Andy Worthington's Blog, page 44

It’s My Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Help Me Raise $2500 (£1850) to Support My Guantánamo Work (And, If You Wish, My Housing Activism, Music and Photography)?

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,

It’s that time of year when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo as an independent journalist and activist trying to get the prison closed down. It’s nearly 16 years since Guantánamo opened, and nearly 12 years since I started researching and writing about Guantánamo on a full-time basis, firstly through my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, through my journalism, most of which has been online (here on andyworthington.co.uk, and, since 2012, also on the Close Guantánamo website). I have occasionally worked for the mainstream media, but mostly my independence has allowed me the freedom to focus relentlessly on Guantánamo on my own terms, and I know that, over the long years of my engagement with this topic, many of you have come to appreciate that.

There is a catch, however. As an independent journalist, commentator and activist, no advertisers, editorial board or institution is paying me, and I rely on you to provide me with the financial support to enable me to do what I do. So 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 Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency. The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of my readers are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

I continue to work to get Guantánamo closed, even though, of course, that ha become a frustrating uphill struggle since Donald Trump became president in January. His threat to send new prisoners to Guantánamo has, thankfully, not materialized, but he has, effectively, sealed the prison shut, refusing to contemplate releasing anyone, even though five of the 41 men still held were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama. So appalling is his presidency on so many fronts that every worthy cause is left crying out for attention, and so Guantánamo has largely fallen off the radar, and has only briefly flickered back to prominence via outrageous maneuvers — allowing hunger strikers to starve to death, and threatening to destroy artworks made by the prisoners, for example.

In endeavoring to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, I was the first to report the hunger strike story, also covering it for Al-Jazeera, and I also wrote about the threats to destroy prisoners’ art — here and here. I have also kept a photo campaign going all year on the Close Guantánamo website, and have written dozens of other articles there and here, and I’m currently preparing for another US visit in January — my eighth successive January visit — to call for the closure of the prison on the anniversary of its opening (on January 11), and your donations will help to pay for this trip.

Outside of Guantánamo, I have also continued to do other work for which I am not paid — or, if you prefer, that I can only do as a reader-funded creative person. One of these initiatives is my photo project ‘The State of London’, which began in 2012 when, after recovering from contracting a rare blood disease the year before, I started cycling around London on a daily basis, taking photos on my travels, although I didn’t start posting photos — one a day, with accompany text — until may this year, the first anniversary of when I started. I have come to regard the cycling as critical for my mental and physical well-being, and the photos represent my cumulative perceptions of the city that has been my home for over 30 years, in all its joy and misery. If you haven’t yet checked out the photos, please do.

Similarly unfunded is my music, with my band The Four Fathers, whose new album of protest music, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, was released last week, and a new outlet for my writing and activism — the housing crisis in London, and, specifically, the cynical destruction of council estates, and the social cleansing of those living there, to make way for new private developments and huge profits for the developers. To that end, I’m narrating a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, whose world premiere is in London this Friday, and recently set up a campaign page to resist social cleansing in Lewisham, in south east London, where I live.

All of the above is also unpaid, so if you can help to support all this work, please do. I am now running two websites, seven Facebook pages and five Twitter accounts, and yet, like so many other creative people, our opportunities to make any money whatsoever are being strangled outrageously by a technological climate in which everyone is encouraged to believe that everything they consume ought to be free —  writing, photography and music, for example — when in fact, although the creative people are finding it extremely difficult to make any money whatsoever, the companies driving the tech revolution are making insane profits, and all of us as consumers are also being fleeced, as everything we share for free also feeds into this outrageous profiteering by a handful of tech billionaires.

So, in conclusion, if you can help me at all by donating to support my work, it will be very greatly appreciated. A donation of $25 (£15) is just $2 (£1) a week for the next three months, hopefully not too much for all the work that I do.

With thanks, as ever, for your support. It really isn’t an overstatement to say that I can’t do what I do without you.

Andy Worthington

London

December 4, 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.

No Social Cleansing in Lewisham: Please Join the New Campaign!

Please visit and like the No Social Cleansing in Lewisham Facebook page!
And, if you can, please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Back in October, after being hit by a number of pieces of bad news regarding the state of social housing in Lewisham, I rather impetuously came up with a name for a campaign and a rallying cry — No Social Cleansing in Lewisham — and emailed Deptford’s legendary live venue, the Birds Nest, to ask if they would host a night of music, consciousness-raising and and solidarity, to which they said yes.

I had been encouraged to think that a gig in defence of social housing — essentially, not-for-profit rented housing, typically available for no more than a third of what unregulated private rents cost — was possible because, contrary to popular notions that politics has no place in music, which is assiduously promoted by the corporate media, my own band, The Four Fathers, refused the imperative to be bland and non-confrontational, and I had been meeting appropriate performers over the previous year — the acclaimed spoken word artist Potent Whisper, whose work is relentlessly political, the Commie Faggots, who play theatrical singalong political songs, and Asher Baker, a singer-songwriter and rapper from Southwark.

Potent Whisper and I had got to know each other online, and had then both played at a benefit for housing campaigners in Haringey in September, which was a particularly inspirational evening. I’d seen the Commie Faggots play at an open mic event in New Cross, and had then put on an event with them for the Telegraph Hill Festival, and Asher and I had met when we were both on the bill for an evening at the New Cross Inn. I then added people I met recently — the fabulous all-women Ukadelix, and local spoken word artist Agman Gora — and, with the last-minute addition of the Strawberry Thieves Socialist Choir, had a powerful evening of protest music lined up for a great night of conscious partying.

The end result was a wonderful event, which exceeded my wildest expectations. The pub was packed, the performers were uniformly excellent, and the vibe was electric. I wrote enthusiastically about it here, and posted photos here and here (the latter by local resident and researcher Anita Strasser), and I’m now engaged in planning a second ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ gig, as well as trying to revisit the format for other boroughs where social housing is threatened with destruction and redevelopment. Get in touch if you can help in any way!

I then set up the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham‘ Facebook page (two weeks ago, on November 20), to provide a focal point for information about the various campaigns, which I invite you to join, and I’ll be setting up a Twitter account soon. And again, if you can help in any way with these social media projects, do get in touch.

To be blunt, the impetus for social cleansing from councils (of all political persuasions) and housing associations has reached epidemic-style proportions in London — and, indeed across the UK — threatening to totally destroy social housing without concerted resistance. Starved of funds by central government, councils are entering into deals with private developers, which involve council estates being demolished, new, private developments being built instead, and the former residents scattered to the winds.

Housing associations, in the meantime, are responding to the changed economic climate by becoming private developers themselves, sidelining the provision of genuinely affordable housing with properties built for profit, and everyone is caught up in cynical semantic games, and deals masquerading as fair when they are no such thing. So, for example, new developments generally include few or no properties at social rent — the genuinely affordable amount — but more for what is labelled as “affordable”, even though that rate was set by former London Mayor Boris Johnson at 80% of market rents, and is therefore not affordable at all. The other great scam is part-ownership, where, for much more than social rent, tenants are encouraged to buy a percentage of the property, while continuing to pay rent — a deal whereby, typically, they will never actually end up owning anything in an meaningful sense.

In the London Borough of Lewisham, the struggles that caused me to set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ in the first place are still very much alive, and causing considerable stress and consternation to those affected. The most immediate cause of concern is Old Tidemill Garden and a block of council flats at 2-30a Reginald Road, whose destruction was approved by Lewisham Council in September, despite the garden being a great community space and a huge environmental asset, and despite the fact that there is no fundamental structural problem with the block of 16 flats.

Having failed to accept an offer, made by campaigners, to provide alternative plans that would not need to involve the destruction of either the garden or the flats, the council is determined to press ahead with the sites’ destruction. The developers Family Mosaic (now merged with Peabody) and Sherrygreen Homes are promising a decent provision of socially rented homes on the new site, but campaigners maintain that an alternative plan that don’t involve the destruction of the garden and the Reginald Road flats is the only responsible way forward, and fear for the integrity of any replacement housing offered — in which properties would almost certainly be smaller, and without security of tenure, and in which it is difficult — no matter what the council says — to imagine that there will not be a significant increase in their rents. For leaseholders (those who believed Margaret Thatcher’s promise about social tenants buying their own homes), the fears are that (a) they won’t be offered an amount that will enable them to buy a new property in the area, and (b) if they return to a new flat in the new development, it will only be on a shared ownership basis and/or will involve high service charges.

Campaigners are meeting in the garden every Saturday from 12-3pm to work on resisting the council’s plans, with banner-making and opportunities for like-minded people to meet. It’s a wonderful space, where a marquee has been set up, and there is also a fire through the winter months. For further information about the Tidemill campaign, see my post on the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ page here.

Below, via YouTube, is a London Live report about Tidemill and Reginald Road from October 3, after Lewisham Council confirmed its decision to proceed with the garden’s destruction:

The second major campaign involves the Achilles Street estate in New Cross, between New Cross Road and Fordham Park, which the council wants to demolish and replace with a new development. Campaigners (see The Achilles Street Stop and Listen Campaign on Facebook, and the busy Save Achilles Area Twitter account here) argue that the estate can be refurbished, and, as with Deptford, fear that, despite the council’s reassurances that their housing requirements will be provided for in the new development, that will not turn out to be true. The council, undoubtedly stung by criticism of its Tidemill plans, keeps putting off its meeting to confirm the Achilles Street plans, but that is not a recipe for complacency, and those who care about keeping this estate — and the many shops adjoining it across New Cross Road and down Clifton Way by The Venue — need to maintain vigilance, and, through protests and publicity, remind the council that they’re not giving up, and will not remain silent. See the post about Achilles Street on the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ Facebook page here.

A third, rather more complicated campaign involves the boating community on Deptford Creek, by the Birds Nest, and three sites on the other side of Creekside, where developers are proposing inappropriate new housing developments, and information about these developments can be found in a post on the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ Facebook page here.

There is, sadly, much more going on in Lewisham which I don’t have the space to cover here, although I will be covering them in due course on the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ Facebook page. Come and join us to find out more!

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

 

How People Power Is Stopping Social Cleansing in Haringey

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

 

The struggle against social cleansing in the UK is a huge struggle, as councils enter into disgraceful deals with private developers, housing estates are destroyed, and tenants and leaseholders dispossessed, and victories often appear elusive.

As a result, what is happening in Haringey, in north London, is inspirational, as local activists have been working to successfully ensure that councillors who support the council’s social cleansing proposals — involving the creation of the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), a £2bn deal with a private developer — are de-selected prior to the council elections next May, and are being replaced with candidates who oppose the plans. See this page on the Stop HDV website for the extraordinary story of how, at the time of writing, there are now 36 Labour candidates who oppose the HDV, and only seven who support it.

The threat in Haringey is more severe than anywhere else in London, as the Labour council’s deal, with Lendlease, the Australian-based international housing developer, would involve all of Haringey’s council housing being transferred to the HDV. Even before an agreement is in place, plans have been announced for estates to be destroyed, and it is not scaremongering to suggest that the destruction and social cleansing, if it is not stopped, will be on a scale that has never been seen before in the UK.

Lendlease is notorious for its role in the destruction of the Heygate Estate in Southwark, in south east London, where, as I described it in an article in September, following a screening of the documentary, ‘Dispossession: The Great Housing Swindle’, in New Cross, “1,034 homes were demolished [and] 2,704 are being built on its replacement, Elephant Park, but only 82 of those will be for social rent.” Social rents are generally set at around 30% of market rents, as opposed to what has been defined as “affordable” in the Tories’ housing legislation, which is set at 80% of market rent, and is, therefore, completely unaffordable for most people.

As I also explained, “Lendlease paid Southwark Council £55m for the Heygate Estate, and £40m for the Oakmayne and Tribeca site, also at the Elephant. The process of evicting and relocating tenants cost the council £65m, while refurbishment of the estate would have cost just £35m. Lendlease, meanwhile, stands to make a profit of £194m, while Southwark will make nothing, although one doesn’t even have to be cynical to notice a revolving door whereby former Southwark council housing employees end up getting jobs with the developers.”

Lendlease’s aggressive policies were recently exposed in a report by Corporate Watch, ‘Lendlease: Development Creeps’, whose introduction explains:

Lendlease is a global property developer and construction company based in Australia, with 12,000 employees working on four continents (Australia, North America, Europe and Asia). Its main speciality is large-scale “urbanisation” developments, often involving “Public Private Partnerships” (PPPs) with city authorities.

In the US, Lendlease is one of Donald Trump’s favourite building partners, responsible for the Trump Tower buildings in New York, Washington and Chicago. It is also well known for having paid up $56 million in “the largest construction fraud settlement in New York City history” in 2012; and for the deaths of two firefighters in the Deutsche Bank Tower fire. In both cases, Lendlease signed “non prosecution agreements” and avoided criminal charges.

In the UK, Lendlease is now in the news as the private partner in the £2 billion Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) partnership with Haringey Council in North London. This follows on from its extremely profitable deal to gentrify the Elephant & Castle area with Southwark Council. For example, in the “One The Elephant” tower, LendLease made a £70 million profit on a site bought from Southwark for just £6.6 million – after councillors it wined and dined agreed to zero affordable housing in the block. Lendlease also built the new Wrexham mega-prison in North Wales – Europe’s second largest.

In Australia, Lendlease is the main developer of the massive Barangaroo site in Sydney – or “Lendlease town”. Community groups and the city’s mayor have protested as Lendlease has won backing from influential politicians to tear up public park plans and nearly double building space, adding three luxury apartment towers and a “six star” casino-hotel skyscraper.

Lendlease also runs Australia’s biggest retirement village empire, where elderly residents allege service cuts and fee hikes. Its subsidiary Capella Capital, meanwhile, leads on private prison projects among other “infrastructure” finance schemes.

To win developments, the company’s official sales pitch is that it can both oversee the building work and raise the finance. It has worked with many major Australian, Asian and global banks, and manages A$26 billion of real estate investment funds for over 150 “global institutional investors”. Lendlease’s shareholders are disguised behind “nominee accounts” run by big banks; the biggest one currently is the massive global investor BlackRock, with just over 5% of the company’s stock.

But perhaps Lendlease’s main superpower, wherever it goes, is its ability to make friends in town halls and state authorities. Planning rules are dropped, laws are amended, criminal charges fade away, and profitable development schemes creep over public space and social housing.

The grassroots Stop HDV campaign began last year, although I didn’t discover it until this year, and I wrote about the campaign in summer, in an article entitled, Tottenham Housing Campaigners Seek a Judicial Review to Save Their Homes from a Rapacious Labour Council and the Predatory Developer Lendlease, when campaigners sought a judicial review regarding the council’s plans, which I wrote about here, a process that has not yet delivered a ruling.

In September, my band The Four Fathers visited Tottenham to show solidarity with the campaigners, playing a benefit gig with other musicians including the powerful spoken word artist Potent Whisper, and since then I’ve watched with increasing admiration as ward after ward of pro-HDV councillors have been replaced by opponents of the proposals.

Now, predictably, the supporters of gentrification, redevelopment and social cleansing are trying to fight back with desperate smear campaigns in the mainstream media and on social media, falsely accusing members of the left-wing, Jeremy Corbyn-supporting Momentum movement of being behind an organised coup, when the truth is that the successful resistance to the proposals has come from a mix of ordinary people from all backgrounds, united by their disgust at the council’s plans, and aghast at the rapaciousness and lack of concern for people’s lives that comes from developers like Lendlease, and the council officials who support them.

The disturbing truth is that, while I expect nothing but contempt from developers, it’s a different matter with council officials, who, whether through class contempt or old-fashioned corruption, have decided that they were elected not to serve the people, or even, in many cases, those who voted for them, but, instead, are seduced by money and/or a sense of class superiority. There is a profound irony in their de-selection that has obviously passed them by, and I can only wonder if they genuinely forgot that their selection — and their election — is a democratic process.

Below, I’m cross-posting an article written for the Independent yesterday by Phil Jackson, one of the Stop HDV campaigners who I met in September, which powerfully explains how the campaign has actually involved “residents from all backgrounds in our mixed, diverse and broad community,” who “have protested this carve-up of our area from day one.” As Phil further explains, “The Stop HDV campaign is supported across the borough – by local community and faith groups from mosques to an elderly vicar, by people of different political parties gathering at meetings of more than 150, and has been active for nearly a year,” and now, “On the estates and in the parks, in our cafes and our pubs, people are talking about politics again and about what we can do together to improve the places we live in.”

Momentum isn’t staging a coup in Haringey, this is about housing not Labour factions

By Phil Jackson, The Independent, November 29, 2017

Labour councillors serving in the previous administration, councillors who have called on Jeremy Corbyn to resign, and even the former council chief whip, have been reselected because they agree with residents that the HDV would be catastrophic

Haringey Council has presented residents with a plan to demolish homes they have lived in all their lives, sign away their land to private developers, and provide barely any genuinely affordable housing for future residents. While there have been dramatised stories about council deselections, this is the real story, and it is about much more than Labour factions.

The Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) is the root of this dispute. The 50:50 partnership between the council and Lendlease involves a massive transfer of land and power to a structure involving a developer motivated by delivering profits to shareholders, not creating a better place to live for residents. The £2bn value of assets involved – our borough’s houses, shops, community venues and shared spaces – represents the biggest transfer of public assets in council history. While elected councillors and the developer would nominally “share power” on the HDV’s board, the governance structure is murky enough to suggest that there is a risk of little accountability. All decisions would be made by a Limited Liability Partnership and its governing Board meetings would not be open to the public or councillors.

We are for investment and renewal, but not on the terms offered. Public consultation on the issue has been minimal, we have had no information about financial risks and the issue was not presented to full council meetings for a vote. It took a scrutiny committee investigation and FOIs to drag details of the deal into the light. A local retired social services chief has even started a bid to challenge the HDV in the High Court. That’s why residents from all backgrounds in our mixed, diverse and broad community have protested this carve-up of our area from day one. The Stop HDV campaign is supported across the borough – by local community and faith groups from mosques to an elderly vicar, by people of different political parties gathering at meetings of more than 150, and has been active for nearly a year.

The local Labour leadership has argued that the HDV is the only way to deliver new homes under a Conservative Government. But the amount of affordable new homes provided is small and in doubt, and nearby Labour-run Camden has rejected a similar development vehicle. Local MPs David Lammy and Catherine West, neither of them diehard Corbynites, have come out against the HDV on similar grounds to the ones we have raised. Pioneering Labour-run councils from Hackney to Salford are finding different ways to meet the challenge of creating decent new homes in the context of a Conservative Government failing to invest and holding back local government from tackling our housing crisis.

As a resident and a Labour activist I was faced with three choices. I could accept the current situation and have to look my neighbours in the eye when I knocked on their doors and told them to vote for councillors that are planning to knock down their estates. I could refuse to campaign for Labour – in spite of Jeremy Corbyn having committed the party to a policy of balloting local residents on changes made to their homes and communities. Or I could use the party’s existing democratic structures to select councillors who are committed to protecting our homes.

We took the last option. We campaigned in the 2017 election on a platform of bringing wealth and power to people and communities, not handing it to developers. While Momentum members have every right to contest council seats like any other Labour member, this selection contest is about ensuring a pro-social housing majority not a pro-Momentum majority. Labour councillors serving in the previous administration, councillors who have called on Jeremy Corbyn to resign, and even the former council chief whip, have been reselected because they agree with residents that the HDV would be catastrophic.

On the estates and in the parks, in our cafes and our pubs, people are talking about politics again and about what we can do together to improve the places we live in. These conversations have the potential to make real change. For now, these conversations are ensuring that politicians cannot draw up destructive schemes in backrooms and railroad them through with no real process. Londoners have had enough of soaring rents, poor doors, luxury flats replacing social housing, and resident voices being ignored; and now we’re doing something about it.

Note: If this topic is of interest to you, please check out ‘Concrete Soldiers UK‘, a new documentary film, directed by Nikita Woolfe, which I’m narrating (and which is having its world premiere in London on December 8), and also check out my band The Four Fathers, whose new album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?‘ also tackles the housing crisis – amongst other topics dealing with human rights and social justice.

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.

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

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

 

Stung by criticism of its paranoid and heavy-handed approach to Guantánamo prisoners’ art, the Pentagon now seems to be involved in a rearguard damage limitation exercise, but it may be too late.

Last week, as I explained here, the Miami Herald reported that “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay,” a show of prisoners’ art in New York, featuring 36 works by eight prisoners, four of whom are still held, had led the US military to say that it would be stopping prisoners from keeping any artwork they have made, and to threaten to burn it, prompting widespread criticism.

In a powerful op-ed in the New York Times, which I’m cross-posting below, Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime and one of the curators of the show at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, stated, “Art censorship and destruction are tactics fit for terrorist regimes, not for the US military. The art poses no security threat: It is screened by experts who study the material for secret messages before it leaves the camp, and no art by current prisoners can be sold. Guantánamo detainees deserve basic human rights as they await trial. Taking away ownership of their art is both incredibly petty and utterly cruel.”

For an accompanying New York Times article, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Ben Sakrisson confirmed to Jacey Fortin by email that the government’s position remained as follows: that “items produced by detainees at Guantánamo Bay remain the property of the US government.” Fortin also noted how he had told the Miami Herald that “questions remain on where the money for the sales was going,” referring to a line on the exhibition’s website, stating that the prisoners’ art was for sale.

Erin Thompson explained that “the only paintings for sale were the ones whose artists had been cleared and released from Guantánamo,” as the Times put it, and stated, “The idea of trying to dispirit someone by destroying what they’ve made, even if the subject is, on its surface, innocuous, is very common in warfare.” She added that she would be “distressed” if US officials destroyed any of the prisoners’ art.

One of the prisoners’ attorneys, Beth Jacob, explained how the exhibition came to be. She stated that her client, Muhammad al-Ansi, freed in January, had shown her his paintings when they had first met, and said, “I was impressed by it, and he told me that the art teacher there had complimented him.” So last year, as the Times put it, “she reached out to Ms. Thompson about putting them on display. Several other Guantánamo detainees agreed to participate, and the exhibition was unveiled last month.”

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, a lawyer with the international human rights organization Reprieve, confirmed that “news of the rule change came from clients, not from the Defense Department,” as the Times put it, adding:

She called the decision “confusing and confused,” adding that officials at Guantánamo Bay once touted the art program — despite restrictions on what content went public. “The ban on art that made the U.S. look bad was absurd already,” she said. “But a ban of painted flower pots is just inane.”

Below is Erin Thompson’s hard-hitting op-ed, which, I suspect, contributed directly to  an apparent climbdown today, reported just a few hours ago by Carol Rosenberg in the Miami Herald, when she stated, “The idea of incinerating artwork made by wartime captives at Guantánamo Bay has stirred such alarm that the US military is now discussing keeping and cataloging detainee art rather than burning it.”

Army Col. Lisa Garcia of US Southern Command, which oversees the prison and its staff, said today that Southcom “is recommending to the prison that the staff archive detainee artwork” rather than destroying it.

Attorney Ramzi Kassem, whose clients include Moath al-Alwi, the maker of extraordinary models of ships, “described the idea of archiving rather than destroying the works of art as a cynical move,” as Rosenberg put it.

“They’re still going to redact the art out of existence. They’re just not going to burn it because that looks bad,” he said, adding, “But if no one gets to see the art, they might as well be incinerating it. Guantánamo has always been about dehumanizing its prisoners and erasing them. This is only the latest example.”

Below is Erin Thompson’s op-ed. I hope you have time to read it, and that you’ll share this article if you find it as powerful as I do. I find her passages about creativity, and about the prisoners’ relationship with the sea, to be very moving, as, I’d like to add, are the memories of the sea of former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, published in September, and included in the catalog for the exhibition.

Art Censorship at Guantánamo Bay

By Erin Thompson, New York Times, November 27, 2017

Moath al-Alwi’s prayer rug is stained with paint. Every day, he wakes before dawn and works for hours on an elaborate model ship made from scavenged materials — one of dozens of sculptures he has created since he was first detained at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in 2002. Mr. al-Alwi is considered a low value detainee, but is being held indefinitely. His art is his refuge.

The sails of Mr. al-Alwi’s ships are made from scraps of old T-shirts. A bottle-cap wheel steers a rudder made with pieces of a shampoo bottle, turned with delicate cables of dental floss. The only tool Mr. al-Alwi uses to make these intricate vessels is a pair of tiny, snub-nosed scissors, the kind a preschooler might use. It is all he is allowed in his cell.

Three of Mr. al-Alwi’s model ships are currently on view in an exhibit at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, along with 32 other paintings and sculptures from other prisoners or former detainees. My colleagues and I curated this exhibit after learning that many lawyers who have worked with detainees have file cabinets stuffed full of prisoners’ art. In the atmosphere of surveillance and control that is Guantánamo, these artworks are among the only ways detainees have to communicate with the outside world.

But last week, the Miami Herald reported a change in military policy: The art of Mr. al-Alwi and the other remaining Guantánamo prisoners is now U.S. government property. The art will no longer leave prison confines and can now legally be destroyed. Attorneys for several prisoners were told the military intends to burn the art.

Art censorship and destruction are tactics fit for terrorist regimes, not for the U.S. military. The art poses no security threat: It is screened by experts who study the material for secret messages before it leaves the camp, and no art by current prisoners can be sold. Guantánamo detainees deserve basic human rights as they await trial. Taking away ownership of their art is both incredibly petty and utterly cruel.

Through this art, you can see what Guantánamo prisoners dream of in their cells, held for years without trial or without even having charges filed against them. They paint the things they wish they could see: sunsets, meadows, cityscapes and their homes. But most of all, they paint and sculpt the sea, rendering beaches, waves and boats in delicate colors and shapes. These prisoners have heard and smelled the sea for years, since the camp is only yards away from the Caribbean. But only for four days once, when a hurricane was approaching, did the guards take down the tarps that cover the fences, and allow prisoners to see it. The sea is central to their art, a symbol of freedom.

Making art is a profoundly human urge. Viewing this art has allowed thousands of visitors at John Jay College and elsewhere a chance to see that its makers are human beings. These detainees have been treated in fundamentally dehumanizing ways, from torture to denial of fair trials, and their art reminds us that we cannot ignore their condition.

Half of the artists featured in in our exhibit, like hundreds of other detainees before them, were released after showing that they pose no threat to the United States. Burning Mr. al-Alwi’s ships won’t help the war on terror. Making art is the only form of therapy available at Guantánamo. Art helps detainees keep sane, meaning that those who are guilty will one day be fit to stand trial. And restricting and burning detainee art offers another excuse for terrorist groups to encourage their followers by pointing to an irrational exercise of absolute power.

For each of his model ships, Mr. al-Alwi ruffles cardboard into feathers to create an eagle-shaped prow. As he spends months creating each one, he imagines that he himself is an eagle, soaring over the sea. Unless the military reverses its cruel new policy, he can no longer even launch his fragile creations into the world, to be free in his place.

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.

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

I’m delighted to announce that today my band The Four Fathers are releasing our second album, How Much Is A Life Worth? via Bandcamp, where you can buy it on CD (which can be sent anywhere in the world), or as a download (either the whole album, or individual tracks). The CD costs £8 (about $10.67), plus postage and packing, while the download of the album costs £5 (about $6.67), with individual tracks available for $1 (about $1.33).

The album features ten original rock and roots reggae songs — eight written by me, as lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and two written by lead guitarist Richard Clare. It follows the release in 2015 of the band’s first album, ‘Love and War,’ and continues to demonstrate a commitment to political issues, with six of the album’s ten songs being protest songs. The band also features Brendan Horstead on drums and percussion, Andrew Fifield on flute and harmonica, and Louis Sills-Clare on bass (replaced after the album was recorded by current bassist Mark Quiney).

Followers of the band on Bandcamp — or those who have seen us live — will already know some of these songs, as six of them have previously been released online, although all of them have now been slightly remastered. Those songs are, in order of release, ‘Close Guantánamo’ (used for the ‘Close Guantánamo’ campaign that I run), ‘Dreamers’ (a song about friendship, written for a friend’s 50th birthday), live favourites ’Riot’ (about austerity and the need for social and economic justice) and ‘London’ (a lament for how the capital’s vibrancy in the 80s and 90s has been destroyed by housing greed), ‘She’s Back’ (Richard’s song about Pussy Riot) and ‘Equal Rights And Justice For All’ (my celebration of habeas corpus, which always gets a laugh when I say live that no set is really complete without a song about habeas corpus).

The album additionally features the title track, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, another live favourite, looking at how white westerners value their lives more than those of others, with reference to 9/11, the current global refugee crisis, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, and three other songs that rarely, if ever, get a live outing: ‘Tell Me Baby’, a vibrant garage rocker about love and aging, sex and materialism, which we’re going to be playing more at gigs in future, ‘River Run Dry’, a lament about the end of an affair that I wrote as a young man in Brixton, and ‘When He Is Sane’, a song from Richard’s younger days about mental health issues.

Here’s the full track listing. All the tracks on Bandcamp include the lyrics, introductory comments, and artwork specific to each song, and the CD, additionally, includes a full colour 8-page booklet designed by Brendan Horstead.

1. How Much Is A Life Worth?

2. Riot

3. London

4. She’s Back

5. Dreamers

6. Tell Me Baby

7. Equal Rights And Justice For All

8. Close Guantánamo

9. River Run Dry

10. When He Is Sane

I hope the album is of interest to you, and that, with just four weeks to go until Christmas, it will provide you with some opportunities for presents for friends and family — or for your own wish list.

We’re planning a new recording session soon to record two new songs of mine that are already a fixture of our live set — ‘Grenfell’, about the terrible and entirely preventable Grenfell Tower fire in June, and ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’ about Brexit. Please do get in touch if you’re running a campaign and would like us to play at a fundraiser, or if want to offer us a gig or a festival appearance, or if you want to help us make a video, or if you want to be on our mailing list. We’d love to hear from you!

Note: if you don’t already know, you can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

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

This Wednesday and Thursday, November 29 and 30, a hearing is taking place at the High Court in London to assess whether Lauri Love, a computer expert with Asperger’s Syndrome, should be extradited to the US for acts of online activism —  allegedly targeting US government websites in the wake of the suicide of computer expert and activist Aaron Swartz in January 2013, along with many other online activists.

There is no evidence that any harm was caused in the US, Lauri has never set foot in the US, the British government has brought no case against him in the UK, and yet, under the terms of the 2003 US-UK Extradition Treaty, the US is able to demand that he be sent to the US to be imprisoned (in isolation in a maximum-security prison) and subsequently tried (in a broken, punitive system in which huge pressure is exerted to accept a plea deal and a 10-20 year sentence rather than fight and lose and be imprisoned for life). Worryingly, Lauri Love has been openly stating that he could not bear punitive isolation in the US, and would kill himself rather than be extradited, and those closest to him do not dispute this intent.

I have some experience of the chronic unfairness of the US-UK Extradition Treaty, because, back in 2012, I worked to oppose the injustice of the treaty with reference to the cases of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, who ended up being extradited in relation to a UK website encouraging Muslim resistance to oppression, which was run from the UK, but had, at one point, involved a server in Connecticut — enough, apparently, for extradition to take place.

Both men had been imprisoned for six and eight years respectively in the UK, without charge or trial, while they resisted extradition, and in neither case was there any sign that they would or could have been successfully prosecuted in the UK, but in October 2012 home secretary Theresa May allowed their extradition to take place, and then boasted about it to the Conservative Party Conference.

After a few years imprisoned in the US, both men’s cases were settled with plea deals, and Talha Ahsan was released, while Babar Ahmad was given a short sentence. Both men are now back in the UK, and free men, although what was abundantly clear at the time was that Theresa May had a blatantly racist attitude to extradition, and, while allowing the extradition of Talha Ahsan, a talented poet with Asperger’s Syndrome, and a Muslim, blocked the extradition of Gary McKinnon, who had hacked into US websites, and who also had Asperger’s Syndrome, but who, crucially, was white.

For my articles from this time, see, in particular, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan: Why It’s Time to Scrap the US-UK Extradition Treaty and America’s Extradition Problem. For more on Theresa May’s racism, see As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration.

Because of criticism of the extradition treaty, with relation to Gary McKinnon, the rules changed in 2013, when a “forum bar” was introduced. The Free Lauri website (very highly recommended) explains that the “forum bar” is meant to be “an additional statutory bar to extradition that can be invoked by a defendant to question whether the UK is in fact the proper place to hear a case,” although the site also notes, “The effectiveness of the forum bar has been questioned by legal commentators and it has not really been tested in court.”

Last year, Lauri challenged his extradition in court, but lost. This week’s hearings relate to the appeal that he launched in response to that ruling — the last chance for his extradition to be stopped. If you can come along to the court, please do. You can also ask your MPs to make their voices heard, adding to the 114 MPs who opposed Lauri’s extradition last year.

For an amazing summary of Lauri’s case, please watch ‘The Rhyming Guide to Lauri Love,’ by the talented spoken word artist — and Lauri’s friend — Potent Whisper, via YouTube:

Please also read the following article by Lauri’s partner, Sylvia Mann, published by the Independent yesterday.

My partner Lauri Love could be saving the world from cyber attacks but instead he faces a 99-year prison sentence

By Sylvia Mann, The Independent, November 26, 2017

Lauri’s Asperger syndrome is a gift. It gives him his genius and it gives him his logical outlook on the world, from which his stubbornness arises. He will fight for what’s right even if it kills him.

Lauri Love is an activist, a physicist, a computer scientist, an angel and the person I want to spend my life with. He is stubborn and smart, near to the point of arrogance, and he fights every battle he can against injustice. Next week Lauri will be in court appealing against extradition to the United States where he faces a 99-year prison sentence on allegations British authorities investigated and decided not to charge him for.

Lauri is a much nicer person than I am and he is a much more positive and hopeful person. Where I see climate destruction and oppressive regimes, he sees opportunities to overcome. His hacker mind is hard-wired to solve problems and this world has many.

When you spend time with Lauri, you realise that it is much harder for him to fight against the injustices he is facing personally. He would much rather be fighting for someone else and helping to create a better world.

Most of the time Lauri either is, or would rather be, at home reading papers on quantum physics and cryptography and all the other similarly abstruse subjects that his brain is uniquely configured to solve. Lauri should be in a university working on inscrutable mathematical problems but, because of his Asperger’s, he does not have the luxury of seeing the political problems of the world as separate from him.

Lauri was studying physics and computer science at Glasgow University in 2010 when he got involved in the Occupy movement. This started a spiral of events which culminated in a mental breakdown and him having to return to his parents’ house in Suffolk. A social conscience combined with mental health problems has always been Lauri’s Achilles’ heel.

Lauri’s Asperger syndrome is a gift. It gives him his genius and it gives him his logical outlook on the world, from which his stubbornness arises.

Lauri won’t do anything that goes against his ethics or how he sees things should be. He will fight for what is right even if it kills him. His neurodiversity presents him considerable problems in the world as it is currently calibrated. This is not a kind world to those who are different and the criminal justice system especially so.

US prosecutors accuse Lauri of being part of #OpLastResort, the round of online protests that followed the death of American internet pioneer Aaron Swartz.

The internet wept when Aaron died. There was an enormous public outcry and calls to reform America’s hacking law, the notorious Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Questions were asked in Congress and new laws proposed. #OpLastResort was part of that public outcry.

The US government know that their claims against Lauri will never be tested in court. The way extradition works means that prosecutors do not have to show any evidence to the British authorities. And because those US prosecutors reserve the right to try Lauri three times, in three different districts, with a potential sentence of 99 years, they know he would be under enormous pressure to accept a plea bargain.

Ninety-seven per cent of federal defendants in the United States never get a trial because they are offered a choice of either accepting years in prison if they plead guilty or risking decades to have their day in court. What Lauri is being offered in the United States is not a trial but blackmail with a potential life sentence attached.

Lauri would not be granted bail if he were extradited and there is no doubt that his human rights would be violated in US custody. All the experts testify to it and even the district judge who approved Lauri’s extradition last year accepted that his life is at risk if extradition goes ahead.

What would Lauri’s life have been for if that happens? The US wants his life to be an example to scare anyone who might embarrass the government or launch an enthusiastic campaign to reform draconian laws.

I can see that Lauri’s life is worth more than that, not just to me but to the public at large. The UK judicial system can see it too. All the members of hacking collective LulzSec were prosecuted here in the UK and are now pursuing very fulfilling lives contributing to society, getting PhDs, teaching and working in computer security. At least 13 people have been tried in the UK in the past few years for computer offences that involved foreign servers, including American ones.

Lauri Love cannot become the first UK citizen extradited to the United States on extraterritorial computer crimes charges. He should be able to continue his work improving online security, and be able to finish his university studies.

Earlier this year when the Wannacry virus affected the NHS and closed hospitals, Lauri and his hacking compatriots worked on analysing the malware and compiling a fact sheet. (Another security researcher, Marcus Hutchins, who activated a kill-switch curtailing WannaCry’s spread, is now being prosecuted by the US, who waited until he was on holiday in Las Vegas to arrest him, seeking to avoid the “headache” of extradition.) Lauri is currently working to formalise this process as a social enterprise, Bogaty Hack, to create a volunteer reserve of people to fight the next major cyber-attack which could take lives.

All we are asking for is a trial in the UK, a trial at home. Lauri’s life is worth more than to be a casualty of the US vindictive “justice” system, another young life like Aaron’s with so much potential thrown away for nothing.

Note: For a detailed account of Lauri’s story, see ‘Keyboard warrior: the British hacker fighting for his life,’ a Guardian article from September.

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.

Celebrating 200 Days of Andy Worthington’s Photo Project, ‘The State of London’

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

 

Today is the 200th day of ‘the State of London’, a photo project that I launched on Facebook on May 11 this year, the fifth anniversary of when I first began travelling around the capital by bike, taking photos on a daily basis. I also set up a Twitter page recently, and, in the new year I hope to get the website (currently just a skeleton) up and running. My article introducing the project is here, and also see here for my reflections after 100 days.

The photos cover every one of London’s 120 postcodes, and also include some of the outlying boroughs, and, since launching the daily photos on Facebook, I’ve posted photos from over half of London’s 120 postcodes.

They feature what I hope is a fascinating cross-section of the capital’s many faces beyond those seen by tourists — its abandoned and run-down places, its buildings old and new (the latter rising up like a plague of greed), night and day, the light, the rain, the seasons and the weather, political protests, and, increasingly, those parts of the city that are threatened with destruction — primarily, council estates that are being knocked down and replaced with new private developments from which the existing residents (both tenants and leaseholders) are generally excluded, a disgraceful form of social cleansing involving councils from across the entire political spectrum.

For further information, see my archive of articles about the UK housing crisis, follow my page No Social Cleansing in Lewisham, check out ‘London’ and other housing-related songs by my band The Four Fathers, and come and see ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a documentary film about social cleansing and the resistance to it, directed by Nikita Wolfe, which I’m narrating, and which launches in London on December 8.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that social cleansing is one of the great injustices in contemporary London, a kind of social cannibalism that is the malignantly logical end result of the entire political and corporate establishment making housing the main driver of the economy, insanely enriching those fortunate enough to have bought properties before the housing bubble began in the early years of the New Labour government, while dreadfully impoverishing everyone else, and also pandering to rich foreign investors, who have been persuaded that London is a safe place to park their money, in a property market whose profits have been assiduously marketed as endlessly-expanding.

Because no one with power and influence is interested in doing anything about the capital’s disgraceful distorted economy, which is creating an ever-increasing chasm between the rich and the poor, and because our so-called leaders also seem not even to accept that there is a problem with this inequality, the destruction of people’s homes for profit is somehow seen as acceptable, even though it is not. Councils are indeed starved of funding by central government, but their response is not to challenge the Tories, or to insist that it is cheaper to refurbish estates than to knock them down, but to enter into disgracefully close relationships wth powerful private developers, who have no interest in protecting existing residents, and only see opportunities for immense profits, exiling existing tenants and leaseholders, and creating new, often largely empty blocks owned by absentee foreign investors.

I hope you’ll start following ‘The State of London’ if you haven’t already. it’s fair to say that, although I’ve outlined some of my key interests above, almost anything can turn up on the page, as I draw on my archive, and sometime photos taken on the day, for each day’s new content — for today, for example, drawing only on photos taken on November 26, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 or 2017 — when, every day, I may or may not have travelled widely, and when the weather may or not have been welcoming or conducive to good photos.

So every day, in other words, is something of a lucky dip — surprising me, and, I hope, surprising you as well. I do hope you’ll come along for the ride!

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 Latest Scandal of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo: A Death Penalty Case Without a Death Penalty Lawyer

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.

 

The military commissions at Guantánamo, since they were ill-advisedly dragged out of the history books by the Bush administration, have persistently failed to demonstrate anything more than a tangential relationship to justice, as I have been reporting for over ten years. Last September, I summarized the trial system’s many failures in an article entitled, Not Fit for Purpose: The Ongoing Failure of Guantánamo’s Military Commissions.

Under Donald Trump, there has been no improvement. Pre-trial hearings drag on, seemingly interminably, as defense lawyers seek to expose evidence of the torture of their clients in CIA “black sites,” while prosecutors, for the government, do everything they can to hide that evidence. Earlier this month, however, as I explained in a recent article, a new low point was reached when, astonishingly, the chief defense counsel, Brig. Gen. John Baker, was briefly imprisoned for defending the right of three civilian defense attorneys to resign after they found out that the government had been spying on them.

The loss of the attorneys led to a disgraceful situation in which the government insist son limping on the with the capital case, against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a victim of CIA torture, and the alleged mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, even though it is illegal to pursue a capital case without a qualified death penalty lawyer on board. That role was filled by Rick Kammen, who had been on al-Nashiri’s case for nine years.

Below, to bring the story up to date, I’m cross-posting a very helpful article posted last week on the ACLU’s website by Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, who explains how, with these latest developments, the commissions “have devolved into an unacceptable and alarming assault on defense lawyers attempting to provide fair representation to their clients.” On the lack of a death penalty lawyer on al-Nashiri’s case, she writes, “Just as you would not expect a recent medical school graduate to perform a complex and risky surgery, you would not assign a junior lawyer without capital experience a leading role in a capital case.”

And on the imprisonment of Brig. Gen. Baker, she writes of the trial judge’s “unjustified and reprehensible attack on defense counsel.”

Her conclusion is stark: “The tribunals have become a costly farce, inflicting incalculable damage to due process and justice.” She adds, “This farce must end.”

Instead, since her article was published, a bad situation has become even worse, with the commissions’ Convening Authority Harvey Rishikof ruling that the trial judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, was correct “in law and in fact” to convict Brig. Gen. Baker. Rishikof ruled that Baker will not have to pay the $1,000 fine that Judge Spath ordered him to pay, and he also responded to the attorneys’ criticism by “recommend[ing] to the Joint Detention Group at Guantánamo Bay that a ‘clean’ facility be designated or constructed which would provide continued assurances and confidence that attorney-client meeting spaces are not subject to monitoring, as the commission proceeds.”

In the Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman described this as “the closest Rishikof has come in his nearly nine-month tenure to acknowledging the danger the government’s seeming inability to allow tribunal defense attorneys to communicate amongst themselves poses to the entire commissions enterprise.”

Baker’s lawyers are currently planning their next move, with Ackerman reporting that, after the contempt ruling, “Lawyers for Baker immediately turned to the federal courts to free him. A reluctant Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington, D.C. district court  punted to Rishikof, though Lamberth left himself the option of subsequent intervention. Baker’s lawyers may go back to Lamberth if the Pentagon will not overturn Rishikof,” according to one of the lawyers.

Barry Pollack, one of Baker’s attorneys, said, “While we are very pleased that the Convening Authority negated the remainder of the sentence of confinement and overturned the fine that had been imposed, we think the Convening Authority was plainly wrong in concluding that the military judge had the authority to hold General Baker in contempt in the first place. The contempt finding should be reversed. We are reviewing whether there is a further avenue within the military that should be pursued to challenge the erroneous contempt finding or whether to return to Judge Lamberth to ask him to overturn the contempt finding.”

At Guantánamo, a Death Penalty Case Without a Death Penalty Lawyer

By Cassandra Stubbs, Director, ACLU Capital Punishment Project, November 14, 2017

The Guantánamo military commissions, the scheme created by the government to try 9/11 and other detainees, have devolved into an unacceptable and alarming assault on defense lawyers attempting to provide fair representation to their clients.

A new letter, drafted by the ACLU and joined by 150 death penalty lawyers and law professors, registers the capital defense community’s outrage over the legal breakdown, which clearly violates federal and international law.

In the current crisis, Brig. Gen. John Baker, a decorated combat veteran and the second-highest ranking lawyer in the Marine Corps, was sentenced to 21 days of confinement by the presiding military judge in the prosecution of Abd Al-Rahim Hussein Al-Nashiri, a suspect in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Gen. Baker, in his role as the chief defense counsel for the Guantánamo military commissions, had granted a request by Al-Nashiri’s defense counsel to withdraw from the capital case because of an ethical conflict that is secret but is known to involve government monitoring of attorney-client communications. Three of Al-Nashiri’s long-term lawyers then withdrew — including his one attorney qualified to work on death penalty cases. The lawyer left on the case was a junior military lawyer.

The presiding military judge, Col. Vance Spath, was displeased — both that the lawyers had withdrawn and that Gen. Baker granted their dismissal without his permission. How Judge Spath expressed that displeasure is where things went horribly wrong. He found Gen. Baker had acted in contempt of the court, and ordered him to be confined for 21 days. (Gen. Baker spent 48 hours confined to his trailer at “Camp Justice” on the Guantánamo naval base before being released after he filed a federal appeal, which is still pending.) Spath then ordered the young military lawyer with no death penalty experience to proceed with Al-Nashiri’s defense on his own.

Capital defense is a highly complex and specialized area of law. Both in traditional federal prosecutions and in the unique provisions for Guantánamo, there must be at a minimum two lawyers representing a person facing the death penalty, and at least one lawyer must be “learned counsel,” with distinguished prior experience and knowledge in the area of capital trials. Just as you would not expect a recent medical school graduate to perform a complex and risky surgery, you would not assign a junior lawyer without capital experience a leading role in a capital case.

Richard Kammen, Al-Nashiri’s former long-term capital defense counsel, had been on the case for nine years. He had been practicing law for 46 years and had served as lead capital counsel in numerous cases. In contrast, Al-Nashiri’s remaining defense counsel, Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, is a 2012 law school graduate who meets none of the requirements for “learned counsel.” He was added to the existing Al-Nashiri defense team just a few months ago. He has no prior capital experience, and no prior criminal defense experience with homicide charges. He rightly told the court exactly that.

Judge Spath ordered the young lawyer to represent Al-Nashiri on his own in the scheduled proceedings. The judge’s departure from the rules, which require learned counsel at every part of a capital prosecution, is inexplicable. Even beyond the binding military commission rules, the American Bar Association’s guidelines for capital cases have long explained that the unique and complex labyrinth of capital trial preparation and investigation requires qualified death penalty counsel represent the defendant at every stage of the proceedings. There is no exception to this rule because the expertise is deemed necessary throughout. Nonetheless, Judge Spath suggested that the junior defense counsel should, alone, stand in the place of learned counsel and a team with deep knowledge of the voluminous issues that the case raises. The young lawyer resisted, repeating several times, that he was “not qualified” to represent Mr. Al-Nashiri in the capital pretrial matter without learned counsel.

Judge Spath dismissed the lawyer’s refusal to speak as a trial “strategy,” as if requesting qualified counsel for his client was somehow a personal choice, designed to disrupt the case. The young lawyer pointed out that it was neither his nor his client’s choice: “This cannot be trial strategy. It was not our choice.” Judge Spath ordered him to continue anyway.

The judge’s unjustified and reprehensible attack on defense counsel, and his insistence that a major capital trial go forward without experienced counsel, is just the latest in a long string of outrages in the Guantánamo military tribunals. Listening devices in attorney-client meeting rooms have been installed, disguised as smoke detectors. The FBI has infiltrated and investigated defense teams. Privileged legal mail is seized. Sadly, the list goes on.

The tribunals have become a costly farce, inflicting incalculable damage to due process and justice. This farce must end.

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.

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

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

 

I wrote the following article (as “The Persistent Abuse of Guantánamo Prisoners: Pentagon Claims It Owns Their Art and May Destroy It, But U.S. Has Long Claimed It Even Owns Their Memories of Torture ” 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.

After years of letting Guantánamo prisoners keep the artwork they have made at the prison, subject to security screening, the Pentagon has suddenly secured widespread condemnation for banning its release, and, it is alleged by one of prisoners’ attorneys, for planning to burn it.

The story was first reported on November 16 by Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, and updated on November 20. Rosenberg explained how, for years, prisoners’ art had been released “after inspection by prison workers schooled in studying material for secret messages under the rubric of Operational Security.”

However, as Rosenberg explained, “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay,” an exhibition in the President’s Gallery of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice until January 16, 2018, which features “paintings and other works by current and former captives” — and “which garnered international press coverage” — “apparently caught the attention of the Department of Defense,” because of an email address provided for people “interested in purchasing art from these artists.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson, said on November 15 that “all Guantánamo detainee art is ‘property of the US government’ and ‘questions remain on where the money for the sales was going.’” At the prison itself, Navy Cmdr. Anne Leanos said in a statement that “transfers of detainee made artwork have been suspended pending a policy review.”

Prisoners’ attorneys discovered the change in policy during recent visits to their clients, when prison staff suddenly “stopped returning art that had been submitted for inspection and release.” Rosenberg added that, according to two attorneys, “a commander told general population captives” (i.e. not the “high-value detainees”) that “they would no longer be allowed to give it away.”

One of the attorneys, Ramzi Kassem, a professor at City University of New York School of Law whose legal clinic represents Guantánamo prisoners, said that one particular prisoner was told “art would not be allowed out of the prison,” and added that, if any prisoner were to be allowed to leave Guantánamo (which, crucially, has not happened under Donald Trump), “their art would not even be allowed out with them and would be incinerated instead.”

Another attorney, Beth Jacob, said that another prisoner had “told her by telephone from the prison that ‘the colonel’ announced that ‘they could continue to make art. But the number of pieces each could have would be limited, and excess ones would be discarded.’”

Jacob was also told, “Not only were the captives no longer to give their lawyers works of art as gifts, but the prison would no longer let the International Red Cross receive artwork for their families.” According to the prisoner’s account, the unidentified colonel told prisoners that the change in policy “was at the direction of someone not at Guantánamo,” which I can only presume means that it was dictated by someone in the Trump administration in Washington, D.C.

Rosenberg noted that the change in policy contravenes Federal Bureau of Prisons policy, which “lets its inmates mail ‘arts and hobbycraft’ to family, give them to certain visitors and sometimes display it in public space, if it meets the warden’s standard of taste.”

At Guantánamo, however, it is rare for prisoners — nearly all held without charge or trial, with some about to enter their 17th year of imprisonment — to receive any perks that might be taken for granted by prisoners on the US mainland, who begin their imprisonment with a court conviction, and who, unlike the Guantánamo prisoners, are allowed family visits.

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

Erin Thompson, Assistant Professor of Art Crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who curated the exhibition, which includes art from eight current or former prisoners, told the Independent that she “arranged the exhibit as a means of providing an insight into the minds” of the prisoners. She said it was “important to show the men as human beings, regardless of what they had or had not done.”

“Art is supposed to be a window into the soul,” she said, adding that the authorities were “‘shooting themselves in the foot’ if they were ignoring the art works produced by the prisoners.”

How did the prisoners get to make their art?

Explaining how the Guantánamo prisoners came to make any art at all, after the early years of the prison, when they were denied almost all “comfort items,” Carol Rosenberg stated that “art classes were among the first programs offered to the captives in the later years of the Bush administration as commanders explored ways to distract detainees who had spent years in single-cell lockups from getting into clashes with the guards.” She added, “Students would be shackled to the floor by an ankle inside a cellblock in Camp 6 and draw still-life displays or copy a picture set up by an Arabic linguist tasked to teach art.”

Rosenberg also stated, “Commanders called it the prison’s most popular, best attended program and would display examples, copies of original art, in a prison storage facility for books. Some showed seascapes and scenes from the home countries of the captives because, their attorneys said, the detainees knew it would be forbidden to show life at Guantánamo.”

As time passed, “Supplies became more bountiful. Captives at times were allowed to create art on the communal cellblocks, and drew their inspiration from elsewhere. At the John Jay exhibit, two different detainees had paintings of the Titanic. The detention center had permitted prisoners to watch the 1997 disaster epic whose theme song is ‘My Heart Will Go On.’”

The two artists are Muhammad Ansi (aka Mohammed al-Ansi), a Yemeni who was released in Oman just before President Obama left office, and Khalid Qasim (aka Qassim), who is still held, and is one of the hunger strikers who claim that the Trump administration is now neglecting them, and, having abandoned trying to feed them, is no longer even monitoring their health. Qasim, the art show’s website explains, “frequently experiments with the limited range of artistic materials Guantánamo affords; he has painted in coffee and on sand and gravel gathered from the prisoners’ exercise yard, and has created sculpture from various discarded materials, including MRE boxes.”

Another prisoner who has explored the use of materials is Moath al-Alwi (aka Muaz al-Alawi), another Yemeni. He has “used castoff cardboard and other found objects to craft increasingly large models of ships he’d only seen in books.” Beth Jacob said that, the first time he met her, “he presented her with a replica gondola,” and the show’s website explains that his works “are intended as presents for his lawyers and family.”

Ramzi Kassem explained that all the artwork that has been released from the prison “has gone through rigorous censorship and contraband review,” adding that officials took an X-ray of Alwi’s model ships before allowing them to leave.

Other works in the exhibition are by released prisoners Ghaleb al-Bihani, a Yemeni who, like al-Ansi, was released in Oman in January 2017, Djamel Ameziane, who was repatriated to Algeria in 2013, and Abdualmalik (Alrahabi) Abud (aka Abd al-Malik al-Rahabi), a Yemeni who was released in Montenegro in 2016. He is featured in a very worthwhile PBS broadcast on the prisoners’ art that is available here.

Apart from Moath al-Alwi, the only prisoners still held whose work is displayed are Ahmed Rabbani, who is currently taking the government to court regarding its new policy regarding hunger strikers, and Ammar al-Baluchi, a “high-value detainee,” who painted the picture below, “Vertigo at Guantánamo.”

[image error]Al-Baluchi is one of five “high-value detainees” held in CIA “black sites,” who are involved in interminable pre-trial hearings for their alleged role in the 9/11 attacks, but as Alka Pradhan, part of his legal team, explained in a tweet when posting this image, “Real reason @DeptofDefense wants to control @BaluchiGitmo’s art? He paints his deterioration from @CIA torture.”

Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, told the Independent that the US authorities “had always censored art they considered sensitive,” and cited the example of a piece of art that Ahmed Rabbani had shown him, of him being tortured. He said that, “without giving a reason, the authorities at Guantánamo refused permission for that drawing to leave the prison.”

And so, as happened back in 2008 with censored drawings by the Sudanese prisoner and journalist Sami al-Haj, Stafford Smith “made a detailed note of the painting, and when he returned to Britain, he asked several artists and art students to recreate the drawing.” The version shown here is by a student from Colfox Academy in Bridport, Dorset, showing his interpretation of Rabbani’s art recreating his experience of being subjected to “a medieval form of torture, known to the Inquisition as the ‘strappado.’” As Rabbani explained to his lawyers, “They took me to a room and hung me by my hand to an iron shackle where my toes hardly touched the ground. They removed the mask away from my face and left me hanging from one hand, naked, thirsty, and hungry.”

Who owns the prisoners’ art?

In dealing with the question of the art’s ownership, Maj. Sakrisson “suggested the art was not the captives’ to give away,” as Carol Rosenberg described it. In a statement, he said, “Items produced by detainees at Guantánamo Bay remain the property of the US government.” he also added, in a sentence that is difficult to read to the end because it is such bland admin-speak, “The appropriate disposition of this property has been clarified with our staff at the detention facility and will be accounted for according to applicable local procedures in the future.”

Beth Jacob told the Miami Herald that “she hadn’t heard of the possibility that somebody at the Pentagon was alarmed to discover the detainee art was for sale.” She explained that one of the former prisoners resettled in Oman “wanted his artwork sold so proceeds could go to his ailing mother in Yemen for costly medicine.”

At Guantánamo, Cmdr. Leanos “would neither confirm nor deny the prison’s plans to burn the art. Nor would she say how many works of art a captive could keep and how many he would have to designate for destruction.” In the meantime, as though unable to recognize that anything untoward had happened, she added that “art classes continue to be held each week and detainees have the opportunity to attend.”

As Rosenberg also explained, “The art program had been such a point of pride at the prison that instructors posted copies of the work on the walls of a library storage facility, and journalists being escorted through the prison were encouraged to photograph it.” In addition, “Two years ago, the prison’s now-defunct newsletter, The Wire, showed an Army officer admiring copies of the ‘vibrant paintings.’”

The article about the prisoners’ art was unambiguously titled, “Program enriches detainee life.”

Rosenberg also noted that the practice of releasing art from Guantánamo “had become so common that prison staff recently printed a form for attorneys to attach to have each work of art reviewed and assigned each piece a tracking number for the clearance process.”

Beth Jacob, who has represented eight Guantánamo prisoners, four of whom have been released, told Rosenberg that her clients “had been using art as a diversion for some time, and had been giving her pieces for years — sometimes as gifts and in other instances to safeguard for fear that the prison would not. She cited a previous time when artwork had been confiscated, never to be returned — during the prison-wide hunger strike in 2013, when, in a raid, “soldiers seized the detainees’ artwork and legal documents from their cells.” Jacob said that the legal documents were eventually returned, “but the detainees never saw that art again.”

It is to be hoped that the authorities back down from their current position, which, like the treatment of hunger strikers, and the atmosphere in general, as recently described by Saifullah Paracha, the oldest prisoner in Guantánamo, seems, across the board, to have taken a harsh turn of late, presumably under directions from those at the top of the government.

Nearly 16 years after the prison opened, it is time for the US government to be working out how to close this failed experiment once and for all, and not how to keep it going, whilst also making life harsher for the prisoners than it has been for many years.

To get involved, please sign this petition by Erin Thompson, “Stop the Destruction of Art at Guantánamo,” 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 hunger strikers. Please also read Erin Thompson’s fine article about why she staged the exhibition, published in the Paris Review last month.

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’s Oldest Prisoner Calls Conditions “Hell,” Says, “We Are Getting Collective Punishment Because of the Hunger Strike”

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.

 

The horrors of Guantánamo — ever present in a prison where men have been held for nearly 16 years without ever being charged with a crime, and with no notion of when, if ever, they will get to leave — seem to be being ramped up under Donald Trump, as we might have suspected from his aggressive stance towards the prison and the men held there, even before he took office in January, and from witnessing his racism, and glimpsing the violence that permanently seems to lurk beneath his blubbery exterior.

Despite threats to send new prisoners to Guantánamo — threats which have not, mercifully, transpired — Trump did nothing in his first eight months regarding the prison except shutting the door on it and refusing to contemplate releasing anyone, even the five men — out of the 41 still held — who were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama.

Two months ago, however, according to hunger striking prisoners, whose story I reported before the mainstream media took an interest, Trump finally made his influence felt, changing the rules about the way they are treated. For over ten years, hunger striking prisoners were closely monitored, but now, according to those refusing food, new instructions, initiated from September 20 onwards, mean that they are no longer having their health assessed at all.

In addition, they claim, the authorities are no longer force-feeding them. For at least ten years, whenever a prisoner lost a fifth of their body weight, they were force-fed. Medical professionals argue that it is unacceptable to force-feed a mentally competent prisoner, who should be allowed to starve himself to death, if he wishes, but, to my mind, it is not acceptable to endorse the force-feeding of men who have never been charged or tried.

In an attempt to challenge the government, lawyers for one of the hunger strikers, Ahmed Rabbani, a Pakistani national, held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for two years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2004, submitted an emergency motion to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on October 16, asking for a judge to order the government to allow an independent medical expert to visit Rabbani, to assess his health, and also to compel the government to release his medical records.

The government then submitted a response claiming that Rabbani was lying, which his lawyers then challenged last week, and we are currently awaiting a ruling from the court. For more information, see my recent article for Al-Jazeera, Guantánamo detainee: US changed force-feeding policy.

In the meantime, however, another prisoner, Saifullah Paracha, another Pakistani national, a businessman seized in Thailand in July 2003, who was held and tortured in a secretive part of Bagram prison in Afghanistan before his arrival at Guantánamo at the same time as Rabbani, has spoken out about how he too has noticed a change in the way prisoners are treated in the last two months.

Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, at 70 years of age, Paracha has a long list of medical problems — including coronary artery disease and gout — and, nine years ago, was described as being “on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective” in his classified military file, which was released by WikiLeaks in 2011, and yet, on October 15, according to an account he gave his lawyers, as reported by Newsweek, “25 guards rushed into [his] cell, one holding a video camera, and forced him on to his stomach before strapping him to a stretcher.” He was then “handcuffed, hoisted out of the lock-up and taken to a cell in solitary confinement.”

After this “forced cell extraction,” Paracha told his lawyer that “he languished alone in a cell for three days,” and that this “was the first time he had received this kind of treatment in over a decade.”

He added, “I’ve always been observing the camp rules. I’ve never been disciplined. I’ve never been told that I broke any of the rules.”

He proceeded to explain that, as Newsweek put it, he “believes the harsh treatment is a direct result of the changing of the guard in Washington, and the election of Donald Trump as president.” His theory is that, because Trump and his administration object to six men “being on hunger strike in protest at their many years of incarceration without charge,” prisoners in general “are being subject to collective punishment and increasingly harsh treatment by guards.”

Paracha reinforced the claims made by hunger striking prisoners that, as Newsweek described it, “military officials are allowing hunger-strikers to weaken past the point of medical intervention, when prisoners were previously subjected to the force-feeding of nutritional supplements through nasogastic tubes,” with prisoners accusing officials of “allowing them to waste away to the point of near-death.”

As the treatment of the hunger strikers “worsened,” as Newsweek put it, Paracha — who said he had “never participated in a hunger strike because of his age” — intervened, “writing a letter to the commander of the facility about their mistreatment.” He said that the guards rushing into his cell and taking him to solitary confinement took place just 30 minutes after he sent it.

He told his lawyer, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve, “We are getting collective punishment because of the hunger strike. It felt like when we were brought in to Gitmo. Not since the beginning days of Guantánamo has it been like this. It’s a hell.”

Paracha, who lived in the US in the 1980s, is accused of meeting Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and working on a plot in the US, for which his son Uzair has been convicted and is serving a 30-year sentence, but he has never been formally charged, and it is difficult to know how accurate the claims are. What is certain is that at Guantánamo he is regarded as “very compliant,” and has been a constructive mentor and father figure to numerous younger prisoners.

Like most of the men still held — 26 of the remaining 41 — who are neither approved for release nor facing trials, Paracha is eligible for Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process that began under President Obama, and led to 38 men being approved for release, all but two of whom were free before Obama left office. Paracha’s first review took place in March 2016, but his ongoing imprisonment was approved the month after. A second review took place in March this year, but in April the board again approved his ongoing imprisonment.

As Newsweek described it, he had offered “to close his businesses upon release …  as evidence that he had no ill intent toward US citizens or desire to fund extremist groups,” but the board “said he would remain in detention for his ‘continued refusal to take responsibility for his involvement with Al-Qaeda’ and lack of remorse for prior actions.” But as his lawyers have always argued, “he cannot show remorse for activities that he is adamant he never participated in.”

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis called on Paracha to be tried or released.

“My 70-year-old client Saifullah is aging and sick,” she told Newsweek. “When I heard that he had been dragged from his cell and thrown into solitary confinement for the first time ever, I knew the new crackdown at Gitmo had reached fever pitch.”

She added, “After 13 years of detention without charge, and two heart attacks, Saifullah needs to be tried or released. It is downright barbaric that instead, he is facing physical abuse and the anguish of solitary confinement.”

As Newsweek described it, however, Paracha’s concerns “are less about his own health [than] the wider treatment of the few dozen prisoners remaining at the camp, which has long out-lived its own projected life-span.”

“They are just humiliating us and punishing everyone,” he said. “The policies are getting worse.”

In an op-ed published by Newsweek today, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis expanded on her criticisms, stating that “Saifullah’s ordeal — like the fiasco of the military commissions [where the chief defense counsel,a brigadier general, was recently imprisoned for refusing to accept the resignations of three civilian lawyers, who had resigned because they had found out that the government had been spying on them] — shows to any casual observer that Guantánamo’s continued existence beyond 2017 is untenable. More than ever, this offshore prison is a repudiation of basic American values, like due process and the right to a speedy and public trial. The Trump administration’s attempts to break up a peaceful protest at the prison is as futile as it is cruel.”

She added, “The US has no justification for holding men like Saifullah, much less assaulting them and throwing them into solitary confinement. They should be charged, or released, and the prison closed for good.”

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.