Andy Worthington's Blog, page 51

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

Today I’ve posted the first of three new Four Fathers videos on our YouTube channel — all recorded at our gig at Vinyl Deptford on April 28. Thanks to Ellen for recording the show.

The first of the videos is of our opening number, ‘Rebel Soldier’, an old folk song that I gave a new tune and a reggae rhythm 30 years ago while living in Brixton. At the time I put together band called the Rebel Soldier with my friend Glyn Andrews, who sadly died some years ago, and we sometime used to play with Vivian Weathers, who played bass with Linton Kwesi Johnson — and who, incidentally, taught me some crucially important lessons about the role of the bass in reggae music.

‘Rebel Soldier’ is one of a handful of songs I wrote — or arranged — in the 1980s that I have played with The Four Fathers, since we first formed three years ago. Our recording of it is on our first album, ‘Love and War’, released in 2015, as well as another song from that time, ‘City of Dreams’, five new songs, a song written by our guitarist Richard Clare, and two covers. Another song from that time, ‘River Run Dry’, about the end of an affair, will be on our second album , ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ which we’re planning to release in the autumn.

The video is below, and I hope you like it, and will share it if you do:

Forthcoming are videos for our cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ (also on ‘Love and War’, and a live favourite), and ‘Riot’, which we released as an online single in May. Please also check out our latest release, ‘London’, if you haven’t already heard it, and do get in touch if you can offer us a gig or if you’d like be on our mailing list — or you just want to say hello. Please also feel free to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter.

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

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

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

 

The following article is one of my few forays into topics that are not related to Guantánamo, British politics, my photos or the music of my band The Four Fathers, but I hope it’s of interest. It’s an overview of the current situation regarding artificial intelligence (AI), written by Tom Pettinger, a PhD student at the University of Warwick, researching terrorism and de-radicalisation. Tom can be contacted here.

Tom and I first started the conversation that led to him writing this article back in May, when he posted comments in response to one of my articles in the run-up to last month’s General Election. After a discussion about our fears regarding populist leaders with dangerous right-wing agendas, Tom expressed his belief that other factors also threaten the future of our current civilisation — as he put it, “AI in particular, disease, global economic meltdown far worse than ’08, war, [and] climate change.”

I replied that my wife had “just returned from visiting her 90-year old parents, who now have Alexa, and are delighted by their brainy servant, but honestly, I just imagine the AI taking over eventually and doing away with the inferior humans.”

Tom replied that it seems that AI “could pose a fairly short-term existential risk to humanity if we don’t deal with it properly,” adding that the inventor and businessman Elon Musk “is really interesting on this topic.”

I was only dimly aware of Musk, the co-founder of Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, so I looked him up, and found an interesting Vanity Fair article from March this year, Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse.

That article, by Maureen Dowd, began:

It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence.

They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who don’t live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking, as a massive rocket part traversed overhead. Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world: interplanetary colonization.

Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars—so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if AI goes rogue and turns on humanity.

Tom found his own particularly relevant quote, about Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, who “compared AI jitters to early fears about airplanes, noting, ‘We didn’t rush to put rules in place about how airplanes should work before we figured out how they’d fly in the first place.’” As Tom explained, AI enthusiasts like Zuckerberg “don’t recognize that at the point it’s too late, we can’t do anything about it because they’re self-learning, and it’s totally driven by the private (i.e. profit-inspired) sector, which has no motivation to consider future regulation, morality or even our existence.”

He added, “I think Musk’s one of the smartest guys on the planet: he wants to tackle climate change, so he starts Tesla and SolarCity; he wants to ensure humans have an ‘out’ against Earth catastrophes, so he develops SpaceX; he wants to ensure the best chance of a good future regarding AI, so he develops OpenAI and Neuralink. His thoughts (and many other experts/ thinkers) on AI come down to: we either advance like never before as a species, or likely become extinct, with no middle ground. And the consensus within the AI field seems to suggest within 30-70 years this change will come about.”

Tom then sent two links (here and here) to two summaries of the debate about AI, which he described as “hugely informative”, adding, “The first link is a basic introduction to the road from narrow AI (what we have today) to general AI (human-level intelligence) and superintelligence (super-human AI). The second one is aimed more at those interested in social science, exploring the potential consequences.” He also stated, “both are definitely worth a read. If you wanted a summary of them though I’d be more than willing to oblige. I love writing, and this subject!”

I replied asking Tom to go ahead with a summary, and his great analysis of the pros and cons of AI is posted below. I hope you find it informative, and will share it if you find it useful.

Artificial Intelligence: Humanity’s End?

By Tom Pettinger, July 2017

“Existential risk requires a proactive approach. The reactive approach — to observe what happens, limit damages, and then implement improved mechanisms to reduce the probability of a repeat occurrence — does not work when there is no opportunity to learn from failure.” AI expert Nick Bostrom

Does artificial intelligence spell the end for all of us? This post looks at how AI is developing and the potential consequences for humanity of this impending technological explosion. Depending on where the technology takes us, our species could experience the greatest advancement in its history, the worst inequality ever seen, or even push us to a point of extinction. I argue that within this century, we’ll likely be seeing human-level and super-intelligent AI and that we should be considering the consequences now rather than waiting until the unknown consequences arrive. Just to make it clear from the start, when we’re talking about AI, think algorithms rather than robots. (The ‘robots’ merely perform the physical function the algorithms behind them tells them to.) So think less Terminator, and more Transcendence. However it turns out, one thing’s for certain — it’s not long before our very existence is transformed forever.

Phase 1: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – specific-functional intelligence

Artificial Narrow Intelligence is already all around us. ANI is essentially algorithms that serve a specific and pre-programmed purpose, allowing humans to function more effectively and enjoyably, supporting our development. It’s in our smartphones, self-driving cars, computer gaming — all of these are examples of single-purpose, ‘narrow’ intelligence. The algorithms cannot change their roles, which are strictly defined by their programmers, and they have no ability to decide what their tasks are outside of human control. We’ve become ever-more dependent upon ANI, to a point where it’s hard to think of an institution or sector that is not driven by ANI; financial institutions, education, public transport, energy, and trade are all sectors run by computing intelligence that would collapse if we removed it. ANI is getting smarter all the time, self-learning within their specified roles; AlphaGo, the program that famously beat Go professional Lee Sedol, developed its tactics by playing against itself, millions of times. However, it cannot perform other tasks, like setting the temperature, displaying a website, or changing traffic lights; this program will remain narrow intelligence and consigned to playing Go.

Phase 2: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – human-level intelligence

Artificial General Intelligence, however, is the point where the algorithms have reached human-level intelligence and can essentially pass the Turing Test, where you can’t tell if you’re speaking with a human or a machine (other definitions of AGI are explored here). AGI is ultimately the ability to practice abstract thinking, reasoning and the art of self-tasking. So where AlphaGo (ANI) can improve its Go playing, AGI would be able to master any game it decides to, as well as look at ways of reducing traffic, analyse stock markets and write up reports on war crimes, all at the same time. The main difference between human and algorithmic ability to ‘compute’ information in this phase would largely be speed. AGI-level algorithms would have similar intuition, analysis and problem-solving capabilities as we possess. But already, smartphones can now perform instructions hundreds of millions of times faster than the best computers that first took humans to the moon, and in the future, this will only have increased dramatically.

Robots (essentially shells containing clever algorithms) could also cook dinner, engage in conversation or debate with you, and take your kids to school. Moves towards AGI are underway; computer programs are now learning a range of video games based on their own observations and practice, like a human learns, rather than just being focussed on becoming proficient at one single game. Robots are beginning to hold basic conversations and are interacting with dementia patients. However, we are still a long way off AGI; self-learning a multitude of games or engaging in primitive interactions is nowhere near passing the Turing Test. Having said this, Moore’s Law, which suggests that computing power doubles every two years, has been upheld for the last 50 years and so although some slowdown will probably occur, the shift from ANI to AGI looks set to occur within 25 years. The median date predicted by experts for AGI has been around 2040 in several different studies. Reaching this level is a milestone as it will pave the way for the next phase in our journey towards superintelligence.

Phase 3: Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) – super-human intelligence

Reaching Artificial Super Intelligence is the point at which artificial intelligence will have become superior to the intelligence of humanity. Here, the ‘Singularity’ is said to have occurred; this term denotes a period where civilization will experience disruption on an unprecedented scale, based on the AI advancements. Essentially everybody in the field accepts that we’re on the brink of this new existence, where AI severely and permanently alters what we currently know and the way in which we live.

In terms of how intelligent ASI could become, it can be useful to think of different animal species. From an ant, to a chimpanzee, to a human, there are distinctive differences in terms of comprehension . An ant can’t comprehend the social life of a chimpanzee nor their ability to learn sign language, for example. And a chimpanzee couldn’t understand how humans fly planes or build bridges. As ASI develops, it will begin to surpass our own limits of comprehension, like the difference between ants and chimps, or chimps and us. The principal difference between AGI and ASI is the intelligence quality. ASI will be more knowledgeable, more creative, more socially competent, and more intuitive than all of humanity. As time progresses and this superior intellect improves itself, the disparity between ASI and human knowledge will only increase. In the ant-chimpanzee-human scale, ASI may be able to progress to hundreds of steps of comprehension above us, in a relatively short amount of time. We can’t really conceive how ASI would think, because its level of understanding would be greater than ours – just as chimps can’t get on our level and comprehend how we fly planes.

There is only very limited debate about whether or not reaching ASI will happen; the debate focusses more on when it will happen. Although some, like Nick Bostrom, warn that this ‘intelligence explosion ’ from AGI to ASI will likely “swoop past”, most predict that the transition from AGI to ASI will take place within 30 years. We can think of the scale of change that this transition would bring by looking back over human history. There have been several marked steps in our existence as a species:

From 100,000 BC early humans without language to 12,000 BC hunter-gatherer society
From 12,000 BC hunter-gatherer society to 1750 AD pre-Industrial Revolution civilization
From 1750 pre-Industrial Revolution civilization to 2017, with advanced technology (electricity, Internet, planes, satellites, global communication, Large Hadron Collider)

It is often said that the shock we would get if we travelled to the 2030s or 2040s might be as great as the shock a person would get if they travelled between any of these steps. If you travelled from 1750 to today, would you really believe what you were seeing? Within this century, most experts predict the arrival of artificial superintelligence, which could result in the same unimaginable shock as if a human from 100,000 BC travelled to the advanced civilization of the present day. Also notice that the time of each step grows exponentially shorter: the first step lasted nearly 100,000 years; the second about 14,000; and the third just over 250, all with similar levels of change. It should not be inconceivable that, in another 50-80 years, we experience another one of these shifts. The rate of technological progress seen in the entire 20th century was accomplished between 2000-2014, and an equal rate of  progress is expected between 2014-2021. Ray Kurzweil, whom Bill Gates called “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”, suggests last century’s advancements will soon be occurring within one year, and shortly afterwards within months and even days.

The Great Debate

Whether the change is for good or bad is debated by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil, who largely see ASI as beneficial, and Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk who see ASI as posing a potentially existential risk. Those who see only good outcomes from ASI denounce pessimists’ views as unrealistic scaremongering, whilst those who consider the future dangerous argue that the optimists aren’t considering all the outcomes properly.

The Optimist’s View

These optimists assert that ASI will vastly improve our lives and suggest we will likely embrace transhumanism, where ‘smart’ technology is implanted into our bodies and we gradually see it as natural. This transition has already begun, largely for medical reasons — implants that trick your brain into changing pain signals into vibrations, cochlear implants to help deaf people hear, and bionic limbs. This will become more commonplace; Kurzweil thinks we will eventually become entirely artificial, with our brains able to connect directly to the cloud by the 2030s. Some think that we will be able to utilize AI to become essentially immortal, or at least significantly slow the effects of ageing.

Any task that may seem impossible for humans — like developing better systems of governance, combating climate change, curing cancer, eradicating hunger, colonizing other galaxies — optimists say will seem simple to ASI, just as building a house must seem unimaginably complex for a chimpanzee but perfectly normal to humans. Though he’s a pessimist, Bostrom says, “It is hard to think of any problem that a superintelligence could not either solve or at least help us solve.”

One concern has been about the mass loss of jobs, as AI becomes ever-more prevalent. Tasks such as driving, administration and even doctoring, which have always been done by humans, are now vulnerable to  automation. It is said that 35% of British jobs, 47% of American jobs, and 49% of Japanese jobs — the list goes on — are at high risk from automation over the next couple of decades. However, the optimists counter that jobs are merely displaced rather than being abolished with technological advancement; automation in one area just means workers retrain and move into other jobs. Bringing tractors on to farms or machinery into factories did not cause mass unemployment; those workers moved into working with the technology or found other jobs elsewhere.

The optimists contend that fears about AI (and in particular ASI) ‘taking over’ are misplaced, because, in their view, we have always adapted to the introduction of new technologies. The lack of pre-emptive regulation around AI is often cited as problematic, but Zuckerberg compared these fears to concerns about the first airplanes, noting that “we didn’t rush to put rules in place about how airplanes should work before we figured out how they’d fly in the first place.” Kurzweil says, “We have always used machines to extend our own reach.”

The Pessimist’s View

The pessimists’ fears are represented by Bostrom’s comment that we are “small children playing with a bomb”; they see the potential threats outweighing the benefits to human existence when thinking about AI. They suggest that optimists ignore the fact that ASI won’t be like previous technological advances (because it will be cognitive and self-learning) and will not act empathetically, philanthropically, or knowing right from wrong without serious research and consideration. As AI research is largely driven by the private (i.e. profit-inspired) sector, there is minimal motivation to consider future regulation, morality or even our existence. Estimates of 10-20% existential risk this century are frequently given by those in the AI field. Once AI passes the intelligence level of humanity, it is argued that we will have little to no control over its activity; those like Gates and Hawking emphasize that there’s no way to know the consequences of making something so intelligent and self-tasking, and it only pays to think extremely cautiously about the future of AI.

The general rule of life on Earth has been that where a higher-intellect species is present, the others become subjugated to its will. Elon Musk is so concerned with the possibility that  “a small group of people monopolize AI power, or the AI goes rogue” that he created Neuralink, a company dedicated to bringing AI to as many people as possible through connecting their brains to the cloud. He thinks ASI should not be built, but recognizes that it will, and so wants to ensure powerful AI is democratized, preventing the subjugation of the majority of humans to AI or a human elite. If the technology is not widely distributed among humanity, pessimists claim the likelihood is that we will become subjected to ASI, similar to the way chimpanzees are sometimes subject to human will (keeping them in zoos, experimenting on them, etc.).

There is, without doubt, potential for devastating unintended consequences as a result of ASI. Super intelligent machines could develop their own methods of attaining their goals in a way that’s detrimental to humanity. For example, a machine’s primary role could be to build houses, but it decides that the best way would be to tear down every other house to use those bricks. Or should they reach the level of intelligence to develop their own goals, they could decide to prevent global warming but determine that humanity stands in the way of protecting the environment and remove us from the equation. Pessimists argue that the idea that we’ll be able to control ASI, or shut it down when it doesn’t function the way we want, is misguided. Like chimps aren’t able to determine their existence outside of human subjection, we will be under the dominion of ASI as we grow more and more dependent upon it.

The pessimist camp expects social upheaval and inequality in the relative short-term, over the next 10-20 years, and as machines become better at a wider range of tasks, jobs will not be able to just be displaced. Several commentators (including then-President Obama) have spoken about the potential need for a universal basic income as mass unemployment becomes somewhat of a likelihood. The lower-skilled and lower-paid workers are far more concerned about AI technology than the elites, because jobs that require less training and education will be among the first to be automated en masse. Obama said, “We’re going to have to have a societal conversation about that.” Currently, however, most governments don’t see it as an impending issue, despite the possibility of a high number of jobs becoming automated in the next two decades.

Conclusion

Hopefully this introduction to AI has made clear where the technology is currently and could be in the near future, and highlighted some of the possible consequences of achieving ASI. As a society, we should begin thinking about what we want from our future. The advent of superintelligence — which, by essentially all accounts, is going to take place at some point this century — is not an issue to overlook, as it will have enormous social consequences and could result in our total extinction. As the last invention humanity will probably ever need to make, we should ensure that the development of this technology is matched by similar, if not more advanced, progress in regulation and philosophy.

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.

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

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

 

I was so busy last week with Guantánamo-related business (on and around US Independence Day) and activities involving my band The Four Fathers that I didn’t have time to devote to a truly scandalous development that took place last Monday — the decision, by councillors in the London borough of Haringey, to sell off all its social housing to a private developer, on the explicit understanding that it will demolish huge swathes of that housing and that those kicked out of their homes — their homes, not “units” or properties that don’t count as homes because those living in them don’t own them — will very probably not be able to return to the area, or even to carry on living in London at all.

In a powerful article in the Guardian last Monday, Aditya Chakrabortty captured the full disgrace of this social cleansing, focusing on how those in power treat those whose housing is in their control — with contempt, “[t]he condition of being held worthless,” as he pointed out.

Explaining that “[c]ontempt is the thread that runs through much of the worst barbarism in today’s Britain,” Chakrabortty began, inevitably and appropriately, by discussing the Grenfell Tower inferno on June 14, when a still untold number of people were killed in an entirely preventable disaster, noting that one Grenfell campaigner told the Financial Times, “It was not that we stayed silent, but that they never responded. It was not just that they ignored us, but that they viewed us with contempt.”

He added:

Contempt is the Tenant Management Association being warned again and again by residents that their homes are a deathtrap, but not lifting a finger. It is a local authority watching its tenants burn to death, then mounting a response so pitiful its leader is forced to resign. It is elected councillors holding the first meeting after the Grenfell tragedy to which they could have invited the survivors, but instead locking them out, citing “the risk of disruption.”

When one group of people is deemed unworthy of the place in which they live, the product is inevitably contempt. That applies to the security guards and nursery workers dying in Kensington just as much as it does to disabled people impoverished by the benefit cuts of austerity Britain.

As he also explained, “Contempt doesn’t belong solely to one neighbourhood or political party,” shifting his focus to Sam Leggatt, who lives in Haringey, in north London. On the day Chakrabortty’s article was published, the Labour-run council approved plans to privatise her entire housing estate, and the whole of Haringey’s social housing stock. Her estate is Northumberland Park, in Tottenham, and another threatened estate, also in Tottenham, is Broadwater Farm.

Leggett has always voted Labour, and yet her council, last week, approved a deal that will probably lead to the demolition of her home. However, as Chakrabortty explained, “neither she nor any of her neighbours have been told this by officials.” That word “contempt” springs to mind again.

When Chakrabortty asked Haringey Council about this, he was told that “no decision has been made on the future” of Leggatt’s estate – but that it is “among the first earmarked for privatisation, with ‘regeneration’ to follow.”

Leggatt only learned this the night before. “We’re not worth anything, are we?” she said to Chakrabortty, adding, “We’ve been treated with utter contempt.”

Chakrabortty proceeded to tell Sam Leggett’s story — and the contempt becomes, to my mind, heartbreaking. As he noted, “She’s lived on Tottenham’s Northumberland Park estate for over 30 years, and does the finance and admin for the local childcare centre. She helped clear up the mess after the Tottenham riots of 2011 and went to all the residents’ meetings. She’s raised two kids in her council maisonette, always pays the rent on time and turns everything, even the prospect of being turfed out of her home, into a husky ‘What you gonna do?’ laugh. Her only crime is that she doesn’t fit her council’s ideas for her own neighbourhood.”

And those ideas? In what Chakrabortty described as “one of the biggest gambles ever to be made by local government,” but which I see more accurately as one of the biggest acts of contempt,” he explained that, via the grandly-titled Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), “Haringey plans to stuff family homes, school buildings, its biggest library and much more into a giant private fund worth £2bn. It’s the largest scheme of its kind – ‘unprecedented’, in the words of backbench councillors. Together with a property developer, it will tear down whole streets of publicly owned buildings and replace them with a shiny town centre and 6,400 homes.”

Chakrabortty described how he “grew up nearby,” and can see that the area “needs investment,” but pointed out that “this is something else entirely: it is privatisation, even if the council holds on to a 50% share and claims otherwise.”

As he proceeded to explain, The new houses “will almost certainly not be for the likes of Sam.” As he learned when he last wrote about the Haringey plans, back in January, he was explicitly told by the council at the time that the private entity in charge of the redevelopment “had no targets for building social housing.”

This is unsurprising, as Haringey’s partner in the HDV is Lendlease, a multinational construction, property and infrastructure company whose headquarters are in Sydney, Australia. AS he explained, “Haringey will entrust the developer with a major plank of its housing strategy for decades, even though when Lendlease partnered with Southwark council on its “regeneration” of the Heygate estate it bulldozed nearly 1,200 social homes and built just 82 replacements.”

The scandal of Lendlease’s role in the Heygate development — and the corruption of Southwark Council — is not only long-standing and disgraceful; it has also been chronicled in one of the greatest examples of citizen journalism that I know, the Southwark Notes website.

Chakrabortty then explained how Haringey Council betrays the principles that the Labour Party is supposed to stand for when it comes to social housing and public assets. pointing out that they “recently sold an art deco town hall to Hong Kong investors to turn into a boutique hotel and expensive flats – with just four affordable homes,” and also that they “spent more than £40,000 of taxpayers’ money this year to swan off to a property fair in Cannes and sell their land to multinational developers,” with an investor brochure full of a futuristic Haringey of shiny, buy-to-let towers. As Chakrabortty added, however, “Strangely, for an area in which around one in four residents is black, it features not a single black face.”

As he also stated:

The council’s own 2015 assessment of its housing strategy says: “Black residents may not benefit from the plans to build more homes in the borough.” It goes on: “The ability of local people to afford the new homes being built, is dependent on them … increasing their incomes to a sufficient level to afford the new homes.”

Sam Leggatt told Chakrabortty that she too understood what was going on. “They want to turn our home into Kensington, without Grenfell,” she told him. She also quoted “an assertion from a senior cabinet member that the estate on which she lives is worth ‘minus £15m.’” The council claims that “this is the net cost of improving the 1,300 homes,” but Leggatt had her own version: “They think we’re what makes it worth minus £15m. Us, the plebs, the people who’ve lived here, raised our families here, worked here, got our memories here. We’re just a commodity to them.”

In conclusion, Chakrabortty noted that, “Unlike its Conservative equivalent, Blairite contempt pretends it is no such thing,” and explained that “Haringey boasts of being transparent, then releases 1,500 pages of legal and financial documents on the HDV just a week before [last Monday’s] cabinet meeting.”

Crucially, he explained that, although the council leader, Claire Kober, promised in Guardian and elsewhere “to rehouse all existing tenants in the same area, if that’s what they want, on the same rent and the same terms”, the following contradictory assertion was buried in the appendices and redactions of those documents: “The HDV Business Plans prioritise a single move for residents rather than Right of Return.”

As Chakrabortty explained, “This means that, whatever the public promises, when Sam is moved out of her home, her coming back isn’t a priority for the council.” Leggatt herself has a grim vision of her future, sold out by her council: “A one-bed on the top floor of a tower block. I won’t be able to get another job, or see my friends.”

Press officers for the council told Chakrabortty that the papers were only “a provisional set of proposals”, and yet, as he pointed out, they were what the cabinet was being asked to agree to at last Monday’s meeting, and when they were approved, they signalled the start of “one of the biggest privatisations ever known to local government” – and “not provisionally, but for real.”

As he also stated:

Contempt, Haringey-style, is publishing a text longer than War and Peace and expecting the public to digest it in just five working days. It is showing foreign investors one thing, and telling local residents another. Employing a director of regeneration who openly describes part of the area she’s regenerating as a “warzone” – a comment the council claims was taken out of context. It is creating a future for an area in which the very people living there are erased.

Haringey: the tip of the iceberg

Unfortunately, although the scale of haringey’s social housing privatisation is unprecedented, the assault on social housing — with a huge role played by Labour councils — is taking place all over London.

The excellent Architects for Social Housing have been pointing this out since their founding in 2015, and also put forward wonderful plans for how estates can be refurbished, with new buildings added to pay for the refurbishment, instead of estates being demolished and new ones built, excluding existing tenants. Their uphill struggle reveals how this is not about fairness or protecting social housing, but is at best ideological malignancy, and, at worst, ideological malignancy plus corruption.

These boroughs — Labour boroughs as well as Tory boroughs (and see the extensive list to the left of 170 Labour-run estates that are “under threat of or already condemned to privatisation, demolition and social cleansing by Labour councils”) — don’t want poorer residents living there anymore, in the places they have called home for years, for decades, even for generations.

They want social cleansing, although they may tell themselves that there is no money for refurbishment, and that, as a result, they have to work with developers to knock estates down and build new ones. The social cleansing then becomes one step removed, and those responsible for it can furiously pretend that it’s either not happening or that it’s not their fault, but neither excuse is true. And this, don’t forget, is the best case scenario. In the worst case scenarios, every word these councillors utter is fraudulent, because there is a revolving door, and sooner or later they will end up on the developers’ boards, being handsomely rewarded for their betrayal of their social tenants, and their explicit role as bigoted social cleansers, squeezing out of London anyone who is not wealthy enough to buy into their fraudulent and exorbitant new home scam.

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.

For Witness Against Torture, My Independence Day Article About Tyranny at Guantánamo Bay

Please support my work! 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.

 

For the last 41 days, my friends with Witness Against Torture — an organization of volunteer activists, founded in 2005, which “seeks to end torture worldwide, close the Guantánamo detention center, and seek reparations for torture victims” — have been running a campaign, “Forever Human Beings,” which I wrote about when their campaign started. the 41 days chosen for the campaign — from May 26 to July 5 — was chosen to reflect the number of prisoners still held at Guantánamo, and every day they highlighted the story of one particular prisoner.

To coincide with the end of their campaign — and US Independence Day — I wrote an article for Witness Against Torture about the significance of Guantánamo on the day that ordinary Americans celebrate their liberation from tyranny; this year, the 241st anniversary of the new nation’s freedom from the tyranny of King George III in 1776.

Ironically, however, those celebrating, for the most part, are unaware or unwilling to think of the uncomfortable fact that, at Guantánamo, a version of that same tyranny still exists, set up by the very government that is supposed to make sure that the kind of tyranny overthrown in 1776 can never happen again — specifically, imprisonment without charge or trial, which is supposed to be something that countries that claim to be civilized, and that claim to respect the rule of law, condemn without reservation.

My article is cross-posted below, for those who are interested. I hope that, if you like it, you will share it.

Remembering Guantánamo on Independence Day

By Andy Worthington, Witness Against Torture, July 4, 2017

Today, as a British citizen, I’m acutely aware that, 241 years ago, the United States of America issued a Declaration of Independence from the UK, noting that King George III had sought “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny.”

A system of checks and balances introduced by the Founding Fathers was supposed to prevent tyranny from arising in the liberated United States of America, and yet, at various times in its history, these safeguards have been discarded — during the Civil War, for example, and during the Second World War, in the shameful internment of Japanese Americans.

Another example is still taking place now — at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, where the U.S. runs a naval base, and where, since January 11, 2002, it has been holding prisoners seized in the “war on terror” that George W. Bush declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Under the laws and treaties we rely on to protect ourselves from executive tyranny, people can only be deprived of their liberty if they are accused of a crime, when they must speedily be put on trial in a court with a judge and a jury, or if they are seized on a battlefield during wartime, when they can be held until the end of hostilities, unmolested and with the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

However, in the “war on terror” declared after 9/11, George W. Bush came up with a third method of imprisonment that brought back into sharp focus the executive overreach of centuries past that was supposed to have been done away with once and for all.

Bush and his advisors decided that prisoners seized in their “war on terror” would have no rights whatsoever, and could be held forever if they so wished. They invented a term for them — “enemy combatants” — and, when they felt they were resistant to questioning, they introduced a torture program to get them to talk. This was repellant under any circumstances, but it was also an innovation based, often, on shockingly imprecise information.

Men were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan not because they were “on the battlefield,” as the US authorities claimed, but because, for the most part, they were sold to the U.S. by their Afghan and Pakistani allies for generous bounty payments. Others, who were rounded up by the U.S., were often seized as a result of unreliable evidence, and these men, held in Guantánamo, in CIA “black sites” in Thailand, Poland, Romania and Lithuania, and even in proxy torture prisons run by other regimes — in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Morocco, for example — then ended up telling lies about their fellow prisoners, to such an extent that the publicly available files (leaked to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, and publicly released in 2011) are so full of unreliable information that they are, fundamentally, worthless.

And yet, Guantánamo continues to exist — with the Bush administration’s early claims that the men held there were “the worst of the worst” still resonating throughout American public life, and with most Americans unconcerned by the tyranny that is happening in their name at this wretched offshore prison.

There have been times in Guantánamo’s long and ignoble history when it has been off the radar more fundamentally than at other times. One such occasion was in the prison’s early years, under George W. Bush, when no one wanted to speak out. Then under Obama, there was widespread silence, after his promise to close the prison within a year expired, unfulfilled, and Congress cynically set up obstacles to try to prevent the release of prisoners, until the prisoners themselves brought Guantánamo and its ongoing injustice back onto the agenda through a prison-wide hunger strike in 2013.

And now, under Donald Trump, with so much going wrong under his inept leadership, Guantánamo has once more receded from view, after Trump’s early attempts to send new prisoners there, and to reintroduce torture, were widely criticized, not just outside his administration, but even by some of his own appointees, who are clearly not as unhinged as the president himself.

To be honest, though, Guantánamo has never been as prominent in the minds and the consciences of ordinary Americans as it should have been, and this is as true now as it was when the prison first opened, 15 and a half years ago.

Those of us who recognize Guantánamo for what it is — a legal, moral and ethical abomination, which shames America every day is it open — will continue to campaign to get it closed, and if you are not already with us, we hope you to will be moved to join us, to rid us of the tyranny that has been allowed to thrive in this U.S.-controlled corner of Cuba for far too long.

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.

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

Please support my work! 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.

 

Good news from Canada, as the Canadian government has agreed to pay $10.5m (about $9m in US currency) to former Guantánamo prisoner — and former child prisoner — Omar Khadr, who launched his suit against the Canadian government in 2014, after his return to Canada (in September 2012, after ten years in Guantánamo), but before he was freed on bail — in May 2015.

Disgracefully, the news has been greeted with a tirade of abuse — a deplorable state of affairs that I first noticed ten years ago, when I first starting publishing articles about Khadr (nearly 100 published to date), and that particularly came to my notice in the summer of 2008, after videotapes were released of Khadr, then 16, breaking down when interrogated by Canadian agents who visited him at Guantánamo, and who, he mistakenly thought, would help him. Check out some of the comments under my article if you want to see the kind of disgraceful comments that were being made at the time, and that continue to this day.

And yet the critics have absolutely no basis for their complaints, as Khadr was not only shamefully abused by the US authorities; he also had his rights violated by his own government, as Canada’s Supreme Court established in 2010.

As I explained in Canada’s Shameful and Unending Disdain for Omar Khadr, an article in January 2013, when Khadr was still imprisoned by the Canadian government, there months are this return from Guantánamo:

Technically, the Canadian government is entitled to imprison him for another five years and ten months, according to a plea deal Khadr agreed to in October 2010. Under the terms of that deal, he received an eight-year sentence for his role in a firefight in Afghanistan that led to his capture in July 2002, with one year to be served in Guantánamo and seven more in Canada.

Notoriously, however, the Canadian government dragged its heels securing his return, which only happened at the end of September last year, instead of in November 2011. This was typical, given that, throughout Khadr’s detention, his government ignored its obligations to demand his rehabilitation under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories, as did his US captors.

So grave was the Canadian government’s violation of Khadr’s rights as a citizen that, in 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that his rights had been violated when Canadian agents interrogated him at Guantánamo in 2003, when he was just 16. The Court stated, “Interrogation of a youth, to elicit statements about the most serious criminal charges while detained in these conditions and without access to counsel, and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the US prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.”

Further confirmation that critics should be silent came from Aaron Wherry of CBC News, who began his article, Why will Omar Khadr receive $10.5M? Because the Supreme Court ruled his rights were violated, by posting a tweet from Jason Kenney, the former defence minister, claiming, ”This confessed terrorist should be in prison paying for his crimes, not profiting from them at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.” Kenney tweeted.

As Wherry explained, “That much is consistent with a Conservative government that resisted repatriating Khadr, opposed his release on bail and might still be fighting Khadr’s lawsuit if it were still in office.”

He added that although the Conservatives are “now in high dudgeon,” they “should be familiar with both the 2010 ruling and a related judgment by the Supreme Court in 2008 that dealt with Khadr’s access to documents.”

He also stated, with particular relevance:

Conservatives should also be aware of their own precedent for such compensation: it was Stephen Harper’s government that agreed to pay $10 million to Maher Arar in 2007, acknowledging the Canadian government’s actions may have led to his torture by Syrian officials in 2002.

Three months ago, the Liberal government agreed to compensate Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin after an inquiry found the actions of Canadian law enforcement officials had indirectly led to their torture in Syria and Egypt between 2001 and 2004.

He also pointed out that there is “no argument now that any of those men are guilty of anything,” whereas Khadr pleased guilty at Guantánamo, although there is no reason to think that his guilty plea was actually a sign of guilt. As Wherry pointed out,

Khadr “has argued that his guilty plea was the compelled result of a ‘hopeless choice,’” which he saw as “his only chance to one day return to Canada.”

I’d like to leave you, if I may, with a Facebook post by a friend, Elizabeth Pickett, which I think sums up the situation very well:

Well once again for Omar Khadr, in the face of all the hate. He was a child. At the very very least he was a child soldier but he might not even have been that. There is no reliable proof that he hurt anyone and very reliable truth that he was captured, deliberately injured and not given adequate medical care, illegally detained, illegally tried and tortured. Canada did absolutely dick all to stop any of this, to intervene on his behalf or to help him. We did much less than other countries did to intervene on behalf of their detainees illegally detained by the criminal state of the USA. Omar Khadr deserves every penny of the compensation he has been awarded and much much more. And no apology is adequate. I have no words for the contempt in which I hold people who are using this opportunity to express further racist Islamophobic moronic hatred. May Stephen Harper rot.

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.

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

Please send us a photo of yourself with a poster urging Donald Trump to close Guantánamo!
Please also support my work! 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.

Just hours before the United States celebrates the 241st anniversary of its freedom from the yoke of British tyranny, all is not well in the Land of the Free. With Donald Trump in the White House, the US’s reputation abroad is floundering. Trump seems to govern by tweet and to have no idea of what the position of president entails, and far from “draining the swamp” as he promised, cleaning up politics and standing up for ordinary Americans, he has, predictably, embarked on a corporate-pleasing, right-wing agenda, slashing healthcare for poorer Americans, being gung-ho for war, showing contempt for the environment and love for energy companies, and hammering away at creating a travel ban for Muslims that is disgracefully racist and unacceptably wide-reaching and imprecise in its scope.

On Guantánamo, he has, to date, done very little despite threatening to send new prisoners there and to reintroduce torture — both ambitions that wiser heads counselled him to drop. However, inaction does absolutely nothing to deal with the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, something that Trump cares nothing about, but that continues to trouble those of us who care about justice and the rule of law.

In a law-abiding world, there are only two ways to deprive someone of their liberty — as a criminal, put forward for a trial without excessive delay, or as a combatant seized in wartime, who can be held off the battlefield, unmolested, until the end of hostilities, under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. The men at Guantánamo are neither. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration arbitrarily rounded up hundreds of men, and claimed that they had no rights whatsoever.

In the 15 years since, there have been legal challenges, but these have, in the end, been blocked by shamefully politicized judges, and the release of prisoners remains a political issue — with questions regarding the release of Guantánamo prisoners being in the president’s hands, or in the hands of lawmakers who have also intervened to impose their opinions and prejudices on the decision-making process. As a result, justice remains absent for those at Guantánamo.

Just 41 men are still held, but five of those were approved for release under Barack Obama, and yet are still held at the whim of Donald Trump, as I have just discussed in an article for Al-Jazeera. Eleven others are facing, or have faced trials, and yet those trials — in military commissions at Guantánamo — are such a poor imitation of justice that most of them are still engaged in seemingly interminable pre-trial wrangling nearly eight years after they were first charged, under Obama, and over a decade since they were first charged under George W. Bush.

The other 25 men are eligible for a review process that is ongoing — the Periodic Review Boards— but this is an internationally aberrant novelty in and of itself — a parole-type process for men who have never been charged or tried — and, in any case, any decision to release them only ends up back in the president’s hands, as, again, a purely political decision.

For Independence Day, please help us to continue to flag up how unjust this whole situation is, and how shameful it should be for Americans, every day that this wretched prison remains open. Please print off a poster, take a photo with it, and send it to us. We’ll post the photos on the page on our website dedicated to photos of supporters asking Donald Trump to close Guantánamo once and for all, and we’ll also share them on social media.

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.

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

Over the month of July, my band The Four Fathers have four gigs in south east London, and we hope that, if you’re around, you’ll come and see us — and even if you’re not around, we hope that you’ll check out our music, and even buy a download or two!

In the last few months, we’ve been releasing songs from our forthcoming second album, How Much Is A Life Worth? — Close Guantánamo, which I wrote for the Close Guantánamo campaign, and with a new verse dealing with the menace posed by Donald Trump, Dreamers, a song about friendship and parenthood, which I wrote for a friend’s 50th birthday, and, most recently, two of our hardest-hitting political songs, Riot, which warns politicians about what to expect if the poorer members of society are relentlessly exploited and treated with contempt, and London, a love song to the city that has been my home for the last 32 years, in which I reflect with sorrow and anger on how the UK capital’s wildness and its relentless and persistent state of dissent in the 80s and 90s has been tamed — or bludgeoned — by greed over the last 20 years, and how, sadly, the recent disaster at Grenfell Tower in west London is the most distressing outcome of this institutional disdain for the poor.

Other key songs we play live include our anthemic anti-austerity song, Fighting Injustice, our cover of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War (from our debut album, Love and War), the folk song Rebel Soldier that I put to a reggae tune in Brixton in the 1980s, and other songs not yet released — How Much Is A Life Worth?, about how white people perceive the value of their lives against those of (i) the victims of our wars, (ii) refugees and (iii) in the US, black people killed by the police, and Equal Rights and Justice For All, about the importance of habeas corpus. A recent addition is Stand Down Theresa, our updated version of the Beat’s classic protest song, Stand Down Margaret. A rough but energetic version of Stand Down Theresa is on video here.

We intend to release the album, How Much Is A Life Worth? on CD in autumn, and if you have an idea about where to launch it do let us know. Likewise, do get in touch if you want us to play — at a festival, a pub gig, a community event or a party — or just to say hello. Also let us know if you’d like to be on our mailing list. We can also be found on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Below is a list of the gigs:

Friday July 7, 7pm, £3: New Cross Inn, 155 New Cross Rd, London SE14 5DJ

We’re on at 8pm, playing a 45-minute set in this legendary live venue, with its great  . sound system. Also playing: Norell & the Dub Factory, Operation Offbeat and the Skamonics. See the Facebook page here.

Saturday July 8, 12.50pm, free: Lewisham People’s Day, Stage Bus, Mountsfield Park, London SE6 1AN

It’s an early start, but do come along if you can to the borough of Lewisham’s biggest annual event. The sound quality is excellent on this stage, and there are plenty of food and craft stalls, and lots more live music to keep you and your family entertained all day. Check out the Stage Bus line-up here.

Wednesday July 12, 7pm, free: The Five Bells, London SE14 5DJ

This is our first gig at this long-standing boozer in New Cross, which has recently begun focusing on up and coming live music. We intend to have a support act also playing political music, and intend to properly rock the place with our rock and reggae militancy! We’ll probably be on at 9pm. The Facebook page for The Five Bells is here.

Saturday July 22, 4pm, free: Arts Cafe, Manor Park, London SE13 5QZ

A one-hour set outdoors at one of our favourite venues — the lovely Arts Cafe in Manor Park, a beautiful little park by the River Quaggy on the border of Lewisham and Lee run by Banu and Fred. Given that it’s in the afternoon, and in a family-friendly venue, we tend to play some mellower material at the Arts Cafe, which we’ve played many times before, so expect our love songs (like this and Dreamers), our cover of Bob Dylan’s Forever Young, and our unexpected cover of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive as well as our political songs. The Facebook page for the Arts Cafe is here.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD 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.

My photos of ‘Not One Day More’, a Huge Protest Against Theresa May in London, July 1, 2017

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See my photos on Flickr here!
Please also, if you can, consider supporting my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.

 

Today (July 1, 2017), I cycled into central London with my son Tyler to support the ‘Not One Day More’ protest called by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, and to take photos. We caught the march on Whitehall, as the tens of thousands of protestors who had marched from BBC HQ in Portland Place advanced on Parliament Square, and it was exhilarating to stand by the Monument to the Women of World War II in the middle of Whitehall, near 10 Downing Street, as a wave of protestors advanced, chanting, “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” and “Tories, Tories, Tories, out, out, out.”

Many of the placards, understandably, dealt with the Grenfell Tower disaster two weeks ago, when an untold number of residents died in an inferno that should never have happened, but that was entirely due to the greed and exploitation of the poorer members of society that is central to the Tories’ austerity agenda, waged relentlessly over the last seven years, and the neo-liberalism — insanely, unstoppably greedy, and utterly indifferent to the value of human lives — that has been driving politics since the 1980s.

The Guardian noted, “When the march reached Parliament Square, a minute’s silence was held ‘in memory and respect’ to the victims of Grenfell Tower. Tributes were also paid to the emergency services who responded to the fire with a minute’s applause.” Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said, “To the victims of Grenfell Tower we pledge now, we will stand with you and your families all the way through. We bring you sympathy but more importantly we bring you solidarity. We will not rest until every one of those families is properly housed within the community in which they want to live. Grenfell Tower symbolised for many everything that’s gone wrong in this country since austerity was imposed upon us.” He also “slammed the Tories for praising the emergency services ‘every time there’s a tragedy’ but then cutting jobs and wages.”

Jeremy Corbyn also addressed the crowd, saying, “We are the people, we are united and we are determined, we are not going to be divided or let austerity divide us. We are increasing in support and we are determined to force another election as soon as we can.” He also said, “Fewer working class young people are applying to university. Let’s end the debt burden and scrap tuition fees!”

These are positive developments, but there is an elephant in the room — Brexit. At present, the Tories, severely damaged by Theresa May’s decision to call a General Election at which she then performed so dismally that she lost her majority, is clinging onto power, and is still responsible for the nationwide car crash that is Brexit, but if the Labour Party is to take power, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters need to be sure that his intention is to stop Brexit and not to insist that it must take place because that is the “will of the people.” As I have stated repeatedly, the referendum result was only advisory, the majority was too slim for a referendum involving major constitutional change, and leaving the EU will be an act of economic suicide on such a scale that it will destroy whoever is responsible for implementing it. I believe it can — and must — be stopped, or else all Jeremy Corbyn’s plans to reinvigorate public sector spending will be impossible, as the economy collapses.

More on this soon. In the meantime, please check out the photos, which you can also see below:

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 debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD 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.

 

Please Read My New Article for Al-Jazeera About the Five Men Still Held at Guantánamo Who Were Approved for Release Under Obama

Dear friends and supporters — and any casual passers-by,

I’m delighted to announce that my latest article for Al-Jazeera, Abdul Latif Nasser: Facing life in Guantánamo, has just been published, and I encourage you to read it, and to share it as widely as possible if you find it useful.

In it, I look at the cases of the five men still held at Guantánamo who were approved for release under President Obama, but who didn’t make it out before Donald Trump took over, with a particular focus on Abdul Latif Nasser, a Moroccan whose government sought his release, but failed to get the paperwork to the US authorities in time. I also look at the cases of Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian, and Tawfiq al-Bihani, a Yemeni. The two other men, sadly, don’t wish to have their cases discussed.

It’s important for these men’s cases to be remembered, because, although Donald Trump has not followed up on threats he made after taking office to send new prisoners to Guantánamo and to reintroduce torture, he has effectively sealed the prison shut for the last five months, releasing no one, and showing no signs of wanting to release anyone, and those of us who care about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo must continue to do what we can to bring this deplorable state of affairs to an end.

As I have stated more often than I care to remember, the prison at Guantánamo is a legal, ethical and moral abomination, and every day that it stays open is an affront to any claim by the US that it is a nation founded on the rule of law that respects the rule of law. Only dictatorships hold people indefinitely without charge or trial, and the US can be no exception to this rule.

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 debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD 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.

Challenging the Nomination of 2005 “Torture Memo” Author Steven Bradbury as a Lawyer in the Trump Administration

[image error] Please support my work! 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.

 

Yesterday (June 28), three members of Veterans for Peace — the US military veterans’ organization founded in 1985 and committed to building “a culture of peace” — interrupted the Senate confirmation hearing for Steven G. Bradbury, nominated by Donald Trump as general counsel for the Commerce, Science and Transportation Department, and were subsequently arrested. Videos are available here and here,

The three VFP members — Tarak Kauff, Ken Ashe and Ellen Barfield — were protesting about Bradbury’s role as one of the authors of the notorious “torture memos” under George W. Bush, and they were not alone. As the New York Times explained, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, told Bradbury at the hearing, “You lacked the judgment to stand up and say what is morally right when pressured by the president of the United States, and I’m afraid you would do so again.” She then “wagged her finger at Mr. Bradbury and accused him of having a dangerous ‘rubber stamp’ mentality,” and said, “I cannot oppose this nomination strongly enough.”

For my call for Steven Bradbury to be prosecuted — along with other senior Bush administration officials and lawyers — listen to my song ‘81 Million Dollars,’ performed with my band The Four Fathers.

The “torture memos” were written and approved in the Office of Legal Counsel (the branch of the Justice Department that is supposed to provide impartial advice to the executive branch), and the first examples were written by law professor John Yoo, and approved by Yoo’s boss, Jay S. Bybee. The memos sought to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA on Abu Zubaydah, seized in Pakistan in March 2002 and regarded as a “high-value detainee,” and approved a list of techniques that included waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning.

Bybee served as head of the OLC until March 2003, when, as a reward for his service, he was made a federal appeals court judge (in the Ninth Circuit in California, joining Yoo who returned to his job as a law professor at Berkeley). His successor, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the memos and advised government agencies not to rely on them, although this was not known at the time. The first the public knew of the memos was when one of the Yoo/Bybee memos was leaked in June 2004, after the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Even so, torture — and its twisted approval by lawyers — continued. After Goldsmith was forced out because of his objections, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a one paragraph opinion re-authorizing the use of torture, and, in December 2004, Daniel L. Levin, the OLC’s latest Acting Assistant Attorney General, reaffirmed the original legal opinions.

This was when Steven Bradbury appeared, revisiting Yoo and Bybee’s spurious authorizations in three memos in May 2005, when he was the OLC’s Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General. The memos were released by the Obama administration in April 2009, along with the previously unpublished Yoo/Bybee memo, and they are available here, here and here.

As I explained in an article at the time:

As with the earlier memos, from my point of view the arguments about the techniques not causing severe physical pain were more plausible than those in which Bradbury attempted to argue that techniques derived from the SERE program — which are based on teaching soldiers to resist techniques designed to cause a complete mental collapse — do not cause severe mental pain or suffering.The very fact that SERE psychologists were so prominent in the CIA’s torture program makes it clear that “learned helplessness” — involving the brutal training of prisoners to become dependent on their interrogators for every crumb of comfort in their wretched, tortured lives — was designed not just to cause them severe mental pain or suffering, but to completely destroy them mentally. As Bradbury himself noted, when discussing the “conditioning techniques” that underpin the CIA prisoners’ conditions of confinement, “they are used to ‘demonstrate to the [detainee] that he has no control over basic human needs.’”

And yet, for page after page, Bradbury concluded that “nudity, dietary manipulation and sleep deprivation” — now revealed explicitly as not just keeping a prisoner awake, but hanging him, naked except for a diaper, by a chain attached to shackles around his wrists — are, essentially, techniques that produce insignificant and transient discomfort. We are, for example, breezily told that caloric intake “will always be set at or above 1,000 kcal/day,” and are encouraged to compare this enforced starvation with “several commercial weight-loss programs in the United States which involve similar or even greater reductions in calorific intake.”

In “water dousing,” a new technique introduced since 2002, in which naked prisoners are repeatedly doused with cold water, we are informed that “maximum exposure directions have been ‘set at two-thirds the time at which, based on extensive medical literature and experience, hypothermia could be expected to develop in healthy individuals who are submerged in water of the same temperature,’” and when it comes to waterboarding, Bradbury clinically confirms that it can be used 12 times a day over five days in a period of a month.

[image error]In the New York Times article about Bradbury’s confirmation hearing, Charlie Savage noted that, after a series of blows to the Bush administration’s torture program — John McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which was intended to prevent torture, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in June 2006, in which, as he put it, “the Supreme Court ruled that a humane-treatment mandate in the Geneva Conventions protected Qaeda prisoners” — the CIA “temporarily shuttered its program,” although Congress then “passed a law limiting the court ruling’s impact by specifying categories of ill treatment that would be considered grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”

However, in 2007, the CIA “proposed restarting a more limited version of its interrogation program under which inmates were deprived of sleep and solid food, slapped and grabbed by the head,” and Bradbury then “approved that shorter list of tactics,” although he “did not address whether the others, too, would also still be legally permissible if a policy maker wanted to use them.”

In a letter to the Chair and Ranking Member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, regarding Bradbury’s nomination, 14 organizations including Human Rights First, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights called for his nomination to be withdrawn and provided a detailed explanation of his role, including an unacceptable statement he made during congressional testimony in 2007. Responding to questions about the president’s interpretation of the law of war Bradbury declared, “The President is always right” — a statement that, as the organizations noted in their letter, “is as outrageous as it is inaccurate.”

In their letter, the organizations ran through Bradbury’s OLC history, stating, “Mr. Bradbury was acting head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 2005 to 2009. During that time, Mr. Bradbury wrote several legal memoranda that authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. As such, he is most prominently — and correctly — known as one of the authors of the ‘torture memos.’ His analysis directly contradicted relevant domestic and international law regarding the treatment of prisoners, and helped establish an official policy of torture and detainee abuse that has caused incalculable damage to both the United States and the prisoners it has held.”

Their letter continued:

Mr. Bradbury’s role in the torture program, even then, was notorious — so much so that the Senate refused to confirm him as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush Administration. The Senate now knows even more about Mr. Bradbury’s record, and the harm caused by his opinions, based on oversight by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and its report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) use of torture and abuse.

In Mr. Bradbury’s time as acting head of the OLC, he demonstrated an unwavering willingness to defer to the authority and wishes of the president and his team instead of providing objective and independent counsel. During congressional testimony in 2007, Mr. Bradbury responded to questions about the president’s interpretation of the law of war by declaring, “The President is always right” — a statement that is as outrageous as it is inaccurate.

The DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) reviewed Mr. Bradbury’s “torture memos” and determined that they raised questions about the objectivity and reasonableness of Mr. Bradbury’s analyses; that Mr. Bradbury relied on uncritical acceptance of executive branch assertions; and that in some cases Mr. Bradbury’s legal conclusions were inconsistent with the plain meaning and commonly held understandings of the law. Senior government officials from the Bush Administration who worked with Mr. Bradbury have said that they had “grave reservations” about conclusions drawn in the Bradbury torture memos and have described Mr. Bradbury’s analysis as flawed, saying the memos could be “considered a work of advocacy to achieve a desired outcome.”

Moreover, Mr. Bradbury’s 2007 torture memo was written with the purpose of evading congressional intent and duly enacted federal law. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA), legislation that passed the Senate with a vote of 90-9, stated, “No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” However, Mr. Bradbury’s memo explicitly allowed the continuation of many of the abusive interrogation techniques that Congress intended to prohibit in the DTA.

Perhaps most concerning from a congressional oversight perspective, Mr. Bradbury affirmatively misrepresented the views of members of Congress to support his legal conclusions. Specifically, in his 2007 memo he relied on a false claim that when the CIA briefed “the full memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Senator McCain … none of the Members expressed the view that the CIA detention and interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate.” In fact, Senator McCain had characterized the CIA’s practice of sleep deprivation as torture both publicly and privately, and at least four other senators raised objections to the program.

In an article about the protest, Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, who also took part in it, provided quotes from those arrested. As he was handcuffed by Capitol Police, Ken Ashe stated, “Anybody whose moral compass is so broken that they would condone torture doesn’t deserve a position in the US government.”

Tarak Kauff said, “I disrupted the hearing for a man, Steven Bradbury, who should be on trial for war crimes. He sanctioned, condoned, and confirmed torture practices that were used by the Bush administration, practices that disgraced our country.”

Ellen Barfield said, “I am a veteran. I am deeply concerned about our soldiers, who are at risk for torture if our nation tortures.”

For his part, Bradbury, at his hearing, claimed that he was just following orders. As the New York Times put it, he “said his legal opinions ‘speak for themselves,’ but denied that he had set out to justify the Bush administration’s existing policies.” As he described it, in his own words, “I viewed them as very hard questions. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have then engaged in having to address those issues. But when you serve in an office where you are asked to provide legal advice about the very hardest questions, that’s the job. And that is what I did.”

Given the Republicans’ majority in Congress, it is extremely unlikely that Steven Bradbury’s nomination will be overturned, but Donald Trump should reflect on the fact that might does not equal right, and be aware that on this, as on so much of his presidency to date, the decisions taken by him — and by a compliant Congress — will be judged not only as inadequate, but also as offensive to the values that the US claims to uphold.

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 debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD 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.