Andy Worthington's Blog, page 43

Guantánamo Writer Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Devastating Criticism of US Claims That It Owns and Can Destroy Prisoners’ Art

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.

 

A month ago, following a report in the Miami Herald about the US authorities at Guantánamo claiming that they own prisoners’ art and can destroy it — a position apparently taken in response to an art exhibition that had rattled the Pentagon — I wrote an article explaining why this was both disgraceful and also typical of the US authorities, who have always behaved at Guantánamo as though every aspect of the prisoners’ lives — even their memories — are owned by them.

That article was entitled, Persistent Dehumanization at Guantánamo: US Claims It Owns Prisoners’ Art, Just As It Claims to Own Their Memories of Torture, and I followed it with two cross-posts of powerful and eloquent articles written by Erin Thompson, one of the curators of the exhibition, at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York — here and here.

Last week, in the Washington Post, another witness to the power of creativity and the distressing censorship and control exercised by the US authorities stepped forward with another powerful and eloquent analysis — Mohamedou Ould Slahi, from Mauritania, who was tortured in Jordan, Afghanistan and Guantánamo on the mistaken basis that he was a member of Al-Qaeda, and who, after the torture at Guantánamo “broke” him, was regarded, again mistakenly, as such a useful informant that he was moved from out of the general population of the prison, and allowed to write a memoir, “Guantánamo Diary,” that, ironically, eventually ended up being published and becoming a best-seller.

“Guantánamo Diary” revealed Slahi, who was eventually released in October 2016, to be a formidable writer, possessed of humour, eloquence and insight, and unwilling to bear a grudge against his former captors, qualities evident in his op-ed for the Post, in which he explained that, although he was “heartened by the individuals and organizations that have protested” the “cruel policy” of claiming to own and be able to destroy prisoners’ art, “as well as by the critical coverage in the U.S. and international press,” he was not surprised by the news.

He proceeded to explain that, in October 2014, the authorities at Guantánamo confiscated everything he had written since completing “Guantánamo Diary” nine years before. As he put it, “stories I had written about my childhood, fictional stories and even a manuscript for a book I was working on called ‘Portable Happiness,’ about how to stay positive in the most hopeless situations.”

Slahi proceeds to explain, “I never saw these things again.” His writing was stolen from him, as were gifts from his lawyer or family members — what the authorities, disgracefully, called “comfort items.” As he describes it, “The comfort of these things, for me, was that they really were mine: They were things I had created and things that my lawyers, family and even interrogators and guards had given to me personally. They were expressions of myself and expressions of what others saw in me. They were proof that I existed.”

Without them, the authorities had “another kind of leverage over us: to build a cloud of anxiety that anything we created or were given could at any time be taken away. They said, essentially, that today you may have something, but tomorrow you will again have nothing, because you are nothing.”

Towards the end of his op-ed, Slahi powerfully explains how those from repressive regimes know how “freedom of speech and expression are a rare commodity,” and adds that he left Mauritania for Germany in search of them. He ends by urging the US to abandon its absorption of methods used by dictatorships. As he states, “The censorship and human rights violations that are taking place in Guantánamo Bay have long been practiced in my part of the world. They do not work. They do nothing but demean us — all of us.”

I do hope you have time to read Mohamedou’s powerful op-ed, cross-posted below, and that you will share it if you find it as powerful as I do.

Why does the U.S. government have to confiscate prisoner artwork from Guantánamo Bay?

By Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the Washington Post, December 13, 2017

During the 14 years I spent cut off from the world in the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, I often found myself wondering whether people cared about the conditions under which I was being held. Since my release a little more than one year ago, I’ve been impressed by how many people do care — something that has been driven home to me again by the public reaction to reports of a change in policy toward artwork created by inmates in the prison.

For several years, the U.S. government had a screening process that permitted artwork created by prisoners to be shared with family members and others outside the prison, but in November it announced it is no longer allowing prisoner art to be publicly released. As a result, these works can no longer be seen by anyone outside of Guantánamo. What’s more, the government has been saying that it owns the works of art and can destroy them if it wishes. I have been heartened by the individuals and organizations that have protested this cruel policy, as well as by the critical coverage in the U.S. and international press.

But I can’t say that I was surprised by the news itself.

In October 2014, one of my guards came to my cell to warn me that I would soon be moved to another block. I asked what I could take with me to the new cell. He said I could take only my copy of the holy Koran, nothing else.

And so, in the blink of an eye, I was separated from the life that I had built around me in that cell over the previous 10 years. That life, for me, included writing. It included a journal in which I recorded my life and thoughts in the years since I completed the manuscript for my “Guantánamo Diary,” which I wrote and delivered in a series of letters to my attorney in 2005. It also included stories I had written about my childhood, fictional stories and even a manuscript for a book I was working on called “Portable Happiness,” about how to stay positive in the most hopeless situations.

I never saw these things again. They disappeared, along with movies, books and other items that were given to me as gifts, sent to me by my family members or brought to me by my lawyers to provide me comfort. That is what they call these things in Guantánamo: “comfort items.” The comfort of these things, for me, was that they really were mine: They were things I had created and things that my lawyers, family and even interrogators and guards had given to me personally. They were expressions of myself and expressions of what others saw in me. They were proof that I existed.

What I learned that day was that those “comfort items” were given to me and to other detainees only so that our jailers could have another kind of leverage over us: to build a cloud of anxiety that anything we created or were given could at any time be taken away. They said, essentially, that today you may have something, but tomorrow you will again have nothing, because you are nothing.

Today, the U.S. government is still holding these parts of me. It did not return my manuscripts and scribblings after my shackles were finally removed when the military plane landed in my home city of Nouakchott, Mauritania, and it has not returned them to this day. It can do this, it claims, because these things I wrote are “classified.” It can do this because — in the words of a Pentagon spokesman who was interviewed about the new policy preventing the paintings and sculptures of Guantánamo prisoners from ever being seen outside the prison — detainee art is the “property of the U.S. government.”

I was born in a part of the world where freedom of speech and expression are a rare commodity, and I know dictatorial methods when I see them. I left my home country in North Africa just after high school to move to Germany so that I could live a life where I could say what was on my mind without being afraid that I would be kidnapped, killed or put in prison. I am not alone in this. Ask any person who emigrated from the Middle East to Europe or the United States to escape suppression of freedom of speech and expression, and they will tell you: I am what I believe, and if I cannot express it clearly and unequivocally, I am no one.

The censorship and human rights violations that are taking place in Guantánamo Bay have long been practiced in my part of the world. They do not work. They do nothing but demean us — all of us. As a positive person, I have to hope that the current policy of confiscating and permanently suppressing the artistic creations of Guantánamo detainees will be reversed. I hope this for the 41 prisoners who are still in Guantánamo, many of them unjustly. But not just for them. The United States deserves better than this, too.

Note: See here for the Restored Edition of “Guantánamo Diary,” with the redacted passages restored by Mohamedou and his editor Larry Siems.

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.

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

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

 

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

Last week, following Human Rights Day (on December 10), and the third anniversary of the publication of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program (on December 9), the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, “appealed to the United States to end a pervasive policy of impunity for crimes of torture committed by US officials,” as a UN press release, issued on December 13, stated.

In a statement, Mr. Melzer, who was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in November 2016, after previously working for the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Swiss government, made reference to the Senate torture report, noting how it “publicly acknowledged the systematic use of torture in US custody,” and stating, “To this day, however, the perpetrators and policymakers responsible for years of gruesome abuse have not been brought to justice, and the victims have received no compensation or rehabilitation.”

He added, “By failing to prosecute the crime of torture in CIA custody, the US is in clear violation of the Convention against Torture and is sending a dangerous message of complacency and impunity to officials in the US and around the world.”

He explained, as the press release described it, that “he was particularly concerned about detainees who had faced prolonged detention in almost complete isolation,” and “highlighted the case of Ammar al-Baluchi [aka Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali], named 153 times in the Senate report, who is said to have suffered relentless torture for three-and-a-half years in CIA ‘black sites’ before being moved to Guantánamo Bay, where his torture and ill-treatment are reported to continue.”

Explaining his position, Mr. Melzer stated, “Mr. al-Baluchi has been held in isolation at a severely restricted-access facility at Guantánamo Bay for more than a decade. In addition to the long-term effects of past torture, noise and vibrations are reportedly still being used against him, resulting in constant sleep deprivation and related physical and mental disorders, for which he allegedly does not receive adequate medical attention.”

He also “expressed grave concern that statements extracted under torture appeared to be admissible under the 2009 Military Commissions Act and could therefore be used against Mr. al-Baluchi,” and “strongly reminded the US authorities that the ban on torture and ill-treatment was absolute and allowed for no exceptions whatsoever,” as the UN described it.

As Mr. Melzer explained, “This is one of the most fundamental norms of international law, and its violation is listed among the most serious international crimes, including crimes against humanity and war crimes.” Highlighting Article 2.2 of the Convention Against Torture, which states, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” Mr. Melzer added, “No circumstances, however exceptional and well argued, may be invoked to justify torture. From Nuremberg to the establishment of the UN War Crimes Tribunals, the United States has contributed decisively to the fight against impunity worldwide. I therefore now urge the US to live up to its legacy, to end its policy of impunity and to bring its own perpetrators to justice.”

He also said that, “in practice, abuse stopped only when effective sanctions for violations were imposed,” as the UN press release explained. As he put it, “A society bruised by torture and abuse can heal only when the truth about secret policies and practices is fully disclosed to the public and when full reparation and rehabilitation is granted to victims.”

Mr. Melzer also “renewed a long-standing request to conduct an official visit to the Guantánamo Bay detention centre and to interview inmates,” as the press release put it — and indeed, since the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the establishment of Guantánamo in January 2002, each of the rapporteurs — Theo van Boven (2001-04), Manfred Nowak (2004-10) and Juan Méndez (2010-16) — has had their requests to visit the prison and to talk to prisoners unsupervised turned down or ignored by the US.

As Mr. Melzer said, “I very much regret that, despite repeated requests, my predecessors and I have consistently been refused access to Guantánamo and other high security facilities in accordance with the standard terms of reference of my UN mandate.”

As with so much about Guantánamo, persistent lawlessness on the part of the US has, in general, led not to an escalation of outrage, but to the government’s crimes being ignored. The illusion is that torture stopped under the Bush administration, and yet claims that noise and vibrations are still being used against “high-value detainees” in the secretive Camp 7 have continued to be made over the years. In addition, it is outrageous that, for nearly 16 years, the US has prevented a visit to the prison by the Special Rapporteur for Torture, and yet this is treated by the US as though the Rapporteur is nothing more than an irritant.

After the release of Mr. Melzer’s statement, Newsweek published an article featuring follow-up comments by the Rapporteur, who stated, in an email, that if the reports he received are true, “the conditions of detention some of the high security inmates are subjected to can only be described as cruel, inhuman and degrading. The only way to determine whether these reports are accurate is for the US to finally allow independent verification by internationally recognised experts.”

He added, “What matters most, and what cannot be disputed, is that US officials have resorted to systematic torture in the past and that the US has consistently refused to prosecute the responsible perpetrators and policy makers. This misguided policy of deliberate impunity for state-sponsored crimes of utmost gravity is not only a danger to US national security, but violates the most basic principles governing any civilized nation, namely humanity, justice and the rule of law.”

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we wonder, sadly, whether the administration of Donald Trump will even deign to respond to the Special Rapporteur’s criticisms, such is the president’s disdain for the international norms regarding the treatment of prisoners, and his enthusiasm for the continued existence of Guantánamo.

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

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 Thursday, as I travelled across London to show solidarity with the victims of a recent injustice in the UK — the Grenfell Tower fire in June, in which 71 people died needlessly because safety standards had been so gravely eroded by those responsible for residents’ safety — the victim of another injustice, not adequately dealt with for 16 years, had an article published in the Guardian.

That victim of injustice is Khalid Qassim (aka Qasim), a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, held for almost 16 years without charge or trial. That would be unacceptable if he were a prisoner of war, as it is longer than the absurdly long Vietnam War, and it is insulting to claim that any war can last forever. However, Qassim and all the men held at Guantánamo since January 2002 have never been held as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, who can be held unmolested until the end of hostilities.

Instead, they are, essentially, the same prisoners without any rights whatsoever that the Bush administration first defined them as back in January 2002. Just ten of the 41 men still held are facing or have faced trials (in the military commission trial system that, in any case, is not fit for purpose), while the rest are still largely invisible, never tried, never charged, and unable to be freed except at the whim of the president.

We all remember, I’m sure, that President Obama promised to close Guantánamo when he took office in January 2009, but left office eight years later having released just under 200 men, but having failed to close the prison. Donald Trump, of course, has made it clear that he has no desire to release anyone, and so the men still held languish with no prospect of release, because, for them to be released, the president has to want to do so. This even applies to the five men out of the 41 who were approved for release by high-level governmental review processes under Obama.

Shorn of hope, some of the remaining prisoners have embarked on hunger strikes, as the only viable way they have of demanding that they either be charged or released. Previously, when they started to seriously lose weight, they were force-fed, a barbaric process, and one opposed by medical professionals, who insist that mentally competent prisoners must be allowed to die, if they wish. However, in those scenarios the prisoners have been through a trial and conviction, whereas at Guantánamo it would, I suggest, be unacceptable to allow men to die who have never been charged or tried.

Since September, however, according to hunger striking prisoners, the behavior of the medical authorities at Guantánamo has changed, and they are no longer being force-fed. Instead, they have explained to their lawyers, their health is being neglected, with no care shown as to whether doing so will lead to serious organ damage.

Back in October, the international human right organisation Reprieve submitted an emergency motion calling for an independent medical expert to be allowed to visit Guantánamo to assess the health of their client, Ahmed Rabbani. The government dragged its heels responding, as I explained in an article for Al-Jazeera, and then denied all Rabbani’s claims.

As this case drags on, with Reprieve having again refuted the government’s claims, another client of Reprieve’s, Khalid Qassim, has written about his experiences — and that is the article published in the Guardian last Thursday, and cross-posted below.

It’s of great interest not only because it provides a window into what is still happening at Guantánamo, but also because of Qassim’s eloquence. He, like Ahmed Rabbani, is not just known because of his hunger strike, but also because he is one of the artists featured in an exhibition of prisoners’ artwork in New York that recently prompted the Pentagon to reveal the extent to which it seeks to control the prisoners’ very thoughts, when threats were made to destroy prisoners’ artwork to prevent it from ever being publicly displayed again. Qassim’s artwork — actually, completely inoffensive and unthreatening — is here, and I hope it helps to provide another insight into who he is.

What readers should also know is that the US government has no credible case against him based on his alleged conduct before he got to Guantánamo, when, at most, he was a foot soldier supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan; instead, his nearly 16 years of harsh imprisonment without due process is based almost entirely on his behavior in US custody, where he has resisted what he sees as the injustice of his imprisonment, through hunger strikes and sometime through having a bad attitude.

After nearly 16 years, however, surely this is an inadequate reason to continue holding him. As he says in his article, “It’s not even as though we’ve just been in Gitmo for a year or two years. It’s been nearly 16 years, no charges and no trial. It doesn’t make sense. Even in the times of the Inquisition, the dark ages, they had courts.”

I hope you find Khalid Qassim’s article informative, and will share it if you do.

We Guantánamo Bay detainees have the right to protest our condition

By Khalid Qassim, the Guardian, December 14, 2017

I have been on hunger strike since October. The Trump administration needs to understand that it is unethical to try to coerce me off it.

I’ve been held at Guantánamo Bay without charge or trial since 2002. Like others here, I’m on hunger strike in protest at my detention without charge. The Trump administration is trying to force us to drop our protest.

I’m currently in solitary confinement – I’ve been stuck here since 19 October. A “single cell operation”, that’s what they call it. In fact, it’s isolation. It’s terrible.

I’ve twice fallen unconscious in here – a “code yellow”. I’ve also had one “code green”. That’s when you nearly lose consciousness, but you can still hear people.

I think maybe I will spend two months in solitary. They don’t tell you how many days you’ll be here.

I feel pain and weakness and dizziness.

The government is claiming that it keeps a close watch on the health of us hunger strikers, but this is nonsense. In the past, the authorities here would weigh the hunger strikers all the time, to ensure we didn’t die on their watch. Now, they are refusing even to do basic medical checks. They last did a blood test on me about seven months ago.

On 28 October, I woke up and I couldn’t see – everything was blurry. My left eye was hurting a lot. I freaked out. I called out, begging for help. I was terrified that my organs were failing.

Later, I passed out and they called a “code yellow”. A lot of people came: the guards, nurses, and one interpreter. When the interpreter saw the condition I was in, he seemed about to cry.

I begged them to do some blood tests. They didn’t do anything. I went to a senior medical officer, and asked again. He said no. “You’re playing a game,” he told me.

I took a deep breath, and replied: “OK. It doesn’t matter what you think of me. I’m asking you to take my blood, and to examine it. I’m not asking you to believe me. Just please, take my blood test.”

They didn’t do it.

That day, I ate to prevent any permanent damage. I ate about 200 calories.

After almost 16 years here, you think you’ve been through everything. But now it’s as though they’re sending us back to the old standard operating procedure – from the bad old days, when we first arrived here. They’ve recently told me: “If you lose some of your organs, it is your choice.” We are like lab rats. I can see and feel the results of this experiment on myself.

My lawyers at Reprieve are going through the courts in the US, trying to get us an independent medical examination. When I read the declarations in that case, made by medical experts, it was amazing. They are saying just what we are saying, and what organisations such as Physicians for Human Rights have said: that you cannot coerce someone off his hunger strike, nor deny him medical attention. That it is unethical to force-feed a hunger striker. These things can be hard to understand if you’re not in detention in places such as these.

Despite everything, the seeds of hope and faith are still there. I planted these the day I came to Gitmo, before I entered the camp and the blocks. I was ear-muffed and couldn’t see anything, then shackled and handcuffed to my belly; chained to the ground, and insulted and beaten with dogs all around. People cursing my mother and cursing me. When I came to Gitmo that day, I planted that faith and that hope. Now it’s like a rose – it still lives to this moment, and never dies.

It’s not even as though we’ve just been in Gitmo for a year or two years. It’s been nearly 16 years, no charges and no trial. It doesn’t make sense. Even in the times of the Inquisition, the dark ages, they had courts.

I always ask the people in charge of the camp: why? If something would happen like this in another country, people would rightly ask, “Why do you put them there for 16 years without a trial?” I will keep asking until they charge or release me.

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.

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

Before June 14 this year, anyone reflecting on the skyline of London would think about the Shard, the Gherkin, One Canada Square, the ostentatious towers of the face of modern capitalism; on the morning of June 14, however, a new vision of a tower was seared into the nation’s memory — the charred, still-smoking remains of Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington, in west London, consumed in an overnight inferno with the loss of 71 lives.

The Grenfell Tower fire was entirely preventable. Designed so that each flat would be able to withstand fire until the emergency services arrived, its structural integrity was destroyed when it was given new cladding — through holes made in the body of the tower, through the use of flammable cladding to save money, and through the gaps behind the cladding that facilitated the extraordinarily swift spread of the fire. At every level, it seems clear — central government, local government, the devolved management responsible for Kensington & Chelsea’s social housing, and the various contractors involved in maintenance and refurbishment — safety standards were eroded or done away with completely,

When I wrote about the fire just two days later, I was deeply shocked to discover that the disaster had been foretold by residents in the Grenfell Action Group, who had stated in a post in November 2016, “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 & 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.”

I have followed the Grenfell story ever since, attending ‘The Truth About Grenfell Tower’, a meeting called by Architects for Social Housing (ASH) the week after, where I met filmmaker Nikita Woolfe, who filmed the meeting (which has had over 15,000 views on YouTube), and who, afterwards, got me involved as the narrator of her documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, which looks at the demolition of council estates, and the resistance of residents, and which also looks at Grenfell.

I also wrote a song over the summer, for my band The Four Fathers, and at the end of October a German TV crew filmed us playing it live. Niki then edited it, and we released it yesterday, to mark six months since the Grenfell fire. That anniversary was on Thursday, but I wasn’t able to post it then, because I travelled across London to Grenfell to take part in a Silent Walk, a moving memorial event that takes place on the 14th of every month. A photo I took is here.

Please see below for the video of ‘Grenfell’ on YouTube — and please note that it’s also available on Facebook here. If you like it, please share it wide and far!

Grenfell was in the news on Thursday, because there was a memorial service in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and because members of the Royal Family turned up, but although that indicates the extent to which the British establishment has been stung by the loss of life, the disaster, and the lessons to be learned from it, may well slip off the radar again, and those of us who care about the residents who lost their lives, and about the survivors, and who see the fire as the most horrendous example of what happens when those responsible for social housing “only count the profit not the human cost”, as I describe it in the song, will need to be vigilant to make sure that it is not sidelined by the many people in positions of power an influence who share the responsibility for what happened on June 14.

Six months after the disaster, it is shocking to realise that 80% of those who lost their homes have not been permanently rehoused, and, although the official public inquiry began this week, with Michael Mansfield QC calling it “a national atrocity”, a petition to Parliament, on behalf of “bereaved families and survivors”, which currently has over 20,000 signatures, call on Theresa May “to exercise her powers under the Inquiries Act 2005 to appoint additional panel member s with decision making power to sit alongside [the] Chair in [the] Grenfell Tower Inquiry, to ensure those affected have confidence in [and] are willing to fully participate in the Inquiry.”

The suspicions were endorsed by a Guardian editorial, which claimed that the government “appears to want a narrow investigation of the technical failings that led to the catastrophic fire in west London”, which “will only add to the families’ sense of neglect.” The editorial came a day after a report that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is launching its own Grenfell fire inquiry, while the Metropolitan Police admitted that its own investigation “is unlikely to be completed until 2019 at the earliest and could take years.”

A list of all those who died . Let them never be forgotten.

Note: The Four Fathers hope to record ‘Grenfell’ in a studio in the new year. For now, however, please check out our new album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?‘ on Bandcamp, to buy on CD or as a download — or you can just listen to it.

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.

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

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

 

Congratulations to MPs, who, yesterday evening (December 13), voted by 309 votes to 305 to give themselves a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal that Theresa May and her small clique of dangerous and deluded Brexit fantasists were planning to pass without including MPs at all.

In the end, the Labour leadership persuaded all but two of its MPs (Frank Field and Kate Hoey) to vote for the amendment, in a move that was obviously difficult for those from constituencies that voted Leave. The amendment was tabled by former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, and its supporters in the Labour Party, and all the smaller parties except the DUP, were joined by eleven Tory rebels — as well as Dominic Grieve, Heidi Allen, Ken Clarke, Jonathan Djanogly, Stephen Hammond, Sir Oliver Heald, Nicky Morgan, Robert Neill, Antointette Sandbach, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston. Hammond, a vice chairman of the party, was almost immediately sacked, and the Daily Mail proceeded to damn the rebels on its front page, causing Keir Starmer to comment, in a tweet, “When judges uphold the law, they are branded enemies of the people. When MPs uphold democracy, they are branded traitors. Never has it been more important to reassert our values.”

In a day of passionate debating in Parliament, which often saw the Tory right attacking their colleagues, as tends to be the way with Brexiteers, who are prone to threats and hysteria, Dominic Grieve gave a passionate half-hour speech regarding his amendment. He “warned that the bill as it stood would unleash ‘a form of constitutional chaos’”, as the Guardian described it. He “said he had sought to engage with ministers to find a compromise, but without success: ‘The blunt reality is, and I’m sorry to have to say this to the house, I’ve been left in the lurch, as a backbench member trying to improve this legislation.'” Labour’s Yvette Cooper said, “This is an important moment. The House of Commons has tonight voted against the government’s attempt to concentrate power and against letting a small group of ministers take crucial decisions on the details of Brexit without Parliament having a meaningful vote.”

Ever since a slim majority of the British people voted to leave the EU on June 23, 2016, in a referendum that should never have been called, and that was not legally binding, I have waited for a coherent demonstration of resistance from MPs, as a crucial step towards what I, and millions of other people believe, implacably, to be a necessity for the future survival of the UK in any meaningful way that bears a relationship to who were are and who we want to be.

A hard Brexit, of the type that the hapless Theresa May leans towards, as she placates the far right of her party, will be a disaster — savagely damaging our economy, and, it has emerged since the referendum, feeding into the enthusiasm of these unsavoury MPs for the UK to become a tax haven — or, I should say, even more of a tax haven than it already is — but one with a decimated job market, no protections for workers, citizens or the environment, and, fundamentally, no state provision of services beyond the barest minimum.

I have, for about six months, been reasonably content to reflect that if the Tories go ahead with this plan, it will destroy them, because their contempt for the majority of the population of the UK fails to recognise that around a third of the public have to actively vote for them if they are to retain power, and yet a hard and EU-hating Brexit of the kind the isolationists seek will be such a crushing blow to the economy that they will not get away with it.

Along the way, I have also assured myself that Labour, grappling with its problematical Leave contingent of voters, has contented itself with sitting on the fence, waiting for the Tories to destroy themselves, and, I think, with the talented Keir Starmer driving the Brexit resistance and Jeremy Corbyn, a natural Eurosceptic, like so much of the left, coming round to the correct view of Brexit as an unacceptable Kamikaze mission.

However, it is no good reflecting that Brexit will destroy the Tories if it also dooms the economy, and so the only options for our national suicide to be stopped have also involved one of two options: either a second referendum, or such a meaningful role for Parliament that MPs can not only block a hard Brexit, but can also end up making a compelling case for why a soft Brexit is not actually much of a Brexit at all, and perhaps we should reconsider the rashness and folly of the referendum outcome, stay with the EU for all its flaws and seek to reform it from within. Certainly, anyone paying close attention to the issues cannot fail to have realized that we need the single market, we need the customs union, we need immigration (as numerous parts of the economy and infrastructure of the country, including the NHS, are already beginning to collapse with the departure of EU citizens), we ought to be ashamed of how EU citizens here, and UK citizens in the EU, are now treated as second-class citizens, and, in any case, we cannot leave because a hard border in Ireland may well revive civil war, a predicament that anyone Irish or Northern Irish knew from the beginning but that the Brexiteers, as with so much about Brexit, aggressively ignored.

From June 2016 to July this year, I covered Brexit closely, looking at the disgraceful way in which the Brexiteers sought to exclude Parliament, and the resistance led by a brave citizen, Gina Miller, who succeeded in getting the courts to rule against the government. I then watched in shock as MPs gave away the powers the courts recognised that they had, and by the summer, after Theresa May’s disastrous election, but when she was still clinging on to power, and the Brexiteers in government were enthusiastically planning to give themselves dictatorial-type powers to import 43 years of EU law into UK law, and then decide, without Parliament, what they wanted to keep, I retreated from Brexit entirely, for the sake go my mental health, publishing a final message for Jeremy Corbyn, You Represent Hope Not Just Because You Oppose Austerity, But Because You Must Save Us From Brexit, and recommending that anyone who cared to keep track of the relentless idiocy of the government follow Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk, the author of the essential book, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?

Now, however, I’m glad to break my silence. As Polly Toynbee explained in her latest Guardian column, “At the referendum the Brexiteers said sovereignty was sacred; but now it turns out that ‘taking back control’ means rule by their diktat, without the deliberation of our sovereign parliament.”

Parliament has, it seems, finally taken a decisive move to consign a hard Brexit to the dustbin of history; now what we need is for the absolute folly of any sort of Brexit to be recognised and acted upon, without any more mumbling cover from MPs of claiming to respect “the will of the people.” The people were duped, the people were lied to, and, in any case, no sane or rational country would allow a decision that will change history for a generation to be made on a simple majority. Two-thirds or 70% majorities are traditionally required for major constitutional decisions, and that should have happened last June.

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.

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

Last Friday a new and timely documentary film that I narrated, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, had its world premiere at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London SE11, showing to a full house of over 150 people, with pre-screening performances from beatboxer Bellatrix and spoke word artist Potent Whisper. The film was directed by Nikita Woolfe, and is the result of three years’ work. As she says, “Three years ago I was looking at all the new developments in London and was surprised to see how much of the construction happened on old council estate land. I started wondering why the councils wanted to sell off their valuable assets and whether there were alternatives. That’s how ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ began. Three years later and ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ is not only answering my questions but it has also become a film about the fighting spirit that I encountered on the way.”

The next screening is at Deptford Cinema on Monday December 18, at 7.30pm, followed by a Q&A with me and with representatives of estates and community spaces threatened with destruction in the borough of Lewisham — Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald Road in Deptford, and Achilles Street in New Cross — under the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ umbrella term that I came up with in October, and which has so far spawned a benefit gig and a Facebook page.

Niki and I are planning to take the film on the road next year — primarily around estates threatened with destruction in London, but also beyond, if we can secure funding for our time and our travel. We also hope it will be shown in cinemas, and if you can help at all with any of these proposals, do get in touch. You can email me here, or you can email Niki here or call her on 07413 138909. We’re currently setting up a fundraising page, so if you want to help with that, do let Niki know.

As Niki and I explain on the film’s Facebook page, “‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ tells the story of the destruction of council estates, the social cleansing of those who live there — and the inspiring resistance of tenants, leaseholders and other committed to the ongoing existence and availability of social housing. The film focuses in particular on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, where the destruction is already underway, but is being challenged, and Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth, both threatened with destruction. In all three cases, residents are fighting back, and giving hope to others whose homes are threatened — both in London and across the UK.”

An inspiring example of successful resistance is Macintosh Court, in Streatham, where residents of a small sheltered housing estate successfully fought back against the proposed destruction of their homes by Lambeth Council, with the help of the architect Kate Macintosh, who rallied support from other architects and heritage bodies.

A main purpose of the film is to give people hope, and that spirit of resistance in the face of adversity was clearly present at the premiere, which was a fundraiser for the leaseholders of the Aylesbury Estate, who won an astounding victory last September, when communities secretary Sajid Javid accepted the findings of a report that concluded that the derisory amounts offered to leaseholders breached their human rights. Unfortunately, the leaseholders now face another uphill struggle at a second Compulsory Purchase Order hearing that is taking place in January over a period of 13 days.

One of the panellists in the Q&A session after the screening, which I moderated, was Jerry Flynn of the 35% Campaign, which, along with Southwark Notes, has spent years conducting extensive research and fighting back against the disgraceful social cleansing perpetrated by Southwark Council, a Labour council at the forefront of the destruction of estates to profit private developers rather than refurbishing existing estates and paying for that through infilling with new properties for sale. Refurbishment and infilling is the position taken by the pressure group Architects for Social Housing (ASH), and it is thoroughly endorsed in the film.

Incidentally, ASH are also the main body responsible for revealing that most of the planned destruction comes from Labour councils — something that was highlighted during the Q&A, and contrasted with the position taken by Jeremy Corbyn, who stated at the Labour Party conference that there should be no estate demolitions without residents’ ballots. History, sadly, shows that residents’ opinions are ignored when councils find them inconvenient (as happened on the Aylesbury Estate), and Corbyn’s statement is clearly not backed up with any mechanism for its own enforcement, but it also clearly has power as a demand, is being used as such across London (see this report on a recent Cressingham Gardens protest), and should continue to have a prominent role in 2018.

Jerry Flynn’s involvement in campaigning on housing issues began with resistance to the destruction of the Heygate Estate at the Elephant and Castle, a campaign that ultimately failed, despite campaigners’ valiant efforts, and that led to the destruction of over 1,000 council homes, and their replacement with a new private development, Elephant Park, which contains almost no socially rented homes. Nevertheless, the lessons from that campaign have fed into the campaign to save the nearby Aylesbury Estate, one of the largest estates in Europe, and as Jerry pointed out, the assistance of lawyers is extremely helpful, although the process is not cheap. If you can help the leaseholders in their imminent battle, please donate here.

Other speakers were Tania Charman, director of the Heart of Hastings Community Land Trust, who brought an  inspiring message of alternative arrangements for ordinary people to take charge of their homes, barrister Jamie Burton, who has experience of housing issues, and Sian Berry, Green Party London Assembly member, who delivered a critical analysis of Sadiq Khan’s plans for London’s housing crisis, whilst also pointing out that he is clearly cowed by criticism, as he has failed to produce a document outlining his proposals for estate regenerations, despite promising to do so.

Hovering over the evening was the triumph of campaigners in Haringey, who seem to be close to seeing off the most outrageous proposals so far put forward by a council (and again, like Southwark, a Labour council); namely, the proposal to transfer all of the borough’s social housing into the control of a £2bn development vehicle, the Haringey Development Vehicle, half-owned by the council and half-owned by Lendlease, the aggressive Australian-based international property developer behind the destruction of the Heygate Estate — a catastrophically one-sided deal that would have given Lendlease (the partner in the deal with all the money) the power to demolish council estates and replace them with new, private developments on an unprecedented scale.

In Haringey, campaigners have been working assiduously to de-select Labour councillors who support the HDV, and to replace them with new candidates who oppose it, and their efforts over the last month of selections have been enormously successful. As the Stop HDV website states, “At the start of this process there were 29 Labour Councillors for the HDV and 21 against — that has shifted dramatically to only 12 for and 45 against. As the Liberal Democrats also oppose the HDV, the incoming Council after May 2018 will almost certainly no longer support the Joint Venture with Lendlease. Now we have to be prepared to stop the current Cabinet from signing the scheme before May. If they did it would be an outrage as they clearly have no mandate to do so.”

Thanks to everyone who came to the launch, everyone who has helped with the film, and everyone with the tenacity for the fight ahead. If I don’t see you in Deptford on Monday, I hope to see you in 2018.

Note: The Cinema Museum also has its own ongoing struggle, which I invite you to address. The most amazing collection of UK cinema memorabilia, housed in the former workhouse that was once home to Charlie Chaplin, it is to be sold by the NHS, which owns it, and which is ignoring a bid by the museum itself, favouring a sale on the open market. A petition is here, and I urge you to sign it — and to visit the museum if you haven’t already. It’s magical.

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

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 time of year has always been a significant time for anyone concerned with human rights to reflect on what has or hasn’t been achieved in the last twelve months, and to make plans for the new year.

A crucial, and long established date is December 10, which the United Nations designated as Human Rights Day in 1950, on the second anniversary of the ratification by the UN of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which, in a Facebook post on Human Rights Day, I described as “probably the most wonderful aspirational document in human history, born out of the soul-churning horrors of the Second World War.”

The UN, on its Human Rights Day page, says of the UDHR that it “sets out universal values and a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. It establishes the equal dignity and worth of every person. Thanks to the Declaration, and States’ commitments to its principles, the dignity of millions has been uplifted and the foundation for a more just world has been laid. While its promise is yet to be fully realized, the very fact that it has stood the test of time is testament to the enduring universality of its perennial values of equality, justice and human dignity.”

Amongst the UDHR’s 30 articles are prohibitions on the use of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and arbitrary arrest, as well as the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, all of which have long been of great significance to those like myself who have been writing about Guantánamo and working to get the prison closed.

I have regularly taken part in events on Human Rights Day. In 2008, for example, I attended an Amnesty International event in Guildford marking the 60th anniversary of the UDHR, with Bruce Kent and other speakers, and in 2011 I spoke at a protest opposite Downing Street that was organized by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, at which Jeremy Corbyn was also a speaker, and last year my band The Four Fathers played a Human Rights Day gig in Deptford.

However, the most significant Human Rights Day event I took part in was in 2014, when Joanne MacInnes and I instigated the creation of a film for the We Stand With Shaker campaign that we had just founded, seeking to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, featuring David Morrissey, Juliet Stevenson and students from Regent’s University (where the film was made) reading from the ‘Declaration of No Human Rights‘, Shaker’s analysis of how the US has systematically destroyed the UDHR at Guantanamo. In another event, Mark Rylance and Vanessa Redgrave read out excerpts from Shaker’s UDNHR outside Parliament.

The Human Rights Day film is below:

Another Human Rights Day event of significance occurred on December 10, 1984, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the text of the UN Convention Against Torture, which was eventually ratified in 1987.

That hugely significant convention — a major step forward for human rights, 36 long years after the ratification of the UDHR — was embraced by the US, but, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was swiftly jettisoned, as the Bush administration officially adopted a brutal and counter-productive torture program, involving CIA “black sites” in countries around the world, proxy torture prisons in other countries, a military-backed torture program at Guantánamo, and even the torture of US citizens in military brigs on the US mainland.

I’m proud that I was one of those who worked to expose the secret detention and torture program, which involved at least 119 prisoners in the CIA’s own program, in a report for the United Nations in 2009-10 (see here, here and here), and I also have admiration for the US system of checks and balances that — driven by Sen. Dianne Feinstein — led to the Senate Intelligence Committee spending six years investigating the CIA’s program of rendition and torture, and producing an extraordinary report on December 9, 2014 — the day before Human Rights Day — that revealed the brutality of the program, and also how the CIA lied about its efficacy, and also lied about exceeding the parameters set by cynical facilitators like John Yoo, who drafted the “torture memos” of 2002 that sought to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA.

The publication of the report was hugely significant — even though it was only the 528-page executive summary that was released, and not the full 6,700 page-report, and even though it remained quite heavily redacted — as I explained in an article for Al-Jazeera at the time, Punishment, not apology after CIA torture report.

Since then, however, all calls for the full report to be issued have been rebuffed, and the last word on the report, before President Obama left office, was that he “agreed to preserve” the report  under the Presidential Records Act, but only by ensuring that it “remains out of public view for at least 12 years and probably longer.” As the Guardian explained, Obama’s decision was revealed in a letter from White House counsel W. Neil Eggleston, and prevented “Republican Richard Burr, the Senate intelligence committee chairman who has been highly critical of the investigation, from destroying existing classified copies” of the report.

Daniel Jones, the former committee staffer who led the torture inquiry, and whose story was reported in a compelling series of articles by Spencer Ackerman (see here, here and here), “criticized the preservation as inadequate,” as the Guardian explained. Jones said, “The bar for positive White House action on this is incredibly low. Preserving the full 6,700-page report under the Presidential Records Act only ensures the report will not be destroyed. It does little else.”

The Guardian added that the Senate torture report would be “exempt from the Freedom of Information Act for a full 12 years. But expiration of the provision afterward does not mean that disclosure will necessarily follow.” Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said, “CIA or other agencies may contend that all or some of the classified information in the report is still classified” after 12 years, when a declassification review can proceed, “but the review may conclude that the information in it should remain classified.”

One year on, we can, perhaps, all feel relieved that Obama at least preserved the report, as Donald Trump might well have destroyed all copies of it, but it is still important that the full report should be released — and, in addition, that the full details of the proxy torture program in other countries (Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria) are revealed, and, of course, that Guantánamo — where some of the men held have spent nearly 16 years as victims of arbitrary detention — is closed once and for all.

In conclusion, if anyone anywhere in the US government has access to a copy of the full torture report, I can only urge them to get it out to the public. My email address is here.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and 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.

The Guantánamo Art Scandal That Refuses to Go Away

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.

Two weeks ago, in my most recent article, for Close Guantánamo, I covered the latest scandal to involve the prison — the US military’s decision, prompted by an art exhibition of prisoners’ work being shown in New York, to threaten to destroy their art, and to insist that it does not belong to the men who made it, but, instead, belongs permanently to the US military.

As I mentioned in the article, the most troubling aspect of the authorities’ position was articulated by Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch, who stated in a powerful tweet that the development was “no surprise” because the “Pentagon has long claimed it owns detainees’ own memories of torture.” When prisoners are not even allowed to own their own thoughts by the US government, it is no surprise that the government also claims that it also owns their artwork.

Nevertheless, since the article was published, criticism of the US authorities’ position has not diminished. At the weekend, the New York Times published an editorial, “Art, Freed From Guantánamo,” which began by stating, powerfully, “The American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — where men suspected of terrorism are for the most part being held indefinitely without trial — has long been a stain on this country’s human rights record. Now the military has stumbled needlessly into a controversy over, of all things, art.”

As the editors proceeded to note, “There has been no claim of a security breach or risk to Americans. The military, it would seem, is simply unsettled by the attention that the John Jay exhibition has drawn from news organizations.”

In a letter to the Times, Mickey Davis, a professor of intellectual property law at Cleveland State University, put the government in its place, stating:

The United States military intends to burn and destroy all the art created by Guantánamo prisoners, claiming that the government owns it. The government can certainly destroy it. But it doesn’t own it at all.

The government cannot destroy the copyright that each prisoner owns in his works. Under United States copyright law, that right belongs to each prisoner-artist for the next 70-plus years.

That copyright cannot be divested by military forces. This may amount to nothing, commercially speaking, especially if the prisoners cannot photograph the works to acquire a permanent record.

But it is nice to know that as a moral and a legal matter, not a practical one, the Guantánamo prisoners have a right that their captors cannot touch.

In a further development, Erin Thompson, one of three curators (with Charlie Shields and Paige Laino) of the exhibition, “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo,” at John Jay College, where she is an assistant professor of art crime, wrote a detailed analysis of what the prisoners’ work means, why it is so important, and how she became involved with it, for Tom Dispatch, in an article published on December 3, which we’re cross-posting below, as she is so eloquent on the topic — and the US government, in contrast, is unable to articulate its own position clearly, because it has no excuse for its heavy-handed approach.

Thompson explained her progress in understanding Guantánamo and the prisoners, moving from her initial lack of comprehension that the men “wanted people to see their art,” and “through it know that they are actual human beings,” which, understandably, she thought was rather obvious, to an eventual revelation, through talking to released prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, who wrote an extraordinarily powerful piece about the prisoners’ relationship to the sea, which I posted here, that “Guantánamo is a system designed to paint the men it holds as monsters, animals, sub-humans who don’t deserve basic rights like fair trials,” and “[t]hat was the reason those prisoners were speaking, but not speaking, in their art.” As she added, “Why would they say anything that risked a further fall from whatever precarious hold on humanity they still had?”

Thompson has also launched a petition, “Stop the Destruction of Art at Guantánamo,” directed to the US government, and you can also sign this petition by Reprieve, calling for Donald Trump to close Guantánamo, and to allow independent medical experts to visit and assess the health of the current hunger strikers, a story I wrote about here.

The Art of Keeping Guantánamo Open: What the Paintings by Its Prisoners Tell Us About Our Humanity and Theirs

By Erin L. Thompson, Tom Dispatch, December 3, 2017

We spent the day at a beach in Brooklyn. Skyscrapers floated in the distance and my toddler kept handing me cigarette filters she had dug out of the sand. When we got home, I checked my email. I had been sent a picture of a very different beach: deserted, framed by distant headlands with unsullied sands and clear waters. As it happened, I was looking not at a photograph, but at a painting by a man imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

Of the roughly 780 people once imprisoned there, he is one of 41 prisoners who remain, living yards away from the Caribbean Sea. Captives from the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror began to arrive at that offshore prison in January 2002. Since Guantánamo is located on a military base in Cuba and the detainees were labeled “alien enemy combatants,” they were conveniently to be without rights under either United States or international law and so open to years of whatever their jailers wanted to do to them (including torture). President Barack Obama released 197 of them in his years in office, but was unable to fulfill the promise he made on his first day: to close Guantánamo.

The man whose painting I saw has been held for nearly 15 years without trial, without even having charges filed against him. The email came from his lawyer who had volunteered to defend a number of Guantánamo detainees. Some had been released after she helped them convince a military tribunal that they were no longer “threats” to the United States. The others remain in indefinite detention. Many of her clients pass their time by making art and, of all the unexpected things to come into my life, she was now looking for a curator who wanted to exhibit some of their paintings.

Collecting the Art of Guantánamo

I’m a professor at John Jay College in New York City. It has a small art gallery and so one day in August 2016 I found myself in that lawyer’s midtown Manhattan office preparing, however dubiously, to view the art of her clients. She was pushing aside speakerphones and notepads and laying out the artwork on a long table in a conference room whose windows overlooked the picturesque East River. As I waited, I watched from high up as the water cut a swath of silence through the city. When I finally turned my attention to the art, I was startled to see some eerily similar views. Painting after painting of water. Water trickling through the reeds at the edge of a pond. Water churning into foam as it ran over rocks in rivers. Calmly flowing water that reflected the buildings along a canal.

But above all, there was the sea. Everywhere, the sea. In those paintings in that conference room and in other work sent to me as word spread among detainees and their lawyers that I was willing to plan an exhibit, I found hundreds of depictions of the sea in all its moods. In some paintings, storms thrashed apart the last planks of sinking ships. In others, boats were moored safely at docks or scudded across vast expanses of water without a hint of shore in sight. Clouds bunched in blue midday skies or burned orange in mid-ocean sunsets. One detainee had even made elaborate models of sailing ships out of cardboard, old T-shirts, bottle caps, and other scraps of trash.

Puzzled, I asked the lawyer, “Why all the water?” She shrugged. Maybe the art instructor at the prison, she suggested, was giving the detainees lots of pictures of the sea. The detainees, it turned out, could actually take art classes as long as they remained “compliant.” But when there was a crackdown, as there had, for instance, been during a mass hunger strike in 2013, the guards promptly confiscated their art — and that was the reason the lawyer’s clients had asked her to take it. They wanted to keep their work (and whatever it meant to them) safe from the guards.

As it turned out, the art doesn’t leave Guantánamo that much more easily than the prisoners themselves. Military authorities scrutinized every piece for hidden messages and then stamped the back of each work, “Approved by US Forces.” Those stamps generally bled through, floating up into the surface of the image on the other side. The lawyer had even nicknamed one of the model ships the U.S.S. Approved because the censors had stamped those words across its sails.

So I found myself beginning to plan an exhibition of a sort I had never in my wildest dreams imagined I would curate. And I began to worry. A curator makes so many choices, judgments, interpretations of art. But how could I make them with any kind of accuracy when I was a woman, a non-Muslim, and a citizen of the very nation that had detained these men for so many years without charges or trial? Wasn’t I, in other words, the ultimate Other?

Greek to Me

By training, I’m a classical art historian. I expand fragments. If I show my students a broken ancient Greek vase, I use my words to mend it. I pour in more words to fill it with the memory of the wine it once carried, yet more to conjure up the men who once drank from it, and still more to offer my students our best guesses at what they might have been talking about as they drank.

This mode of dealing with art was known to the ancient Greeks. They called it ekphrasis: the rhetorical exercise of describing a work of art in great detail. For them, ekphrasis was a creative act. The speaker often explained things not shown by the artist, such as what happened just before or just after the illustrated moment. The maiden in this painting is smiling because she has just received a declaration of love, they would say.

But faced with this art from Guantánamo, ekphrasis seemed somehow inappropriate. These artists are still alive, even if entombed. Their artworks are as they intended them, not the fragmentary remains of some past world that needs a framework of interpretation. And whatever interpretation these might need, how in the world was I to provide it? Who was I to pour my words over them?

And yet I knew that they needed help or why would that lawyer have come to me? The detainees certainly couldn’t curate their own exhibit in New York because they would be barred from entering the United States even after being released from Guantánamo. So I told myself that I would have to help them realize their desire for an exhibit without inserting my own judgments. I told myself that I would instead be their amanuensis.

From the Latin: a manu, servant of the hand, the term once referring to someone who aided in an artistic project by taking dictation. Consider, for instance, John Milton’s daughters, Mary and Deborah, who took down his seventeenth century epic poem Paradise Lost after he had gone blind. They were his amanuenses. He composed the verses in his head at night. Then, in the morning, as a contemporary of his wrote, he “sat leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it” while they wrote down what he recited. If they dawdled coming to him, he would complain that he needed to be milked.

I would similarly let the artists speak for themselves through me, or so I thought. I wrote out a list of questions for their lawyers to ask them, including “What do you like about making art?” and “What would you like people to think about when they are looking at your art?” Then I waited for those lawyers to pose them during their Guantánamo visits in the midst of conferences about legal matters.

The answers were strikingly uniform and seemingly unrevealing. They wanted people to see their art, they said, and through it know that they are actual human beings. Really? I didn’t get it. Of course, they’re human beings. What else could they be?

At first, I wasn’t too concerned that their answers didn’t really make much sense to me. That’s part of the role of an amanuensis. Milton’s daughters were ten and six when he began Paradise Lost. It would take them all nearly a decade to finish it. In those years, their father also taught them to read books aloud to him in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, of which they couldn’t understand a word.

I was used to being an amanuensis myself. When I was a year and a half old and my mother was still pregnant with my sister, my father had an accident and broke his neck. The fractured edge of a vertebra sliced into his spinal cord, leaving his arms and legs paralyzed. As soon as we were old enough — and I can’t remember a time when we weren’t considered old enough — my sister and I would spend hours a day being his “hands.” We opened mail, paid bills, slid computer disks in and out of the desktop that he operated by stabbing at the keys with a long pointer held in his mouth. Through us, two daydreamy little girls, he did all the work of a stereotypical man of the house — fixing broken appliances, hanging Christmas lights, grilling steak.

To be an amanuensis is, by the way, anything but a passive act. After all, there wouldn’t be enough time in the world if you had to tell your own hands what to do in every situation: reach for the coffee cup, close that finger around its handle, bring it to your mouth. In the same way, an amanuensis must anticipate needs, prepare tools, and know when something’s missing.

And this sense that something was missing — honed from my years with my father — was growing in me as I looked at the artwork and thought about those responses. It was the midsummer of 2017 and the exhibit was set to open in the fall. The file cabinets in my office were filled with paintings, overflowing into piles on the floor that came up to my shins. After the struggle to pry those artworks out of Guantánamo, I didn’t know how to say that one piece should be seen by the world and another should stay a prisoner in some dark drawer.

Freedom of the Seas

So I asked again — this time by emailing Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee working on a memoir about his time at Guantánamo. He explained that the cells of detainees were right by the sea. They could smell and hear the surf, but because tarps blocked their view, they could never see it. Only once, when a hurricane was coming, had the guards removed those tarps from the fences that separated them from the water. A few days later, when they went back up, the artist-inmates began to draw pictures of the sea as a substitute for what they had glimpsed during that brief moment of visual freedom.

Suddenly, those endless visions of water — that is, of freedom — made sense to me. And I understood something else as well. Guantánamo is a system designed to paint the men it holds as monsters, animals, sub-humans who don’t deserve basic rights like fair trials. That was the reason those prisoners were speaking, but not speaking, in their art. Why would they say anything that risked a further fall from whatever precarious hold on humanity they still had?

They hoped someday to be released, which was unlikely to happen if the authorities became convinced that they bore any anger towards the United States. And even release would not mean freedom of speech, since they would be sent to countries that had agreed to host them. Dependent on the good graces of these governments, they would continue to live constrained lives in constrained circumstances, needing never to offend these new sets of authorities either.

I was indeed the Other. I might misinterpret and misrepresent, but so undoubtedly would anyone else in our world speaking for those artists. And they were incapable of speaking for themselves.

So I added an essay of my own to the catalog, becoming ekphrastic. I pointed out what was movingly missing in their artwork. It wasn’t that there weren’t people in their paintings. It was that those works had invisible holes where the people should have been. All those unmanned boats, sailing across those open waters, were carrying invisible self-portraits of the artists as they hardly dared to imagine themselves: free. Even when there were no boats, the famously mutable sea served as the perfect disguise. Its winds and waves and rocks represented the all-too-human emotions of the artists without ever making them visible to the censors.

It was, of course, so much less dangerous for me to interpret what they were saying than for them to say it directly. I had held many doors open for my father when I was his amanuensis, running ahead to make sure the path was clear and that there were no surprising flights of stairs. If there were, it was up to me to find a new way.

This is what I wanted to do for the artists. Open doors, scout out paths — but their choice of doors, their choice of paths, not mine. They had told me they wanted people to see them as human beings and that was the case I tried to make for them.

As it turned out, I evidently succeeded a little too well. After the exhibit opened and received a surprising amount of media attention, the artists’ lawyers noticed that the authorities were taking longer and longer to clear artworks to leave Guantánamo. Then, three weeks ago, the Department of Defense declared that all art made at Guantánamo is government property. Detainees reported that their guards then told them any art left behind if they were ever released would be burned and works in their cells deemed “excess” would simply be discarded.

As with so many policy decisions about Guantánamo, the true rationale for this one remains hidden. My guess: the U.S. authorities there were surprised that the artwork they had been scrutinizing so carefully for hidden messages had a unifying one they had missed: that its makers were human beings. Which is precisely the realization the authorities need to stop the rest of us from having if Guantánamo is to remain open.

Erin L. Thompson, co-curator of “ Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo ” with Charlie Shields and Paige Laino, is an assistant professor of art crime at John Jay College. Her book, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present , was an NPR Best Book of 2016. The exhibition “ Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo ” is on display in New York City at the President’s Gallery of John Jay College, 899 10th Avenue (6th Floor) until January 28, 2018.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and 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 Quarterly Fundraiser: Why I’m Asking for $200 (£150) a Week from You to Support My Guantánamo Work (Clue: It Involves Capitalism, and the Internet)

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2500 (£1850) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

 

Dear friends and supporters — and any kindly passing strangers!

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my writing about Guantánamo, and my campaigning to get the prison closed. I’m not a young man, but I am a modern creation — a reader-funded journalist and activist — and the blunt truth is that, without your support, I can no longer continue doing what I’ve been doing for the last 12 years: making sure that Guantánamo is not forgotten, telling the stories of the men held there, and working to get the prison closed once and for all.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated. 

I should also note that you don’t have to have a PayPal account to use PayPal, and also that, although the default setting for donations is dollars, as most of the my readers are in the US, PayPal will convert donations from any other currency.

Once upon a time, journalists were employed by media organizations, whose income, for TV and the print media, came from advertising, and, for newspapers, from paper sales. Those jobs still exist, but over the last 30 years paid jobs have been axed in huge numbers as newspapers’ corporate owners have sought to shore up their profits, and in the last five to ten years the rise of the internet, while theoretically making everything available to everybody at any time, and, crucially, giving individuals like me a platform, has also seen a massive rise in the amount of journalism — and, it should be noted, creative work of all kinds — that consumers now expect to be done for free.

In addition, those responsible for disseminating it — primarily, the tech companies making computers and mobile phones, and running search engines, social media and apps — also profit from people’s work, making eye-waveringly huge profits without giving anything back. When it comes to the wordsmiths, artists and creators, however, a handful of big names in all these fields — from journalism to entertainment — are well-rewarded, but everyone else is struggling in a manner that is profoundly dispiriting.

As an independent journalist, activist and creative person, I fell into this precarious world by accident — or perhaps through being driven by a desire to put fighting injustice above making a living. Certainly, when I researched and wrote The Guantánamo Files, my book about Guantánamo and the men held there, in 2006-07, I was not thinking about money. I wrote the book without being paid, and when I finished it, despite being acclaimed as having exposed the truth about Guantánamo and there men held there like no one before, my efforts to secure paid mainstream media work have only ever been sporadically successful, and have never been enough to maintain anything resembling a living, largely because, in the new, stripped-down mainstream media world, there is only a certain amount of money allocated for proper news, and only a few jobs to go with it. Instead, I set up this website, and have published, at the last count, 2,147 articles relating to Guantánamo over the last ten years.

In addition, a persistent injustice like Guantánamo is not generally of interest to the mainstream media, which typically has a short attention span. But as I have always maintained, just because an injustice is ignored doesn’t make it any less disgraceful, and when it comes to Guantánamo, the fact that, next month, it will begin its 17th year of operations ought to be even more of a surge of shame than it has been to date, because its fundamental injustice — holding people endlessly without charge or trial — has never been adequately addressed.

Regular followers of my work will know that I also do other work that is only possible with your support — my photo project, ‘The State of London’, for example, the campaigning against the destruction of social housing in London that I have recently begun, and even the music I perform with my band The Four Fathers — and if you want to help me with any of these projects then I will be very grateful, but the core of what I do remains the struggle to get Guantánamo closed, and if you can make any kind of donation — be it $25, $50, $100 or more — than I will at least be able to keep going.

So to answer the question I posed in my headline, I need $200 (£150) a week just to get by, to pay my bills with a little bit left over, so if you appreciate my work and can help out, please do. If everyone who took an interest in my work gave just a few dollars, I’d be able to wrap up this fundraiser tonight, but there’s the problem: you can read my writing, look at my photos, and listen to my music all for free, and it’s only up to you if you want to give anything back.

Thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington

London

December 6, 2017

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and 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.

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

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

 

This Friday, December 8, it’s the world premiere of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ at the Cinema Museum, in Kennington, London SE11, and if you’re in London and care about social housing, I do urge you to come and watch it.

I’m the narrator of the film, but I came to it after all the hard work had been done — by the director, Nikita Woolfe, who spent three years working on it between other projects. It focuses on the destruction of council estates, and their replacement with new projects built by private developers, from which, crucially, existing tenants and leaseholders tend to be excluded, a form of social cleansing that is on the verge of becoming an epidemic in London.

Starved of funding by central government, councils have been working with private developers, who have no interest in renovating existing estates, as they know that there are huge profits to be made by demolishing estates instead and building new housing for private sale. To try to avoid claims of social cleansing, some of these new properties are marketed as “affordable”, but because “affordable” rents were set at 80% of market rents under Boris Johnson during his lamentable eight-year tenure as the Mayor of London, they are not actually affordable for most Londoners. Another sham is shared ownership, whereby, for many times more than they were paying previously in social rent, tenants get to nominally own a share of their property (say, 25%), but on what can only objectively be construed as a nominal basis, as it’s not something that can ever actually be sold.

Instead of the rosy picture painted by councils and developers, the reality of these new developments is that tenants get squeezed out, as there is no provision — or very little provision — for social rents (generally regarded as being 30% of market rents), and leaseholders get squeezed out too, offered derisory amounts for the homes they bought, after being encouraged to do so by none other then Margaret Thatcher, the pioneer of the ‘Right to Buy’ programme that started the decimation of council housing, as she also refused to allow councils to replace the stock they sold.

The film looks in detail at the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, and Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth, all with Labour councils (who, sadly, are at the forefront of social cleansing) and all threatened with unnecessary destruction, as independent housing experts like Architects for Social Housing (ASH) have demonstrated that refurbishment is preferable to destruction, and that, by adding stories to existing buildings, and through the careful infilling of unused space, estates can be saved from destruction, and the costs of refurbishment borne through the private sales of these new and additional properties.

The film celebrates the resistance of those whose homes are threatened, and funds for one group — the leaseholders of the Aylesbury Estate — are being raised through the takings on the night at the premiere, as the Aylesbury leaseholders secured a hugely important victory last September, when communities secretary Sajid Javid accepted the conclusion of a report into the estate that declared that the human rights of leaseholders were being breached by the derisory amounts offered in the council’s compulsory purchase orders. Javid then backed down when the council promised to amend its offer, but that has not happened yet, and the new CPO hearings will begin in the new year.

The film also features a wonderful victory — by the residents of sheltered housing in Streatham, who stopped Lambeth Council from cynically destroying their homes, as reported by ASH here — and this is an important part of the story, and one which Niki wanted to stress: that victory is possible.

Niki and I actually met at ‘The Truth About Grenfell’ Tower, an event called by ASH the week after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in June, which Niki filmed, and Grenfell is, of course, featured in the film, as it is not possible to discuss social housing and social cleansing without taking some time to consider how and why those who died in the fire lost their lives — because of the deliberate cutting of “red tape”, and because of decisions, taken at many levels, to make profit-making and cost-cutting more significant than residents’ safety.

The darkness of the Grenfell disaster must not be allowed to fade, but it remains important to recognise that we can overcome the hostility and indifference of those making decisions about our lives, and as the premiere of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ approaches, we should all take heart from what is happening up in Haringey.

In the north London borough — with all eyes particularly focused on Tottenham —  the council’s outrageous proposal to enter into a £2bn partnership with the rapacious international property developers Lendlease that would see the transfer of all Haringey’s council housing to a new entity, the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), to be followed by a programme of estate demolition, is being defeated by local campaigners, who have been working assiduously to get pro-HDV councillors de-selected and replaced with new candidates for the elections next May who oppose the plans. The campaign has been so successful that a pro-HDV majority has now been turned into a tiny minority, almost certainly destroying the HDV plans and sending Lendlease packing.

So it really is true: we can defeat any injustice if we put our minds to it, because we are many, and they are few.

NOTE: If you’re interested in screening ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ in 2018 — if you’re part of a housing campaign, or you’re involved with a cinema — please email Nikita Woolfe or call her on 07413 138909, or email me.

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.