Andy Worthington's Blog, page 40

Andy Worthington: An Archive of Articles About Guantánamo, My UK Housing Activism and Other Writing – Part 23, July to December 2017

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

 

This article is the 23rd in an ongoing series of articles listing all my work in chronological order. It’s a project I began in January 2010, when I put together the first chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the nearly 3,000 articles I have published since I first began publishing articles here in May 2007, which, otherwise, are not available in chronological order in any readily accessible form.

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

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

The period covered by this 23rd list — featuring 85 articles — continued to deal with the fallout regarding Guantánamo of Donald Trump being in the White House, when, sadly, the generally unfulfilled threats of the first six months gave way to concrete — and deplorable — actions. The first was a decision to no longer monitor the health of hunger strikers, which seemed designed, heavy-handedly, to try and get prisoners to stop refusing food (an unlikely course of action, given that hunger striking tends to be the action of prisoners who assess that they have no other power, and no other way of being heard). The second was the Pentagon’s threat to destroy prisoners’ art, which arose after a show of prisoners’ artwork in New York annoyed the government, presumably by daring to convey to the public that the men held at Guantánamo were human beings with feelings and sensitivity.

Neither policy reflected well on Donald Trump and his administration, but sadly he remains impervious to criticism, and two months into 2018, it would be impossible to suggest that there is any light at the end of the tunnel for the 41 men still held. I will, however, continue to monitor the situation, to write about it, and to campaign for the prison’s closure, both here and via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I established with the US attorney Tom Wilner in 2012.

This six-month period also saw a massive increase in my involvement in housing activism in London. As someone who lives in social housing (not-for-profit rented housing), the crisis of unaffordable housing has long been of concern to me  — in particular, since a permanent housing bubble became a substitute for meaningful economic activity 20 years ago, under New Labour. However, since the Tories took power in 2010, the crisis has only got worse, and now, for the first time ever, hard-working, productive and decently-paid people are finding it impossible to carry on living in London, such is a the all-consuming greed of the housing market, while the less economically robust are pushed out after having their homes destroyed.

The Grenfell Tower fire last June, was, in hindsight, the trigger for my increased activity as a housing campaigner. Just after it, I attended a panel discussion about Grenfell that was organised by ASH (Architects for Social Housing), where I met film-maker Nikita Woolfe, who asked me to be the narrator of her new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, which was released in December. Prior to that, however, I had become concerned by the situation in Haringey, in north London, where the Labour council was trying to enter into a deal with the international property developer Lendlease, which would have led to the destruction of council estates, and had also been alerted to developments in Lewisham where I live, via a screening of the documentary ’Dispossession’ that I attended in September.

As a result, I wrote a new song for my band The Four Fathers, ‘Grenfell’, which a German film crew recorded us playing in October, just before we released our second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ We also played a benefit gig in Tottenham in September (hot on the heels of an inspiring anti-war protest gig in Docklands, where we played ‘Masters of War’ as police charged at protestors, and a helicopter flew down low), and I set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for the various Lewisham campaigns, with a benefit gig at the Birds Nest in November, featuring three bands (including The Four Fathers), two spoken word artists, a rapper and a socialist choir.

I also continued to post a photo a day to my pages ‘The State of London’ on Facebook and Twitter, drawing from the photos that I’ve been taking in all London’s 120 postcodes on daily bike rides over the last six years, which I hope you’ll have time to look at, if you haven’t seen them already.

Two months into 2018, all of the above — my Guantánamo work, my housing activism, and my daily photos of London — are all ongoing, and I hope you’ll continue to take an interest in my various endeavours. In closing, I hope that the list below is helpful.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part 23, July to December 2017

July 2017

1. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: For US Independence Day, Please Join Us in Telling Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo

2. Omar Khadr: Canada Agrees to Pay $10m Compensation to Brutalized Former Child Prisoner Omar Khadr, Held at Guantánamo for Ten Years

3. Guantánamo media: For Witness Against Torture, My Independence Day Article About Tyranny at Guantánamo Bay

4. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: Donald Trump’s Stumbling Efforts to Revive Guantánamo

5. Life after Guantánamo: “Choose Peace”: An Inspiring Message of Tolerance From Former Guantánamo Prisoner and Torture Victim Mustafa Ait Idir

6. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: Six Months of Trump: Is Closing Guantánamo Still Possible?

August 2017

7. Guantánamo: Sufyian Barhoumi, the Peaceful Algerian Cleared for Release But Still Trapped in Guantánamo

8. Life after Guantánamo: A Dream of Freedom Soured: Former Guantánamo Prisoners in Tunisia Face Ongoing Persecution

9. Torture: Judge Confirms That Trial of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, Architects of CIA Torture Program, Will Go Ahead

10. Guantánamo, military commissions: The Absurdity of Guantánamo: As US Prepares to Release Ahmed Al-Darbi in Plea Deal, Less Significant Prisoners Remain Trapped Forever

11. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: Donald Trump Is Still Trying to Work Out How to Expand the Use of Guantánamo Rather Than Closing It for Good

September 2017

12. Guantánamo media: Detailed Los Angeles Review of Books Article Asks, “What Are We Still Doing in Guantánamo?”

13. Torture: 11 Years After CIA Torture Victims Arrived at Guantánamo, Whistleblowers Joseph Hickman and John Kiriakou on How Torture “Became Legal” After 9/11

14. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: EXCLUSIVE: Fears for Long-Term Hunger Striker at Guantánamo: Lawyers Urge Court to Order Independent Medical Examination

15. Guantánamo, 9/11: Calling for the Closure of Guantánamo on the 16th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks

16. Guantánamo, accountability: At Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Former Guantánamo Prisoner Djamel Ameziane Asks US to Apologize, and Calls for Prison’s Closure

17. Guantánamo, accountability: “Guantánamo Was Created to Destroy People, to Destroy Muslims”: Ex-Prisoner Djamel Ameziane’s Powerful Statement to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

18. Guantánamo media: Former Obama Security Official Says Keeping Guantánamo Open “Damages Our National Security”

19. Omar Khadr: Omar Khadr’s Bail Conditions: On 31st Birthday, Judge Allows Internet Access, Refuses to Lift Ban on Free Travel within Canada, or Unsupervised Meeting with Sister

20. Torture, Iraq: 14 Years On, US Court Rules that Iraqis Tortured at Abu Ghraib Can Sue US Contractor

21. Guantánamo media: An Extraordinarily Powerful, Poetic Article about Guantánamo and the Sea by Former Prisoner Mansoor Adayfi

22. Guantánamo campaigns: No Justice at Guantánamo After 250 Days of Trump

October 2017

23. Life after Guantánamo: Life After Guantánamo: The Story of Mourad Benchellali, Freed 13 Years Ago But Still Stigmatized

24. Guantánamo, torture: Ten Years On, Guantánamo’s Former Chief Prosecutor on Why He Resigned Because of Torture, and How It Must Never Be US Policy Again

25. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Trump’s Disturbing New Guantánamo Policy: Allowing Hunger Strikers to Starve to Death

26. Donald Trump. enemy combatants: What Should Trump Do With the US Citizen Seized in Syria and Held in Iraq as an “Enemy Combatant”?

27. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: New York Times Finally Reports on Trump’s Policy of Letting Guantánamo Hunger Strikers Die; Rest of Mainstream Media Still Silent

28. Guantánamo, Supreme Court, military commissions: Abandoning Guantánamo: The Supreme Court’s Shame as a Military Commission Appeal Is Turned Down

29. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Guantánamo Hunger Striker Ahmed Rabbani, Left to Die by Trump, Calls for “Basic Justice – a Fair Trial or Freedom”

30. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: “When Will My Organs Fail? When Will My Heart Stop?”: Guantánamo Hunger Striker Khalid Qassim Fears Death Under Trump’s New Policy

31. Guantánamo, military commissions: Ahmed Al-Darbi, Admitted Terrorist at Guantánamo, Receives 13-Year Sentence Following 2014 Plea Deal

32. Radio, Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Radio: On the Scott Horton Show, Andy Worthington Discusses Trump Letting Guantánamo Hunger Strikers Die, the Failures of the Supreme Court and More

33. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Celebrities Fasting With the Hunger Striking Guantánamo Prisoners That Donald Trump Is Allowing to Die

34. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, life after Guantánamo: Mohamedou Ould Slahi: One Year of Freedom, and the Uncensored Version of “Guantánamo Diary”

November 2017

35. Guantánamo, terrorism, Donald Trump: Donald Trump’s Racism and Dangerous Lawlessness Revealed in Response to New York Attack; Proposal to Send Sayfullo Saipov to Guantánamo is Shameful

36. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Former Guantánamo Prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene Condemns “Cruel, Sadistic” New Policy of Allowing Hunger Strikers to Starve

37. Deaths at Guantánamo: Guantánamo Suicides “Unlikely,” Says Investigator Jeffrey Kaye in New Edition of His Book, “Cover-up at Guantánamo”

38. Canada, torture accountability, Guantánamo: Torture Accountability in Canada: After Payments to Three Men Tortured in Syria, Former Guantánamo Prisoner Djamel Ameziane Also Seeks Damages

39. Guantánamo, military commissions: A New Low for Guantánamo’s Credibility: The Brief But Absurd Imprisonment of the Military Commissions’ Chief Defense Counsel

40. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Guantánamo detainee: US changed force-feeding policy (for Al-Jazeera)

41. Guantánamo campaigns: 300 Days of Trump: Join Our Photo Campaign Calling for the Closure of Guantánamo

42. Guantánamo media: After Powerful Screening of ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’ at Westminster University, I’m Available for Further Events

43. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Guantánamo’s Oldest Prisoner Calls Conditions “Hell,” Says, “We Are Getting Collective Punishment Because of the Hunger Strike”

44. Guantánamo art: Persistent Dehumanization at Guantánamo: US Claims It Owns Prisoners’ Art, Just As It Claims to Own Their Memories of Torture

45. Guantánamo, military commissions: The Latest Scandal of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo: A Death Penalty Case Without a Death Penalty Lawyer

46. Guantánamo art: Curator of Guantánamo Art Show Responds to Authorities’ Threats to Burn Prisoners’ Work: “Art Censorship and Destruction Are Tactics of Terrorist Regimes, Not US Military”

December 2017

47. Guantánamo art: The Guantánamo Art Scandal That Refuses to Go Away

48. Guantánamo, torture, Human Rights Day: Guantánamo, The Torture Report and Human Rights Day: America’s Unaddressed Legacy of Torture and Arbitrary Detention

49. Guantánamo, hunger strikes: Guantánamo Hunger Striker Khalid Qassim Says, “We Are Like Lab Rats,” Says Doctor Told Him, “If You Lose Organs, It Is Your Choice”

50. Guantánamo, torture: Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Accuses US of Still Using Torture at Guantánamo, Asks to Visit and Meet Prisoners Unsupervised

51. Guantánamo art, Mohamed Ould Slahi: Guantánamo Writer Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Devastating Criticism of US Claims That It Owns and Can Destroy Prisoners’ Art

52. Guantánamo, Donald Trump: Guantánamo Lawyer: It is “Entirely Unprecedented” for Trump to “Take the Position That There Will Be No Transfers out of Guantánamo Without Regard to the Facts”

An archive of articles about British politics, July to December 2017

July to August 2017

[image error]1. Photos, Theresa May protest: My photos of ‘Not One Day More’, a Huge Protest Against Theresa May in London, July 1, 2017

2. Protest music: Four London Gigs for Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers, Promoting Songs from Forthcoming Album, How Much Is A Life Worth?

3. Housing crisis: Haringey and the Wholesale Social Cleansing of London: Thousands of Social Tenants to Be Removed Via Estate Regeneration

4. Protest music: Video: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play ‘Rebel Soldier’ Live at Vinyl Deptford

5. Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit: Message to Jeremy Corbyn: You Represent Hope Not Just Because You Oppose Austerity, But Because You Must Save Us From Brexit

6. Protest music: Video: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ at Vinyl Deptford

7. Grenfell Tower fire: Video: Architects for Social Housing’s Powerful Public Meeting, ‘The Truth About Grenfell Tower’, and Their Detailed Report

8. Photos, WOMAD: My Photos: The Wet But Still Wonderful WOMAD Festival 2017

9. Protest music: Video: Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play Anti-Austerity Song ‘Riot’, Released on Sixth Anniversary of UK Riots

10. London photos: The First 100 Days of My Photo Project, ‘The State of London’

September to October 2017

11. Protest music: My Band The Four Fathers Release New Single, ‘She’s Back’, About Pussy Riot, As Maria Alyokhina Releases Memoir, ‘Riot Days’

12. Photos, anti-war protests: Photos: Festival of Resistance Against the DSEI Arms Fair in London’s Docklands, Sept. 9, 2017

13. Housing crisis: Social Cleansing and the Destruction of Council Estates Exposed at Screening of ‘Dispossession’ by Endangered New Cross Residents

14. Protest music: My Band The Four Fathers Release ‘Equal Rights And Justice For All,’ Defending Habeas Corpus, Opposing Arbitrary Detention at Guantánamo and in the UK

15. Housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn: The Crime of Destroying Social Housing in London – and the Significance (Or Not) of Jeremy Corbyn’s Response

16. Housing crisis, protest music: No Social Cleansing in Lewisham! Fundraiser for Tidemill and Achilles Street Campaigns with Potent Whisper, The Four Fathers, Commie Faggots at the Birds Nest, Nov. 12

17. Housing crisis: Tottenham Housing Campaigners Seek a Judicial Review to Save Their Homes from a Rapacious Labour Council and the Predatory Developer Lendlease

18. Housing crisis: How Architects for Social Housing Took On the Dangerous Neo-Liberal Contempt for Social Housing of Patrik Schumacher and Others at the Barbican

November to December 2017

19. Housing crisis: ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’: New Documentary Film About Social Cleansing and Council Estate Destruction in London Features Andy Worthington as Narrator

20. Housing crisis, protest music: ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’: After Success of Gig in Deptford on Nov. 12, Campaigners Plan to Stage Events in Other Boroughs

21. London photos: Celebrating 200 Days of Andy Worthington’s Photo Project, ‘The State of London’

22. US extradition: Support Lauri Love, Computer Expert and Activist, Who Faces Extradition to the US in a Life-Threatening Betrayal of Justice

23. Protest music: How Much Is A Life Worth? New Album Released Today by The Four Fathers, London Journalist and Activist Andy Worthington’s Band

24. Housing crisis: How People Power Is Stopping Social Cleansing in Haringey

25. Housing crisis: No Social Cleansing in Lewisham: Please Join the New Campaign!

26. Housing crisis: Just Two Days Until the World Premiere of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, About Community Resistance to the Destruction of Council Estates, Which I Narrate

27. Housing crisis: Following the Successful World Premiere of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ at the Cinema Museum, the Next Screening is at Deptford Cinema on Dec. 18

28. Brexit: Finally! Theresa May and the Tories Suffer a Major Defeat on Brexit as MPs Secure a Meaningful Vote on the Final Deal

29. Grenfell Tower fire, protest music: Grenfell, Six Months On: The Four Fathers’ New Song Remembering Those Who Lost Their Lives and Calling for Those Responsible to be Held Accountable

And a few anomalies:

1. Artificial intelligence: Guest Post: Tom Pettinger, PhD Student, Examines Artificial Intelligence – Is It the Saviour of Humanity, Or Its Destroyer?

2. Life offline: Switch Off Your Devices and Have a Week Off: Why Headspace, Silence and Human Interaction is Good for Us

3. Life offline: Radio: I Discuss My Contention That We Should Take a Break from Constant Phone and Internet Use with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

4. Gun control: My Thoughts on Gun Control, Based on a Comparative Analysis of the US and the UK

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

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

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.

 

It has taken ten years, but on Wednesday (February 21), a US judge, District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that “the treatment of three Iraqi individuals formerly detained at the infamous ‘hard site’ at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq constitutes torture, war crimes, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, based on a thorough review of US domestic and international law.”

The victory was described in a press release by the Center for Constitutional Rights, who, with other lawyers, first submitted the case ten long years ago, under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which “allows non-US citizens to sue for violations of international law committed abroad that ‘touch and concern’ the United States. I wrote about it back in September, when Judge Brinkema allowed the case to proceed.

As I also explained at the time:

In the long legal journey to this important day, as CCR stated, “the Fourth Circuit denied CACI’s attempt to have the case dismissed under the ‘political question’ doctrine” in October 2016, and in June this year the District Court “affirmed that war crimes, torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment are well-recognized and definable norms and thus fall within the court’s jurisdiction” under the Alien Tort Statute. The court then “ordered both parties to brief whether the record supports a finding that the plaintiffs suffered these violations,” and, as CCR noted, “Shortly after, CACI moved to dismiss the case,” the move that has just been turned down.

This week’s ruling also made it clear that the three men — Suhail Al Shimari, Asa’ad Al-Zuba’e and Salah Al-Ejaili — “have sufficiently alleged that employees of private military contractor CACI Premier Technology conspired to commit and aided and abetted these crimes,” as CCR’s press release also explained.

CACI is the defendant in the case, Al Shimari v. CACI, and, as CCR described it, its lawyers have “repeatedly argued that, even if its employees were involved in torture and other abuse, the company is shielded from liability.” As CCR added, however, Judge Brinkema’s 54-page ruling “definitively rejected that position, as well as attempts by certain Bush-era officials to water down the prohibition against torture, and allowed the lawsuit to proceed against CACI.”

As CCR also explained, “While a number of low-level military officers were court-martialed over their roles in the abuse, CACI has gone unpunished — and continues to reap millions of dollars in government contracts — even though US military investigators long ago concluded that CACI interrogators conspired with the US soldiers who were later court martialed to ‘soften up’ detainees for interrogations, according to statements by co-conspirators.”

As CCR also noted, a US Army General, Antonio M. Taguba, in a ground-breaking report in 2004, referred to the treatment as “sadistic, blatant, and wanton” criminal abuses.

CCR also noted that Judge Brinkema’s opinion included a detailed account of what happened to Suhail Al Shimari, Asa’ad Al-Zuba’e, and Salah Al-Ejaili, which included:

[being] subjected to repeated stress positions, including at least one that made [Plaintiff Al-Ejaili] vomit black liquid; sexually-related humiliation; disruptive sleeping patterns and long periods of being kept naked or without food or water; and multiple instances of being threatened with dogs … being doused with hot and cold liquids … sexual assault and threats of rape; being left in a cold shower until [Plaintiff Zuba’e] was unable to stand; dog bites and repeated beatings, including with sticks and to the genitals … at least one [stress position] that lasted an entire day and resulted in [Zuba’e] urinating and defecating on himself; and threats that his family would be brought to Abu Ghraib … systematic beatings … with a baton and rifle, [being] hit against the wall; [being] forced to kneel on sharp stones, causing lasting damage to [Plaintiff Al Shimari’s] legs; … being kept in a dark cell and with loud music nearby; threats of being shot … electric shocks; being dragged around the prison by a rope tied around [Al Shimari’s] neck; and having fingers inserted into [Al Shimari’s] rectum.

Given this list, it is unsurprising that the Court concluded, “it is clear that the abuse suffered by plaintiffs was intended to inflict severe pain or suffering and rises to the level of torture.”

However, as I noted just two days ago, to date it has been impossible to get a US court to confirm that torture took place in any of the detention sites established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — in large part, because President Obama blocked efforts to do so via the “state secrets doctrine” (see the Jeppesen case here), and last August, when James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, former military psychologists who had developed the torture program for the CIA, had been told that several survivors of the rendition and torture program, and the family of another man, Gul Rahman, who had died in Afghanistan, were to be allowed to challenge them in a court, they settled out of court instead — for a significant, but undisclosed amount.

I discussed these previous cases in an article looking at the potential for the International Criminal Court (the ICC) to launch an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, including those committed by US forces, and also “crimes committed on the territory of other countries that are a member of the ICC where the crimes have a nexus to those committed in Afghanistan, such as Romania, Poland and Lithuania — all known to have hosted CIA black sites.”

It is still to be fervently hoped that the ICC investigation goes ahead — because, as the academic Mark Kersten noted, to do so would be “brave and courageous — exactly the kind of thing the ICC was supposed to investigate” — but in the meantime this ruling by Judge Brinkema means that she will have a place in the history books, not just for this ruling, but also, I hope, because it leads to some genuine accountability on US soil for what took place in America’s torture prisons around the world.

As CCR’s Legal Director Baher Azmy said after the ruling, “The decision is a historic judicial rebuke to the Bush administration’s torture paradigm, which had sought to evade the well-established prohibitions against torture, and is one of the clearest statements in the post-9/11 era that victims of torture and grave human rights abuses can access the courts for a remedy.” He added, “The court confirmed what was plain to the eye: that the horrific treatment our clients endured at Abu Ghraib was unlawful and that, in a country operating under the rule of law, those responsible can be held accountable.”

Note: For more information, visit CCR’s case page.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Guantánamo Lawyers Urge International Criminal Court to Investigate US Torture Program

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.

 

Ever since evidence first emerged of the US’s post-9/11 torture program — most conspicuously, via the photos of abuse in Abu Ghraib that were revealed in 2004, and the network of CIA “black sites” that were first revealed in the media in late 2005 — opponents of torture have sought to hold accountable those responsible for implementing torture in its various forms: in the CIA’s global network of “black sites,” in proxy prisons in other countries, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at Guantánamo.

Their efforts have persistently been thwarted. President Obama, notoriously, used the “state secrets doctrine” to prevent torture victims from having their day in the US court system (check out the Jeppesen case in 2010, for example), and, earlier that year, after an internal Justice Department investigation into John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote and approved the notorious “torture memos” of 2002 that purported to re-define torture so that it could be used by the CIA, concluded that they were guilty of “professional misconduct,” the Obama administration allowed a DoJ fixer to override that conclusion, deciding instead that they had merely exercised “poor judgment.”

In December 2014, an important step towards the truth came with the publication of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s post-9/11 detention program (the Senate torture report, as it is more colloquially known), which delivered a devastating verdict on the program, even if it was not empowered to hold anyone accountable. And last August, there was good news when James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, former military psychologists who had developed the torture program for the CIA, settled out of court — for a significant, but undisclosed amount — with several survivors of the rendition and torture program, and the family of another man, Gul Rahman, who had died in Afghanistan.

Outside the US, there have also been sporadic successes. In 2009, an Italian court convicted, in absentia, CIA agents who were responsible for the kidnap in broad daylight from a street in Milan, and the rendition to torture in Egypt of a cleric, Abu Omar, and the European Court of Human Rights has issued rulings against two countries: Macedonia, regarding Khaled El-Masri, who was seized in Macedonia on behalf of the CIA and sent to a “black site,” until it was discovered that he was a case of mistaken identity, and, Poland, regarding Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were held in the “black site” that existed there from 2002-03.

Now lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York are urging the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is marking the 20th anniversary of its establishment, to “demonstrate its maturity,” as CCR senior staff attorney Katherine Gallagher explained in an article for the Guardian, by proceeding with “a request to investigate members of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the US armed forces for torture and other serious crimes committed in Afghanistan or in Eastern Europe in the so-called ‘war on terror.’”

As Gallagher described it, “A criminal investigation of US torture – and other serious crimes in Afghanistan – is long overdue.”

In November, Fatou Bensouda, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, “lodged a request to open a formal investigation following a decade-long preliminary investigation into possible international crimes committed in Afghanistan since it became a member of the court in May 2003, as well as to related crimes in other member states since July 2002,” as Gallagher described it, adding that it also followed “longstanding efforts” by CCR “to hold high-level Bush administration officials accountable, through the principle of universal jurisdiction, for many of the human rights violations that the imminent ICC prosecution would encompass.”

As she explained, CCR has “pursued former US officials in Canada and around Europe, seeking to hold them accountable for torture at Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and secret ‘black sites’ around the globe.” I reported on those efforts at the time — see George W. Bush, War Criminal, Is Not Welcome in Europe, my cross-post of the case against him, which is one of my most popular articles ever, having had nearly 900 likes on Facebook, and Rights Groups Call for the Arrest of George W. Bush for Torture as He Arrives in Canada.

The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber is currently, in Gallagher’s words, “considering whether the proposed investigation – which would cover international crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and affiliated armed groups, Afghan authorities, and members of the US military forces and the CIA – will go forward,” and as she explained, proceeding with an investigation would be hugely significant, becasue, “[t]o date, no high-level US official from the civilian leadership, military, CIA, or private contractor has been prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” She added, “An ICC investigation could finally change that – bringing an end to the impunity US officials have enjoyed and, critically, some measure of redress to victims of the US torture program.”

Crucially, as she noted, “The investigation would cover not only serious crimes in the context of the armed conflict in Afghanistan but also crimes committed on the territory of other countries that are a member of the ICC where the crimes have a nexus to those committed in Afghanistan, such as Romania, Poland and Lithuania – all known to have hosted CIA black sites.” This is important, because, although the US is not a state party to the ICC, the court “has jurisdiction over all international crimes committed on the territory of a state party regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators.”

Gallagher also noted that the ICC “is unique among international criminal tribunals in that victims have an opportunity to participate in all stages of the proceedings, separate and apart from any role they might play as witnesses for the prosecution.” She proceeded to explain how, “In the short time-frame given to victims, thousands of victims presented their views on the proposed investigation – with most coming from Afghanistan, at a time when near-daily bombings targeting civilians continue – and almost all urged the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorize the investigation.”

Gallagher also explained how CCR has submitted “victim’s representations” on behalf of two of their clients — Sharqawi Al Hajj, one of ten men who arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2004, and Guled Hassan Duran (identified by the US as Gouled Hassan Dourad), one of 14 so-called “high-value detainees” who arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” two years later, in September 2006.

In its submissions, CCR has explained, drawing on publicly available information, how both men “were detained by the CIA in black sites or “proxy-detention” by other countries, tormented, and tortured,” urging the ICC to make sure that “any investigation include looking into extraordinary rendition and proxy detention sites overseen by the CIA, and continuing crimes at Guantánamo.”

As Gallagher added, “We have argued that the prosecutor should investigate crimes against humanity, i.e., a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, as well as war crimes by US officials,” noting that CCR “also set out for the ICC why it should focus its investigation on senior leadership of the Bush administration, including George Bush, Dick Cheney, and former CIA Director George Tenet, as well as private contractors who played a key role in developing the CIA torture program.”

Gallagher continued, “In pressing for such an investigation CCR is asking the ICC to reject the “war on terror” paradigm advanced by the US to justify not only its detention and interrogation program but also its global campaign of so-called ‘targeted killings’ and drone attacks in the wake of September 11.” This is an important addition, and one that also extends the ICC’s proposed remit to President Obama, who embraced drone attacks as, essentially, a replacement for the discredited rendition and torture program, and a revival of the assassination programs that existed long before the 9/11 attacks, choosing to ignore how much criticism was also levelled at the drone program by numerous legal experts.

Gallagher concluded her article by stating that, “Overall, Al Hajj and Duran’s victim’s representations make the case for a thorough investigation that brings an end to impunity for over a decade of international human rights violations related to the war in Afghanistan.” She added, “The ICC is deemed a court of last resort, the place to go when other courts in other countries have proved unable or unwilling to prosecute. The responsibility of US parties for crimes related to the war in Afghanistan, for which impunity has reigned for nearly 15 years, is exactly the sort of case the ICC was designed to take on.”

Her article ended, “An investigation will make clear that all victims of serious crimes have recourse to an independent and impartial process for having their claims heard. It will show that those who bear the greatest responsibility for serious international crimes will be held accountable. In short, it will demonstrate that no one is above the law. This is especially important in the face of a US president who has shown disdain for human rights, disregard for the law, and zeal for escalating the use of force in Afghanistan that will likely result in even more death and destruction. It is high time an international body takes action. The ICC Pre-trial Chamber should authorize the investigation.”

Last month, in an article about the potential investigation, IRIN, news analysts who were part of the UN until January 2015, noted that “many analysts” expected it to go ahead, and stated, “The potential case is a bold one – it would be only the second for the ICC outside Africa, where the court has become highly unpopular. Burundi has recently withdrawn from the court and South Africa is threatening to follow.

IRIN spoke to several experts who were supportive of the proposal to proceed with the investigation. Param-Preet Singh, the associate director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch, said, “It’s an important first step in the direction of justice that has eluded victims for a long time in Afghanistan, but it’s definitely going to be hard. The ICC is going to face roadblocks to cooperation everywhere it turns.”

IRIN noted how analysts agreed that the US “will never cooperate with an ICC case against its armed forces, meaning Afghan victims won’t ever see an American in the dock at The Hague,” and also noted “dire warnings that a confrontation with the United States will hurt the fledgling court – already weakened by African disapproval and under fire for mistakes it has made in previous prosecutions.”

However, Mark Kersten, a fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and the deputy director of the Wayamo Foundation, said that “fear of confronting a major power is no reason for the ICC not to take on the case,” as IRIN described it.

As he said, “There’s no one on this planet that thinks the US will cooperate. But the vast majority of criticism and blame for that will be placed at the feet of Washington not the ICC. This is brave and courageous – exactly the kind of thing the ICC was supposed to investigate.”

Note: The image at the top of this article is from the website of the AMICC (the American NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court), a Program of Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights, which states, as its vision, “AMICC believes strongly in the power of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to promote fundamental human rights and the foundational American principles of liberty and justice for all people worldwide. It is our firm belief that full American participation in the ICC and subsequent ratification of the Rome Statute will both enhance the aims of the court and help bring to fruition the vision of our United States. ”

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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 Band The Four Fathers Launch A Year of Political Gigs in Walthamstow This Saturday, In A Protest Against Another Divisive Private Development

Check out all The Four Fathers’ studio recordings here, and the video of our song ‘Grenfell’ here.

Kicking off a year of varied gigs — involving a healthy dose of political events and community festivals — Lewisham-based band The Four Fathers are heading to Walthamstow this Saturday, February 24, to play a few songs (including ‘London’ and ‘Fighting Injustice’) at an occupation of Walthamstow Town Square by campaigners resisting plans to redevelop the square, primarily because of their opposition to the lack of genuinely affordable housing in the planned new development, but also because of concerns about the size of the towers that are proposed for the site, and the loss of public land in the centre of the town.

Please note that I’m also attending a screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK‘, the new documentary film about the housing crisis, directed by Nikita Woolfe, and for which I’m the narrator, at Harmony Hall in Walthamstow at 6pm, and also staying on afterwards what I hope will be a lively post-screening Q&A session. Further details here.

The Observer picked up on the story this weekend, in large part because of Walthamstow’s proximity to Haringey, where, last month, council leader Claire Kober announced her resignation, after an extraordinary grass-roots campaign to stop the council from entering into a unprecedented £2bn deal with the international property developer Lendlease, which would have seen all of Haringey’s social housing, and other assets, put into a 50:50 development project with Lendlease, known as the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV).

This would have led to the destruction of council estates, and, it is reasonable to assume, the social cleansing from the borough of many former council tenants and leaseholders, and the campaign against the HDV not only secured the support of the local Labour MPs, but also led to a situation in which councillors who supported the development plans were either deselected, or deselected themselves, in the run-up to May’s council elections, turning a majority in support of the HDV into a unworkable minority. I’m delighted to note that The Four Fathers played a very small part in the campaign by playing at a benefit gig in Tottenham in September.

In Walthamstow, the row involves the proposed redevelopment of the town’s central shopping mall by Capital & Regional, described by the Observer as “one of Britain’s biggest shopping centre and retail park groups.” The plan, as the Observer explained, “involves building more than 500 new homes, just 20% of which will be classed as affordable.”

Opposition has come from another grass-roots campaign group, Save Walthamstow’s Town Centre, who point out that the proposals involve “grab[bing] a third of our Square — which is publicly owned”, “construct[ing] huge towers along the side — one of which, at 29 stories, is higher than Centre Point”, “chop[ping] down the mature trees in and around the Square (around 80)”, and “mov[ing] the Children’s Playground nearer to the fumes of the bus station.” As they also state, very few, if any of the new homes currently built by developers “go to those on housing waiting lists; and to buy or rent you have to be on up to £90k [a year]. ‘Affordable’ means ‘unaffordable’ for most people in this borough. These developments are aimed purely at making big profits for shareholders.”

Nevertheless, the plans were approved by Waltham Forest Council in December. On its website, the council explained that “[f]ull planning permission was granted for expansion of the shopping centre to create new retail and restaurant outlets overlooking a refurbished and fully accessible town square with a new children’s play area plus 42 new homes,” while “[o]utline permission was granted for up to 460 more homes to be constructed above the shopping centre in four residential buildings of between 12 and 29 storeys.”

The development therefore “has the potential to provide as many as 502 new homes, 20 per cent of which will be affordable and available through shared ownership”, the council added, also stating, “Although this is below the 50 per cent minimum guideline set out by the Mayor of London’s London Plan, the council accepted the difficulties of building above both an operational shopping centre and the Victoria Line tunnels would incur much higher than normal development and construction costs.”

Campaigners, as noted above, query the extent to which “affordable” actually means”affordable”, and this is a key concern of mine, as it appears to constitute a dangerous rewriting of the very meaning of words. It was, after all, Boris Johnson, when he was Mayor, who set the “affordable” rate at 80% of market rents, thereby making it unaffordable for most people, and yet it continues to be used in all discussions about housing without, in general, any elaboration. Usually overlooked is social rent, in contrast to “affordable” rent, which tends to be set at around 30% of market rent, and which is actually what the average Londoner requires. Also under-discussed is the problem with shared ownership, which is a particularly dubious development, being little more than a huge increase in outlay for a nominal suggestion of part-ownership.

To proceed, the proposals will have to be approved by London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, with the Observer noting that “[t]he application to build four tower blocks is expected to land on his desk imminently.”

It is not yet known what Khan will have to say about the proposals’ affordable housing element being “below the 50 per cent minimum guideline set out by the Mayor of London’s London Plan”, but the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell recently got involved, attending a meeting called by Waltham Forest Trades Council, specifically to discuss PFI (the horrendous Private Finance Initiative), at which he heard from campaigners opposing the town square development, where, as the Observer described it, he “warned councils to abandon schemes that depend on the private sector and referred to the situation in Haringey.” The Evening Standard reported that he said, “I would just say to any local councillor anywhere, the most important thing on these developments is listen to people, and take people with you, rather than impose anything.”

McDonnell surely had a point, as, in the Observer’s words, “Labour councillors signed off on the plans despite nearly 1,000 letters expressing concerns ranging from the lack of affordable housing to the loss of a large chunk of the only public space in the town centre.” However, Waltham Forest Council’s leader, Clare Coghill, responded to McDonnell’s comments by stating, “Why is Labour energy not being spent exclusively on winning places like Wandsworth, and querying Waltham Forest instead? Isn’t energy better spent going to places the Tories control and highlighting their failings?”

Currently standing outside the fray is the local Labour MP Stella Creasy, who, as the Observer noted, is “considered to be at risk from leftwingers’ plans for mandatory reselection of parliamentary candidates.”

Nancy Taaffe, chair of the Waltham Forest Save Our Square campaign, who “has waged a guerrilla campaign against the council and Creasy on the pages of community Facebook groups,” as the Observer described it, spelled out her position, and that of other activists, telling the Observer, “This is about opposing the taking of the public land and a model that has become turbocharged because councils are in a panic about their grants from government being cut.”

She “derided Waltham Forest councillors as being ‘loyal to the ideas of Tony Blair’ and pointed out that their leader, Clare Coghill, had joined other local authority chiefs to sign a letter criticising a call by Labour’s national executive committee for Haringey to rethink its public-private initiative” — a letter signed by 70 council chiefs across the country, but with notable exceptions in London, especially in Haringey’s other neighbours, Camden, Hackney and Islington.

The Observer also noted that Stella Creasy and Clare Coghill were “unavailable for comment,” but that a spokesperson for Waltham Forest Council said that the plans “would bring £200m of private investment and 8,000 square metres of additional retail space”, and claimed, “A new and expanded Mall would give a significant boost to the local economy, giving our residents the opportunity to shop in the borough, rather than going further afield, which has a detrimental effect on the local economy.” Even that later pot is subject to dispute, as often new retail developments have a detrimental knock-on effect on the local businesses, leading to the closures of many other shops.

The Four Fathers’ other gigs over the next three months are listed below. Further details will be provided soon:

Friday March 16: The Telegraph at the Earl of Derby, London SE14, with the Commie Faggots, as part of the Telegraph Hill Festival

Saturday April 7: Protestival, Eastbourne

Sunday April 29: Old Tidemill Garden, Deptford, London SE8, as part of a day of music and films in the community garden approved for destruction by Lewisham Council, as part of the New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival

Saturday May 12: Hither Green Festival opening day, The Clocktower, Des Vignes Drive, London SE13

Sunday May 13: No Social Cleansing in Lewisham, New Cross Inn, London SE14, with the Commie Faggots, Ukadelix, Asher Baker, The Wiz-RD, and many other acts to be confirmed

Friday May 25: The Royal Sovereign, Clapton, London E5, with the Commie Faggots

Saturday May 26: Arts Cafe, Manor Park, Lewisham, London SE13, as part of the Hither Green Festival

To keep informed about gigs and any other relevant information (new music releases, for example), please email us and ask to join our mailing list. We hope to see you soon!

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

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

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.

Back in November, a disturbing story emerged from Guantánamo — of how a ten-year policy of allowing prisoners to give away art they have made at the prison to their lawyers and, via them, to family members had been stopped by the authorities, in response to an exhibition of prisoners’ artwork at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York, which is known for its criminal justice, forensic science, forensic psychology, and public affairs programs.

The Pentagon had taken exception to an email address provided for people who were “interested in purchasing art” from the artists featured in the show. A Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson, said on November 15 that “all Guantánamo detainee art is ‘property of the US government’ and ‘questions remain on where the money for the sales was going.’”

One problem with this position was that some of the art was by prisoners who are no longer at the prison,which surely raises questions about the extent of the Pentagon’s claimed “ownership” of their work, but the Department of Defense wasn’t interested in having that pointed out. Instead, a spokeswoman at the prison, Navy Cmdr. Anne Leanos, said in a statement that “transfers of detainee made artwork have been suspended pending a policy review,” and Ramzi Kassem, a professor at City University of New York School of Law whose legal clinic represents Guantánamo prisoners, said that one particular prisoner had been told that, if any prisoner were to be allowed to leave Guantánamo (which, crucially, has not happened under Donald Trump), “their art would not even be allowed out with them and would be incinerated instead.”

This was outrageous, of course, because, as Carol Rosenberg, who broke the story, noted in the Miami Herald, the change in policy contravenes Federal Bureau of Prisons policy, which “lets its inmates mail ‘arts and hobbycraft’ to family, give them to certain visitors and sometimes display it in public space, if it meets the warden’s standard of taste.”

However, as Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch stated in a powerful tweet, the development was “no surprise” because the “Pentagon has long claimed it owns detainees’ own memories of torture.” As I noted in an article at the time, “She was referring in particular to the ‘high-value detainees,’ brought to the prison from CIA ‘black sites’ in September 2006, whose every word to their lawyers in the eleven years since has largely remained classified, but even for general prisoners, everything they say to their lawyers remains presumptively classified until the lawyers’ notes are reviewed by a Pentagon censorship team, which decides whether or not what the prisoners say can be made public.”

It also strikes me that it is part of a fundamental problem with the “war on terror,” whereby prisoners have been regarded as somehow exceptional — undeserving of the normal rights afforded to prisoners. Although the art program was triumphed by the military at Guantánamo for many years, with officials recognizing that it was good for the prisoners, and also good for the prison’s own blighted public relations, the sudden change of policy appears to be a return to the bad old days of hiding the prisoners away and keeping them silenced, which seems, moreover, to reflect a disconcerting clampdown on their status under Donald Trump.

My visit to ‘Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay’

In January, during my annual visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison on the anniversary of its opening, I visited the exhibition with a party of friends including Jeremy Varon of Witness Against Torture, and Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait, and was delighted to meet Erin Thompson, one of the curators of the show, whose eloquent and passionate defense of the prisoners’ work I had written about last year (see here and here). We had also exchanged messages on Twitter.

The show was powerful, but in a genuinely understated way. Some of the prisoners showed a real artistic talent; others less so. Of particular note was the work by Mohammed al-Ansi (aka Muhammad Ansi) and Djamel Ameziane, both released, and the elaborate sculptures of ships made of discarded materials by “forever prisoner” Moath al-Alwi, a Yemeni still held not because he has ever been accused of any significant involvement with terrorism, but because he has been a long-term hunger striker, and is not regarded as having been sufficiently cooperative. In a similar position is Khalid Qassim, who has produced interesting paintings through a variety of media.

Above all, however, the prisoners’ work, generally featuring uncontentious subject matter, did nothing more shocking than daring to show that they are human beings. It was, therefore, genuinely shocking that the Pentagon had responded in such a heavy-handed manner to the show — and it was, of course, ironic that by doing so they had made the show considerably more popular than it would have been otherwise.

Erin Thompson told us that nearly a thousand people had been to see the show, which was open to the public, even though it was not a regular gallery, and was just a corridor, but of course the DoD’s intervention meant that a huge number of people heard about it via the mainstream media, on TV, in newspapers and online, like this CBS News feature, broadcast on January 21, in which Erin Thompson explained the prisoners’ attachment to the sea as follows: “The prison is only a few yards away from the sea, but they can’t look at it. There are tarps covering all of the fences. Only once, when a hurricane was approaching, did the tarps come down. And they spent those days just looking at the ocean. And after the tarps went back up, they started to paint and sculpt ships, boats, ocean, just to recapture the feeling of peace from those days.”

CBS News also spoke to the family of someone who died in the 9/11 attacks, who complained, “To have a public university sponsor this, I think is absolutely outrageous and reprehensible. We are now giving them a forum which they should not have. They should have no voice, because they snuffed out the voices of almost 3,000 people on September 11.”

Unfortunately, the family missed the point, because only one of the eight men featured in the show has been accused of having any involvement with the 9/11 attacks — Ammar al-Baluchi, whose piece ‘Vertigo at Guantanamo’ was described by CBS News as “depict[ing] his experience of the brain injury he claims he suffered when he underwent so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ (like waterboarding) by the CIA,” and was “one of the most popular artworks” in the show. As Thompson said, to her it was “the most important work in the show.” As she put it, “It’s the most-clear link we have to the mind of someone capable of terrorism.”

No one, whatever they are accused of, should be prevented from creating art, if they wish, but it’s also important to remember that the rest of the prisoners are not accused of having had any significant role in any kind of terrorist activity, and that four of them have been released, with just four still held, including al-Baluchi.

On January 24, six lawyers wrote to wrote to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, expressing “support of the long-established policy — which allowed for the release of art to detainees’ counsel, their families, and the public — as one that demonstrably benefits our detainee-clients, the detention authority, and the public at large.”

An article for Hyperallergic further noted:

Protesting the ban on art leaving the base, the lawyers argue that the new regulations are counter-productive, as the art program has historically helped Guantánamo function more smoothly and made authorities’ jobs easier. “The benefits of art classes for prison populations, and for detaining authorities, have been widely researched and documented,” they write. “For example, a literature review of studies on the topic found such benefits as greater emotional self-regulation and self-discipline. The validating effect of being seen through one’s own artwork can hardly be overstated. Thus, art programming has been positively correlated with improved inmate behavior.” The letter further attests that the new policy is illegal under copyright law.

Bringing the story up to date

Bringing the story up to date, Carol Rosenberg confirmed for the Miami Herald last week that artwork by the prisoners, “once a proud fixture of media visits, has vanished from prison materials that reporters are allowed to see” following the change in policy.

Officials stated that the art program is ongoing, and prisoners are still making art, but pointed out that “a usual stop at a trailer where, for years, troops and contractors hung detainee drawings and paintings was excluded from a five-hour Detention Center Zone visit by US, Australian and Colombian reporters on Feb. 3.” Rosenberg added, “It was the first media visit since summer, and the first since the Pentagon declared the art US government property and halted a long-standing prison policy of letting captives give their artwork to their lawyers and families.”

The prison’s cultural adviser, Zaki, told Rosenberg, “Detainees are still going to art class,” although he acknowledged that the artists among the 41 remaining prisoners “were not happy about the change.”

The prison’s commander, Rear Adm. Edward Cashman, also read out a statement about the authorities’ position. “I do not have the mission, the requirement, the direction or the capability to store every detainee art project forever,” he said, adding, “I don’t have a project to build a detainee art museum. I do not have a project to hire a detainee art curator” — a not so subtle dig at Erin Thompson and her colleagues.

Asked whether it was true that prisoners’ art would be incinerated, he said that prisoners “voluntarily turn in ‘completed projects’ or those ‘they’ve lost interest in’ and the method of destruction was not incineration but having it ‘shredded, thrown away if necessary.’”

Whether that is better than incarceration is open to discussion. However, what is abundantly clear, to anyone prepared to pay attention, is that the artists among the prisoners are profoundly unhappy about the policy change.

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve told Hyperallergic that her clients “were devastated to hear that their art couldn’t leave the prison. For some, that was its express purpose. For others, they realized the importance of its outside recognition only once it was taken away. Of my three clients, only one continues to attend art class, and it’s intermittently.” On my US visit, I was also told that, until the recent clampdown, Moath al-Alwi had been making his ships on a full-time basis, but that he too has had this outlet for his creativity savagely curtailed.

Sullivan-Bennis added, “My understanding is that the attendance of the class and production of art has all but ceased.”

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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: My Discussion with Scott Horton About the Shameful Rehabilitation of George W. Bush, As I Recall His 2002 Memo Authorizing Torture

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 be invited to discuss Guantánamo, George W. Bush, torture and the “war on terror” by Scott Horton, the libertarian, Texan-based radio host, and the author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, in which, as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg notes in a review, he “masterfully explains the tragedy of America’s longest war and makes the case for immediate withdrawal.”

Scott and I have been talking several times a year — and sometime more frequently — since September 2007, when we first spoke about the case of US “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla, tortured on the US mainland. Our interviews have generally been for 20-25 minutes, but for our latest interview the brakes were off, and we spoke for a whole hour.

The show is available here, or here as an MP3, and I wholeheartedly recommend it as a tour through the darkness of the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks, as manifested in CIA “black sites,” in the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” to torture prisons in other countries, in Guantánamo, and in the wars — and the accompanying lawless prisons — in Afghanistan and Iraq. We also looked at the sad failures of the Obama years — not only his failure to close Guantánamo, but how extrajudicial assassination by drones replaced the messy detention, rendition and torture program of the Bush years, but is no more legally or morally acceptable.

The trigger for our conversation was my article, Exactly 16 Years Ago, George W. Bush Opened the Floodgates to Torture at Guantánamo, which looked at the presidential memo, dated February 7, 2002, which removed the protections of the Geneva Conventions from prisoners seized in the “war on terror,” paving the way for their torture.

Scott and I began by discussing the unfortunate success of US black propaganda at the start of the “war on terror,” with Scott mentioning how the US portrayed their prisoners as somehow superhuman, when in fact many of them were nothing more than sheep herders, although far too many people still don’t know how few genuinely significant prisoners have ever been held at Guantánamo — essentially, just a few percent of the 779 men and boys held there by the US military since the prison opened 16 years ago.

I also explained how one of the fundamental insanities of the post-9/11 detention program is that people allegedly involved in terrorism were regarded as soldiers — and allowed to portray themselves as warriors, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has done — while ordinary foot soldiers for the Taliban ended up being portrayed as terrorists, a topsy-turvy world that not only reeked of incompetence, but was so brutal that it involved everyone who ended up in US custody — often bought for bounty payments, or seized via faulty intelligence — being stripped of absolutely all their rights.

We also discussed the various post-9/11 torture programs — the CIA’s “black sites,” the proxy prisons in other countries where prisoners were sent via “extraordinary rendition” to be tortured on the CIA’s behalf, and those tortured in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Interestingly, although the 2014 Senate Intelligence report into the CIA’s torture program established that 119 men went through the CIA torture program, no official figures exist for how many were sent to be tortured in other countries.

Scott also made reference to Strawberry Fields, the CIA “black site” that briefly existed within Guantánamo, in 2003-04, Camp No, also known as Penny Lane, where supposedly pliant prisoners were apparently trained to be double agents, and where, as Scott pointed out, three men were reportedly killed, according to a story that emerged in 2010, via former Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and the other Scott Horton, the lawyer and Harper’s columnist.

We also spoke about how accountability went so far awry after 9/11 that, when two men, Manadel al-Jamadi in Iraq, and Gul Rahman in Afghanistan, were conspicuously murdered, officially no one appeared to be responsible.

In this responsibility-free world, the US not only killed and tortured with impunity, but also, essentially, did away with the Geneva Conventions, a bleak innovation that very few people truly seem to have taken on board. Scott and I also spoke about how Daesh (Islamic State) was created in Camp Bucca in Iraq, with Scott also noting that its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also held at Abu Ghraib.

Scott also made reference to a former interrogator who has explained how routine torture was in Iraq — how, essentially, tens of thousands of people were tortured in Iraq, on the roadside, in their homes, everywhere, including, of course, the US’s network of horrible prisons, even though the Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply there.

Everywhere, sadly, from Bagram to Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, torture techniques migrated from site to site, with, essentially, two parallel torture programs existing for several particularly dark years — the CIA program that Jay Bybee approved via the 2002 “torture memos” written by John Yoo, and Donald Rumsfeld’s program, initially for Mohammed al-Qahtani, which was then widely used in Guantánamo, and, inevitably, spread to other locations.

There was much more that Scott and I discussed about these particular topics before we finally brought the story up to date in the last 15 minutes or so of the show — looking at who is still left, and what injustices they still face — but I won’t try and encapsulate everything in this article, as I really would like you to listen to the show, to share it if you like it, and even to let me know what you thought of it.

This, in conclusion, is how it was described on Scott’s website:

Investigative journalist Andy Worthington returns to the show to discuss the absurd rehabilitation of George W. Bush by the left. Worthington recalls the early days of the Bush-Cheney administration and the crimes committed at Guantánamo and the murder of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Worthington then breaks down the various elements of the U.S. torture network and the long draw down of Guantánamo starting in the Bush days, but which has never reached its conclusion. Finally Worthington talks about how Obama’s preference for drone assassinations limited captures of enemy combatants and why Trump wants to revitalize the prison.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

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

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In December, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a new documentary film about Britain’s housing crisis, was released, for which I was delighted to have been asked by the director, Nikita Woolfe, to be the narrator. As we explain on the film’s website:

“‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ is a new documentary film by Nikita Woolfe, looking at an under-reported scandal in London and across the country — the social cleansing of council estates. Starved of funds by central government, councils and housing associations are entering into deals with private developers in which, instead of renovating estates, they are being demolished and rebuilt. The developers make huge profits, but existing tenants, and leaseholders are squeezed out, socially cleansed from their homes, and often from the boroughs in which they have lived for years, for decades, or for their whole lives.”

The film looks in particular at three struggles currently taking place — on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, and Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth — and is particularly concerned to provide a voice for those resisting the destruction of their homes. As we put it, “The film encourages viewers to have hope, and a belief that a fairer future is out there.” And with good news of late — Haringey residents seemingly victorious over their council, which sought to put all the borough’s social housing into a development vehicle with the rapacious Australian-based international property developer Lendlease, and with both Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan backing residents’ ballots before any demolitions can take place — it is to be hoped that 2018 will be the year that the tide finally turns on the social cleansing that has threatened to become an epidemic in recent years.

The launch of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ was at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, and it was followed by a second screening at Deptford Cinema. Both were very well-attended, and the film was also very well-received. For London Intelligence, Paul Coleman encouraged viewers to absorb the film’s “refreshing amplification of the voices of working class Londoners; the people subjected to developer-led, council-backed regeneration – one of the most perniciously anti-democratic and inhuman facets of London’s unequal political economy.” Theatre director Anita Parry wrote, “Such a good film and of real substance so people are actually armed with some facts as well.”

Since launching the film, we have begun approaching housing campaigners to arrange screenings, and we ask you to contact us if you’d like to show it. We are particularly interested in supporting those actively fighting against the proposed destruction of their homes, but we are happy to show it to any interested audience — and of course, we welcome invitations from independent cinemas and film festivals. We are also about to launch a fundraiser to raise money so that Niki and I can travel to show the film — in London and elsewhere — so please do get in touch if you’d like to donate to support us.

Below are the first two screenings of 2018, both next week — a screening in Hackney Wick on Tuesday February 20, and a screening in Walthamstow on Saturday February 24. We are currently also lining up screenings in April in Tottenham (at the Lordship Hub in Lordship Recreation Ground, by Broadwater Farm estate, on Sunday April 15) and New Cross (at Sanford Road Co-Op on Monday April 30, as part of the Deptford and New Cross Free Film Festival) and will provide further details about those screenings soon.

Tuesday February 20, 7pm – 9pm, Hub 67, 67 Rothbury Road, Hackney Wick, London E9 5HA

Screening followed by Q&A with narrator Andy Worthington and director Nikita Woolfe.

This is a Films For Food screening. There is no charge for admission but you must bring a bag of non-perishable food which will get donated to First Love Foundation (Tower Hamlets Food Bank). Films For Food was set up in 2014 by Rainbow Collective, which describes itself as “a unique production company, formed as a social enterprise and committed to raising awareness on issues of human and childrens’ rights through powerful cinematic documentaries”, who “have collaborated with Amnesty International, The Consortium For Street Children, War On Want, TRAID, Labour Behind The Label, International Labor Rights Forum and many others.” They set up Films for Food in response to the news, in 2014, that “there had been a 51% rise in people using food banks across the UK, with the number of users now over one million.”

If you are coming to this screening, please sign up on the Eventbrite page here.

Saturday February 24, 6pm – 8pm, Harmony Hall, 10 Truro Rd, Walthamstow, London E17 7BY

Screening followed by Q&A with narrator Andy Worthington.

The screening is free, but a suggested minimum donation is £3. It’s organised by Save Walthamstow’s Town Centre, and follows an occupation of Walthamstow Market Square from 1-3pm, against proposals to build 500 new and unaffordable homes in the square, which, as the campaigners state, will involve the developers grabbing a third of the Square, which is publicly owned, constructing huge towers, one of which will be 29 storeys tall, and chopping down around 80 mature trees in and around the Square. As the campaigners also state, they want mass council house building and social rents and private rent control, and also for any changes to the market to be subject to a borough-wide ballot.

My band The Four Fathers will also be playing a few songs at the occupation in the afternoon.

Please visit the Facebook page for the occupation, and please also check out Save Walthamstow’s Town Centre on Facebook and Twitter. The Reclaim Walthamstow Twitter page may also be of interest

For Harmony Hall, and directions, see the website here, and for further information about the Walthamstow campaign, please email David Gardiner.

See below for a short teaser for the film — official trailer to follow soon:

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Over 1,200 Views for The Four Fathers’ ‘Grenfell’ Video, Remembering Those Whose Lives Were Lost, and Calling for Those Responsible to be Held Accountable

Last month, at a party of activists in Brooklyn, towards the end of my annual US visit to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the anniversary of its opening (the 16th anniversary of its opening, on January 11), I played ‘Grenfell’, the song I wrote after an entirely preventable inferno consumed Grenfell Tower, a residential tower block in west London last June, killing 71 people.

I wasn’t sure how much the small audience of human rights activists knew about it — how much news of distant disasters spreads around the globe, despite the notion that technology has made us all inter-connected — but I realised when introducing it that it was, for me, the defining moment of 2017, and I’m sure my passionate rendition of it helped one small corner of Brooklyn to understand.

I wrote ‘Grenfell’ last summer, as my response to the disaster, and played it with my band The Four Fathers for the first time in September at a benefit gig for campaigners in Tottenham, as part of their opposition to the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), a deeply unpleasant proposal by Haringey Council to enter into a £2bn deal with the rapacious international property developers Lendlease (the destroyers of Southwark’s Heygate Estate), which would involve the council transferring all its social housing to the HDV, with the ensuing destruction of entire estates, and their replacement with new private housing, from which most of the existing tenants would almost certainly be excluded.

In October, a visiting German film crew, making a documentary about London’s housing crisis, recorded my band The Four Fathers playing ‘Grenfell’ — or, to be specific, three members of the band (myself, Richard Clare and Mark Quiney), plus my son Tyler beatboxing — which we made available as a video, on YouTube and Facebook, in December. The YouTube video is below, and the Facebook video is here, and I’m delighted to note that the video, on YouTube and Facebook, has now had over 1,200 views. I hope you have time to watch it, and will share it if you appreciate its sentiments.

The state of social housing — and its future — have long been of concern to me, as a social tenant myself for most of my adult life, first on a council estate in Brixton, then in housing co-ops, and, latterly, as a tenant of a housing association. I’d love to see social housing — housing for rent, on a genuinely affordable basis — made available to anyone who wants it, but it has been under attack throughout this entire period.

As part of her ‘Right to Buy’ initiative in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher sold off council housing at huge discounts, but refused to allow councils to re-invest the money they made in new housing, starting a supply problem that has persisted ever since. Moreover, in Brixton, the estate I lived on was one of six areas designated by Thatcher’s government in 1987 as Housing Actions Trusts (HATS), where the cynical intention was to take estates out of council control, hand them over to private developers to renovate, and then, so the story went, rent them back to existing tenants. On Loughborough Estate, where I lived — and particularly on Angell Town next door, where the tenants’ organisation was led by the formidable Dora Boatemah — we weren’t fooled by this scam, which, in a premonition of today’s regeneration projects, would have led to most tenants being priced out of their homes, and we fought for tenants’ ballots, and saw off the Housing Action Trust proposal in 1988.

Since then I have continued to champion social housing, but have been sadly aware that it has been persistently under attack, partly as New Labour turned its back on its socialist principles, partly as the right-wing media and the Tories cynically and inaccurately portrayed council estates as “sink estates” full of criminals, and partly through a general consensus of the better-off that social housing ought to be only for the most desperately poor, rather than being something that ought to be as widely available as possible.

The denigration of social housing is, shamefully, one way in which those with power and influence maintain an endlessly overheated and artificially maintained housing bubble in which, for most of the last 20 years, housing has become a source of exploitation and profiteering on a colossal scale. With mortgages nowadays beyond the reach of all but the wealthy, and with an unfettered private rental market, in which tenants have essentially no protections whatsoever against exploitative landlords, who can charge whatever they can get away with, can kick people out at a moment’s notice, and can oblige people to live in slums, the need for genuinely affordable social housing is greater than it has been since the large-scale visionary projects of last century, which Thatcher’s malignant government brought to an entirely unnecessary end.

In recent years, however, the destruction of social housing has become even bigger business. Shorn of money by central government, councils — and let it be noted that Labour councils figure prominently in this story — have turned to private developers to, conveniently, help them knock down estates that can be portrayed as too expensive to renovate, to be replaced by new housing from which, as was intended in 1987 by Margaret Thatcher’s Housing Action Trusts, existing tenants can be priced out.

That’s what happened at the Heygate Estate in Southwark, mentioned above, it was the intention of Haringey Council, until a formidable grass-roots movement rose up that seems to have derailed it, and it’s a story that is being replicated across London, and up and down the country, which can only be stopped by concerted resistance. This is something I’m trying to help with through my role as the narrator of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a new documentary film about the destruction of estates and the inspiring resistance of residents, through my establishment of a specific campaign group in Lewisham, ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’, and through my music.

To return to Grenfell Tower, another huge problem with social housing has been the failure of everyone with responsibility for the safety of tenants living in high-rise blocks to protect them, and this was something that became shockingly apparent as the reasons for the inferno at Grenfell were analysed.

As I undertook research, I discovered the work of the Grenfell Action Group, representing tenants in Grenfell Tower, whose writings, shockingly, had foretold the disaster. As I explained in Deaths Foretold at Grenfell Tower: Let This Be The Moment We The People Say “No More” to the Greed That Killed Residents, an article I published on June 16:

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

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

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

Although KCTMO were directly responsible for the management of Grenfell, and all of Kensington and Chelsea Council’s social housing, politicians at the central and local government level also have a significant responsibility for what took place — to give just a few key examples, cutting “red tape” to make the management of social housing more profitable, failing to order the installation of sprinklers in all tower blocks, eroding safety standards so that contractors were allowed to self-certify that their work was safe, allowing flammable materials to be used as cladding, as specifically happened with Grenfell Tower, and failing to ensure that the structural integrity of tower blocks was maintained when, for example, towers were re-clad, another fatal omission that specifically happened with Grenfell Tower.

Unfortunately, although the disaster inspired widespread outrage in the days and weeks that followed it, the media and society as a whole have moved on. A public inquiry has begun, but those affected do not trust it to deliver justice (see the petition here), and the survivors made homeless by the disaster have, for the most part, not been re-housed. In addition, there is no sign of a desire on the part of anyone with power and influence to immediately address some of the most serious problems identified at Grenfell — the need to install sprinklers in all tower blocks, and the need to remove flammable cladding, and to make sure that safety standards are amended to remove obvious examples of safety being compromised.

Instead, stories continue to emerge of how tenants continue to be failed by those responsible for their safety. In the last few weeks, for example, the Guardian has published the following articles: Only three out of 160 social housing towers reclad after Grenfell fire, Residents of tower with Grenfell-style cladding told they must foot £2m bill, Taxpayers face £4m bill as landlord refuses to make tower block safe and Salford block residents must pay £100,000 for fire wardens.

On January 24, Seraphima Kennedy, a writer and academic researcher, who used to be a neighbourhood officer at KCTMO, wrote an article for the Guardian summarising the failures of the seven months since the disaster. Her article began as follows:

There was a moment in the aftermath of the fire at Grenfell Tower when all political parties were agreed: no government of any stripe could fail a community the way that residents in North Kensington had been failed. It felt like a turning point, both locally and nationally, in how social housing tenants were being treated. Theresa May admitted: “The support on the ground for families in the initial hours was not good enough … That was a failure of the state, local and national, to help people when they needed it most.”

Yet on Monday the Guardian revealed that tens of thousands of people are still living in unsafe homes across the country, with 312 social and private housing blocks wrapped in flammable cladding seven months after the disaster. That 299 of these blocks are likely to breach building controls reveals the state of inertia gripping this government when it comes to looking after the lives of its citizens. Even after a report confirmed that the current system of building controls was not fit for purpose, the government still refused to commit any additional funding to help cash-strapped councils meet the costs of fire safety works.

A Shelter housing commission, launched on Wednesday in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy, shows that almost half of families in social housing who reported issues around poor or unsafe conditions feel ignored or are refused help, and a quarter feel looked down on because of where they live. Edward Daffarn, a Grenfell survivor and member of Shelter’s panel, says change will only ever be achieved when social housing tenants are never again “treated like second-class citizens”.

To make that happen, we need to make sure that Grenfell is not forgotten, and its lessons are not swept under the carpet. If you like ‘Grenfell’, a heartfelt effort to support the community, and to call for justice, then please share it. And if you can, come to the Silent Walk this Wednesday, February 14. The Silent Walks take place on the 14th of every month, and this Wednesday’s walk marks eight months since the disaster. I went on the walk in December, and will be going again this Wednesday, and I can confirm that there is something extremely powerful about marching in silence to show solidarity with the victims and the survivors.

The Four Fathers also intend to make a studio recording of ‘Grenfell’ soon, and we’d like to use it to support the Grenfell community, so if anyone from the area wants to be involved — via a studio, or as a guest rapper, for example — then do get in touch. We are still intent on doing all we can to provide support and to try to keep the spotlight on Grenfell, where it should remain until justice is delivered, and promises can be made that nothing like the Grenfell Tower fire should ever happen again.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Will Donald Trump Actually Close Guantánamo?

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. Please also sign the new petition launched by Reprieve, from which the image accompanying this article was taken, calling for Guantánamo’s closure.

 

I wrote the following article, as “Alberto Mora, U.S. Navy’s Former Top Lawyer, Explains How Donald Trump Might Close Guantánamo,”  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.

Forgive me for what must appear to be a weirdly upbeat headline, given that it’s just over a week since Donald Trump issued a practically pointless but symbolically malevolent executive order keeping the prison at Guantánamo Bay open. However, as Alberto Mora, the General Counsel of the Department of the Navy under George W. Bush, has just explained in an op-ed for the Atlantic’s Defense One website, despite Trump’s seeming obsession with keeping Guantánamo open, it may be that a review of detention policies that he included in his executive order will conclude that he should close it after all.

Alberto Mora, who nowadays is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, played a key role in resisting some of the most dangerously lawless innovations of the Bush administration in his role as the Navy’s General Counsel. In December 2002, when he was advised by David Brant, the director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), that military interrogators, were “engaging in escalating levels of physical and psychological abuse,” as Jane Mayer described it in a groundbreaking New Yorker article in 2006, he was appalled, and when Brant revealed that the abuse wasn’t “rogue activity,” but was “rumored to have been authorized at a high level in Washington,” he confronted William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, and Donald Rumsfeld, who had approved a memo authorizing torture at Guantánamo on December 2, 2002,  unearthing the memo, and threatening to go public about its contents unless it was withdrawn. Rumsfeld complied, but secretly convened a working group to reinstate the policies Mora objected to, which had the approval of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, as written by John Yoo, the author of the infamous CIA “torture memos,” which cynically sought to redefine torture so that the CIA could use it.

As a result, Mora is well-placed to comment on Guantánamo 15 years on from his struggle to prevent the use of torture at the prison, and his suggestion that Donald Trump might close it is based on Trump’s “command to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to ‘reexamine our military detention policy’ and report back to him within 90 days and his request to Congress to ensure that ‘we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists.’” I’m not sure that I agree with Mora that this shows “unexpected open-mindedness” on Trump’s part, and I cannot agree with his assessment that, in “asking Mattis to take charge,” and also including Congress in an assessment of detention policy, Trump “acted prudently and, dare I say it, wisely.”

Mora seems to have more faith in Congressional Republicans than is warranted, based on their behavior in general over the past 16 years, and I fear that his regard for Mattis — presumably, as colleagues in the armed services — may also be misplaced, but it is on that point in particular that he may be onto something — that Mattis may recognize that the existing, post-9/11 architecture of detention doesn’t work, is in need of reform, and, moreover, needs bringing back in line with how the rest of the U.S.’s allies operate.

We shall have to wait and see, but I encourage you to read the whole of Mora’s op-ed, cross-posted below, and to reach your own conclusions about the six points he raises. Briefly, he calls, firstly, for detention policies to be rationalized, because, at present, “tactical operations are being hamstrung” by a ban on holding any prisoners for interrogation in the U.S., by the use of ships for interrogations, which he calls “a wasteful use of valuable assets,” and because prisoners are being killed rather than captured.

He also notes that indefinite detention — the hallmark of Guantánamo, 16 years on from its opening — is an “endless headache” that should be brought to an end, despite the fact that post-9/11 law permits it, and advises that, if prisoners can be tried, they should be, but in federal courts, and not in the broken military commission system at Guantánamo, which, he notes, even Trump has referred to as one consisting primarily of “staggering inefficiency.”

He also calls for detention operations to be “conducted in strict conformity with U.S. and international law, including the Geneva Conventions,” and for them to be “harmonized with those of our allies,” noting, accurately, that, “One of the unfortunate mistakes made by the Bush administration in its response to 9/11 was to attempt to create a different legal architecture than the one that the international community had crafted so painstakingly out of the horrors of World War II.” As he proceeds to explain, “Our allies could not and will not condone torture, abandon due process protections as the military commission system has done, or support Guantánamo’s system of indefinite detention.”

And finally, Mora focuses on the outrageous cost of Guantánamo, noting that “[t]he cost of holding a single Guantánamo detainee is about 139 times more expensive than housing a prisoner in the escape-proof Supermax prisons in the continental United States.”

As I mentioned above, I have no great faith that either Mattis or Congress will respond sensibly to Mora’s proposals, because Republicans have generally done very little to show that they are anything but content with Guantánamo’s continuing existence, and, likewise, there has been little suggestion from the military that those in positions of power and responsibility are unduly appalled by the fundamental wrongness of holding people indefinitely without charge or trial.

But, as I also concede, I may be wrong, and I certainly hope I am. Over 16 years since Guantánamo opened, all arguments for its closure are to be welcomed, especially from someone like Alberto Mora, whose criticism — like that of the dozens of general and admirals who have regularly called for the closure of Guantánamo — comes from the inside the U.S. establishment rather than from those with no experience of the workings of the U.S. military at its highest levels.

How Trump Just Might Close Guantánamo Prison

By Alberto Mora, Defense One, February 5, 2018

The president asked SecDef and Congress to ensure that detention policies support warfighting aims. That should mean shutting Gitmo down.

Will President Trump close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay?

This question may sound preposterous. After all, President Obama, who called the prison a threat to national security and American ideals, actually tried to close it. President Trump, by contrast, is on record as vehemently favoring not only its continuation but its expansion. On Jan. 30 he reaffirmed that commitment both in his State of the Union address and in an executive order revoking President Obama’s order commanding its closure.

Why, then, even raise the prospect of closing Guantánamo during this administration? The answer lies in two related actions recently taken by the president: his command to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to “reexamine our military detention policy” and report back to him within 90 days and his request to Congress to ensure that “we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists.” The two actions in conjunction represent an unexpected open-mindedness on the part of the president with respect to detention policy. By seeking a broad-focus, “blank-sheet-of-paper” review, asking Mattis to take charge, and inviting Congress to join with them, President Trump acted prudently and, dare I say it, wisely.

What Secretary Mattis should find and report to our president is that our current detention policies, including the use of Guantánamo, are a failure. They are overly cumbersome and restrictive from a military perspective. Also, they embody elements that violate core elements of U.S. law and human rights and damage our international reputation and our ability to achieve our foreign policy objectives. A well-crafted detention policy would seek to eliminate these costs and thus strengthen our nation’s defenses.

Such a policy should meet the following criteria:

First, it would permit the military, working in concert with other agencies and departments, to swiftly transport prisoners to the optimum locations for interrogation and detention — including, if need be, the United States. Because of our overly restrictive or unclear detention policies, tactical operations are being hamstrung, U.S. forces are suspected of making kill over capture decisions in anti-terrorism operations, and naval ships at sea are being used as interrogation sites, a wasteful use of valuable assets.

Second, while the U.S. has the legal authority to hold prisoners taken in the war against terrorism indefinitely, we should avoid buying into the endless headache of the wholesale or indefinite detention business. The only prisoners we should hold are those who have harmed or who directly threaten the United States. They should be tried and put away; the rest should be transferred to our allies. Detention policy should ensure that a pre-built off-ramp exists for every person brought into the system.

Third, detention operations should be conducted in strict conformity with U.S. and international law, including the Geneva Conventions. Not only is this mandated, it would reduce the legal friction that has proven so counterproductive in the fight against terrorism.

Fourth, the system to try terrorism defendants should yield swift justice consonant with the best traditions of the American legal system. Since 9/11, Article III courts have fairly and efficiently tried and convicted more than 620 individuals on terrorism-related charges. By contrast, despite more than 15 years of effort and three iterations, the military commission system has failed to try a single one of the detainees credibly alleged to have participated in the 9/11 mass murders. President Trump himself has noted the staggering inefficiency of the military commission system.

Fifth, U.S. detention operations should be harmonized with those of our allies, for the simple reason that this war is not a solo fight. One of the unfortunate mistakes made by the Bush administration in its response to 9/11 was to attempt to create a different legal architecture than the one that the international community had crafted so painstakingly out of the horrors of World War II. Our allies could not and will not condone torture, abandon due process protections as the military commission system has done, or support Guantánamo’s system of indefinite detention.

And, sixth, our detention system should be cost-efficient. Whatever Guantánamo is, it is not that. The cost of holding a single Guantánamo detainee is about 139 times more expensive than housing a prisoner in the escape-proof Supermax prisons in the continental United States. Moreover, the military assigns 2,000 soldiers to guard the 41 Guantánamo prisoners, an unconscionably wasteful use of scarce personnel. The ratio of Guantánamo guards to prisoners is more than 48 to 1, while in the federal prison system it is about five prisoners to one guard.

The application of these criteria to our detention policies would lead to numerous long-needed reforms, all of which would help ensure that these policies support our warfighting objectives. These reforms would necessarily include the closure of Guantánamo and the elimination of the military commission system.

Mattis, who prizes boldness and whose command history shows no tendency for reinforcing failure, will likely recommend a break with the dead-end Bush and Obama detention policies. When he does, will President Trump and Congress abandon campaign rhetoric and act in the national interest? My hope is that they will.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

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

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

 

Since the terrible elevation of the grotesquely inadequate figure of Donald Trump to the position of President of the United States, there has been a bizarre propensity, on the part of those in the center and on the left of US political life, to seek to rehabilitate the previous Republican president, George W. Bush.

So let’s nip this in the bud, shall we? Because unless you’ve been away from the planet for the last 20 years, you must be aware that it was George W. Bush who initiated the US’s brutal and thoroughly counter-productive “war on terror” in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which involved authorizing the CIA to set up a secret detention and torture program, establishing a prison outside the law at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, establishing deportation and surveillance programs within the US, invading one country (Afghanistan) in response to the attacks, where US troops remain to this day, despite having long ago ”snatched defeat from the jaws of victory,” as the author Anand Gopal once explained to me, and invading another country (Iraq) that had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda, but which was nevertheless destroyed, along the way serving as the crucible for the creation of a newer threat, Daesh, or Islamic State, as it is more colloquial known in the West, a kind of turbo-charged reincarnation of al-Qaeda.

Today, February 7, is the 16th anniversary of one particularly sinister and misguided development in Bush’s “war on terror” — a memorandum, entitled, “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees,” which was sent to just a handful of recipients including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Attorney General John Ashcroft, CIA director George Tenet, and General Richard B. Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As I explained in an article marking the 10th anniversary of the issuing of the memorandum, in February 2012, on the day itself the only mention of it came from Andrew Cohen in the Atlantic, who reminded readers that the heading of the memo “was a cruel irony, an Orwellian bit of business, because what the memo authorized and directed was the formal abandonment of America’s commitment to key provisions of the Geneva Convention. This was the day, a milestone on the road to Abu Ghraib, that marked our descent into torture — the day, many would still say, that we lost part of our soul.”

As I proceeded to explain in my article:

This is no exaggeration. Depriving prisoners seized in wartime of the protections of the Geneva Conventions was a huge and unprecedented step, and thoroughly alarming. And yet, despite criticism from Secretary of State Colin Powell, the administration pushed forward remorselessly towards the creation of an America that practiced arbitrary detention and torture.

Powell had been included in the paper trail that led to President Bush’s memorandum of February 7, 2002, and he was particularly upset by a memo on January 25, 2002, signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, but written by Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington, which claimed that the “new paradigm,” which, it was claimed, the “war on terror” presented, “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

In his memorandum, just two weeks later, President Bush declared that “none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere through the world, because, among other reasons, al-Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva.” He added, “I determine that the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under Article 4 of Geneva. I note that, because Geneva does not apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war.”

This was the rationale for holding prisoners neither as criminal suspects or as prisoners of war, but as a third category of human being, without any rights, which was disturbing enough, but it also paved the way for the use of torture, as people with no rights whatsoever had no protection against torture and abuse, and to this end the most alarming passage in the memorandum is the President’s claim that “common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees because, among other reasons, the relevant conflicts are international in scope and common Article 3 applies only to ‘armed conflict not of an international character.’”

President Bush claimed that the prisoners would be “treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva,” but it was a meaningless addition. By refusing to accept that everyone seized in wartime must be protected from torture and abuse, and by removing the protections of common Article 3 from the prisoners, which prohibit “cruel treatment and torture,” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment,” President Bush opened the floodgates to the torture programs that were subsequently developed, both for use by the CIA, and at Guantánamo.

16 years on, February 7, 2002 remains a grim day in the modern American calendar, and one that, I think, should be marked every year, along with other key dates — August 1, 2002, for example, when the “torture memos,” seeking to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, written by John Yoo and approved by his boss, Jay Bybee, and December 2, 2002, when Donald Rumsfeld approved his own specific torture program for use at Guantánamo, which was initially intended for use on just one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, but which ended up being used on one in six of the prisoners, according to a former interrogator who spoke to Neil A. Lewis for a New York Times article in January 2005.

It is also important to remember that the torture and abuse that Bush unleashed in his memo of February 7, 2002 remained US policy for nearly four and half years, until the Supreme Court reminded the president, in Hamden v. Rumseld, on June 29, 2006, that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions apply to all prisoners held by the US, whatever their location (theoretically, Common Article 3 was reinstated in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, but critics have suggested that that legislation, introduced by John McCain, had numerous loopholes that sidestepped its intended prohibition on the use of torture). Within three months of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, demonstrating the Supreme Court’s influence, Bush emptied the CIA’s “black sites,” bringing 14 “high-value detainees” to Guantánamo, where all but one of them remain to this day.

That wasn’t quite the end of the US torture program, as a handful of other “high-value detainees” eventually washed up at Guantánamo, and, as Jeffrey Kaye in particular has noted, torture techniques remain in the Army Field Manual despite the fact that President Obama issued an executive order banning the use of torture when he took office in January 2009.

Significantly, in December 2014, a major step was taken against the use of torture, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued the 500-page executive summary of a scathing 6,200-page report about both the brutality and the pointlessness of the CIA’s torture program. Stung by this, almost the entire US establishment turned on Donald Trump when, during his first weeks in office, a draft executive order was leaked indicating that he wanted to revive the use of torture and of CIA “black sites,” as well as officially keeping Guantánamo open.

That said, torture is less of an option than it used to be, as, under Barack Obama, the US moved away from the messy business of detention, embracing assassinations instead — through drone attacks, which are, to be frank, as legally dubious as the Bush administration’s rendition and torture program was. With hindsight, the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was a time when, as it was throughout the Clinton years, assassination had fallen out of favor, but it is now back with a vengeance, and the drone program is being enthusiastically pursued by Donald Trump.

And while it remains significant that Donald Trump seems to be getting away with his enthusiasm for killing people in drone attacks, it is also worth remembering, on this baleful anniversary, that, when it comes to torture, although the US establishment has generally retreated from endorsing its use (through recognizing how close they came to prosecutions, if not because of their recognition of the uselessness of torture), the US public, through shows like ’24’ and films like the disgraceful ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ is not so well-informed.

As Donald Trump took office, 48% of Americans said that “there are some circumstances under which the use of torture is acceptable in US anti-terrorism efforts.” Encouragingly, 49% disagreed, but it remains, i believe, a sign of the enduring power of the Bush administration’s bellicose pro-torture maneuverings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that torture remains so popular, just as, with Guantánamo, the dark propaganda of the priosn’s early days — as a place which, allegedly held “the worst of the worst” — has proven alarmingly durable, despite relentless efforts by campaigners, myself included, to demonstrate its almost complete groundlessness.

Cross-posted on Common Dreams.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.