Andy Worthington's Blog, page 46

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

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On Saturday, while I was meeting up with other social housing campaigners at the Anarchist Bookfair in Tottenham (where there was a screening of the powerful documentary ‘Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle,’ housing activist and academic Lisa McKenzie and anti-fascist activist Martin Lux were discussing ‘Taking it to the Streets — the politics of Class Solidarity,’ and the Radical Housing Network was discussing ‘After Grenfell, the struggle for housing justice’), Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing was taking on some of those seeking to justify and celebrate the neo-liberal destruction of social housing at the Battle of Ideas in the Barbican Centre, described as “two days of high-level thought-provoking public debate.”

To be blunt, it is hard to think of a more important topic for those living in the UK right now than the parlous state of housing, and the class war and exploitation of the poor by the rich that is currently underway, and that, if it isn’t stopped, will destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over the coming decade.

Those people live in social housing, on estates that are being torn down not because there is fundamentally anything wrong with them structurally, but because those responsible for them — councils and housing associations — starved of funding by central government, have chosen not to fight for their tenants, but to enter into deals with wealthy and rapacious international property developers, who knock down the estates, and replace them with hideously overpriced new apartment blocks and towers, largely for sale to foreign investors.

In contrast, those who used to live on the estates — the tenants and, in the cases of properties formerly owned by councils, the leaseholders — are lied to about the reality of their predicament until, in many cases, they willingly sign their own death warrants regarding their homes. Tenants, in general, do not get to return to the new developments — and if they do, they pay considerably more, for less space, and with no tenancy rights whatsoever — while leaseholders — those who bought into Margaret Thatcher’s promise of home ownership for council tenants — are offered such derisory amounts of money for their homes that they can no longer live in the area.

Simon Elmer and his colleague, Geraldine Dening, set up Architects for Social Housing in 2015 as an alliance of like-minded individuals opposed to this destruction, and their main contribution to this unfolding nightmare — beyond taking a strong moral and ethical point of view in defence of those who live in social housing — has been to demonstrate, over and over, how refurbishment is much cheaper than demolition, and, through detailed planning, how infilling and adding to existing buildings can create extra homes without the need for any destruction.

The councils and developers don’t care, of course, because their mission is not to save existing estates, and provide new housing for genuinely affordable social rents, but to socially cleanse their boroughs of their poorer inhabitants, or those who failed to jump onto the housing ladder the last time it was remotely affordably for people on average incomes, around 15 years ago, and to join in the profiteering of the developers. In some cases, those responsible seem to have nothing but contempt for those in social housing — and as ASH has continually pointed out, the majority of the wrecking crews are Labour councils —but in other cases the ideology also involves old-fashioned corruption, with many councillors and council officials joining developers via generous revolving door policies.

On Saturday, Simon Elmer was not up against councillors but an unappealing group of architects and advisers in thrall to neo-liberal supremacist views, and all demonstrating absolute contempt for those poorer than themselves and their destructive and heartless colleagues. The only one I knew of in advance was Patrik Schumacher, who took over from Zaha Hadid as the head of Zaha Hadid Architects after Hadid’s death, and whose contemptuous supremacist views appal everyone who retains a shred of decency.

As the architectural website Dezeen explained last November:

Zaha Hadid‘s closest confidantes have distanced themselves from the speech made by her successor Patrik Schumacher, in which he called for social housing to be scrapped and public space to be privatised.

Rana Hadid, Peter Palumbo and Brian Clarke – the three other trustees of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and executors of Hadid’s estate – said they “totally disagree” with Schumacher’s views.

They also claimed that Hadid herself would have opposed the speech, which mapped out the architect’s vision for a deregulated and privatised city, with support for foreign investment into property and gentrification.

“The views recently expressed by Patrik Schumacher regarding the closure of art schools, the abandonment of social housing and the building over of Hyde Park are his personal views and are not, in any way, shared by us,” said the trio.

“Knowing Dame Zaha as well as we did, we can state categorically that she would have been totally opposed to these views and would have disassociated herself from them. We personally also totally disagree with these views.”

The others on the panel are two compromised academics, Kath Scanlon and James Woudhuysen, and Lisa Taylor, the Chief Executive of a think-tank grandiosely called the Future of London.

Below I’m cross-posting the text of Simon Elmer’s speech on Saturday, as made available on the ASH website, prefaced by an introduction in which he explained more about his fellow panelists, and provided pertinent links to their work — or their malignant propaganda. This is a rather powerful and concise defence of ASH’s position, which I thoroughly endorse, and a necessary and important rebuke to the dark forces bent on the destruction of all social housing.

Unfortunately, those on the dark side have considerable money and influence, but we are many and they are few, and if we can genuinely work out how to remember what solidarity is, after 30-40 years of its persistent erosion by the neo-liberals who are still trying to wipe us out, then we can take on these disgraceful people, who wage their bitter ideological wars not on traditional battlefields, but though turning our actual homes into battlefields from which we are to be cleansed, resist them en masse, and win this fight!

Be warned, though, if we don’t work out how to fight back effectively, we will be evicted, marginalised and removed to whatever towns can be found that can be made into privately-rented ghettos.

Battle of Ideas: Reform or Revolution in Housing?

ASH, October 28, 2017

On Saturday, 28 October, as part of the Barbican’s Battle of Ideas festival, ASH was part of a panel debate titled Housing: Reform or Revolution? The rest of the panel was composed of Patrik Schumacher, the Principle at Zaha Hadid Architects, who the previous year, at a speech at the World Architecture Festival, had called for estates in Inner London to be demolished to make way for more productive people and their ‘amazing multiplying events’; Kath Scanlon, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, who the same year co-authored a report commissioned by the Berkeley Group recommending their estate redevelopment, Kidbrooke Village, as an example of why London’s housing should be taken out of the control of local authorities and placed in the hands of private developers; Lisa Taylor, Chief Executive of [the] Future [of] London, a policy network which the previous year had published a report recommending that demolishing and redeveloping council estates was one of the keys to addressing London’s housing crisis; and James Woudhuysen, Visiting Professor at London’s South Bank University, who in 2006 on the BBC Breakfast Show had argued that recycling was a symptom of an ‘authoritarian state’ and accused the Green Party of being ‘reactionary’ and ‘anti-human’. This is the text of ASH’s presentation.

1. Reform or revolution?

I want to start with title of this event: reform or revolution, and look at what this opposition means in practice through a recent image of a new housing development. The image is an advert for the NX Gate apartments in New Cross. It shows a young woman in what I guess advertising executives would call a state of excitement, over which are written the words: ‘The rental revolution is here! Rent from £300 per week’. Developed by Realstar Living, NX Gate rents 2-bedroom apartments from £1,525 per month, not including the numerous service charges. Just down the road from this new development is the Achilles Street estate, where a 2-bedroom council flat costs £414 per month, nearly a quarter as much. Despite this, Lewisham council has plans to demolish this estate and redevelop it along the same lines as NX Gate, making it just one of over 190 such estates that have recently undergone, are undergoing, or are threatened with redevelopment, privatisation and social cleansing by London’s estate regeneration programme. In case we don’t know at whom this ‘revolution’ is being marketed, the Rightmove advert for NX Gate indicates that the new development is 10 minutes from Cannon Street and 12 minutes from Canary Wharf, with Goldsmiths College just around the corner.

In short, the ‘revolution’ in housing is a marketing gimmick, aimed at young bankers looking to buy and international students looking to rent with the bank of mum and dad. So let’s look at the reality behind this gimmick.

2. There is no such thing as a free market

Last year my fellow panelist Patrik Schumacher famously declared that council tenants were being subsidised by the state to live in parts of London they would not otherwise be able to afford, and that he wanted to demolish their homes to make way for what he called ‘his people’. Now, whatever you may think of this programme for the social cleansing of Inner London, the reality is that the UK’s post-war housing estates paid off their construction costs and debt interest years ago, and are actually making a profit for councils and housing associations. Or at least, they would be if they weren’t demolishing so many of them.

Like so many things taken as fact in debates about how to solve the housing crisis, the truth is the exact opposite of what we are told. It is the private sector that is being subsidised by the state through a myriad of schemes: Right to Buy, which has sold 1.8 million council homes, a quarter of which are now owned by private landlords; Housing Benefit, which pays £20 billion a year to subsidise the growing private rental market that has taken their place; Help to Buy, Rent to Buy and Shared Ownership, which are available to households earning £90,000 a year; and more generally with the billions of pounds of public land and assets that are being sold to private developers at a fraction of their market value. The truth is that there is no private housing scheme that is not based on pocketing huge sums of public money.

3. The public sector doesn’t exist

But just as there is no such thing as a free market, so the public sector also doesn’t exist. Is it any wonder that Parliament refuses to regulate the private rental market when 1 in every 5 MPs is a landlords? In the local authorities implementing the estate demolition programme the conflict of interest is even greater. The prime example here is Southwark council, where 1 in 5 councillors are lobbyists for the building industry, and where 6 of the most senior officers responsible for selling the Heygate estate to property developers Lendlease for one-fifteenth of its market value now either work for or with the company.

And the lobbying is not confined to councillors. Kath Scanlon of the London School of Economics, who sits beside me on this panel, was paid by the Berkeley Group to produce a report on Kidbrooke Village, a development built by them on land cleared of over 1,900 demolished council homes and around 5,000 evicted council tenants. Of the 4,500 properties for private sale being built in their place, only 150 are planned for social rent. Despite this, Professor Scanlon’s report recommended that not only our homes but our communities too be handed over to the design and profits of private developers like the Berkeley Group, whose pre-tax profits have quadrupled in just five years from £136 million in 2011 to £531 million in 2016.

In short, our public housing and public land is in the hands of individuals and institutions that mistake stewardship for ownership, and public service for the opportunity to flog our public assets to the highest bidder.

4. Building more homes is not the answer

It is universally agreed that to solve the housing crisis we need to build more homes. However, the housing crisis is not one of supply but of affordability, with 56 per cent of London homes failing to meet this criterion. Now, while the law of supply and demand describes a capitalist dream of competitive markets responding to human needs, London’s financialised housing market, flooded by global capital, is driven by profit margins. House prices in London have risen by 86 per cent since 2009 to an average price of nearly £491,000 in January 2017, fourteen-and-a-half times the average London salary, and in Inner London to £970,000; while rents in London’s private rental market have gone up by 9.6 per cent in the past two years alone to an average of £2,216 per month for a 2-bedroom home, double the national average. Simply building more high-value properties will only push these prices up.

In transport systems this is called ‘induced demand’, when building more roads actually increases traffic. As an example of which, a decade ago the only baker’s on Hackney’s Kingsland High Street was Greggs, where you could buy a loaf for under a quid. Nowadays the street is lined with artisanal bakeries selling loaves at many times that price – and, just as importantly, as of last year Greggs stopped selling loaves to concentrate on take-away health-food fodder for the influx of Dalston hipsters. Not only has the increased number of bakeries in the area increased prices rather than reducing them, but it has also removed the low-cost loaf for the local working-class population. We all know what this process is called: gentrification, which isn’t driven by consumer choice but by market creation. If we leave London’s housing to the market, all we’ll get is the housing equivalent of more artisanal bakeries.

5. There is no housing crisis

The estimated total value of the housing stock in England in January 2017 was £6.8 trillion, an extraordinary figure that has increased by £1.5 trillion in the last three years alone. Equivalent to 3.7 times the gross domestic product of the entire UK, and nearly 60 per cent of the UK’s entire net wealth, the property market now constitutes an economy in itself. Unsurprisingly, £1.7 trillion of that housing stock is in London. The function of new-build properties in London is not to house the 250,000 London households currently on housing waiting lists, or the 240,000 London households with 320,000 children living in overcrowded accommodation, or the 50,000 London households with 78,000 children that are currently homeless and living in temporary accommodation; it is to satisfy the demand of international capital for investment opportunities.

Because of the enormously inflated exchange value of these new-build properties, their use value as homes for Londoners in need of housing is almost zero. On the contrary, the more council estates are demolished to clear the land for their construction, and the more public land is lost to private companies, so the higher the demand for housing grows, the higher the price of the housing being built in their place is driven up, and the louder the demands to demolish more council estates to make way for higher cost housing in their place.

6. Architects for Social Housing

So what’s the answer? Over the past 3 years Architects for Social Housing has designed alternatives to the demolition of 5 estates, increasing their capacity by up to 45 per cent without demolishing a single existing home. Through renting or selling a percentage of the new builds privately we can generate the funds to refurbish the rest of the estate, which has typically been deprived of maintenance for years as part of its managed decline. If the requirement is to build more homes in which Londoners can afford to live, there is no necessity to demolish the only homes in London to have escaped the speculation in property. Like austerity measures, London’s programme of estate demolition and redevelopment is not an economic necessity but a political choice.

Simon Elmer

Architects for Social Housing

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

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

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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.

Just over a year ago, one of Guantánamo’s most celebrated prisoners, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, was released from the prison and sent back to his home country, Mauritania, after a review process at Guantánamo — a Periodic Review Board — recommended his release in July 2016.

Shamefully, this was over six years after a US federal court judge ordered his release, after Slahi’s lawyers submitted a habeas corpus petition on his behalf. In April 2010, Judge James Robertson found that the government “had failed to establish that what looked suspicious in his case — primarily, the fact that he was related to senior Al-Qaeda member Abu Hafs, and, while living in Germany, had met some of the 9/11 hijackers and had helped them to visit Afghanistan for military training — was actually evidence of involvement with Al-Qaeda.”

The government, however, refused to accept Judge Robertson’s ruling, and appealed, and in November 2010 the D.C. Circuit Court vacated that ruling, sending it back to the lower court to be reconsidered, where, as I described it in an article about Slahi’s case in April 2016, “it has languished ever since, mocking all notions of justice every day it has remained unaddressed.”

The shame of Slahi’s case, however, revolved around two other aspects of his story — the first is that he was subjected to a specific torture program at Guantánamo, approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that was so horrible that when military prosecutor Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, assigned to prosecute Slahi in a military commission trial, found out about it, he was so sickened that he resigned. Moreover, the torture “broke” Slahi to such an extent that, as the Washington Post explained in 2010, he started telling his captors whatever they wanted to hear. They then gave him special treatment, holding him apart from the general population, along with another allegedly useful informant, both of whom were allowed privileges forbidden to other prisoners — they grew mint for tea, for example, and Slahi, in spite of the profound reservations any objective observer would have about the genuine value of the information he gave to his torturers, was, as a reward for his cooperation, allowed to write.

The second aspect of his story that shames the US is that what Slahi wrote — in the summer and fall of 2005 — was electrifying, so much so that his lawyers sought to publish it. Years of wrangling with the government’s censors ensued, but in January 2015, to huge acclaim, Slahi’s memoir, Guantánamo Diary, was published, an account of his abduction and torture that, despite his experiences, is bursting with intelligence, compassion and an extraordinary sense of humor.

The shame, of course, is that an acclaimed, best-selling author, who had humiliated the US by showing them the truth and doing so in an extraordinarily eloquent manner, then continued to be imprisoned for nearly another two years. Had any other country done the same — continued to imprison a best-selling author, who had never been charged or tried — the outcry would have been immense, but because it was America, the great hypocrite in chief, everyone was supposed not to notice.

Since his release, Slahi has been an irrepressible presence on social media, and, to commemorate the first anniversary of his release, a new edition of Guantánamo Diary has been published, with the many redactions that the US insisted on finally removed by Slahi himself and his editor Larry Siems, who worked hard at reassembling what Siems’ government had sought to hide. See here for the US edition.

Slahi also wrote a wonderful account of his first year of freedom for the ACLU, which sought his release for many years, and we’re pleased to cross-post it below. We hope you have time to read it, and will share it if you find it useful.

My Guantánamo Diary, Uncensored

By Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ACLU, October 23, 2017

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was released one year ago from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, after 14 years without charge or trial. This week, the best-selling memoir he wrote from prison was rereleased — with the U.S. government’s redactions removed.

If I wanted to, I could put my pen down right now, close my office door behind me, and go for a long walk outside.

Today in Nouakchott, Mauritania, it is terribly hot and dry, so that would not be the wisest choice, but freedom is having that option. And freedom is choosing to write instead, not because my life depends on it, but because these days, thank God, it finally doesn’t.

A year ago this week, a U.S. military cargo plane touched down on this city’s arid runway and I was escorted, unshackled, down the airplane’s ramp and toward a group of government officials. With each step I pulled farther ahead of my American guards, farther away from the territory of bondage, and toward the territory of freedom.

Hours later, a car turned onto the street of the house where I grew up and I was swarmed by family members and supporters. And then I was standing inside the house, just a few feet away from where I sat one day when I was 11, listening to the radio as they announced names of children from around the country who had made it into high school.

Getting into high school was a big deal back then: There were few slots, and many who passed all their classes still did not make the cut. Those who managed had their names printed in the military dictatorship’s official newspaper and read over the air for the whole country to hear. My family did not even know I had taken the admissions test, because most students took it when they were 13, but I couldn’t wait. Standing in that room for the first time in 15 years, I flashed back to that moment, hearing the radio announcer mispronounce my last name and seeing the shocked look on my sister’s face.

But I don’t think my family was all that surprised. As a child, I always wanted to teach and write, and after school I would gather the neighborhood kids whose parents could not send them to school and re-create the lessons I’d received that day, using walls as my blackboard. I also had a minor compulsion for writing: I wrote things down anywhere and everywhere, and more than once I was embarrassed when friends found my intimate ideas scribbled in the margins of my schoolbooks.

That afternoon, back in my home, I held a copy of “Guantánamo Diary” for the first time. My lawyers had shown me photographs of the book on the shelves of bookstores in several cities and languages, and they were able to bring me a photocopy of my text, with all of the government’s redactions. But while I was in Guantánamo, I could not see the book itself.

Censorship is a familiar thing in Mauritania. I remember my mother telling my older brothers not to discuss politics, for fear the walls would hear. In my country, we’re used to having things kept hidden in the name of national security. What still shocks my family and friends was that the censorship in Guantánamo Diary wasn’t just in the Arabic edition. It came directly from the American original, which meant the information was being kept from the American people.

When I wrote the manuscript that became Guantánamo Diary in 2005, I had all but disappeared. I was in an isolation hut, the same one I had been dragged into two years before during my months-long torture. For four years, the U.S. government had shut me up and done the talking for both of us. It told the public false stories connecting me to terrorist plots, and it kept the public from hearing anything from me about my life and how I had been treated.

Writing became a way of fighting the U.S. government’s narrative. I wanted to bring my case directly to the people. I wasn’t sure if the pages I was writing and giving to my lawyers would ever become a book. But I believed in books, and in the people who read them; I always had, since I held my first book as a child. I thought of what it would mean if someone outside that prison was holding a book I had written.

Now, incredibly, I was holding that book myself — though in a censored, broken form. And I was meeting many people who had read it. The first thing many of them asked me was when they would be able to read the book in an uncensored version. So in the months after my release, I worked with my editor Larry Siems on what we came to call a “restored edition” of “Guantánamo Diary,” because it often felt like we were trying to restore an old building.

I worked in a copy of the book, making notes above the redactions and in the margins, and then I would take a break, go home, eat lunch, and remember even more. I found myself writing and remembering, and writing some more, and then Larry and I did what we were denied the opportunity to do the first time “Guantánamo Diary” was published: We worked together to edit these censored sections. The result was published in the U.S. last week. As with the original, uncensored, and handwritten manuscript, this is as close as I can come to the truth as I experienced it and understand it, in the best form I can express it.

Here, for example, is a passage from the new book that the U.S. government for some reason thought necessary to redact in the original. It describes a scene from a polygraph test I was forced to take while at Guantánamo:

“I noticed an ant walking up the wall, and then many more leading and following her. I learned to follow ants in the Mauritanian secret prison, watching them until they left the cell and me behind. I watched this one climb, going about her daily business and not realizing the drama that was unfolding before her very eyes.”

[image error]To the left is a page with redactions and restored text in gray (click on the image to enlarge it):

Restoring this broken text has been about seeing things that someone wanted hidden. Sometimes that someone was me. When I received the photocopy of my book in Guantánamo I stayed up all night reading it, afraid I had written something I would regret. And yes, there were things that embarrassed me. I was especially ashamed of my habit, when I was young, of making up sarcastic nicknames for people I met. The Jordanian intelligence agent who oversaw my rendition operation was not “Satan,” as I named him in the original manuscript; he is a human being, with a full life and a family. That kind of name-calling is someone I was, not someone I am now.

In that sense, reading what I wrote 12 years ago really is like reading an old diary. Sometimes I’d laugh, and sometimes I got very upset. But mostly I just smiled at my own silliness and learned more about who I was, and who I am.

Who am I now, thanks to my lawyers, my family and friends, my publishers, and my readers, is a free man: a free man who can make the choice to stay inside on a hot, hot day and write about the enormous, beautiful world outside my door.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

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

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

 

Yesterday, an important court case began in the High Court in London — an application, by 73-year old Tottenham resident Gordon Peters, for a judicial review of the legality of Haringey Council’s intention to enter into a £2bn partnership with the Australian-based international housing developer Lendlease that is deeply troubling on its own terms, as well as — if it goes ahead — having disturbing ramifications for the future of social housing throughout the entire country.

As Aditya Chakrabortty described Gordon Peters’ claim in a powerful article for the Guardian yesterday, ‘A Labour council attacking its own people? This is regeneration gone bad,’ “Aspects of his claim for a judicial review sound local and technical – but the fight itself is national and totemic. His case is being watched by the construction industry, by councils across the country and by Jeremy Corbyn’s team. Anyone who cares about the future of social housing, or what happens to London, or to local democracy, should root for Peters – not least for his bravery in placing himself squarely before a juggernaut.”

Chakrabortty added, “That juggernaut is the Haringey Development Vehicle, a scheme by the zombie Blairites running the north London borough to shove family homes, school buildings and libraries into a giant private fund worth £2bn. Its partner is the multinational Lendlease, which will now exercise joint control over a large part of Haringey’s housing and regeneration strategy. This is the plan Peters and many others want stopped. The 25-year deal is unprecedented in size and scale. It is breathtaking in its risks. And for many its consequences will be dreadful, including for their relatives and friends.”

Gordon Peters worked as a social services director in London, and “a consultant in health and social development with particular experience in policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequalities, acting for governments in Europe and Asia and with UK donors,” as he explained in a post on the Stop HDV website describing why he is seeking a judicial review. Since this retirement, he explains, he has been “an active member of Haringey Over 50s forum and chair of the Older Peoples Reference Group in the borough.”

As he explained in that article, “The legal argument here is a matter of widespread concern at a lack of accountability and democratic process, and indeed relates to a concern for the fundamental rights of people to a home and support in their community. It has ramifications far beyond Haringey regarding the ways in which social housing and truly affordable housing are being squeezed out by corporate actions in collusion with councils, many of them Labour councils, as the record of Lendlease in Southwark [currently creating an ugly private complex, Elephant Park, on the site of the Heygate council estate] shows all too dramatically. All evidence to date points to a further loss of homes for poorer people and an influx of better off rented and purchased homes in new high densities which deny or destroy existing communities. The HDV has not been able to demonstrate in any way how its establishment and operation will change things for the better, especially in such an unpredictable economic climate, and the Council putting all its development ‘eggs in the HDV basket’ in such an untested way is being irresponsible with public money. That is why it must be stopped, and the Council think — and listen — again.”

As Chakrabortty proceeded to explain, Gordon Peters is “shy and sweetly reticent,” but in the high court he has embarked on “one of the most unequal and important battles I’ve seen,” funded largely by donations from those who live in social housing in Haringey.

Chakrabortty’s article continued with the following detailed explanation of the scandal unfolding in Haringey:

The team of council leader Claire Kober has promised that every displaced tenant who wants to move back to a redeveloped estate will be able to. Yet the agreement with Lendlease is peppered with enough get-out clauses to keep Houdini happy. Housing association tenants and leaseholders won’t get that deal – and neither will those who live on Broadwater Farm and other estates to be regenerated later in the scheme.

All this rolls on with minimal consultation of residents – as observed by the council’s own consultants. The council’s own scrutiny committee twice this year called for an immediate halt. Both times it was ignored by Kober. Only a week before Kober’s cabinet voted on the scheme, in July, her team dumped 1,476 pages of documents in the public domain. Councillors and the public alike had just five working days to digest the legalese, bureaucrat-speak and appendices that would determine the future of more than a quarter of a million people.

I went to that July vote, which came days after the Grenfell inferno had sent Britain a warning about what happens when poor people go disregarded. We sat inside the civic centre, while outside an army of protesters roared up through the windows. In a night of damaging admissions, one of Kober’s lieutenants admitted that the new HDV estates could fit “poor doors” , presumably to stop any working-class tenants blotting the sightlines of those in the new luxury flats. The chamber exploded with outrage.

It passed, despite opposition from the area’s two MPs and its two constituency Labour parties, and despite Corbyn making clear at last month’s party conference that the plans of this Labour council would be impossible under any Labour government he heads.

Merely to set up this scheme, Kober’s administration expects to spend more than £2m – a sum that would build a tidy number of starter homes. It admits to having already spent £90,000 on lawyers for this week’s hearing – before any of its QCs have even uttered a word in court. Although Lendlease has joined the case, it wouldn’t tell me how much it was spending. Nor would it answer any of the other questions I put to it – unsporting behaviour for a firm about to get its hands on all that public property. Peters’s float for legal fees, by the way, is £5,000.

Yet since the HDV was made policy this summer two key bits of information have emerged that raise questions about both its aim and its workings. As far as I know, neither has been picked up by any other major media.

First, some context. Crucially, the business plan for the HDV makes not one mention of building new social housing. In a borough where more than 9,000 households are waiting for a council flat and more than 3,000 are in temporary accommodation, Kober has promised only to ensure that 40% of new homes are “affordable”.

On Northumberland Park, one of the first estates earmarked for regeneration under the HDV, more than 1,000 social-rent homes face demolition. Their replacement is just over 5,000 homes – the vast majority for sale or rent privately. According to the freedom of information (FoI) response, only 31% of new homes are designated as affordable. And crucially, the plans make no explicit provision at all for social-rent housing. Lendlease, to remind you, bulldozed nearly 1,200 social-rent homes on south London’s Heygate estate and built just 82 in their stead.

That takes us to the second big warning: the secrecy that now shrouds much of council housing policy. A few weeks ago it emerged that three council representatives had been meeting Lendlease as part of what was called the “shadow board”. These meetings began taking place months before the cabinet actually approved the scheme. Many councillors I have spoken to were told nothing of the board’s existence – they found out through an FoI request.

I asked the council why and it said that it had been disclosed in cabinet papers in February. True: in that 650-page bundle, there is indeed one solitary mention of a shadow board. Press officers also said that the shadow board had no “formal status”. Earlier this month, a senior officer who sits on the shadow board told councillors they hadn’t been told of its existence as it was “pretty boring stuff”.

Chakrabortty proceeded to mock that used the word “boring”, noting, “[a]s if the corporate takeover of a London council’s housing strategy was a mere banal detail,” and adding, “Yet the group was deciding how the new HDV should run, its marketing and even going out for getting-to-know-you-dinners costing £450 a time – just as Haringey is looking to scrap subsidies for meals on wheels. But I guess that’s pretty boring as well.”

He continued:

Equipped with a £50,000 budget, the shadow board also issued position papers. One sets out a helpful grid for the reaction the HDV should elicit from “varied audience types”. So politicians should think “this company will help me achieve my political objectives”. Community members should “engage constructively in discussions. Share messages on social media.” As for hacks, they must “write positive pieces promoting the good work that is being achieved to counteract negative activity”.

I hope all journalists who value the supposed integrity of their profession are taking note of this last point.

Chakrabortty concluded his article as follows: “This is what happens when a Labour leadership attacks the very base that keeps it in power. When an ideologue claims she is being a pragmatist, while those lodging pragmatic objections are dismissed as ideologues. Peters and his side don’t come armed with millions. They rely on a fiver given here, a benefit gig there and a lot of social media. As one said: ’We’re like the Vietcong, going up against the all-powerful Americans.’ Well, we know how that one turned out. My money is on Peters’s side winning – eventually.”

I hope Aditya Chakrabortty is right — as I also hope that the victory takes place sooner rather than later. All eyes need to be on this struggle, and everyone who believes in social housing (non-profit housing for rent, at no more than 30% of market rent) needs to be prepared to fight to protect it.

In the meantime, the court case continues. Yesterday, barrister David Wolfe QC, representing Gordon Peters, told Mr. Justice Duncan Ouseley, “The claimant and others are particularly concerned about the process the council has followed. They are very concerned the council is taking a once in a generation decision without proper consultation and without redress to full council. There is a lack of accountability and democratic process.”

As the Ham & High newspaper explained:

The first detailed concern was on whether it was lawful for Haringey to set up the HDV as a limited liability partnership, LLP, (a type of business where one partner cannot be held responsible for the misconduct of another) rather than as a company.

The second focused on whether the law required the council to consult the public before deciding to give the scheme a green light.

The third was about whether the council failed in its duty to assess the HDV’s impact on vulnerable people, including the elderly and minorities.

The last centred on whether or not the decision to pursue the HDV should have been taken by all Haringey’s councillors and not just a “select few” cabinet members.

David Wolfe QC disputed the council’s claim that it is “not looking to make a profit out of the HDV,” with Gordon Peters providing a document establishing that the scheme is actually required to generate a “commercially acceptable return” from its activities, which in turn suggests that “cabinet members were misled” when they were told that the HDV’s aims “are non-commercial” before deciding in favour of the HDV in July.

Wolfe added that, “under the HDV residents and lease holders would be moved from a council landlord bound by the Human Rights Act to one that is not,” and also explained that “the council has to consider how to prevent discrimination, advance equal opportunities and encourage a sense of community, whereas the HDV would not.”

The Ham & High also noted that, “When Mr. Justice Ouseley pressed Mr. Wolfe to explain his claimant’s concerns over how the HDV would be managed, the barrister explained how if something went wrong in a council tenant’s home he or she could contact their ward councillor who might then get in touch with a Haringey officer who could help.” However, as he described it, “Once this goes to an HDV that is imperilled. The extent to which it is imperilled depends on [how the HDV is governed].”

Today, Ranjit Bhose QC tried to defend the position of Haringey Council and Lendlease, claiming that there have been “no democratic deficiencies,” and that “[e]xisting residents and tenants have been kept informed about the HDV,” an also claiming that there are “no equality issues in this case.” He also put forward the council’s argument that the scheme “will bring jobs and improve housing, something which it could not do without private sector investment and expertise,” as though that argument — even if true — were justifiable. To my mind, it is unacceptable to take dirty money just because you’re underfunded, and I completely fail to understand how Claire Kober and her team can justify their social cleansing intentions, and their hideously unequal planned relationship with Lendlease, which, lest we forget, is a multinational corporation interested only in making a profit.

The hearing concludes tomorrow.

UPDATE October 26, 18:36: Stop HDV tweeted, “[H]earing now over. Judge will make decision asap but could take some weeks. The campaign continues on estates & in political arena.”

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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! Fundraiser for Tidemill and Achilles Street Campaigns with Potent Whisper, The Four Fathers, Commie Faggots at the Birds Nest, Nov. 12

Check out the Facebook event page here — for ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham!’ at the Birds Nest, in Deptford, London SE8, on Sunday November 12 from 6-11pm, with Potent Whisper, the Four Fathers, the Commie Faggots, Asher Baker, The Wiz-RD and Ukadelix.

Followers of London’s housing crisis — and, particularly, the destruction of social housing estates and their replacement with new, private developments — will know, from the experiences of residents and leaseholders on the Heygate Estate in Walworth, in the London Borough of Southwark, that councils and developers talk sweetly about the right to return for tenants, and about adequately compensating leaseholders, but that in the end both groups are socially cleansed out of their homes, and often out of their boroughs, and even out of London completely, as they are excluded from the new properties built to profit the developers, and to appeal to investors (and largely, it seems, to foreign investors).

The biggest culprit to date has been Southwark Council, which is currently engaged in another huge act of social cleansing on the Aylesbury Estate, also in Walworth, but there have been other notorious examples — the West Hendon Estate, for example, Woodberry Down in Hackney and Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets — and other councils are queuing up to engage in their own social cleansing. Lambeth Council plans to demolish two well-regarded estates, Cressingham Gardens and Central Hill, and Haringey Council is currently trying to enter into a 50/50 partnership with the rapacious international property developer Lendlease (the butchers of the Heygate Estate) in a £2bn deal that will see the council handing over control of all its social housing, with plans for the destruction of several estates.

Until recently, Lewisham has not figured prominently in this story, having largely bypassed social cleansing issues by working with developers on brownfield sites. But at the end of September, Lewisham councillors approved the destruction of Old Tidemill Garden and a block of social housing on Reginald Road, in Deptford, and the council is also intending to demolish blocks of flats and shops on and around Achilles Street in New Cross. See the Tidemill Facebook page, the Achilles Street Facebook page, and also see my article, Social Cleansing and the Destruction of Council Estates Exposed at Screening of ‘Dispossession’ by Endangered New Cross Residents.

Another current campaign involves resistance to the development of Creekside by the Birds Nest — the so-called Deptford Riviera — which centres on a boating community in Deptford Creek, and a number of properties on Creekside itself. For more on that, see this extraordinarily detailed article on the Crosswhatfields? website.

As part of the resistance to the plans, as a fundraiser for the campaigns, and as a way of hopefully bringing people together, the No Social Cleansing in Lewisham! fundraiser for the Tidemill and Achilles Street campaigns is taking place on Sunday November 12 at Deptford’s legendary live music venue The Birds Nest, and features the acclaimed spoken word artist Potent Whisper (check out ‘Grenfell Britain’ here), the militant rock and roots reggae of my band The Four Fathers, the theatrical singalong dissent of the Commie Faggots, Southwark-based rapper Asher Baker, teenage beatbox poet The Wiz-RD, and local ukulele group Ukadelix.

I hope you can join us!

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

Celebrities Fasting With the Hunger Striking Guantánamo Prisoners That Donald Trump Is Allowing to Die

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.

It’s two weeks since the international human rights organization Reprieve let the world know that, under Donald Trump, the military at Guantánamo has come up with a disturbing new way of dealing with hunger strikers — allowing them to die. Previously, long-term hunger strikers who lost one-fifth of their body weight but refused to stop hunger striking were force-fed — a barbaric process that experts view as tantamount to torture, and a view that I endorse. However, although experts also state that competent hunger strikers must be allowed to die if they wish, that has always struck me as an unacceptable option for prisoners who have never been convicted of a crime. The third option, which should be implemented, is for the US government to do what the hunger strikers want — which is to be charged or released.

I broke the news of this disturbing policy change on my website on October 7, and followed up with an analysis of the New York Times’ coverage four days after. Since then there have been op-eds by the two prisoners represented by Reprieve, Ahmed Rabbani (in Newsweek) and Khalid Qassim (in the Guardian), and to accompany the coverage — finally shining a light back on Guantánamo after, for the most part, silence on the topic since Donald Trump took office — Reprieve launched a petition to Donald Trump, asking for him to allow independent medical experts to assess the health of the hunger strikers, and to close Guantánamo for good, which currently has nearly 22,000 signatures, and also encouraged supporters to fast in solidarity with the hunger strikers.

Reprieve’s founder, Clive Stafford Smith, led the way with the fasting (for five days straight), and was soon joined by others. Over a thousand days have been pledged so far, with some well-known people joining in, like music legend Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, who wrote on Facebook:

Ahmed Rabbani and Khalid Qassim.

Have been in Guantánamo for 15 years

Neither man has been charged

There is no evidence either man has committed a crime

They have been on hunger strike since 2013

The only way they have to protest their innocence

And affirm their humanity

Until three weeks ago they were strapped into restraint chairs

Twice a day and force-fed supplements through their noses

Since September 20th the supplements have been withheld

They are being left to die

Ahmed weighs 95lbs

–

Reprieve is trying to save their lives

Alongside my comrades at Reprieve

I am fasting for 24hrs, 15th October 2017

Tomorrow I shall eat

I am ashamed.

Restiamo Umani.

On October 17, Tom Watson MP, the deputy leader of Britain’s Labour Party, joined the fast, writing in the Guardian:

I’m following the Guantánamo diet in solidarity with two men who are being slowly starved to death by President Trump.

His administration has changed its practice towards detainees who choose to refuse food in protest at their incarceration. Previously they were force-fed, a cruel and inhuman punishment in itself. Now they are no longer fed at all. Make no mistake, these men will die at the hands of Donald Trump if nothing is done.

The human rights organisation Reprieve got in touch last week to alert me to the situation of two of their clients, Ahmed Rabbani and Khalid Qasim [aka Qassim]. They have been on long-term hunger strike in protest at their indefinite detention in the notorious prison camp without charge or fair trial. Neither man wants to die, but after over a decade of torture, injustice and indifference, they are desperate. The only thing they feel they can do, the only control they have, is to refuse food.

On 20 September, the authorities in Guantánamo stopped feeding Ahmed and Khalid altogether. It is no coincidence that this has happened under Trump, a man who has talked of wanting to ‘load up’ the island prison with more ‘bad dudes’. As I write this, the two men have had nothing in their stomachs for 26 days.

Worse than just starving them, the medical teams at the American military base have stopped providing them with any treatment or even monitoring their health. That is criminal neglect, pure and simple.

After 26 days … Khalid and Ahmed are almost certainly close to severe organ failure. It is a matter of time until irreversible damage is done; we may have already passed the point of no return. Make no mistake, force-feeding is cruel. But this dramatic change in practice is sadistic.

Tom Watson also wrote:

So what can I and other MPs do about this?

First, we can’t let these two men die in silence. They are among the most powerless in the world and have faced grave injustice at the hands of our close ally. We need to take on their plight as our own and raise the alarm, on social media and in the House of Commons.

We should be asking questions of ministers. Why have they not spoken publicly about this? Have they raised it at the highest levels with their counterparts in the US? What responses have they got?

And we should be demanding that the prime minister show some leadership. Earlier this month, Theresa May said she wanted Britain to provide a ‘moral lead in the world’. This is her chance. She has closely allied herself with President Trump, holding his hand in Washington and inviting him here. She must now tell him to save the lives of Ahmed and Khalid, and she should go one step further.

She should tell President Trump to close down Guantánamo Bay and give the men locked up there what they have been asking for: a fair trial or a release. When America abandons our shared values, we must play the role of the critical friend.

On October 19, Clive Stafford Smith appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, revealing how other supporters fasting in solidarity with the prisoners include the actor and director Mark Rylance (who recorded a short video here), the actor David Morrissey, the comedian Sara Pascoe, and French-born actress Caroline Lagerfelt.

The Democracy Now! feature is below, via YouTube:

That same day the Pakistani politician — and former cricketing legend — Imran Khan had an op-ed published in the Washington Post, looking at Ahmed Rabbani’s case, and entitled, “A Pakistani man is starving to death in Guantánamo. We have a duty to stop it.”

And on October 20, the British writer and actor Stephen Fry joined the fast, posting on Twitter the following message: “Obviously a day without food is nothing for a well-fed, well-upholstered man like me, but doing nothing seems like a feeble option in the face of such brutal, cruel and barbaric injustice.”

I hope you agree, and will be able to help, whether by signing the petition, joining the rolling fast, or contacting your elected representatives if you’re in the US — find your Senators here, and your Representatives here. The sad truth is that, commendable though their involvement is, all of them, with the exception of Tom Watson, have been on fasts before, for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was finally freed in October 2015, or have actively called for the closure of Guantánamo, as have dozens of Watson’s colleagues in the British Parliament, whereas, unfortunately, few American celebrities have ever stood up for the rights of the Guantánamo prisoners, or called for the prison’s closure, and it is, frankly, almost inconceivable that a Senator or a member of the House of Representatives would fast in solidarity with the prisoners or even publicly take a stand with campaigners calling for the prison’s closure.

If you want to get involved, you can also send us a photo with our poster urging Donald Trump to close Guantánamo, an initiative that we’ve been running all year, in an effort to chip away at the indifference towards Guantánamo that was malignantly blossoming until this latest outrage broke out of its confines.

It’s time to make Donald Trump pay attention — and to get Guantánamo closed once and for all. Are you with us?

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

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

 

Last week I was delighted to be interviewed by Scott Horton, the Texas-based libertarian who has conducted more than 4,000 interviews since 2003, and is also the author of the recently published book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. Our 34-minute interview is here (and here as an MP3), and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful.

Scott and I have spoken dozens of times since he first contacted me a little over ten years ago to discuss the distressing case of Jose Padilla, a US citizen held on the US mainland and tortured as an “enemy combatant,” who was then transferred to the federal court system and given an 17-year sentence, shamefully increased to 21 years in 2014.

On this occasion, Scott contacted me to talk about the first genuinely shocking news to emerge from Guantánamo since Donald Trump took office in January, when it was revealed that he wanted to send new prisoners there — a terrible idea, and something that hasn’t happened since 2008, hasn’t yet happened under Trump, and hopefully never will, despite Trump’s evident enthusiasm for it.

The recent news, however, concerns a disturbing new policy, implemented on September 20, whereby long-term hunger strikers are no longer being force-fed, and, as a result, are being left to die by the authorities — or, at the very least, to suffer serious organ damage before they are force-fed just before they die — because, verne with an unfeeling sociopath in the White House, deaths at Guantánamo are, in general, to be avoided because they can be inconvenient in terms of PR.

I’ve been covering this story since it was first revealed two weeks ago (also see here and here). Scott also wanted to talk about other Guantánamo-related news, and I was happy to oblige; in particular, the failure of the Supreme Court to accept an appeal by Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, al al-Qaeda propagandist convicted in 2008, but who has since had most elements of his sentence overturned. I wrote about that here, and was pleased to have the opportunity to talk to Scott about how the Supreme Court has been a profound disappointment on issues relating to Guantánamo since its powerful and important habeas corpus ruling in Boumediene v. Bush in 2008, which, subsequently, the justices allowed to be overturned by politically-motivated judges in the D.C. Circuit Court (the Washington, D.C. court of appeals).

There was more in the show, and, as I say, I hope you have time to listen to it. This is how it was described on Scott’s website:

Author and director Andy Worthington returns to the show to discuss his latest article, “New York Times Finally Reports on Trump’s Policy of Letting Guantanamo Hunger Strikers Die; Rest of Media Still Silent.” Worthington details the legacy of hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay and explains that the US is facing the awful decision whether they should they let prisoners starve themselves to death or use grotesque measures to force feed them to keep them alive.

According to Worthington the Supreme Court has abdicated any responsibility lately to address prisoners at Guantánamo Bay while the drone program has made the capture program close to obsolete. Ultimately Worthington believes that the United States has been totally incapable of identifying threats and responding appropriately, let alone justly.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

Ahmed Al-Darbi, Admitted Terrorist at Guantánamo, Receives 13-Year Sentence Following 2014 Plea Deal

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

 

Last Friday, the US authorities secured a rare success at Guantánamo, when a panel of US military officers gave a 13-year sentence to Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi prisoner, for what the New York Times described as “his admitted role in a 2002 attack by Al Qaeda on a French oil tanker off the Yemeni coast.”

Al-Darbi had pleaded guilty in his military commission trial in February 2014, but his sentencing had not taken place until now because it was dependent upon him providing testimony for the trials of other prisoners, testimony that he undertook this summer, providing videotaped testimony against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is on trial for his alleged involvement in the bombing off the USS Cole in 2000, and a deposition in the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, another prisoner facing a trial by military commission.

Under the terms of the plea deal, as Charlie Savage described it in the New York Times, “the commission could have imposed a sentence of 13 to 15 years.” However, the prosecutors joined with al-Darbi’s defense team to ask for “the minimum available term in light of his extensive assistance to the government.” As Savage put it, al-Darbi “has renounced Islamist ideology and lived apart from the general detainee population for years.”

His attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University New York (CUNY), told the jury that his client “was a changed man from the time of his capture,” as Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald, who has kept himself apart from detainees who “espouse extremist or violent ideology, and he has counseled other detainees to abstain from useless, disruptive behavior.” According to “a document Kassem read into the record that was signed by a prosecutor,” he also “had ‘respectful and professional relationships’ with war court prosecutors and law enforcement agents.”

Charlie Savage noted that al-Darbi “received no credit for the nearly 12 years he was in custody before his guilty plea, so he would complete his sentence in February 2027.” However, he added that “the Pentagon official who oversees the commission system may waive the remainder of his sentence after February 2023.”

Before the sentence was announced, al-Darbi, who was “wearing a dark suit and glasses, stood at a lectern and said he took full responsibility for his actions, for which he apologized.”

He also “thanked Guantánamo staff members and guards who he said had been kind to him, forgave those he said had ‘treated me harshly’ and expressed remorse about the hardship and shame he said his actions brought his wife and children.”

As he put it, “I wish that I could talk now to myself years ago, or to any young man considering the same path, and tell them: ‘Don’t lose your life and future for something that is not real.’”

Carol Rosenberg reported that he said, “The time I have spent at Guantánamo has taught me to see clearly who I was, where I was going and what I was doing. It gave me time to think and to see that the violence is wrong and does not stand on any solid foundation. I am thankful for these lessons.”

Rosenberg also noted that, “In his last court appearance, at the prodding of a prosecutor, he described how a US Army interrogator abused him in Bagram,” which including an incident when “the soldier pulled out his penis and stuck it in [his] face.” Nevertheless, at his sentencing, al-Darbi said he forgave those who mistreated him and declared himself “grateful to each person who has dealt with me since my capture, even those who treated me harshly, because I have learned something from each one. The guards who showed me kindness even though they believed I was their enemy, they are a lasting legacy to me. I leave this place a better man thanks to them.”

According to al-Darbi’s plea deal, as Charlie Savage proceeded to explain, “he admitted that from 2000 until 2002, he helped plan and arrange for a Qaeda operation to sink at least one civilian oil tanker near the Strait of Hormuz, resulting in the attack on the French ship, the Limburg. Yemeni suicide bombers rammed an explosives-laden boat into the ship in October 2002, killing a Bulgarian crew member and wounding 12 other sailors.”

By that time, al-Darbi was already in US custody. Seized in Azerbaijan four months earlier, he was one of those unfortunate enough to be subjected to particular abuse in Bagram, and continuing at Guantánamo, as he explained in a statement in 2009 that I made available here.

Charlie Savage also explained that al-Darbi’s attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University New York, “told the commission on Friday that as early as August 2002, his client had provided detailed information about the members and last known locations of the Qaeda cell plotting to attack ships,” which, frankly, renders inexplicable the abuse he subsequently suffered at Bagram and Guantánamo, as described in his 2009 declaration.

The question now, of course, is whether Donald Trump will honor al-Darbi’s plea deal, but I suspect that he will — not though his own irredeemably broken attempts to understand the situation, but because his advisors will poi t out that it would be absolutely unacceptable to mess around with the terms of a plea deal — not only on its own terms, but also because it would so thoroughly undermine any future efforts to secure cooperation from prisoners with information that might help in military commission cases.

As Charlie Savage put it, the question for the Trump administration is “whether it will live up to the Obama-era deal and transfer him to Saudi Arabia by February to serve the remainder of his sentence.” He noted that al-Darbi “struck the deal with the Pentagon official who oversees the commission system, who agreed to recommend a transfer,” but who also “lacks the authority to order the government to carry it out.”

For his part, Ramzi Kassem said after the sentencing that, as Savage put it, “it was in the United States government’s interest to live up to the deal.”

Kassem said, “Honoring the agreement with my client and Saudi Arabia would serve the Trump administration’s interests. It would encourage other witnesses to testify for the government in the military commissions and federal court. And it would avoid alienating an important ally.”

As Charlie Savage added, he also noted that “if the United States did repatriate Mr. Darbi, he would not be released, but would instead serve the remainder of his sentence in a custodial rehabilitation program for low-level Islamist extremists.”

While al-Darbi’s sentencing proceeded smoothly, elsewhere the troubled military commissions suffered another severe blow to their generally tattered credibility. Charlie Savage explained how Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri’s entire civilian defense team — Richard Kammen, a death penalty specialist, and two other civilian lawyers — “quit for ethical reasons related to a dispute over the confidentiality of their communications with their client,” as Kammen said in a statement; in other words, they quit because the government had been spying on them.

Savage added that the details of the dispute “are murky because filings related to the matter are classified,” but Kammen’s resignation, reported by the Miami Herald, “means pretrial hearings probably cannot proceed until Mr. Nashiri gains representation by a new death penalty expert.” and Brig. Gen. John Baker, the chief defense lawyer in the military commissions, “said in an email that he was looking for one but did not know how long it would take to find one.”

With the government’s track record off his it has been dealing with the defense team, I have to say that it could take some time — but for Ahmed al-Darbi, at least, some sort of justice does seem to have finally been delivered.

However, as I pointed out in an article in summer, The Absurdity of Guantánamo: As US Prepares to Release Ahmed Al-Darbi in Plea Deal, Less Significant Prisoners Remain Trapped Forever, al-Darbi’s sentencing only highlights the fact that less significant men than him are still held at Guantánamo without charge or trial, and if Donald Trump gets his way, will still be there when al-Darbi returns home, and when he competes his sentence — men like Khalid Qassim and Ahmed Rabbani, held without charge or trial, whose despair at ever receiving justice led them to embark on hunger strikes many years ago, and who now, instead of being force-fed, as has been the policy for 11 years, are being subjected to a new policy of being allowed to starve themselves until they suffer serious internal damage, at which point the authorities are threatening to intervene to force-feed them again to stop them from dying.

While men like Khalid Qassim and Ahmed Rabbani go through these agonies, the repatriation of Ahmed al-Darbi cannot be allowed to happen without concerted efforts to show how unfair that is for the majority of the men still held, and I urge everyone who wants to see Guantánamo closed to think about how we might mobilize, at the time of his transfer back to Saudi Arabia, to expose how unjust that is for the majority of the 40 other men at the prison, only nine of whom are facing, or have faced trials.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

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

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 eleven days since prisoners at Guantánamo, represented by the human rights organization Reprieve, reminded a forgetful world of the never-ending injustice of the prison. Ahmed Rabbani, a Pakistani prisoner, and Khalid Qassim (aka Qasim), a Yemeni, both long-term hunger strikers, told their lawyers that, since September 20, “a new Senior Medical Officer (SMO) stopped tube-feeding the strikers, and ended the standard practice of closely monitoring their declining health.”

I wrote about the plight of the hunger strikers — and Donald Trump’s disturbing new policy — in an article last Saturday, but at the time the rest of the world’s mainstream media showed no interest in it. It took another four days for the New York Times to report on the story, and even then Charlie Savage accepted assurances from the US authorities that “an 11-year-old military policy permitting the involuntary feeding of hunger-striking detainees remained in effect,” an assertion that I regard as untrustworthy, because the US military has a long track record of being untrustworthy when it comes to telling the truth about Guantánamo.

Last Thursday, Reprieve followed up on its initial reporting by securing an op-ed in Newsweek by Ahmed Rabbani, entitled, “Dear President Trump, Close Guantánamo Bay and Give Us a Fair Trial”, which I reported here, and on Friday the Guardian gave Khalid Qassim the opportunity to comment. His article, “I am in Guantánamo Bay. The US government is starving me to death,” is cross-posted below, and I hope you have time to read it, and will share it if you find it useful.

In Reprieve’s original press release, they suggested that six men were on a hunger strike, and I confirmed that one was Sharqawi al-Hajj, whose lawyers had publicized his case just last month. Another man who is known to be on a hunger strike — out of the remaining 41 prisoners — is Abdul Salam al-Hela (aka al-Hilal), a Yemeni businessman, whose attorney David Remes told Charlie Savage that he was one of the hunger strikers, and who, yesterday, told the Independent, that al-Hela’s “weight had dropped from 165lbs to 110lbs and that he has been coughing up blood.” He added that al-Hela “had launched his protest after he was refused permission for a second phone call a month to his family in Yemen.”

In addition, I think, based on an email from a reader, that the fifth hunger striker is Ghassan al-Sharbi (aka Abdullah al-Sharbi), who, as his most recent review, on April 18, stated, “has continued to engage in a long-term, nonreligious fast.” The lawyers who spoke to Charlie Savage also told him about a sixth prisoner, identified as a hunger striker by other prisoners, although he “does not have a lawyer,” and it is not known which category of prisoner he is.

The other prisoners, however, are all what is known as “forever prisoners,” held without charge or trial, but given parole-type reviews — Periodic Review Boards — every few years to ascertain whether they are still regarded as a threat. This process was established under President Obama in 2013, and while it was useful for enabling the Obama administration to release low-level and insignificant prisoners who had previously been regarded — with too much caution, frankly — as ”too dangerous to release,” it has left those still regarded as some sort of a threat in a terrible sort of limbo, in which it is understandable that hunger striking can be seen as the only way of protesting against the injustice of imprisonment without charge or trial, and, it would seem, without end.

As I have previously pointed out, force-feeding prisoners is an abomination, and has accurately been assessed by experts as a form of torture, but Trump’s new position — of letting hunger striking prisoners starve to death — is also unacceptable, and it is completely valid for the prisoners to demand, as they are doing, that they be charged or released. To help with this, please sign Reprieve’s petition to Donald Trump, calling for independent medical experts to be allowed to assess the hunger strikers, and for Guantánamo to be closed, which currently has over 18,000 signatures, and please also consider joining Reprieve’s founder, Clive Stafford Smith, and over 400 supporters to date, who are fasting in solidarity with the prisoners.

Before posting Khalid Qassim’s Guardian article, I’d like briefly to look at his case. At the time of his Periodic Review Board, in February 2015, it was clear that he was nothing more than a foot soldier for the Taliban, but had responded to his long and unjust imprisonment by “committ[ing] hundreds of infractions” against the guard force, prompting Clive Stafford Smith to tell his PRB, “Let’s face it, his disciplinary record is not good.” However, as the Guardian reported at the time, he also “said Qasim should be transferred because other Guantánamo Bay prisoners with disciplinary problems had been resettled without becoming security threats to the United States.”

In the transcript of Qassim’s PRB, Clive Stafford Smith elaborated further on his client’s case, stating:

I’m convinced from my experience with Khalid that he’ll adjust well to release. And there are various factors that lead me to this conclusion. First, it is my assessment that Khalid is not interested in extremism. I have never got the slightest indication in the last year that he is. Second, I’ve got to say, at the risk of embarrassing him, he is an intelligent young man. I was struck by this when I first received his letter [introducing himself to Clive]. And I’d really appreciate it if you’d actually look at this letter because it’s astounding really. He’s taught himself English here in Guantanamo. And what really struck me about this letter is the amazing copperplate handwriting that he uses, you know, that he’s taught himself here. I’ve got to say it’s better than any handwriting I’ll ever have. And I have shown this letter to my six-year-old son Wilford to try and teach him to write better; because frankly, Khalid’s writing in English is a lot better than Wilf’s.

Khalid has taught himself English since he was in U.S. custody. And this is both an illustration of his hunger for learning, and his willingness to make the most of his situation. It is perhaps also one of the reasons that he’s been viewed as noncompliant and been noncompliant, because he’s taught himself English and become the person who is the interlocutor in some of the cellblocks.

When I meet with Khalid, we have these interesting discussions about the state of the world. And you know, he has a very open and inquiring mind. His main requests of many frankly are less about legal things and more about materials to help him learn. For example, we provided him with a complete dictionary of English pronunciations in rather tiny print so that he could improve his diction.

Below is Khalid Qassim’s article:

I am in Guantánamo Bay. The US government is starving me to death

By Khalid Qassim, the Guardian, October 13, 2017

I am in so much pain that I know it can’t go on much longer. As each night comes, I wonder if I will wake up in the morning writes Khalid Qassim.

I haven’t had food in my stomach for 23 days. The 20 September was the day they told us they would no longer feed us. They have decided to leave us to waste away and die instead.

I am in so much pain every minute that I know it can’t go on much longer. Now as each night comes, I wonder if I will wake up in the morning. When will my organs fail? When will my heart stop? I am slowly slipping away and no one notices.

There is a man who is in charge of all the medical staff. I don’t know his name but they call him the senior medical officer. He was the one who called us all in and told us they would stop feeding us. As soon as he took over I knew he was bad news and now he has decided to end our lives.

I started hunger strike because I was so frustrated, so depressed – I have been locked up here so far from my family for 15 years. I have never been charged with a crime and I have never been allowed to prove my innocence. Yet I am still here. And now Donald Trump says that none of us – the 26 “forever” prisoners who have apparently committed no crime, but merit no trial – will ever leave here so long as he is in charge.

Some will say I brought the pain on myself. But how can that be? I did not ask to be brought here. I did not do anything that justified being kidnapped and hauled half way around the world. It is true that there have been times when I thought I would be better off dead. This was the only peaceful way I thought I could protest. What I really want, for me and for the other men here, is justice. Certainly, I never wanted to die in the pain I’m now in.

They have stopped feeding us before but this time feels different. They want to stop the hunger strike by any means. They keep repeating: if you lose part of your body that is your choice; if you are damaged, that is your choice. They intend to leave us until we lose a kidney or another organ. They will wait until we are damaged. Maybe until we are too damaged to live.

Just over a week ago, on 29 September, I collapsed and they called a “code yellow” – that’s what they call it. I’ve seen it before but this is the first time the code has been for me. Still I got no treatment. Still they continue to starve me. I can’t walk anymore. My hip joints are swollen and it is too painful. I am so tired and so weak.

The worst thing is, the medical staff aren’t recording anything. They don’t check how close I may be to death. The nurses are writing nothing down. They don’t reply when I ask them if they’ve recorded my missed meals. They should be there to care, but they don’t care.

These days have been the most terrifying of my 15 years in this place. We are used to torture here but this is so slow and so cruel. The people who are supposed to look after us are hurting us. I have been reduced to pleading for my life. I am asking for anyone out there to talk about what’s going on here. To ask why Trump is letting us slowly die. I don’t have many days left.

These words were dictated by Khalid Qasim from Guantánamo Bay to his attorney, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, of the human rights organization Reprieve. Khalid Qassim has been held at Guantánamo Bay for 15 years. He has never been charged with a crime or had the chance to prove his innocence at trial. Khalid comes from a small town in Yemen and travelled to Afghanistan in search of work in 2000. He was detained by Afghan police and handed over the US forces in a case of mistaken identity. It emerged later that the US offered large financial incentives to local law enforcement to hand over Arab prisoners for interrogation.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

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

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 now nine days since the international human rights organization Reprieve issued a shocking press release, explaining that two clients at Guantánamo, the Pakistani Ahmed Rabbani, and Khalid Qassim (aka Qasim), a Yemeni, both hunger striking to protest about the injustice of their seemingly endless imprisonment without charge or trial, had told them that, since September 20, following new instructions from Donald Trump, “a new Senior Medical Officer (SMO) stopped tube-feeding the strikers, and ended the standard practice of closely monitoring their declining health.”

I immediately wrote an article about the news, and was, frankly, astonished that it took another four days for the mainstream media to respond — and when that happened, it was just the New York Times paying attention, and, to my mind, giving too much credibility to the authorities, via a spokesman who claimed that the military’s “11-year-old military policy permitting the involuntary feeding of hunger-striking detainees remained in effect.” Given the lies we have heard from the military at Guantánamo over the years, I asked, in an analysis of the New York Times article, why we should trust them.

Expanding on the story further, Reprieve, on Thursday, secured coverage in Newsweek — a description of the current situation, made in a phone call to Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, by Ahmed Rabbani, who has been at Guantánamo, without charge or trial, for just over 12 years, and who, before that, was held and tortured for 545 days in CIA “black sites” including the disgusting “black site” in Afghanistan, codenamed COBALT, which was known to the prisoners as the “dark prison.”

I hope you have time to read the article, which I’m cross-posting below, and that you will share it if you appreciate its worth. Before I post it, however, I want to say a few words about the manner in which hunger strikers have been treated at Guantánamo, why they are hunger striking, and what they hope to achieve. I completely acknowledge that “tube-feeding” or force-feeding is a horrible process, which I have frequently referred to as a form of torture, but although mentally competent prisoners are supposed to be allowed to starve themselves to death, that presupposes that they are not, in the first place, held in conditions that are legally, morally and ethically unacceptable. Since Guantánamo was established under George W. Bush, the US has claimed that a law passed the week after the 9/11 attacks, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, allows prisoners to be held at Guantánamo, but in fact holding men indefinitely without charge or trial is unacceptable, whatever the US claims, and any other country practicing it would be branded as a dictatorship.

For the hunger strikers, therefore, a third option, beyond force-feeding or starving themselves to death, is for Donald Trump to address their complaints — and to either charge them or let them go. Of the 41 men still held, just ten are facing, or have faced charges, five are approved for release but are still held, while 26 others are officially held without charge or trial. Since 2013, they have been reviewed via Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process which led to 38 prisoners being approved for release (of whom all but two were free under President Obama), but while this was a helpful way of reassessing prisoners’ significance, it remains inadequate as a justification for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial and with no end in sight.

To send a message to Donald Trump urging him to close Guantánamo, please sign this Reprieve petition, which currently has nearly 16,000 signatures, and if you want to do more, please send a photo to the Close Guantánamo campaign that I’ve been running since 2012, and please also consider joining Clive Stafford Smith in a fast in solidarity with the prisoners.

Dear President Trump, Close Guantánamo Bay and Give Us a Fair Trial

By Ahmed Rabbani, Newsweek, October 12, 2017

I’m a taxi driver from Karachi, in Pakistan. Fifteen years ago I was sold for a bounty and taken by the U.S. military to a secret prison in Afghanistan.

They mistook me for someone called Hassan Gul, and I was tortured for over a year before they flew me to Guantánamo. There’s no disputing this — it’s in the U.S. Senate report on torture. I’ve been held here ever since then, without charge or trial.

I’ve been through a lot — but a new punitive medical regime at this prison might finally kill me.

In May 2013, without any way of defending myself or securing my freedom, I resorted to peaceful protest, and began a hunger strike.

The authorities immediately instituted rules to deal with me and others. If you lost over a fifth of your weight, they would tube-feed you, by force and in a painful way. I weighed 135 pounds when I started, so when I reached 108 pounds I had to be tube-fed.

I have tried to keep my dignity, insisting on going to force-feedings by myself, rather than being dragged to the chair by the ‘forcible cell extraction’ team.

Now, on September 20, things abruptly changed. A new punitive regime has begun, one which deprives us of the proper medical surveillance we so badly need.

A new senior medical officer (SMO) arrived, bringing in a new Trump administration policy of refusing to tube-feed anyone on hunger strike. They apparently don’t mind if people die because of the injustice here, because they figure nobody cares about Guantánamo anymore, and nobody will notice.

I’ve lost more weight than ever before — I’m well under 100 pounds — but they have stopped bringing anyone to check my vitals, weigh me, or force-feed me. They want this peaceful protest over. So they refuse us access to medical care.

The doctors here do what the new medical boss tells them. He wants me to beg him for food, but I will not. He is like a dictator.

They tell me it’s my fault if I die. But all I am asking for is basic justice — a fair trial or freedom. I know I am innocent, but I’m not allowed to prove it. I don’t want to die, but they will not succeed in breaking my strike. I will not stop demanding justice.

I have a message for President Trump. He is a businessman. The government doesn’t have a case against any of us. Instead of wasting $11 million a year on each prisoner they hold on this island by killing us, why not bring us to court where we can defend ourselves?

Then he can turn this place into a museum — a place for others to visit, to learn about the awful mistakes of the past. Trump could even charge for entry and make money.

Maybe I will die as a result of this hunger strike. Maybe I will lose my sight, and go blind — even so, in here I have nothing to see. One thing is clear: that one day, the authorities at Guantánamo will be held responsible for what they have done.

Ahmed Rabbani is a Pakistani citizen who has been held at Guantánamo Bay without charge or trial since September 2004. Ahmed is assisted by the human rights organization Reprieve.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

Abandoning Guantánamo: The Supreme Court’s Shame as a Military Commission Appeal Is Turned Down

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.

On Tuesday (October 10), when the Supreme Court turned down an appeal submitted by Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Guantánamo prisoner convicted of terrorism charges in October 2008 in a military commission trial, the justices demonstrated that, for over nine years now, they have proved incapable of fulfilling their role of upholding the law when it comes to issues relating to terrorism.

This is a profound disappointment, because, four months before al-Bahlul’s conviction, on June 12, 2008, those who respect the law — and basic human decency — were thrilled when the Supreme Court delivered a major ruling in favor of the prisoners at Guantánamo. In Boumediene v. Bush, the justices ruled that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights; in other words, that they could ask an impartial judge to rule on whether or not their imprisonment was justified.

The ruling was the third major ruling by the Supreme Court regarding Guantánamo. In June 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the court had ruled that the military commission trial system at Guantánamo did not have “the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.” The court also ruled that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, prohibiting torture and “humiliating and degrading treatment,” had been violated.

In June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, the court had first granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights. This ruling was subsequently undermined by Congress and the executive, leading, eventually, to the court not only reasserting that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights in Boumediene, but also ruling that Congress had erred in seeking to remove them.

Nevertheless, since Boumediene the Supreme Court has done nothing for the men at Guantánamo. In the wake of that ruling, the law finally penetrated Guantánamo, and 38 men had their releases ordered by judges after they ruled that the government had failed to demonstrate that the men in question were connected, in any meaningful sense whatsoever, to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Unfortunately, in 2010-11, judges in the court of appeals (the D.C. Circuit Court) set out to undermine Boumediene, vacating or overturning six of the lower court’s habeas rulings, and eventually gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners by ruling that the lower courts had to presume that everything the government submitted as evidence must be regarded as accurate unless it could be proved otherwise.

This was absurd, as so much of the so-called evidence against men held at Guantánamo is thoroughly unreliable, having been produced through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, but when the Supreme Court was repeatedly asked to address this power grab by the D.C. Circuit Court, which effectively nullified Boumediene, the justices repeatedly chose not to.

Five years ago, when a mentally ill prisoner, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, took his own life, I pointed out that all three branches of the US government — including the Supreme Court — were to blame. Latif had his habeas corpus petition granted by the District Court in 2010, but that ruling had then been dismissed by the D.C. Circuit Court after President Obama’s Justice Department appealed it, which should never have happened. Latif then appealed to the Supreme Court, like many other Guantánamo prisoners in the years since Boumediene, but, like all of them, he had been ignored, as the court effectively allowed its authority to be usurped by the D.C. Circuit Court.

Given this history, Monday’s failure of the court to take up al-Bahlul’s appeal comes as no surprise, but as law professor Steve Vladeck explained in an op-ed in the New York Times last week, the justices should have taken the case.

As Vladeck pointed out, “Since the establishment of the Guantánamo Bay military commissions over 15 years ago, the dominant legal question has been whether they may try individuals charged with ordinary domestic criminal offenses that are not recognized as international war crimes.”

As he proceeded to explain, “Although the United States had occasionally used military commissions to try enemy soldiers before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of such trials only in areas under military occupation or in cases in which the offenses were international war crimes. Because military occupation presupposes the absence of a functioning, civilian government, military tribunals are the only option. And as for international war crimes, the Supreme Court concluded during World War II that such offenses committed by enemy belligerents fell outside of the Constitution’s jury-trial protections — which otherwise require that all serious crimes be tried in civilian court.”

As he also explained, “The principal innovation (and one of the central controversies) of the post-Sept. 11 military trials at Guantánamo has been to extend the reach of military commissions to purely domestic criminal offenses, especially conspiracy and ‘providing material support to terrorism.’ The government has been unable to tie almost any of the Guantánamo detainees — most of whom were, at most, low-level Qaeda fighters — to specific international war crimes. But rather than simply hold the detainees in military detention or try them in civilian court, the government has used the secrecy-laden criminal proceedings at Guantánamo to push the constitutional envelope.”

It has indeed been a rocky road for the commissions, as experts warned when President Obama revived them in 2009, having frozen them when he took office to assess what to do with them. Several serving officials in the Obama administration warned Congress that they expected any material support convictions to be overturned on appeal, and there was no great confidence that the conspiracy charge would also survive. As Steve Vladeck described it, while conspiracy to commit war crimes “is a crime under domestic law, it is not recognized as a war crime by international law. Hence the constitutional question: Does a military commission’s assumption of federal court jurisdiction over domestic crimes violate the Constitution, which reserves the ‘trial of all crimes’ to the judiciary?”

In the fall of 2012, the fears about misplaced war crimes charges came true, when Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, had his material support conviction quashed, and in January 2013 the court also overturned the conviction for material support, conspiracy, and another charge, solicitation, in al-Bahlul’s case.

This was not the end of al-Bahlul’s long legal saga. As I wrote in June, after his appeal had been submitted to the Supreme Court, “In July 2014, on appeal, a full, en banc court confirmed the decision to overturn the conviction for material support and solicitation, but issued a fractured ruling on the conspiracy charge. However, in July 2015, that conviction was overturned, although that decision was then appealed, and in October 2016, the en banc court reinstated it,” although, again, in an unclear manner, as I explained in an article entitled, In Contentious Split Decision, Appeals Court Upholds Guantánamo Prisoner Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul’s Conspiracy Conviction.

As Steve Vladeck described it, “The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld Mr. Bahlul’s conviction last year. But Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion, said the question in play should be decided because ‘other cases in the pipeline require a clear answer.’” Vladeck added, “He’s absolutely right. Settling this question would go a long way toward settling the structural legitimacy of the Guantánamo tribunals.”

He proceeded to explain that “[e]ach of the eight convictions obtained by the commissions to date has included at least one purely domestic criminal charge, and five turned exclusively on such offenses. And each of the three cases pending at Guantánamo, including the trial of five men accused of being the masterminds of the Sept. 11 attacks, includes charges unsupported by the Supreme Court’s pre-Sept. 11 precedents.”

As he also explained, “There are compelling arguments against extending the jurisdiction of military commissions to domestic offenses,” and he offered three explanations, each of which, unfortunately, the Supreme Court ignored. The three reasons are as follows:

First, as the court recognized during World War II, military tribunals are a narrow and carefully circumscribed exception to the general right of all criminal defendants to a trial by a civilian jury. To expand that exception beyond international war crimes, even for those accused of being part of Al Qaeda, is to open the door to further, novel incursions on that right in the name of national security. As Justice Felix Frankfurter once explained, “The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”

Second, allowing military tribunals to try domestic offenses creates a serious line-drawing problem, since it is not at all clear what would otherwise limit the jurisdiction of military tribunals — and the government has not identified such a line in the Bahlul case. Especially as transnational terrorism continues to blur longstanding distinctions between the military and civilian spheres, preserving a constitutional stopping point is crucial.

Third, and perhaps most important, the government has demonstrated no compelling need for the Guantánamo tribunals. Civilian courts have been remarkably effective over the past 15 years in trying and convicting terrorism suspects, even amid complaints by some civil liberties groups that judges have been too solicitous of government arguments. Just last Friday, a federal court in Brooklyn convicted an American for his involvement in a 2009 truck bombing of a United States Army base in Afghanistan. He had been captured by Pakistani authorities in 2014 and extradited to the United States. And this week, the trial of a man prosecutors say was the ringleader of the Benghazi attacks began in a civilian federal courtroom in Washington.

Despite the evident success of terrorism trials in federal court, Donald Trump continues to demonstrate a desire not only to keep Guantánamo open, but also, as Steve Vladeck described it, to “reinvigorate the detention operations and military commissions.” Given these aims, it is important, as he noted, for the highest court in the land to determine “[w]hether domestic offenses are or are not within the jurisdiction of the Guantánamo tribunals,” because this “will have a lot to say about their utility as a policy option for future detainees — along with the legitimacy of the entire military commission enterprise thus far.”

As Vladeck also noted, the government “urged the Supreme Court to turn down the Bahlul case, arguing that the lower courts have not been divided on the major constitutional question it presents, and that, in any event, there are difficulties specific to the case that would preclude the justices from deciding the issue.” As he pointed out, however, the D.C. Circuit Court’s decision actually “stands in marked contrast to both claims: First, seven of the nine judges who ruled on Mr. Bahlul’s last appeal thought that it was the right case to decide the constitutional question, and then they reached a decision, dividing 4-3 in favor of the government.”

Vladeck concluded his op-ed by stating that, “If the justices are interested in settling, once and for all, the central question that has surrounded the post-Sept. 11 military commissions, they should agree to hear the case.”

It is now clear that they are not interested in settling that question, and that, it seems to us at “Close Guantánamo,” is an abdication of their responsibilities, one that will continue to ensure that the much-criticized commissions continue to limp on with unresolved confusion at their core, as well as continuing to deny justice to Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who has been separated from the rest of the prison’s population since November 2008, even when, for 18 months in 2013-14, his conviction had been overturned.

Every indication we have is that al-Bahlul, who refused to even mount a defense at his trial in 2008, has no interest in the twists and turns of his case, but for anyone who has a lingering belief in the concept of justice in the US, it is hard to see how the Supreme Court’s ruling this week does anything to indicate that the post-9/11 excesses of the Bush administration are being taken seriously, nearly 16 long and depressing years since Guantánamo first opened.

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.

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