifa’s lawyers and the now-defunct State Department office tasked with closing the detention camp.” Last year, I highlighted the problems with the shutting down, under Trump, of the role of the envoy for Guantánamo closure, in an article entitled, Shutting the Door on Guantánamo: The Significance of Donald Trump’s Failure to Appoint New Guantánamo Envoys.

As the Intercept noted, in other cases prisoners “have resisted being sent to various countries for fear of what would happen to them as ex-Guantánamo detainees,” which is the reason that lawyers “have carefully negotiated conditions to secure their safety upon their release.”

After noting that Salem Gherebi “received a similar notice last week informing him of his impending deportation,” the Intercept explained that both men “now face an uncertain but very dangerous future upon their return to Libya.”

Ramzi Kassem told the Intercept that, “without immediate intervention on the part of the U.S. State Department to uphold its commitments by halting his deportation from Senegal, Khalifa faces the prospect of imminent death in Libya.”

As Kassem stated, “My client and I relied on [the] US government’s assurances two years ago that Mr. Khalifa’s resettlement in Senegal would be permanent and that he would face no risk of a forced repatriation to imprisonment and torture in Libya. But now, the US State Department is nowhere to be found. Irrespective of who sits in the White House today, the United States should honor its promises. For Mr. Khalifa, this is a matter of life or death.”

Since being released from Guantánamo, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr has, in the Intercept’s words, “managed to rebuild some semblance of a normal life in Senegal.” The website added, “Despite crippling physical ailments and psychological trauma suffered as a result of his detention, Khalifa became engaged to a Senegalese woman and had begun making plans to settle and work in the country for the long-term.”

And in the meantime the situation in Libya has become severely chaotic following the revolution in 2011 and the NATO-led overthrow of Col. Gaddafi. “Today,” as the Intercept explained, Libya “is under the control of an array of divided armed groups, political factions and tribes that are often in conflict with one another,” adding, crucially, “Were Khalifa to be returned to any of the two major airports in the country, both of which are presently in the hands of hostile tribes and political factions, he would likely be immediately detained, subjected to torture, and even executed. If Khalifa were to fly to Tripoli, the factions in control of the capital would assume he were an Islamist by virtue of his due-process-free detention by the US, and would thus regard him as a threat. But his other option, Misrata, is controlled by a tribe that he says is adverse to his, putting him in at least as much danger upon his return.”

For Khalifa, as the Intercept put it, “the apparent betrayal by the US government of its promises to him upon release from Guantánamo has put him in an impossible position. Two Libyan government officials who met with him in Senegal to discuss his pending repatriation conceded that it would be impossible to guarantee his safety in Libya, telling him during a meeting that they ‘couldn’t even guarantee their own safety in Libya, let alone his.’” Omar Deghayes confirmed this to me. “Returning to Libya was something that they looked forward to in the past,” he said, “but recently the conditions have changed and can be very dangerous for them. Sending them to Libya will cause a risk to their lives and liberty, locked up in the most dreadful of conditions.” Deghayes also said, “They are asking that if Senegal does not want them anymore can they let them arrange to leave to any third country.”

In a statement to the Intercept, Khalifa said, “If the US government told me two years ago that I would remain in Senegal temporarily, only to be sent to Libya after two years, regardless of the situation in Libya, I would have refused resettlement in Senegal. I would have even chosen to remain at Guantánamo over torture and death in a dungeon in Libya.” He added, “I have grown to love Senegal and its people. The Senegalese friends I have made here invite me to their weddings and festivities. I have learned about the different Islamic practices people follow here, including Sufism. I expected to marry here and to make my life in Senegal — that is still what I want.”

The Intercept noted that State Department and Senegalese officials had not responded to requests for comment about the cases, but, in an email to me, Ramzi Kassem explained how important it was for both the Sengalese and US governments to be made aware that their plans are unacceptable. 

Kassem pointed that “Mr. Khalifa is a refugee and should not be sent anywhere against his will,” and reiterated what he told the Intercept, that the US government “can’t simply wash its hands and do nothing when it made promises that my client relied on when he accepted resettlement in Senegal.”

He added that he was hopeful that pressure on both governments can prevent the unjustifiable deportation of the two Libyans to an alarmingly dangerous situation in Libya.

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.

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

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.

16 years ago, on March 28, 2002, an event took place that has had dreadful repercussions ever since, when Pakistani and American agents raided a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan and captured Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), creating a torture program especially for him, which was then applied to dozens of other prisoners seized in the US’s brutal and pointless “war on terror.”

A Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia in 1971, Zubaydah had traveled to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen in the Afghan civil war (1989-1992) that followed the retreat of the Soviet Union after its ten-year occupation. In 1992, he was severely injured by an exploding mortar shell, suffering shrapnel wounds and severe memory loss. For over a year, he was also left unable to speak.

Although he eventually recovered sufficiently to become a logistician for Khalden, an independent training camp run by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, which closed around 2000 when al-Libi refused to allow it to come under the control of Al-Qaeda, FBI agents who interviewed him after his capture had no doubt that the mortar damage had caused permanent damage. They also knew that he was a kind of travel agent for Khalden, and not number 3 in Al-Qaeda, as the CIA and the Bush administration mistakenly thought. (Al-Libi, meanwhile, tortured into telling lies that the US used to justify its illegal invasion of Iraq, was eventually returned to Libya, where Col. Gaddafi imprisoned him and later killed him).

Nevertheless, the Bush administration refused to listen to reason, and decided that he had to be tortured. He was flown to Thailand, where the CIA had set up its first “black site,” and where he was waterboarded on 83 separate occasions and also subjected to other disgusting and disgraceful forms of torture under the direction of two former US military psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

When the Thai government tired of allowing Thailand to be used for abuses that the US was unwilling to do on its own soil, he was shunted around a variety of other “black sites,” including one in Poland, one in Guantánamo (known as Strawberry Fields), and others in Morocco, Lithuania and, probably, Afghanistan, before ending up back at Guantánamo, this time in military custody, with 13 other alleged “high-value detainees” in September 2006.

Since then, while six of the men who arrived with him in September 2006 have been put forward for military commission trials, which are mired in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings, largely because of the torture to which they were subjected, which the government still seeks to hide, he and six others continue to be held without charge or trial. Under Obama, they were eventually allowed to have their cases reviewed, but the review process set up in 2013, the Periodic Review Boards, which is similar to a parole process, approved their ongoing imprisonment. With ten other prisoners, he is now asking a judge to rule on whether, 16 years after Guantánamo opened, their endless imprisonment is “arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’”

Just two weeks ago, Joe Margulies, who is one of Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers, wrote about his client for TIME. Margulies wrote, “I represent Abu Zubaydah, who was the first person imprisoned at a CIA black site and the first to have his interrogation ‘enhanced.’ He was subjected to all of the approved techniques and many that were not. In a bit more than three weeks in August 2002, he was waterboarded 83 times, suspended from hooks in the ceiling, forced into a coffin for hours at a time in a gathering pool of his own urine and feces, crammed into a tiny box that would’ve been small even for a child, bombarded with screaming noise and cold air, compelled to stay awake for days on end, and ‘rectally rehydrated.’”

Margulies also wrote, “Because of what he was made to endure, Abu Zubaydah suffers from frequent seizures, the origin of which cannot be determined. He is tormented by sounds that others do not hear, and cannot remember simple things that others cannot forget. Because his condition is classified, there is much about his welfare that the United States will not let me say. They have authorized me to report, however, that I am ‘very concerned’ about his health.”

Joe Margulies’ article followed the news that Gina Haspel, currently the Deputy Director of the CIA, had been chosen by Donald Trump to be its Director. Haspel didn’t torture Abu Zubaydah, but from what we understand she was in charge of the “black site” in Thailand from October 2002 until its closure in December 2002, and, as Joe Margulies put it, she was “present when another prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was subjected to similar torture, including waterboarding.”

Margulies’ article was carefully non-judgmental. “We do not know,” he wrote, “whether she approved of the torture that had taken place before she got to Thailand or that took place after she arrived, and if she did, whether her approval was enthusiastic or begrudging. We do not know whether she made any attempt to restrain the two psychologists [Mitchell and Jessen], and if so whether her attempts were overruled by authorities elsewhere.”

As he also explained, “In fact, we do not even know the limits of her authority. One CIA cable, for instance, indicates that, even if she had wanted to, she could not have stopped the torture on her own. The Senate Torture Report, by contrast [whose executive summary was published in December 2014], claims she most certainly had that authority, and in fact that her authority was ‘final’; according to the Senate, she was the only person who could’ve ended the torture.”

Margulies also stated, “In short, all we know is that she appears to have been in charge of a site where my client had previously been tortured, and supervised the site while another man was tortured. And make no mistake: it was torture. We ought not mince words about that. It was legally wrong and morally bankrupt, and my client will bear the physical and psychological scars for the rest of his life.”

He added that although, for some people, “Haspel’s supervisory presence at a secret prison where human beings were tortured is enough to disqualify her,” “we need less knee-jerk condemnation and more sober, careful assessment. That is why we have a confirmation process.”

That confirmation process, as he also noted, needs to establish Haspel’s exact role in the destruction of videotapes showing the torture of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, contravening a judge’s ruling, and, as he also put it, we need to know “her current view.”

As he explained, “It is entirely possible that her position on ‘enhanced interrogations’ has changed since 2002. In fact, given the course of events, we should hope that it has. The CIA tortured my client because they believed — apparently in good faith — that he was a senior member of al Qaeda who, among other misdeeds, had been involved in all of the organization’s prior attacks and had particular expertise in resisting torture. They were wrong. We now know, and the US has repeatedly admitted, that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of al Qaeda, that he was opposed to its ideology and that his protestations of ignorance were not evidence of a supernatural capacity to resist torture, but proof that the torturers had their facts wrong. In light of this, it is certainly worth asking whether Haspel believes the Agency’s sickening experiment with torture was a mistake.”

Unfortunately, while Joe Margulies shows admirable balance in his view of Gina Haspel, there is no sign that, having recognized that Abu Zubaydah “was not a member of al Qaeda,” and “was opposed to its ideology,” the US government has any intention of  treating him fairly, by either releasing him or putting him on trial.

While ten of the 41 men still held are going through or have been through the military commission process, and while five others were approved for release but are still held, the 26 others — including Abu Zubaydah — remain in a limbo that has no justification, and that still seems to have no end, and that, every day, ought to be a source of shame for all decent Americans, just as it was 16 years ago when Abu Zubaydah was first seized in Faisalabad.

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.

Why Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Mustn’t Be Destroyed

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.

 

On March 6, indefatigable Guantánamo chronicler Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, reported that the Pentagon “plans to tear down Camp X-Ray, a weed-filled warren of chain-link-fence cells where the Bush administration held its first 311 war-on-terror prisoners at Guantánamo — and famously released a photo of kneeling captives in orange jumpsuits that stirred allegations of torture.”

Rosenberg added that, for many years, the prison’s various commanders had said that the site “was under a federal court protective order and could not be razed.” However, on March 5, Justice Department attorney Andrew Warden wrote to lawyers who represent Guantánamo prisoners, informing them that “the FBI has created an interactive, simulated three-dimensional, digital virtual tour of Camp X-Ray that shows all areas of the camp where detainees were held, interrogated, or otherwise present.”

Rosenberg added that “Trump administration attorneys consider it a suitable substitute,” and also explained that, although the prison supposedly closed in April 2002, when the first more permanent cells of Camp Delta were erected, it was used later in 2002 for the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi prisoner regarded as the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks. Just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, the convening authority of the military commission trial system set up under Bush at Guantánamo, explained to the Washington Post that she had refused to have al-Qahtani prosecuted because of the torture to which he was subjected, which included sleep deprivation, being threatened by dogs, sexual abuse, forced nudity, being shackled in painful positions, and being physically beaten.

Rosenberg also noted that Ahmed al-Darbi, another Saudi prisoner, who was supposed to have been sent back to Saudi Arabia five weeks ago under the terms a 2014 plea deal, only arrived at Guantánamo in March 2003, but “testified at a recent deposition that guards threatened him with time at Camp X-Ray for failing to cooperate with his captors.”

The proposal to raze a site protected by a judge because a virtual 3D model of it has been created is a very modern story, and cheerleaders for technology’s possibilities are presumably, therefore, unable to grasp that a virtual simulation is no substitute for reality. However, others paying close attention very vigorously disagree.

In the Guardian, Liz Ševčenko, the director of the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers University-Newark, and the founding director of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, wrote a powerful article entitled, “Destroying the notorious Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo is a huge mistake,” in which she declared that “[p]reserving sites with the most shameful or contested histories is critical for building democracy.”

Ševčenko is particularly well-equipped to make this kind of analysis, because, in addition to her work with the the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, which “seeks to build public awareness of the long history of the US naval station at Guantánamo, Bay, Cuba, and foster dialogue on the future of this place and the policies it shapes.,” she is the founding director of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, “a network of historic sites that foster public dialogue on pressing contemporary issues, which started in 1999 as a meeting of nine sites under the auspices of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and under her leadership has grown to an independent organization with over 250 members in more than 40 countries.”

In her article, she asserted that “[d]estroying the physical structure of Camp X-Ray would destroy both vital legal evidence and the foundation of our future conscience,” adding:

Across the world, governments and grassroots communities alike have recognised that preserving sites of their most shameful or contested histories is critical for building democracy. Auschwitz and other concentration camps were preserved within two years of the end of the second world war; the Argentinian government, under pressure from civil society, saved hundreds of clandestine detention sites as part of its transition from military dictatorship; South Africa even constructed its first democratic constitutional court on the site of an apartheid-era prison, so that decisions about the future of justice in the country could be made with this physical reminder of past struggles. In 2005, the UN commission on human rights established the “duty to preserve memory” as an obligation of states to combat impunity.

She also stated:

Some might argue that these sites represent histories their societies have universally denounced, and which are firmly in the past, whereas Guantánamo remains a lightning rod for controversy and is still in active use. But it is even more important to preserve sites of contested memory. Contested sites of violence and trauma become vital places to visit and provide an opportunity to revisit the forensic evidence of what actually happened, as understanding evolves with new study and technologies. But perhaps even more importantly, the physical sites and structures have unique capacity to catalyse ongoing dialogue on the implications of what took place there.

Preserving Camp X-Ray is critical no matter what you believe about Guantánamo. Camp X-Ray must be saved not because there is consensus about what happened there and what it means – but precisely because there isn’t. A government-commissioned digital reconstruction is insufficient should someone wish to demonstrate examples of humane treatment of detainees at Camp X-Ray, or contest allegations of torture there, or open real dialogue on lessons of the war on terror.

Delving further back into history, Ševčenko also explained:

Guantánamo has been forgotten before, with disastrous policy consequences. America’s aggressive amnesia about the site has enabled more than a century of use, reuse and abuse of the US naval base. In the 1990s, Guantánamo was even “closed” twice to great public fanfare. After a massive social movement and legal battle, a US district court judge in 1993 declared the Haitian refugee tent city on Guantánamo a “HIV prison camp” and ordered it shut. Barely a year later, another camp went up to house an even greater influx of Cuban refugees, also trapped in indefinite detention. In 1996, after an intense public campaign led by US-based Cuban exiles, including with a concert on the base by Gloria Estefan, the last refugee was released. Prescient refugee journalist Mario Pedro Graverán observed: “We must remember that the camps of Guantánamo are closing, but Guantánamo Bay is a painful story that’s not over yet.” Six years later, the first “enemy combatants” were brought to Camp X-Ray, to facilities first constructed for Haitians.

Preservation need not be impractical. Guantánamo’s detention facilities are extensive and sprawling. But other governments who faced the challenge of preserving vast prison complexes for posterity, from Northern Ireland and South Africa to Argentina, chose to save specific buildings, preceded by careful study and evidence collection.

Ševčenko closed her article by stating:

Only the Pentagon can stop the bulldozers. But responsibility for remembering Guantánamo falls on all of us. None of the places we now take for granted, from Auschwitz to Robben Island, were saved without a fight. In the face of so many immediate crises – including the fate of the 41 captives who remain at Guantánamo – it can be hard to focus on building the conscience of future generations. But without the foundation of sites like Camp X-Ray, we’ll never have the chance to try.

However, in her penultimate paragraph, she also pointed out how the US authorities have already destroyed numerous other detention sites that form a key part of the history of its brutal and ill-conceived “war on terror.” As she stated, “In the Guantánamo death penalty trials of those accused of planning 9/11, the military judge recently approved the secret destruction of a CIA black site, despite an existing court order preserving it.”

The judge in question is Army Col. James L. Pohl, and as Carol Rosenberg reported in January, “Court filings and in-court presentations showed the judge, through the prosecution, authorized the spy agency to dismantle the overseas site — in a nation that has never been disclosed — at a time when Pohl publicly had a protection order on any surviving remnants of the George W. Bush administration era overseas prison network. However, prosecutors using their national security powers got behind-the-scenes, unilateral permission from the judge to give the defense attorneys photographs and some sort of 3D diagram as a substitute for the real thing.”

In an assessment that the Justice Department presumably took on board for its Camp X-Ray decision, Judge Pohl ruled that defense attorneys had failed to show that “the physical evidence is of such central importance to an issue that is essential to a fair trial, or that there is no adequate substitute for the physical evidence.”

At this point it is worth reflecting that Guantánamo is probably one of the last sites remaining that can provide both “vital legal evidence and the foundation of our future conscience.” A place that haunted prisoners for years — Bagram, in Afghanistan, where the use of torture was rife, and numerous prisoners died in US custody — was completely destroyed and rebuilt by the US in 2009. Used by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-1989 (although it was initially built by the US in the 1950s), it had been the main prison for processing prisoners for Guantánamo in 2002-03, and had also housed a secretive CIA-run “black site,” and yet now all that remains of it are memories and the odd photo like the one here. Others from my archive include the only photo from inside the prison, of a barbed-wire-encrusted “sally port,” a photo of a guard in a gun outpost, this photo of the main building and tents, and another from a different angle.

Another key site of US torture and abuse is Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where photos of abuse by soldiers, following instructions from higher up the chain of command to keep prisoners awake by abusing them, shocked the world when they were leaked to the public in April 2004, and did considerable damage to the US’s claims that its “war on terror” was somehow humane, when it was clearly no such thing.

In the wake of the scandal, the US threatened to destroy the site, which, ironically, was formerly Saddam Hussein’s main political prison, where, as Al-Jazeera reported in 2014, “Political prisoners, mostly from the persecuted Shia majority, were routinely executed in the hundreds during his decades-long rule of the country.” Al-Jazeera’s report added, “As US military forces approached Baghdad, . When US forces came upon Abu Ghraib, they found the blindfolded bodies of prisoners in striped uniforms piled in rooms beside the hanging chambers, or lying in ditches inside the complex.”

However, the US never followed through on their promise to destroy the prison, and it was, instead, handed over to the post-invasion Iraqi government, who renamed it Baghdad Central Prison, and kept it open from 2006 to 2014, finally closing it down because of their inability to secure the area in which it is located. As Al-Jazeera reported, “A mass breakout orchestrated by Al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni fighters in 2013 led to the escape of hundreds of prisoners and a shootout that killed over 50 prisoners and members of the Iraqi security forces.”

Ironically, while it seems that the buildings of Abu Ghraib, used to such horrific effect by both Saddam Hussein and US forces, may still be standing, it is difficult to imagine them being reclaimed to be used either legally or as part of Liz Ševčenko’s sites of conscience — a conclusion that must surely serve as an ironic reflection on the failure of the US-led invasion 15 years ago.

And then there is Guantánamo itself, where Camp X-Ray is not the only site that the authorities want to — or have — destroyed. In the last months of the Obama presidency, for example, the military announced its intention to destroy part of Camp 5, a block of solid-walled isolation cells, which was no longer in use. Specifically, the intention was to destroy Alpha Block, and replace it with a new medical complex, along the way removing a place well-known to prisoners and their lawyers for keeping prisoners regarded as troublesome in complete isolation. It was there, on September 8, 2012, for example, that Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a mentally troubled Yemeni prisoner, reportedly died by taking an overdose of pills he had hoarded.

Latif was the last prisoner to date to die at Guantánamo, but as was first reported in 2010, former US military personnel have stated that the three alleged suicides in June 2006 were reported dead shortly after they had been taken off-base to a top-secret facility know only as “Camp No,” whose existence has never been formally acknowledged. It was possibly also known as Penny Lane, a companion to Strawberry Fields, a top-secret CIA “black site” that existed at Guantánamo from 2003-04.

I suspect that all these facilities have disappeared along with the global network of “black sites,” adding importance to the need to prevent the destruction of Camp X-Ray, not just for the evidence it can provide in the future of US wrongdoing, but also for its symbolism, as the first place that the US government publicly showed what it was doing to prisoners seized in its “war on terror” — and a place where the photos that were taken on that opening day, of orange-clad, sensory-deprived prisoners kneeling in the gravel, first indicated to perceptive observers that something had gone terrible wrong in the US’s response to 9/11.

Note: Please also check out Liz Ševčenko talking about the importance of preserving Camp X-Ray on CBC Radio.

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.

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

At Battersea Arts Centre in south west London, an extraordinary performance is taking place over the next two weeks, which I urge you to go and see if you’re in London. The show is ‘Frankenstein’ (aka ‘Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster’), and it’s performed by the BAC Beatbox Academy, a collective of beatboxers, singers and rappers who have produced a genuinely unique and completely exhilarating show. As I suggest in the headline of this article, I can guarantee that you have never heard anything like it before.

Perhaps you think beatboxing is a little one-dimensional — men with big lungs making massive, meaty dance beats through a microphone. Impressive, but essentially a novelty, and not something you could spend much time listening to.

If that’s what you think, then ‘Frankenstein’ will blow away those preconceptions, as the BAC Beatbox Academy, which is marking its 10th anniversary this year, is expert at confounding expectations. The group first came to my attention back in 2015, when a friend suggested that my son Tyler, then 15, should audition to take part in it. Tyler had always been a sonically interested child, and had been impressed by seeing the beatboxer Shlomo at WOMAD, which eventually led to him coming up with his own beats and compositions, but it wasn’t until he went to the Beatbox Academy audition that, as he put it, he realised that he had found his people, that there were other people like him.

At the time, the Beatbox Academy included beatboxers in their late teens and early 20s, who had been with the academy since it began, and who were wonderfully supportive, and natural mentors to the younger members. In addition, the group also featured female vocalists and rappers, immediately giving the whole beatbox experience an added dimension, one that was readily apparent every time the academy performed at Battersea Arts Centre, as they introduced cover versions into their repertoire, and regular thrilled audiences with beatbox battles, when two individual beatboxers go head to head in a competition, and circle jams, spontaneous jam sessions, conducted by the academy’s director Conrad Murray, a singer, beatboxer and theatre practitioner who, last year, toured an acclaimed autobiographical solo show, ‘Denmarked.’

And so to ‘Frankenstein’, the Beatbox Academy’s coming of age. Supported with funding from Battersea Arts Centre, the Arts Council and PRS, it took the promise of the academy’s inspiring mix of beatboxing, singing and rap and gave it time to develop via six core members — ABH, runner-up in the UK Beatbox Championships in 2016, and Native (Nate Forder-Staple), both providers of deep beats, angelic singers Amanita (Rochelle Francis) and Glitch (Nadine Rose Johnson), The Wiz-RD (Tyler Worthington), singing, rapping and providing beats and texture and playing Dr. Frankenstein, and, joining recently, Germane Marvel, rapping and playing the part of the Monster, and also providing beats.

Check out the promo video for the show via YouTube below:

As the core membership for the ‘Frankenstein’ cast settled in, and began to come up with their own compositions based around themes from Mary Shelley’s novel, which marks its 200th anniversary this year, the ever-supportive Murray was joined by David Cumming from the Roundhouse, who brought an intense work ethic to the show, secure in the knowledge that if you drive naturally talented people to push themselves as much as possible, the most extraordinary results can be achieved.

As the show developed, the cast drew on their own experiences to deliver a very modern urban take on ‘Frankenstein’, with some extraordinary pieces about insecurity, alienation and the dangerous power of social media. Scratch performances (works in progress) took place at BAC every few months from the end of 2016, with often sweeping changes evident each time as the cast and directors experimented with what worked best and added new material, and throughout 2017 other key players were brought on board.

I was at the first performance when sound engineer Rich Robinson worked his magic on the mikes, thrillingly bringing out the best in each performer’s voice, adding depth and reverb, clearly differentiating between the various voices, and when, for the first time, a choreographer (Natasha Harrison) helped the group move around the stage, a transformation made all the more effective through the work of lighting designer Sherry Coenen. Suddenly, the previous Beatbox Academy format — generally a line of performers, with undifferentiated mikes — was gloriously upgraded, to astonishing effect.

The final version of ‘Frankenstein’, which opened on Thursday evening, was a proud vindication of those who had faith in the academy, and the performers, directors and technicians who worked tirelessly to bring it to life.

It is a totally thrilling performance, sonically mixing up its components so effectively that, often, it has a sound that would make Massive Attack nervous, and emotionally it runs the gamut from ferociously dark to hilarious and irreverent. On that first evening, the crowd were spontaneously cheering and shouting out almost from the word go, and the effect was so stunning that The Stage gave it a thoroughly deserved five-star review. As reviewer Tom Wicker wrote, “the company pop and slide through funny, jittery jabs at our over-stimulated digital age, cruel and soulfully sad numbers about the bullying, endless pressure of having to look and act a certain way and gorgeously sung laments for lives forced off the tracks.” He concluded, “This is an old story made electrically alive. Let it take your breath away.”

It’s on for five more evenings at Battersea Arts Centre — Thursday March 29, Saturday March 31, Thursday April 5, Friday April 6 and Saturday April 7 — and then, I hope, it will be picked up by arts venues around the country. I hope they’re all paying attention, because it really isn’t every day that you hear something that genuinely hasn’t been done before, but that is what BAC Beatbox Academy’s ‘Frankenstein’ does so compellingly. Catch it while you can, and if you have any theatre connections, urge them to check it out, and get this crew of talented beatboxers, singers and rappers out on the road.

Note: BAC Beatbox Academy will be performing ’Frankenstein’ on October 24 in the Grand Hall at Battersea Arts Centre, reopening after a complete rebuilding, following its destruction by fire in 2015. The performance is part of the BAC’s Phoenix Season, which also includes the UK Beatbox Championships on October 26-27.

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.

The Torture Trail of Gina Haspel Makes Her Unsuitable to be Director of the CIA

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

 

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

Last Tuesday, Donald Trump announced that Mike Pompeo, the current Director of the CIA, would become the new Secretary of State, replacing Rex Tillerson, while Gina Haspel, the current Deputy Director of the CIA, would be promoted to Director, “the first woman so chosen.”

There was nothing positive about this development. As usual, Trump, defying protocol and any notion of politeness, announced Tillerson’s sacking, and the new appointments, by tweet. Tillerson, formerly the CEO of ExxonMobil, had been an indifferent Secretary of State, but Pompeo is a poor choice to be the nation’s top diplomat — hawkish on Iran, and a supporter of the continuing existence of Guantánamo. Interestingly, the New Yorker noted that Tillerson was fired shortly after agreeing with the British government that Russia “appears” to have been responsible for the recent nerve-gas attack on a former Russian spy in Salisbury, in the UK. Pompeo, however, is not averse to criticizing Russia, in contrast to Trump himself, who, ignoring his advisers, on Tuesday congratulated Vladimir Putin on his recent election victory.

However, the bulk of the criticism after Trump’s announcement has, deservedly, been reserved for the promotion of Gina Haspel, who oversaw the last few months’ existence of the CIA’s first post-9/11 “black site” in Thailand, and later conspired to destroy videotapes of the torture that took place there. Unlike Mike Pompeo, who has taken a stance agains torture, there is no sign from Haspel that she recognizes the illegality of torture, and in Donald Trump, of course, she has a president who is an enthusiastic advocate for the use of torture.

Last week, we joined with other rights groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and Witness Against Torture, to issue a statement declaring that Gina Haspel’s “documented involvement in torture should absolutely disqualify her from consideration for the post.”

We stand by that assessment, and are pleased to note that, on March 16, 29 organizations including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, CCR and Reprieve, wrote to Senators “to ask that you not advance her nomination until all of the records on her past involvement in the CIA torture program are declassified and released to the public.”

The letter explained well the reasons for fearing that Haspel had crossed lines that should disqualify her from leading the CIA. As the signatories stated:

Detainees at the Thailand “black site” were waterboarded, slammed against walls, subjected to enforced sleeplessness, and confined to coffin-shaped boxes, among other criminal practices. Ms. Haspel reportedly was in a supervisory position over the Thailand “black site” during this period — including an on-site leadership role when at least one detainee was brutally tortured — and knew about, reported on, and was otherwise involved in other cases of torture and detainee abuse. But the full extent of her involvement is impossible to confirm because the CIA continues to insist that information about the full extent of her role remain classified. Executive Order 13526 prohibits the classification of records to “conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency,” so there is no reason for the torture program, or Ms. Haspel’s role in it, to remain classified. Senators and the American people must be able to read these documents in assessing her nomination to be CIA Director.

The signatories also noted:

In addition to her role overseeing the use of torture, Ms. Haspel’s participation in the destruction of videotapes of the torture program, over objections of White House counsel and CIA General Counsel among others, is alarming. In November 2005, amid increasing public outrage over revelations of torture at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba detention facility, the CIA destroyed 92 videotapes of interrogations at clandestine facilities elsewhere. While the CIA maintains that the decision to destroy the tapes was made by then-Director of the National Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez, Rodriguez says in his 2013 book that Haspel drafted the order herself. Former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo says Haspel and Rodriguez were the “staunchest advocates inside the building for destroying the tapes.”

As the signatories proceeded to note, the tapes’ destruction was “a clear violation of the Federal Records Act, and indicates that Ms. Haspel does not believe she has an obligation to follow the law or a court order.”

The signatories stopped short of describing Haspel as having engaged in criminal activities, but as they pointed out, “The Senate’s constitutional obligation to ‘advise and consent’ on any nomination requires that it have full access to relevant information on the nominees before it. In Ms. Haspel’s case, the precise details of her role in the torture program remain classified. All senators should demand that those records be declassified and made public — before her nomination moves any further — so that they can actually discuss Ms. Haspel’s deeply disturbing background in open session, and so that the public can glean a more detailed picture of her role in one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history.”

In their conclusion, they added, “Ms. Haspel was a central figure in the torture program and the destruction of evidence of torture. Based on already available records and public reporting, it is clear by her wrongdoing that she demonstrated disregard for the rule of law and fundamental human rights.”

In a letter to Senators, it is not entirely surprising that the organizations involved toned down their language for the occasion, but the blunt truth about Gina Haspel’s involvement in supervising the “black site” in Thailand and in the destruction of the videotapes documenting that torture is that she broke the law, both by being involved in torture, which is illegal, and in covering up evidence of that torture.

Rather shockingly, however, these irrefutable details were swiftly overshadowed when ProPublica retracted claims made in a 2017 article, based on interviews with people involved in the CIA torture program, that Haspel has been in charge of the “black site” in Thailand when Abu Zubaydah was being tortured there, and that she had mocked his suffering as an act in a private conversation with him.

Haspel’s supporters attempted to use this retraction to whitewash her crimes, even though she oversaw the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at the site in Thailand, and remains complicit in the destruction of the videotapes. Moreover, in the Daily Beast, as Spencer Ackerman reported, “The Daily Beast’s reporting, and its continued understanding, is that Haspel was in a position of responsibility over the black site during the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, though she was not physically present. That reporting did not and does not rely on ProPublica’s, and a Daily Beast report on Wednesday mentioning ProPublica’s reporting treated it cautiously, particularly in a footnote calling attention to discrepancies in the account. The Senate intelligence committee’s 2014 report on CIA torture references extensive cables describing Abu Zubaydah’s spring and summer torture — including his ‘involuntary spasms of the torso and extremities’ following his extensive August 2002 waterboarding sessions — which Haspel was likely to have received.”

It is to be hoped that Senators will recognize the importance of having a full and frank disclosure of Gina Haspel’s past activities before confirming her as the next Director of the CIA, and we continue to believe that any objective analysis will reveal her as unsuited for the role, and as someone who “should be in jail,” as Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights explained last week.

What I also find troubling about her nomination, and the sacking of Rex Tillerson and his replacement with Mike Pompeo, is what Trump said last Tuesday, after his tweet, and, as Rolling Stone described it, “as he left for a trip to view prototypes for his proposed wall on the Mexican border.” He said of Haspel, “She’s an outstanding person who I’ve gotten to know very well. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people very well over the last year. I’m really at a point where I’m close to having the cabinet and other things that I want.”

Does that mean what I think it means? That, in Trump’s mind, “the cabinet and other things that I want” means having those closest to him who share the fundamental impulses that drive him — including his enthusiasm for torture. I fear that it does, and urge Congress not to indulge him, for all our sakes.

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.

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

Please support the crowdfunding campaign here!

Dear friends and supporters,

I’m writing to ask if you can help with a crowdfunding campaign I’ve just helped to launch, for a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, which I narrate. Directed by Nikita Woolfe, the film looks at council estates threatened with destruction in the UK, and the inspiring resistance of residents to the proposed destruction of their homes, and we’re hoping to raise the money required to take it around the country, and to produce a booklet compiling information about how to successfully resist estate destruction — and which pitfalls to avoid. If you can help out at all, it will be very greatly appreciated.

The crowdfunding page is embedded below:

My involvement with the film came about after I met Niki at an open meeting last June to discuss the Grenfell Tower fire — and specifically, to examine what caused the fire, and what lessons can and must be learned from it. Niki was filming that meeting, which was later made available as a video, and afterwards she asked me to narrate ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, which she had been working on for three years.

I was honoured to be asked to narrate the film, and to take part in screenings, and, crucially, the important post-screening Q&A sessions, in which, with the audiences,  we all get the chance to learn from each other and to suggest strategies for resistance. We launched the film at the Cinema Museum on December 8, had a second screening at Deptford Cinema on December 18, and this year we’ve shown it at Hub 67 in Hackney Wick and in Walthamstow, at the end of a day of action against the proposed redevelopment of the main square.

More screenings are being lined up, but we need your support to enable us to take the film on the road, and to produce the booklet, as the film has been independently produced, and we have no institutional backing whatsoever.

I hope you can help — and if you have any doubts about the importance of the resistance, please be aware that, across London and throughout the country, councils across the political spectrum, faced with a lack of funding for social housing that has existed since Margaret Thatcher’s time, and with the added burden of cuts introduced since the Tories returned to power in 2010, are destroying, or planning to destroy hundreds of council estates, and to replace them with private developments.

It may sound as if the councils are simply doing their best in difficult times, but unfortunately deals wth private developers do nothing for existing tenants or for those in the greatest need, and councils almost entire refuse, in an obsessive manner, to contemplate alternative plans — like, for example, refurbishment and infill options that are perfectly viable, but that do not involve the destruction of people’s homes.

Instead, under the destruction deal that is generally favoured, existing tenants are priced out, leaseholders (those who bought their homes after Margaret Thatcher introduced the ‘Right to Buy’ in the 1980s) are given derisory amounts for their homes, making it impossible for them to stay in the area, and the long housing waiting lists are generally undisturbed, as the new properties cater to private investors on the one hand, and, on the other, new people coming into the area.

There’s nothing wrong with new blood, of course, and people bringing money into an area can help to create and support businesses, but none of that should happen at the expense of those already lining there, whereas, across the capital and up and down the country, what is actually happening is social cleansing, as all of these new arrivals and investors only get to move into the area because existing council tenants and leaseholders are moved out, after having their homes destroyed.

I hope you find this as appalling as I do, and that you will help us resist! So if you can help, please donate here.

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.

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

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

 

Seven years ago yesterday, I was admitted to hospital after suffering for two months with severe pain in two toes on my right foot. As a human rights campaigner, it was, I thought, somewhat ironic that I was in such pain that I was suffering from sleep deprivation, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes before being jolted awake in excruciating pain, a situation that lasted for at least a month, if I recall correctly after all this time.

Eventually, doctors worked out that I had a blood clot, which was what was turning my toes black, but it wasn’t until I was admitted to hospital — and, specifically, St. Thomas’s, where I was taken on March 20, that specialists worked out what to do for me — or, rather, what they would try, to see if it worked — which involved me, for five days, having what felt like liquid cement pumped into me, in an effort to widen the artery that fed my toes and, ultimately, to save them. (I wrote about my experience at the time, in an article entitled, Intimations of Mortality — And Why This Is the View From My Bedroom).

Their endeavours, I’m very glad to say, were successful. After 12 days in hospital, thoroughly marinaded in morphine (a miraculous pain-killer that doctors work hard to prevent mere mortals from having access to on a regular basis, presumably to prevent the world from being overrun with morphine addicts), I returned home, to resume my life, to allow my toes to fully heal, and, eventually, to start a new life.

My illness led me to give up smoking after 29 years, which ranks as one of the great achievements of my life, along with giving up drinking, but not as great an achievement, I have to say, as being a husband and a father.

However, as I recovered (and threw away the morphine), I started bingeing on biscuits instead, so that, a year later, and much heavier, I realized that I was going to have to take up regular exercise. That led me to revive the love of cycling I had had since I was about four years old, but that had lapsed to a large extent as my smoking took its toll on my health, and as my obsessive Guantánamo work, for almost the whole of the five years before my illness, swallowed up what, with hindsight, was far too much of my time.

The revival of my cycling soon led to me deciding to cycle around the whole of London, taking photos (another enthusiasm that had largely lapsed in the Guantánamo years), a project that I soon gave a name to — ‘The State of London.’ I’ve continued the project ever since, covering all 120 London postcodes (as well as some of the capital’s outer boroughs), and last May, on the fifth anniversary of the day I officially started the project (May 11), I began publishing a photo a day from my archive on Facebook, and, a few months later, on Twitter as well.

Stopping smoking also enabled me to begin singing again, which is something that runs through my family’s history, but which, as with the cycling and the photography, I had let lapse as Guantánamo consumed my life. If you haven’t checked out any of the songs I’ve been writing and performing with my band The Four Fathers over the last few years, you can find our music on Bandcamp here, and please also check out the video of ‘Grenfell’, a song I wrote in response to the Grenfell Tower fire last June, an entirely preventable disaster in which over 70 people died.

Seven years on from my illness, I remain grateful to those who saved my toes, and also to the consultants and staff at St. Thomas’s partner hospital, St. Guy’s, who have continued to monitor my health. The year after my illness, via a bone marrow biopsy, they ascertained what disease I was suffering from — Essential thrombocythaemia (ET), if that helps — and prescribed me medication that is keeping me safe from any recurrence.

Their work, as with so much that is undertaken by the NHS (including how consultants and nurses at King’s College Hospital also saved my wife’s life and my son’s life when he was born prematurely in 1999) is remarkable, and paid for through general taxation, without the horrendous stress of, for example, the US system with its savage inbuilt inequality, but I can’t let this anniversary pass without reflecting on the fact that the NHS is very seriously endangered by the continued existence of a Tory government that is determined to destroy it through under-investment, and then to privatise it, as well as by the threat posed by Brexit, which, for example, would serious undermine the sharing of research across the EU that, in my case, the experts at Guy’s are currently part of, exchanging information about their progress dealing with blood diseases on a weekly basis with their colleagues thoughout Europe.

I have, at various times, worked in defence of the NHS — back in 2011-12, when the Tories first took an axe to it in their disgraceful Health and Social Care Act, and in 2012-13 as part of the successful Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, but the threat to the NHS only continues to grow under the vile and inept government of Theresa May and her muppet ministers, and the seemingly endless horror show that is the smarmy butcher of the NHS Jeremy Hunt as health minister.

I can only encourage readers to get involved in any way they can — via Keep Our NHS Public, for example, and by following NHS Million on Twitter and sharing their posts. I wish I could say that there was a mass movement to save the NHS that is poised to topple the Tories from power, as that is what should be happening in an ideal world, but this is a far from ideal world. I see Jeremy Corbyn as a defender of the NHS, but not unless Brexit is stopped, because if Brexit goes ahead the damage to our economy will be catastrophic and the NHS will be as shorn of funds as every other part of British life. As it is, however, one of the saddest results of the lamentable Brexit vote is that EU citizens living and working in the UK are leaving in droves, having been advised, in no uncertain terms, that they are no longer welcome here, and one area of the economy that is taking a serious hit is the NHS, which has long been a multi-national operation, reliant on workers from across the EU and the rest of the world.

So as I celebrate my health, seven years on from my major illness, please do what you can to save the NHS, to get rid of the Tories, and to stop Brexit. Our health — in as many ways as you can think of — depends on it!

Note: For further reflections on the anniversary of my illness, see: As Armed Police Turn Up At A Peaceful Protest in Whitehall to Save the NHS, I Reflect on the First Anniversary of My Hospitalisation and Cure (2012), Intimations of Mortality Revisited; or Why I Will Always Fight to Save the NHS (2013), Save the NHS from the Tory Butchers: How Doctors Saved Me and My Family, and How People Forget That Insurers Don’t Cover Pre-Existing Conditions (2016) and My Heartfelt Defence of the Wonderful NHS, Exactly Six Years After My Major Illness (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.