Andy Worthington's Blog, page 45

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

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

 

On Friday, I was delighted to attend a screening of ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’, the 2009 documentary film I co-directed with Polly Nash, at the University of Westminster, followed by a lively Q&A session with a packed room full of very engaged students.

My thanks to Sam Raphael, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, for arranging the event. Sam, with Ruth Blakeley, set up The Rendition Project, described on his university page as “an ESRC-funded project which works with NGOs and human rights investigators to uncover and understand human rights violations in the ‘War on Terror.’” Sam’s page also explains that the project “provides an unparalleled picture of the CIA’s torture programme, and has been described by the Guardian as ‘a groundbreaking research project which sheds unprecedented light on one of the most controversial secret operations of recent years.’”

Sam and I have worked together before, most recently last November at ‘Enshrined Injustice: Guantánamo, Torture and the Military Commissions’, a panel discussion at the University of Westminster, which I spoke at, and which Sam moderated, and which also featured Alka Pradhan, Human Rights Counsel at the Guantánamo Bay Military Commissions, and Carla Ferstmann, the director of REDRESS. My report about that and other Guantánamo-related events in London at that time was entitled Parliament and the People: Two Days of London Events About Guantánamo, Torture and the Military Commissions.

So on Friday, when we were also joined by George Edwards, a law professor in Indiana, who has worked on legal issues relating to Guantánamo, in the cases of David Hicks and Omar Khadr, it was reassuring to discover that, although ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’ has obviously aged since its release eight years ago — particularly because of the release two years ago of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, whose story features prominently in the film — its fundamental narrative remains intact, telling a compelling account of the prison and its fundamental and unremitting injustices, primarily though interviews with five people — former prisoners Omar Deghayes (who is at the heart of the film, with his powerful and poignant reflections from an interview with myself and Polly, which was his first major interview following his release in 2007) and Moazzam Begg, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, Tom Wilner, Counsel of Record to the prisoners in their habeas corpus cases before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008, and myself.

I toured ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’ extensively in 2010 and 2011, but it hasn’t been shown much in recent years. However, if you’re at a university, with students studying international relations, or any other topic that involves Guantánamo, then please do get in touch if you’d like to arrange a screening, and have me talk.

We don’t hear enough about Guantánamo these days, even though it remains open, and even though Donald Trump has been in charge of the prison for ten months, and has done nothing whatsoever to facilitate its closure. He has so far been thwarted in his efforts to bring new prisoners there, which would be a massive backwards step, but every day that Guantánamo remains open ought to be disgrace for all decent people, whether in the US or elsewhere, as there is no excuse ever for a country that claims to respect the rule of law to hold anyone indefinitely without charge or trial, as has been happening at Guantánamo for nearly 16 years.

Below is a YouTube clip showing the first five minutes of the film. You can buy it or pay to watch it online here or here, or you can buy it on DVD from Spectacle in the UK or the World Can’t Wait in the US.

Note: On Friday December 8, a new documentary film, which I’m narrating, is being released. ‘Concrete Soldiers UK‘, directed by Nikita Woolfe, looks at the destruction of council estates, and the people fighting back to try to save their homes, and to prevent a dangerous and scandalous epidemic of social cleansing.

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.

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

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

 

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

What a disappointment Donald Trump is — something that many of us suspected when he was elected as the 45th President of the United States over a year ago, but that does not become any easier to bear with the passage of time.

Largely governing by tweet, Trump has nothing positive to show for his first 300 days in office (yesterday, Nov. 16), as he alienates allies and does nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. His Muslim ban, which he still persists in trying to enforce, remains shockingly racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and it is clear that he also extends these prejudices to the men held at Guantánamo.

Uninterested in any nuances regarding Guantánamo  — the fact that indefinite detention without charge or trial ought to be fundamentally un-American, for example, or that there are men held at the prison who have been approved for release — Trump has always behaved as though the prison contained “the worst of the worst,” turning the clock back to the terrible hyperbole of Guantánamo’s early days under George W. Bush.

On the campaign trail, speaking of Guantánamo, Trump promised to “load it up with some bad dudes,” and just weeks before taking office he tweeted, incorrectly, “There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.”

He was, unfortunately, true to his word. There have been no further releases, even though the battlefield claim was wrong, drawing on a history of unsubstantiated allegations about recidivism that originate from within the military and the intelligence services, and even though five of the 41 men he inherited from President Obama had already been approved for release by high-level government review processes.

Trump’s other threats have not materialized — he has not yet “load[ed] it up with some bad dudes,” and it is to be hoped that he won’t even try, as any new prisoner accused of terrorism should be tried in federal court (as the courts have a good track record of successfully prosecuting terrorists), and any prisoners seized in a military context should be held in a prison that is compliant with the Geneva Conventions, which Guantánamo — a legacy of the Bush administration’s dangerous desire to hold people outside the law, and with no rights whatsoever — is not.

Seven of the 41 men still held by Trump are facing trials, but these are stuck in endless pre-trial hearings because the military commission trial system — unlike federal courts — is not fit for purpose. In the latest scandal to undermine the commissions, a military judge imprisoned the chief defense lawyer, a general, because he had accepted the resignations of three of his team, who quit because they discovered that the government was spying on them.

It would be hard to imagine a scenario more discrediting to the legitimacy of the commissions, but elsewhere at Guantánamo Trump’s dismal leadership is having other damaging repercussions.

As I reported for Al Jazeera two days ago, Trump appears to be in charge of a change of policy at Guantánamo regarding hunger strikers, whereby the prison authorities are refusing to feed them, or even to monitor their health. This is a situation that could lead to them suffering severe organ damage before, presumably, the authorities force-feed them to prevent them from dying, because the death of a prisoner would be bad from a PR perspective.

As a policy, however, it only shows the harshness of the administration’s approach to the prison, because anyone with any empathy would recognize that men held for nearly 16 years without charge or trial might have some reason to demand, via starving themselves, that they should either be charged or released.

We’re currently working on plans for the new year, for the 16th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo (on Jan. 11), and for the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration (on Jan. 20), but for now, if you want to make your dissatisfaction with Donald Trump known, why not join the many dozens of people who, this year, have taken photos of themselves with our campaign poster, which states, “Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo,” and have sent those photos to us to post on our dedicated page for the campaign against Trump.

Your support will be very greatly appreciated, and if you want to do more, you can sign a petition to Trump, initiated by the human rights organization Reprieve, which currently has over 23,000 signatures, calling for him to close Guantánamo, and to allow independent medical experts to visit and assess the health of the hunger strikers, and you can also, if you wish, ask your elected representatives to act. You can find your Senators here, and your Representatives here.

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

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

My New Article for Al Jazeera English: The Struggle to Stop the Trump Administration’s Potentially Deadly Neglect of Guantánamo Hunger Strikers

I’m delighted to report that Al Jazeera English have just published an article I wrote for them, Guantánamo detainee: US changed force-feeding policy, which I hope you have time to read, and will share if you find it informative.

The article came out of the shocking news announced by the human rights organization Reprieve six weeks ago, when they reported that they had been told that the authorities at Guantánamo were no longer force-feeding long-term hunger strikers, as had been happening for ten years — an announcement that I wrote about at the time in an article entitled, Trump’s Disturbing New Guantánamo Policy: Allowing Hunger Strikers to Starve to Death.

Force-feeding is akin to torture, as medical experts have long established, but, as I have been mentioning since this story broke, it surely cannot be acceptable for men who have been held for up to 16 years without ever being charged or tried to be allowed to starve to death, and there should, therefore, be another response, one sought by the prisoners themselves, who are asking either to be charged or released, a not unreasonable request after so long.

I began this article a month ago, after Reprieve submitted an emergency motion calling on a judge to tell the Trump administration to allow an independent medical expert yo visit the prison to assess the health of their client, Ahmed Rabbani, but it has taken so long to complete because the government then dragged its heels responding, and then denied all Rabbani’s claims. After speaking to Rabbani by phone, Reprieve then refuted the government’s claims in a submission on Friday, and we are now awaiting a ruling by the judge, District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C.

As I noted above, I do hope you have time to read this article, and will share it if you find it useful. It is, I think, extremely important that Donald Trump, who has behaved with either indifference or hostility in relation to Guantánamo since taking office in January, is no longer allowed to continue down either path, both of which show complete contempt for the men still held at the prison.

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

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

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

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

 

It was hard to move in the legendary music pub The Birds Nest in Deptford on Sunday night. I’d arranged a benefit gig there — also intended as a consciousness-raising event, and an opportunity for all kinds of different campaigners to meet — under the umbrella heading, ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’, and it had proved to be so popular that the place was rammed, with sets from the acclaimed spoken word artist Potent Whisper, my band The Four Fathers, playing punky political rock and roots reggae, the theatrical singalong politics of the Commie Faggots, the talented Southwark-based rapper Asher Baker, Deptford spoken word artist Agman Gora passionately tackling current crises, the massed voices of the Strawberry Thieves Socialist Choir, and the ukulele-wielding women of Ukadelix, with their wonderful vocal harmonies. Check out all my photos here.

I organised the event because I’d become aware that the plague of modern London — social cleansing by, predominantly, Labour boroughs — was starting to make its baleful presence felt in the borough of Lewisham, where I live, in south east London. This is not to say that Lewisham had previously been impervious to this greedy, class-based curse. The monstrous Lewisham Gateway development in the heart of the borough had begun with the destruction of a council estate, the Sundermead Estate, and the council is also currently involved in the long-running destruction of two estates on the border with Greenwich, Heathside and the wonderfully Brutalist Lethbridge Estate, (which I’ll need to write about soon, as I can find absolutely no criticism of the estate’s destruction online, and very few photos), as well as demolishing the extraordinary Excalibur Estate of post-war prefabs high in the back streets of Catford.

However, compared to its rapacious neighbour, Southwark, Lewisham is not yet a fully paid-up member of the Premier League of social cleansers. Lewisham’s biggest imminent project is the redevelopment of Convoys Wharf, a historically significant wharf on Deptford’s shoreline. This insulting effort to recreate Dubai at the end of Deptford High Street on the site of Henry VIII’s great dockyard is profoundly disappointing, but it doesn’t involve the destruction of people’s homes, whereas Southwark Council, at the Heygate Estate, working with the Australian-based international property developer Lendlease, has destroyed an estate of 1,034 socially rented homes, replacing them with 2,704 new homes, but with only 82 for social rent, and is currently undertaking similar destruction on the Aylesbury Estate, one of Europe’s biggest council estates, with Notting Hill Homes, a former social housing provider that has eagerly responded to government cuts by becoming an enthusiastic private developer.

The current threats in Lewisham that prompted me to put on the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ event are the destruction of Old Tidemill Garden, a community garden, and a block of council flats on Reginald Road in Deptford, to be replaced by a new private development, which the council approved in September,  and the proposed destruction of an estate in New Cross, Achilles Street, where there are 87 homes, and also around 20 shops. The Achilles Street area has the misfortune to stand next to Fordham Park, because private developers seeking to oust existing tenants and leaseholders particularly love parks, hills and waterside locations. There is also a need for concerted action to save the boating community on Deptford Creek, by the Birds Nest, and to prevent inappropriate development of force industrial sites on Creekside, also by the pub.

On the evening itself, Deptford and New Cross campaigners were joined by local squatters, by private renters, sick of paying so much of their income on rent, by people seeking to get on the housing ladder but unable to even contemplate doing so given the insanity of London’s housing bubble, by concerned people, whether renters or not, who are disturbed at the scale of social cleansing in the capital, and, I noticed, by some veterans of the powerful road protest movement of the 1990s, with which I was tangentially involved, and which I wrote about in my first two books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield.

My feeling is that we may be at the dawning stages of some sort of mass movement. We certainly need to be, as the proposed scale of destruction is astonishing, the institutional and cultural greed is almost beyond comprehension, and the need for a massive not-for-profit social housebuilding programme is greater than ever. Everywhere you look in London, if you start to pay attention, plans for the destruction of council housing and of socially rented homes through housing associations are increasing. Lambeth, for example, has plans to destroy two perfectly sound estates for profit, dispossessing those who live there — the architecturally-renowned Central Hill in Crystal Palace, with a commanding view over the city, and Cressingham Gardens, which overlooks Brockwell Park.

Greenwich Council, meanwhile, has destroyed the first of three estates to be bulldozed in Woolwich, to be replaced by new developments largely for sale, and things are no better north of the river. Haringey Council is currently trying to enter into a £2bn partnership with Lendlease, which will see its entire housing stock transferred to the management of a new company, the Haringey Development Vehicle, with the intention being to destroy a number of estates, and in Clapton, on the Northwold Estate, Guinness Partnership tenants are resisting the destruction of their estate, while in Brixton Guinness is engaged in a disastrous new build project after demolishing existing housing in Loughborough Park.

Other prominent victims of social cleansing include the residents of West Hendon Estate, Woodberry Down in Hackney, the Balfron Tower and Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, and, if developers get their way, the residents of West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estates in west London, whose homes are coveted by the developers redeveloping the Earls Court, who have already knocked down the iconic art deco Earls Court Exhibition Centre.

The list goes on and on, as this article by the exemplary Architects for Social Housing (ASH) explains, and everywhere local movements need support, and could do with a capital-wide campaign to mobilise resistance, and to wake up not only all social tenants, but also all decent owner-occupiers to the scale of the planned destruction, which, if it is not stopped, will led to tens of thousands of people — and, more realistically, hundreds of thousands of people — being removed from London over the next ten to 15 years, to be replaced either by young people and families struggling to keep up with the costs of having bought into a hideously overpriced new development, or by empty properties, bought by foreign investors, which house no one. And all of this, it should noted, is unnecessary, because refurbishing estates is much cheaper than demolishing them, and, as ASH has also demonstrated, infilling on existing estates can provide the necessary money for refurbishment.

I’m planning to roll out the template of the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ gig over the months to come, as well as hopefully staging another event in Lewisham itself, so if you can get involved in any way, do get in touch — that means venues, organisers, housing campaigners, bands, performers, rappers, spoken word artists, sound engineers, photographer and filmmakers!

Many of the acts listed above, who played at the Birds Nest, will be on board, but I’d also love to hear from musicians and performers tackling political themes elsewhere in the capital. We’re persistently told that politics has no place in music, or that politics is boring, or that you mustn’t frighten audiences away by dealing with politics, but life is political, choosing to shy away from politics is political, and, as Sunday night showed, most of the reasons for the widely-touted anti-political stance of what passes for our culture nowadays originate from, and plays into the hands of those who seek to keep people essentially tranquillised. So if you’re awake and want to make some noise about it, get in touch!

Note: If you’re interested in issues relating to social cleansing, please also see the website of ‘Concrete Soldiers‘, a new documentary directed by Nikita Woolfe, which I’m narrating, and which has its world premiere at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London SE11 on Friday December 8.

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.

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

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

 

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the website for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a new documentary film directed by Nikita Woolfe, for which I’m doing the voiceover. I met Niki at ‘The Truth About Grenfell’, a powerful event the week after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in June, organised by ASH (Architects for Social Housing), which Niki was filming (and which also features in ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’). The completed film of the event, which has had nearly 15,000 views to date, is here.

Please note that there is also now a Facebook page and a Twitter page. Please like and follow us!

A few months later, Niki asked me if I’d like to narrate the film, and I was honoured to say yes. I live in social housing (which, for foreign readers, is rented housing that is, essentially, run on a not-for-profit basis), and am a passionate defender of it, and it has been thoroughly depressing watching as it has been denigrated by those who seek to destroy it so they can make a profit from its privatisation or its destruction and replacement by new private developments.

Those who want to get rid of social housing have a number of ploys: one is claiming that it should only be for those who are especially poor and desperate, and not, as I think it should be, for anyone who wants to rent rather than own a property, but who wants to do so cheaply, and sees that as a fair trade, as those who rent never end up owning the properties they live in, unlike those who take out mortgages.

Moreover, the insane housing bubble that has dominated Britain’s economy for almost the last 20 years makes the case for social housing more, not less compelling the more the bubble continues. Far from being something that only the very poor should have, social housing is now something that is needed by everyone but the very rich, as house prices are completely out of reach for all but a small number of ordinary people, and private rental prices have followed suit into the stratospherically expensive. Where once it was accepted that no more than a third of a person’s salary should pay for their rent, people are now regularly paying over two-thirds.

While the argument for social housing for all is not widely aired, but should be, another huge threat to social housing is the planned destruction of housing estates — council estates — on the generally false basis that they are too run down to renovate. Whilst it is true that some estates were poorly built, most of those examples were demolished long ago, and most surviving estates are run down because councils themselves have failed to invest in them, and, moreover, could be renovated much more cheaply than it costs to demolish them, as ASH has persistently demonstrated.

However, those who seek to destroy them are not interesting in renovating properties for their existing tenants and leaseholders, and, as ASH has also demonstrated, paying for these works by infilling with new properties that can be sold on the open market. Instead, they are in thrall to private developers, whose preferred method for profiteering is to demolish estates and build replacements that are largely for private sale, with some available through inadequate alternatives to social rent (which is generally between 30% and 50% of private rents); for example, “affordable” rents (the greatest linguistic misnomer in modern Britain, as “affordable” rents are set at 80% of market rents, and are therefore unaffordable), and shared ownership deals, a scam that involves people paying far more than social rents to nominally own a proportion of the properties they live in.

In addition, existing tenants and leaseholders are treated with contempt, and, in general, are socially cleansed not only from their former homes, but from the entire area in which they lived. Tenants, if they are allowed to return, get smaller properties that cost much more, with no security of tenure, while leaseholders are generally priced out by being offered, through compulsory purchase orders, far less money for their old homes than is required to buy a replacement — either in the new developments or elsewhere in the vicinity.

‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ looks at the epidemic of social cleansing that is currently underway in London — most of it, it must be noted, engineered by Labour councils, with a particular focus on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, and two estates in Lambeth: Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, which I have covered before. See Surprise as Tories Judge that Compulsory Purchases for the Regeneration of Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate Breach Leaseholders’ Human Rights, for example, about the struggle of the Aylesbury leaseholders to prevent Southwark Council from offering them a derisory amount for their homes.

It is also an important part of the film that it presents a positive message, encouraging people to believe that they can make a difference, and that they can succeed in their campaigns, as happened with a small estate of sheltered housing in Streatham, Leigham Court Road, which was saved from its planned destruction by Lambeth Council through a concerted effort by its residents, with support from its architect, Kate Macintosh, and other architects.

The world premiere of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ is on Friday December 8 at the Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way, Lambeth, London SE11 4TH. Niki and I will be part of a Q&A, as will other housing activists, and there will also be a performance by the acclaimed spoken word artist Potent Whisper.

A second screening will take place at Deptford Cinema, on Monday December 18, at which I’ll be doing the Q&A, and there will also be representatives of housing campaigns in Lewisham — specifically, Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald Road in Deptford, and Achilles Street in New Cross, which I wrote about here — and if you’re in London tomorrow, please come to a benefit gig I’ve organised at the Birds Nest pub, featuring Potent Whisper, my band The Four Fathers and many other performers.

Please email Niki (or phone 07413 138909) for further information about the film, interview requests, and inquiries about screenings.

A short teaser for the film is below, via YouTube:

Note: This article has been updated to reflect the change of the film title from ‘Concrete Soldiers’ to ‘Concrete Soldiers UK.’

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

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

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

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I’m delighted to announce the launch of the website for ‘Concrete Soldiers’, a new documentary film directed by Nikita Woolfe, for which I’m doing the voiceover. I met Niki at ‘The Truth About Grenfell’, a powerful event the week after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in June, organised by ASH (Architects for Social Housing), which Niki was filming (and which also features in ‘Concrete Soldiers’). The completed film of the event, which has had nearly 15,000 views to date, is here.

A few months later, Niki asked me if I’d like to narrate the film, and I was honoured to say yes. I live in social housing (which, for foreign readers, is rented housing that is, essentially, run on a not-for-profit basis), and am a passionate defender of it, and it has been thoroughly depressing watching as it has been denigrated by those who seek to destroy it so they can make a profit from its privatisation or its destruction and replacement by new private developments.

Those who want to get rid of social housing have a number of ploys: one is claiming that it should only be for those who are especially poor and desperate, and not, as I think it should be, for anyone who wants to rent rather than own a property, but who wants to do so cheaply, and sees that as a fair trade, as those who rent never end up owning the properties they live in, unlike those who take out mortgages.

Moreover, the insane housing bubble that has dominated Britain’s economy for almost the last 20 years makes the case for social housing more, not less compelling the more the bubble continues. Far from being something that only the very poor should have, social housing is now something that is needed by everyone but the very rich, as house prices are completely out of reach for all but a small number of ordinary people, and private rental prices have followed suit into the stratospherically expensive. Where once it was accepted that no more than a third of a person’s salary should pay for their rent, people are now regularly paying two-thirds.

While the argument for social housing for all is not widely aired, but should be, another huge threat to social housing is the planned destruction of housing estates — council estates — on the generally false basis that they are too run down to renovate. Whilst it is true that some estates were poorly built, most of those examples were demolished long ago, and most surviving estates are run down  because councils themselves have failed to invest in them, and, moreover, could be renovated much more cheaply than it costs to demolish them, as ASH has persistently demonstrated.

However, those who seek to destroy them are not interesting in renovating properties for their existing tenants and leaseholders, and, as ASH has also demonstrated, paying for these works by infilling with new properties that can be sold on the open market. Instead, they are in thrall to private developers, whose preferred method for profiteering is to demolish estates and build replacements that are largely for private sale, with some available through inadequate alternatives to social rent (which is generally between 30% and 50% of private rents); for example, “affordable” rents (the greatest linguistic misnomer in modern Britain, as “affordable” rents are set at 80% of market rents, and are therefore unaffordable), and shared ownership deals, a scam that involves people paying far more than social rents to nominally own a proportion of the properties they live in.

In addition, existing tenants and leaseholders are treated with contempt, and, in general, are socially cleansed not only from their former homes, but from the entire area in which they lived. Tenants, if they are allowed to return, get smaller properties that cost much more, with no security of tenure, while leaseholders are generally priced out by being offered, through compulsory purchase orders, far less money for their old homes than is required to buy a replacement — either in the new developments or elsewhere in the vicinity.

‘Concrete Soldiers’ looks at the epidemic of social cleansing that is currently underway in London — most of it, it must be noted, engineered by Labour councils, with a particular focus on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, and two estates in Lambeth: Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, which I have covered before. See Surprise as Tories Judge that Compulsory Purchases for the Regeneration of Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate Breach Leaseholders’ Human Rights, for example, about the struggle of the Aylesbury leaseholders to prevent Southwark Council from offering them a derisory amount for their homes.

It is also an important part of the film that it presents a positive message, encouraging people to believe that they can make a difference, and that they can succeed in their campaigns, as happened with a small estate of sheltered housing in Streatham, Leigham Court Road, which was saved from its planned destruction by Lambeth Council through a concerted effort by its residents, with support from its architect, Kate Macintosh, and other architects.

The world premiere of ‘Concrete Soldiers’ is on Friday December 8 at the Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way, Lambeth, London SE11 4TH. Niki and I will be part of a Q&A, as will other housing activists, and there will also be a performance by the acclaimed spoken word artist Potent Whisper.

A second screening will take place at Deptford Cinema, on Monday December 18, at which I’ll be doing the Q&A, and there will also be representatives of housing campaigns in Lewisham — specifically, Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald Road in Deptford, and Achilles Street in New Cross, which I wrote about here — and if you’re in London tomorrow, please come to a benefit gig I’ve organised at the Birds Nest pub, featuring Potent Whisper, my band The Four Fathers and many other performers.

Please email Niki (or phone 07413 138909) for further information about the film, interview requests, and inquiries about screenings.

A short trailer is below, via YouTube:

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.

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

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

 

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

In the “you couldn’t make it up” department of Guantánamo absurdity, the prison last week secured its first new prisoner since March 2008 — not an ISIS- or al-Qaeda-related prisoner sent there by Donald Trump, as he persistently threatens to do — but Brig. Gen. John Baker, the Chief Defense Counsel of the troubled military commission trial system.

Writing in Slate, Philip Carter, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, who briefly served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy under President Obama, correctly identified Brig. Gen. Baker’s only offence as having been to “stand[] up for the rule of law and being held in contempt by a judge overseeing the military tribunals at Guantánamo.”

Carter proceeded to explain that the US has two legal systems: the best, “on display every week in federal courthouses, where processes unfold neatly and along well-worn lines established by centuries of statute and precedent,” and the worst, “on display at Guantánamo, where a dispute over government surveillance of defense counsel has resulted in a Marine general being detained (and released two days later) and civilian counsel being threatened with the same fate.”

Carter, who, in 2008, described the military commissions as “fundamentally and fatally flawed,” and argued that “the rule of law will prevail only if they are perpetually blocked,” then briefly explained the hugely problematical history of the commissions as follows: “The Guantánamo story starts two months after 9/11, with a deeply flawed executive order creating military commissions. The fateful order emerged from a hurried process that excluded most of the nation’s experts in war crimes law — including many at the Pentagon and State Department — resulting in tribunals that were eventually deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court. Congress has twice tried to fix Guantanamo’s war crimes courts, once in 2006 at the urging of President Bush and once more in 2009 at the urging of President Obama. Each time the trials get under way, however, prosecutors or defense attorneys for the detainees uncover some new defect or problem in the system.”

That is an accurate summary, but it does nothing to prepare anyone examining the commissions for what prompted Brig. Gen. Baker’s imprisonment. To understand that, what is needed is an understanding of how, at various times in the commissions’ history, defense lawyers have discovered that they are being spied on — as in April 2014, for example, when Judge James Pohl, the judge in the case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, halted pre-trial hearings after an allegation surfaced that the FBI had “turned a member of a 9/11 defendant’s defense team into a secret informant.”

In this latest collapse of trust in the commissions, the defect referred to by Philip Carter “concerns government surveillance of defense attorneys during their conversations with detainees they were assigned to represent.” He also cited other previous examples of spying, relating both to the commissions and to regular Guantánamo prisoners preparing habeas corpus petitions. As he explained, “Unnamed security agencies had listened to attorney-client conversations, read mail to and from detainees,” and even “allegedly used an interpreter who previously worked at one of the CIA’s black sites overseas.”

As he also stated, many of these incidents “remain shrouded in secrecy,” because “nearly everything at Guantánamo is presumptively classified,” and, as a result, “[e]ven the defense attorneys themselves, who hold the government’s highest security clearances, cannot candidly discuss the matter.”

However, as he proceeded to explain, “public court filings and media reporting suggests the government installed surveillance gear in the rooms used by lawyers to meet with their clients. It is unclear to what extent the government used this gear to actually listen to attorney-client conversations (which are generally sacrosanct in the American legal system), although the government has claimed the right to do so for security reasons, not to gain an advantage in the Guantánamo legal proceedings. Nonetheless, each discovery of surveillance has caused the war courts to grind to a halt, with judges very skeptical of the government’s right to eavesdrop on detainee lawyers.”

This time, however, as Carter described it, the meltdown “did more than delay the war trials: It blew up the defense team as well.”

The problem was as follows: because, by law, anyone facing the death penalty has to have a death penalty expert (“learned counsel”) to defend them, and because no such lawyers are available in the military, the Department of Defense was obliged to hire civilian attorneys to defend those facing the death penalty — the 9/11 co-accused, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

However, as Carter stated, “The Pentagon’s repeated surveillance of the defense team created an untenable ethical situation for these lawyers (Rick Kammen, Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears), who declined to continue their work under these circumstances.” Brig. Gen. Baker agreed, and “wrote that he was recommending a halt to attorney-client meetings and asking (again) that the government curb its eavesdropping on defense counsel.” He then “went further by disbanding the Nashiri defense team, citing the inability of civilian counsel to continue ethically representing their client.”

“At that point,” Carter continued, “a minor derailment of the Guantánamo trials turned into a full-fledged train wreck.” He then explained, “Under well-established law, defense counsel cannot withdraw without the court’s permission. Baker refused a request from Air Force Col. Vance Spath, the judge overseeing Nashiri’s trial, to reinstate the defense team, and also refused to testify on the matter before Spath’s court. In response, Spath declared Baker’s disbanding of the defense team to be ‘null and void’ and held Baker in contempt of court, sentencing him to 21 days of confinement and a $1,000 fine.”

This made headlines worldwide, of course, prompting widespread incredulity, and confirming what an irredeemable disaster the commissions are.

After Brig. Gen. Baker’s imprisonment, lawyers working for him sought a writ of habeas corpus, “perhaps the first time in history such a writ has been sought on behalf of an active duty general officer,” as Carter explained, adding that District Court Judge Royce Lamberth expressed concerns that Baker “had no obvious appeals route because he himself was not subject to the commissions’ jurisdiction.”

Last Friday, the commissions’ convening authority, Harvey Rishikof, decided to release Baker from his short-lived but significant imprisonment, although he “merely deferred Baker’s punishment without addressing any of the more basic tensions laid bare by Baker’s actions and Spath’s response,” as Carter put it, adding that al-Nashiri’s pre-trial hearing then continued, “but with just one relatively junior Navy lawyer, former Navy SEAL and 2012 Georgetown law school graduate Lt. Alaric Piette, representing the accused.”

As a result of this epic legal disaster, Carter concluded, accurately, that the military commissions “have gone off the rails and broken down so completely that they cannot be repaired.” As he also stated, “They now labor under the weight of ethical dilemmas like this, years of delay, and confusion about basic rules that make any effort to move them forward impossible.”

He also explained, “All three branches have tried to fix the Guantánamo war courts, and yet, even in their current incarnation, these tribunals are failing. It is time to end the charade of justice at Guantánamo and terminate these trials. The defendants in the dock at Guantánamo should face prosecution by a properly constituted American court — or none at all, and thus be detained under the laws of armed conflict. There simply is no substitute for justice and the rule of law.”

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we wholeheartedly agree — and we thank Philip Carter for explaining so accurately, and with such controlled exasperation, why the military commissions are not fit for purpose, and need to be shut down, as, of course, does the entire prison, a failed experiment in lawlessness that ought to be a source of profound shame for all decent Americans every day it remains open.

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.

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

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.

 

There was some very welcome news from Canada last week, when three Canadian citizens — Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin — were paid $31.25 million by the Canadian government as compensation for the government’s key role, via the spy agency CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) and RCMP (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), in arranging for them to be imprisoned and tortured in Syria between 2001 and 2003, when they were wrongly suspected of having some involvement with terrorism.

As the Toronto Star explained on October 26, “The payout was kept secret until this month and is part of a legal settlement that was first reported by the Star in February and announced by the Liberal government weeks later.”

The Star added, “The resolution and accompanying government apology put an end to a nine-year court battle for compensation that has been demanded since 2008,” when then-Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci concluded, in a report on their cases, that “Canadian agents labelled the men Islamic extremists and shared information with other countries without proper precautions about its unreliability.”

As the Star also stated, bluntly, “The men were never charged,” and they ended up suing the Canadian government for $100 million.

I had missed the story of the settlement earlier this year, but the Star explained that, “In March, the Liberal government announced it had reached a settlement and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale apologized to Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin for ‘any role Canadian officials may have played’ in what led to their arrests and torture.”

The Star also noted that, although the government “refused to say how much it would pay each of the men,” when officially announcing their compensation payments two weeks ago, “the $31.25-million settlement was revealed in government accounting documents tabled in the House of Commons on Oct. 5 and quietly published online.”

I am delighted to hear that the three me have finally received compensation for their horrendous ordeal. I wrote about their cases back in 2009, when I was the lead researcher and writer of a UN report into secret detention.

In that report (available here in the third of three posts reproducing the report’s key findings on my website), I noted how:

Ahmad Abou El-Maati, a Canadian-Egyptian national, was seized at Damascus airport on his arrival from Toronto on 11 November 2001. He was held in the Far Falestin prison in the Syrian Arab Republic until 25 January 2002, when he was transferred to Egyptian custody, where he remained in various detention sites (including in secret detention until August 2002) until his release on 7 March 2004.

I also stated:

Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian-Syrian national, also spent time in secret detention in the Syrian Arab Jamahiriya, in Far Falestin, from 3 May to 7 July 2002, when he received a family visit. On 25 August 2003, he was sent to Sednaya prison. He was released on 10 March 2004. He returned to Canada on 25 July 2004 after being acquitted of all charges by the Syrian State Supreme Security court.

Another Canadian, Muayyed Nureddin, an Iraqi-born geologist, was detained on the border of the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq on 11 December 2002, when he returned from a family visit in northern Iraq. He was secretly detained for a month in Far Falestin, then released on 13 January 2003.

In an interview with the Toronto Star, Abdullah Almalki, who lives in Ottawa with his wife and children, said, as the newspaper described it, that he was “ready to try to move on from a terrible episode in his life that has stretched on for 15 years.” He “wouldn’t discuss the settlement because it’s confidential,” but he did say that people “should instead focus on how to change the system so that something like this never happens again.”

Almalki said, “We were falsely targeted based on racism and bigotry. I had to fight for years to get an inquiry, and then to show that’s what [Canadian officials] did. They falsely accused us of things we had absolutely nothing to do with.”

In response to the announcement of the settlement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as the Star put it, “called the payout ‘a difficult lesson’ for what happens when Canadian governments ‘of any stripe’ allow a citizen’s rights to be violated.” As he stated, “I certainly hope that people remain concerned, angry and even outraged at these settlements, because no future government should ever imagine that it’s a good idea or an acceptable idea to allow Canadians’ fundamental rights to be violated. When we don’t stand up for people’s rights, it ends up costing all of us.”

The payments are not the first by the Canadian government. In January 2007, Canadian citizen Maher Arar received $10.5 million from Stephen Harper’s Conservative government for his abduction in the US, while he was changing flights, and his torture in Syria. As the Star put it, “He, too, was detained for almost a year in 2002 and tortured in Syria after Canadian intelligence wrongfully flagged him for suspected terrorist links.”

That was Harper’s only concession to Canadian wrongdoing in the “war on terror.” Elsewhere, he worked persistently to prevent the release and repatriation of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was just 15 when he was seized by US forces after a firefight in Afghanistan. As I explained in an article in 2013, in Khadr’s case the Canadian government “ignored its obligations to demand his rehabilitation under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories, as did his US captors.”

After agreeing to a disgraceful plea deal, just to get out of Guantánamo, Khadr finally returned to Canada at the end of September 2012, ten months after the agreed date of his return. The government then fought to keep him in prison, and he was only finally released on bail in May 2015.

In July, the Trudeau government also agreed to a $10.5-million settlement in Omar Khadr’s case, on the basis that, in 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that his rights had been violated when Canadian agents interrogated him at Guantánamo in 2003, when he was just 16. The Court stated, “Interrogation of a youth, to elicit statements about the most serious criminal charges while detained in these conditions and without access to counsel, and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the US prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.”

Nevertheless, Conservatives complained vehemently about Khadr’s payment, although they did not complain about the payment to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin. The Star reported that Rob Nicholson, a Conservative MP who was minister of justice, foreign affairs and national defence during the Harper era, told reporters that, “to the extent that false information was given to foreign agencies, which was apparently what this case was all about, they certainly deserved compensation.” His caucus colleague, Peter Kent, “added that the three men in this case are victims who ‘deserved every penny’ of their settlement.”

Djamel Ameziane seeks damages from the Canadian government

Ten days after the announcement of the settlement for the three men tortured in Syria, the Canadian Press reported that former Guantánamo prisoner Djamel Ameziane, who lived in Canada for five years and was interrogated by Canadian agents at Guantánamo, was seeking “damages of $50 million” from the Canadian government “on the grounds that Canada’s security services co-operated with their US counterparts even though they knew the Americans were abusing him.”

Speaking from Algeria, Ameziane, who is now 50 years old, and who, in September, submitted his case to the  Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, seeking an apology from the US, said, “My current situation is really bad. I am struggling to survive. I was repatriated from Guantánamo and left, like, almost homeless. I couldn’t find a job because of the Guantánamo stigma and my age, so a settlement would be very helpful to me to get my life back together.”

In a draft statement of claim obtained by The Canadian Press, Ameziane’s lawyer, Nathan Whitling, states, “The Crown’s conduct constituted acquiescence and tacit consent to the torture inflicted upon the plaintiff,” explaining that Canadian intelligence “began sharing information with the Americans after failing to pick up on the 1999 ‘Millennium plot’ in which Ahmed Ressam, another Algerian who had been living in Montreal, aimed to blow up the Los Angeles airport,” and, as a result, interrogating Ameziane and Omar Khadr at Guantánamo.

Nate Whitling told the Canadian Press that “the government’s recent out-of-court settlement … with Khadr over violation of his rights has prevented scrutiny of Canada’s alleged complicity in abuses at Guantánamo Bay,” and that a “judicial inquiry is needed.”

As he described it, “Only then can the Canadian public come to understand the extent to which Canada is responsible for the torture of innocent detainees in the aftermath of 9/11.”

Whitling also said that Ameziane “would be prepared to put the claim on hold in exchange for an inquiry,” and added that “two other people” — he did not provide names — “planned similar suits that name the federal government, RCMP and Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.”

Speaking about his lawsuit, Ameziane said, “For many years, I had the idea of suing the Canadian government, but didn’t know how, and honestly didn’t know it was possible until I read the news about the settlement of Omar Khadr, who was my fellow inmate in Guantánamo Bay. The action I am taking may also make [Canadian officials] think twice before acting against the interests of Canada and Canada’s human values.”

Ameziane’s claim reiterates his story, which is well-known to anyone who has studied Guantánamo closely. As the Canadian Press describes it, he “left Algeria in the 1990s to escape rising violence there. After working as a chef in Austria, he came to Canada in December 1995 and asked for refugee status. He lived in Montreal for five years, attending mosques where the Americans said members of al-Qaida prayed. When Canada rejected his request for asylum, Ameziane opted to go to Afghanistan rather than Algeria, where he feared abuse. He left Afghanistan for Pakistan in October 2001 when fighting erupted, but was captured and turned over to American forces in exchange for a bounty.”

US forces then “took him to a detention facility in Kandahar, where he alleges guards brutalized him, then sent him to Guantánamo Bay based partly on information provided by Canadian intelligence, according to his claim.”

Ameziane has also explained that “Canadian agents interviewed him in Guantánamo in February and May 2003 and turned over recordings of the interrogations to the Americans,” and he claims that they did so “despite widespread allegations that US forces were abusing detainees and even though they knew he faced no charges and had no access to a lawyer or the courts.”

Ameziane also alleges that “American officials interrogated him hundreds of times and abused him when they decided he wasn’t co-operating,” using forms of torture including “sleep-deprivation, intrusive genital searches, pepper-spraying, waterboarding, being left in freezing conditions, and having his head slammed against walls and the floor, dislocating his jaw.”

Speaking of his experiences with Canadian agents, Ameziane said that they “came to interview me on two occasions [and] they not only shared information about me with my American torturers, but even tried to get information out of me that had nothing to do with Canada in order to help my American torturers. I refused to answer questions. After that, I was subjected to a worse treatment by the Americans.”

Time will tell if Djamel Ameziane’s claim is successful, but in the meantime, while the Canadian government deserves respect for having dealt with its journey to the “dark side” in the “war on terror” — though the five cases of Maher Arar, Omar Khadr, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin — it is noticeable that the US still refuses to consider any claims of compensation from the tens of thousands of people it abused in the years following the 9/11 attacks — in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Guantánamo and in its global network of “black sites,” including proxy torture sites like those in Syria. The closest the US has come to accountability was an out-of-court settlement this August by two former US military contractors, the psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were the architects of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 torture program.

41 men still remain in Guantánamo, and the least the US should do is to close the prison and then to begin to think about compensating those who have been treated so lawlessly and with such brutality in the years since. But with Donald Trump in the White House, of course, no one should hold their breath hoping for positive change. America went to the “dark side” after 9/11, and shows no sign of returning to the light in the imminent future.

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.

Former Guantánamo Prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene Condemns “Cruel, Sadistic” New Policy of Allowing Hunger Strikers to Starve

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

 

It’s nearly a month since Guantánamo thrust its way back into the public consciousness with news from the human rights organization Reprieve that, under a new chief medical officer at Guantánamo, the rules for treating long-term hunger strikers had changed. Where, previously, those going without food were force-fed when they lost a fifth of their body weight, two hunger strikers — Ahmed Rabbani and Khalid Qassim, clients of Reprieve — indicated that, since the new appointment, on September 20, they were no longer being force-fed, and were not even being monitored.

Following further phone discussions with their clients, Reprieve suggested that what was happening was that prisoners were being left to suffer whatever damage might ensue from prolonged starving, but the medical authorities were still intending to force-feed them if it looked like they might die.

Force-feeding is a horrible process, of course, akin to torture, but although medical experts insist that mentally competent prisoners must be allowed to starve themselves to death, if they wish, that does not strike me as relevant at Guantánamo, where the men on hunger strike have never been tried or convicted of any crime, and allowing them to die would actually endorse the very reason they are hunger striking in the first place — because they are being held without charge or trial, with no end in sight to their preposterously long ordeal, and they have no other way of protesting about the injustice of their predicament.

Two weeks ago, Reprieve submitted an emergency motion to the District Court in Washington, D.C., asking a judge to intervene, but since then the trail has gone cold, as the government has dragged its heels regarding its response. Further developments are expected very soon, but in the meantime Maha Hilal, the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., wrote an article for Newsweek about the unfolding scandal, in which she spoke to Eric Lewis, the Washington, D.C-based attorney who is the chairman of Reprieve US and co-counsel for Ahmed Rabbani, who told her that “he now weighs just 95 pounds.”

As Maha Hilal also explained, “When I asked him whether the government would actually let prisoners at Guantánamo die, Lewis answered, ‘I don’t think they want to do that, but I don’t think they are good enough to really manage the process. So I wouldn’t rule it out.’ In other words, the only way out of Guantánamo might be for the prisoners to starve to death on the government’s watch.”

Maha Hilal also explained that a “lack of access to Rabbani has made it difficult to monitor his condition, and a recently filed affidavit by the senior medical officer in question disputed Rabbani’s claims.”  However, Lewis told her that Rabbani is “in an ‘acute state of distress,’ eating less than 300 calories of fruit a day,” and “what is clear is that he has been on prolonged hunger strike, he is severely underweight and decompensating, and the [US government] controls all the information” — which is why Lewis and his co-counsel “filed an injunction asking, among other things, for regular updates on Rabbani’s condition, including his vitals and his weight.”

Another response to the ongoing crisis came in the form of an article for New Republic by Lakhdar Boumediene, one of six Algerians kidnapped from Bosnia-Herzegovina in January 2002, flown to Guantánamo, and subjected to horrible abuse. The six were seized in connection with a plot that the US authorities had invented, but it took years for them to be able to challenge the basis of their wrongful imprisonment.

Boumediene gave his name to the Supreme Court case that, in June 2008, finally led to the Guantánamo prisoners being granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, and in the two years that followed, before the D.C. Circuit Court shut down those rights (with, ever since, the Supreme Court refusing to revisit Guantánamo prisoners’ rights), Boumediene had his release ordered.

Earlier this year, Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo, a book he co-wrote with another of the Algerians, Mustafa Ait Idr, was released, revealing both men as compelling commentators on the brutality and horrors of Guantánamo.

Boumediene’s op-ed is posted below, and I hope you have time to read it, and will share it if you find it useful. I was impressed by how Boumediene explained how hunger strikes are not a death wish, but the only form of control that exists for men unjustly imprisoned with, seemingly, no way out of their ordeal. As he states, “I stopped eating not because I wanted to die, but because I could not keep living without doing something to protest the injustice of my treatment.”

Boumediene is also critical of force-feeding, but also, of course, recognizes how unacceptable it is to compel someone at Guantánamo to give up their hunger strike, and makes the following perceptive statement about the policy of the new chief medical officer: “when faced with two inhumane options, the American government seems to have chosen both of them.”

His conclusion is particular powerful. As he says, “the American government should stop denying Guantánamo detainees their basic legal and human rights. Detainees would not have to hunger strike in the first place if they received timely, fair trials and humane treatment.”

I Was Force-Fed at Guantánamo. What Guards Are Doing Now Is Worse.

By Lakhdar Boumediene, New Republic, October 30, 2017

The military prison camp is reportedly allowing hunger strikers to waste away for longer times between feedings. It is a cruel, sadistic approach.

On November 20, 2008, sitting in my cell in Guantánamo, I swallowed food for the first time since 2006. It was a celebration of sorts. Earlier that day, my friends and I had listened to Judge Richard Leon announce his decision in our case, Boumediene v. Bush. It had taken nearly seven years and a successful appeal to the United States Supreme Court to compel the judge to review our case, but once he did, it only took a matter of days for him to realize there was no case against us. When he ordered our release, I was so relieved, so overcome with emotion, so excited to be reunited with my wife and children, that I don’t even remember what I ate.

The next morning, I resumed my hunger strike.

“Next time I eat,” I told the guards, “it will be in my own home, from the hand of my wife.”

Another 181 days passed before I was actually released. With the exception of my one celebratory meal, I had eaten nothing but what was force-fed to me through a tube. I emerged from Guantánamo at 5’9” weighing 125 pounds. When my older daughter first saw me, I was so wasted away she didn’t recognize me. “This man,” she told my wife, “is too old to be my father.”

I am sometimes asked why I went on a hunger strike. Did you want to die? Had you given up? The answer is no. Even in the darkest moments of my seven years in Guantánamo, I never let go of the hope that I would one day see my wife and daughters again.

I stopped eating not because I wanted to die, but because I could not keep living without doing something to protest the injustice of my treatment. They could lock me up for no reason and with no chance to argue my innocence. They could torture me, deprive me of sleep, put me in an isolation cell, control every single aspect of my life. But they couldn’t make me swallow their food. And I knew they wouldn’t let a detainee starve to death.

That, however, may no longer be the case. According to The Guardian and other news outlets, hunger-striking detainees have not been fed in the last month. “I am slowly slipping away,” Khalid Qasim told his attorney, “and no one notices.”

To be honest, I’m torn about whether hunger-strikers should be force-fed. On the one hand, force-feeding is a form of torture. You’re strapped into a six-point restraint chair — we even called it the “torture chair” — and a lengthy tube is jammed into your nose and snaked down your throat. You feel as though you are choking, being strangled, and yet somehow still able to breathe. It’s an excruciating, impossible-to-describe feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

At the same time, it is also torture to force a man to choose between giving up his only means of protest and giving up his life.

Remarkably, when faced with two inhumane options, the American government seems to have chosen both of them. The human rights organization Reprieve reports that “instead of force feeding them in the painful way previously done, Guantánamo medical staff have adopted a strategy of allowing the men to starve; denying them basic medical checks until their organs begin to fail and they become seriously ill; whereupon, when they are half dead, they will be kept half alive in forever-detention without trial.”

If true, this is a particularly cruel, sadistic approach. At the very least, if the American government is going to torture detainees by force-feeding them, it should return to the old policy of doing so before they starve half to death.

Better yet, the American government should stop denying Guantánamo detainees their basic legal and human rights. Detainees would not have to hunger strike in the first place if they received timely, fair trials and humane treatment. They demand justice for themselves in the only way they can because the rest of the world does not demand it for them. They are slipping away because no one notices. As a recent article about Guantánamo concludes, “Innocent, guilty, or somewhere in between, every human deserves to be treated as one.”

Lakhdar Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case Boumediene v. Bush. Prior to his seven-year internment in Guantánamo Bay, he was an aid worker for the Red Crescent Society in Bosnia. He now lives in France with his wife and children, and is the co-author of Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo.

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

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

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

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.

 

What a nasty racist clown Donald Trump is.

In response to the arrest of Sayfullo Saipov, the US citizen of Uzbek origin who is charged with killing eight people in an attack in New York, the Washington Post reported the following:

President Trump said Wednesday that he is considering sending the Uzbek immigrant accused of killing eight people in Tuesday’s terrorist attack in New York to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the United States must be “much tougher” with its treatment of terror suspects.

Trump also called on Congress to immediately dismantle the State Department’s Diversity Visa Lottery program, through which authorities have said the suspected attacker, Sayfullo Saipov, came to the United States from Uzbekistan.

The Post also stated:

“Diversity lottery — sounds nice. It’s not nice,” Trump told reporters at the White House during a meeting with his Cabinet. “It’s not good. It’s not good. It hasn’t been good. We’ve been against it.”

He added, “I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program. I am going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program.”

Speaking generally, Trump said U.S. immigration laws and the criminal justice system’s handling of suspects are “a joke” and “a laughingstock.”

“We have to get much tougher,” he said. “We have to get much smarter. And we have to get much less politically correct. We’re so politically correct that we’re afraid to do anything.”

Trump said the United States needs a system of “punishment that’s far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now. They’ll go through court for years … We need quick justice, and we need strong justice.”

As if this assault on immigration procedures and the very basis of the judicial system wasn’t alarming enough, Trump also called Saipov an “animal,” and, as the Post put it, “said the 29-year-old was responsible for the entry of 23 immigrants, many of them family members,” adding that what he called this “chain migration” endangers national security.

In a typically garbled statement, Trump said, “This man that came in, or whatever you want to call him, brought in with him other people, and he was the primary point of contact for — and this is preliminarily — 23 people that came in or potentially came in with him. That’s not acceptable.”

Trump’s comments about Guantánamo came after a reporter asked him whether Saipov should be sent there. Trump replied, “I would certainly consider that, yes. Send him to Gitmo. I would certainly consider that.”

In response, Anthony D. Romero, executor director of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued the following statement:

President Trump’s reaction to the tragedy in New York represents a trifecta of unconstitutional and wrong-headed policies. His call for more ‘extreme vetting’ and an end to the diversity visa program — which will unfairly target Muslim and African immigrants — would double down on his Muslim ban and anti-immigrant policies.

Sending Saipov to Guantánamo or treating him as an ‘enemy combatant’ would violate due process and the rule of law. The FBI and our federal court system are more than capable of dealing with terrorism cases, and Guantánamo was shown long ago to be an epic failure. It’s a shame that Trump is using this attack as a platform for pushing his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda.

Romero is correct to point out that US citizens are not allowed to be held at Guantánamo — and, of course, to take aim at Trump’s racism, and to call it out for what it is.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented Guantánamo detainees for 15 years, also issued a statement that further spelled out Trump’s horrendous anti-Muslim bias:

Guantánamo Bay is and always has been a prison exclusively for Muslims, which is undoubtedly the only reason Donald Trump made the idiotic suggestion to send Sayfullo Saipov there. Fifteen years has proven no one will ever be successfully tried or “brought to justice” at Guantánamo, and the president and his supporters within his own party are deluded if they believe otherwise.

Trump’s hatred of immigrants and Muslims emboldens white supremacists and strengthens terrorist groups like ISIS. He cares little for the escalating violence inspired by his statements or the damage to institutions of democratic government he is intent on undermining.

I thoroughly agree with the positions taken by ACLU and CCR, of course, and am so sorry for my American friends, who have to deal with this ill-thought out racism and lawlessness on an almost daily basis. US citizens can’t be sent to Guantánamo, but no one else should be either, and Trump should give up his petulant posturing and take sound advice for once — close Guantánamo, try terrorists in federal court, and stop trying to make isolated incidents into excuses to try to revive his unacceptable notions that sweeping, blanket bans on immigration are in any way either fair, just or legal.

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.