Andy Worthington's Blog, page 54

Guantánamo’s Difficult Diaspora: Former Prisoner Hussein Al-Merfedy, in Slovakia, Still Feels in a Cage

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.

 

Over the last few months, I’ve been catching up on some stories I missed, about former Guantánamo prisoners seeking — and often struggling — to adjust to life in third countries, which took them in when the US government refused or was unable to repatriate them after they had been approved for release by high-level US government review processes.

Since 2006, dozens of countries have offered new homes to Guantánamo prisoners, and the examples I have looked at have mostly focused on men resettled in various European countries — see Life After Guantánamo: Yemeni Released in Serbia Struggles to Cope with Loneliness and Harassment (about Mansoor al-Dayfi, released in July 2016), Life After Guantánamo: Egyptian in Bosnia, Stranded in Legal Limbo, Seeks Clarification of His Rights (about Tariq al-Sawah, released in January 2016), and Life After Guantánamo: Yemeni Freed in Estonia Says, “Part of Me is Still at Guantánamo” (about Ahmed Abdul Qader, released in January 2015). In The Anguish of Hedi Hammami, A Tunisian Released from Guantánamo in 2010, But Persecuted in His Homeland, I also wrote about the difficulties faced by Hammami, a Tunisian first released in Georgia, who returned to his home country after the Arab Spring, only to find that he faces “a constant regimen of police surveillance.”

One day, I hope, all the men released from Guantánamo will have lawyers successfully negotiate an acceptable basis for their existence with the US government. As it currently stands, they are regarded as “illegal enemy combatants” or “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” even though almost all were never charged with any sort of crime, and their status, compared to every other human being on earth, remains frustratingly a  unacceptable unclear. This is especially true, I believe, for those settled in third countries, as no internationally accepted rulebook exists to codify their rights, and the obligations of those taking them in.

In catching up on the stories I missed, I’m cross-posting below an article that was published in Newsweek last September, written by the intrepid photographer and  journalist Alex Potter, who mostly works in Yemen. Potter met with Hussein al-Merfedy, a Yemeni resettled in Slovakia in November 2014, along with a Tunisian, Hisham Sliti, and her article also includes a video of al-Merfedy speaking, and 20 photos, not just of al-Merfedy and his life in Zvolen, in Slovakia, but also of Salah al-Dhaby (known in Guantánamo as Saleh al-Zabe, or Salah al-Thabi), a Yemeni resettled in Tbilisi, Georgia at the same time as al-Merfedy (seen for the first time in Potter’s photos, as no photo of him at Guantánamo was ever released), and Sabry al-Quraishi (aka Sabri al-Qurashi), resettled in Semey, Kazakhstan in December 2014, who, as Potter describes it, “lives a lonely life in Semey.” He told her, “I miss my family — I was in prison for over a decade, and I am still not able to bring my family here to visit me.” When she met him in December 2015, he showed her “some of the artwork he created while in Guantánamo.” He “claimed to have had thousands of drawings,” but in the end they “returned to him only a small folder.”

For Hussein al-Merfedy (identified at Guantánamo as Hussein Almerfedi), as I wrote at the time of his release, his long imprisonment at Guantánamo was preceded by him being “one of dozens of the more unfortunate prisoners” to be “held in secret CIA prisons prior to his transfer to Guantánamo.” He claimed he had traveled to Pakistan as a missionary, but particularly hoped to make it to Europe, where he envisioned a more open society than Yemen. He also stated that he had paid a smuggler to get him to Greece via Iran and Turkey, but was seized in Iran, and ended up being handed over to Afghan forces, who then hand him on to the US.

In Guantánamo. he explained that he was held for a total of 14 months in three prisons in Afghanistan — “two under Afghan control and one under US control,” although he added that they all “seemed to be under US supervision.” One of these prisons was Bagram, and another was the “Dark Prison” near Kabul. Almerfedi stated that he was only interrogated on three occasions in Afghanistan, and that on each occasion he was told that the authorities knew he was innocent and would soon be released.

Potter runs briefly though the story of how he ended up at Guantánamo, but her portrait is more concerned with the contours of his life post-release, and the difficulties of adjusting to life in “the only EU member state without a real mosque, ‘ where, in response to the colossal refugee crisis, from Syria and elsewhere, prime minister, Robert Fico, told a Slovak news agency that “Islam has no place in Slovakia.”

For al-Merfedy, however, as for the other men Potter spoke to, the abiding impression is one of a dreadful loneliness. “We thought we would be free when we left Guantánamo,” he told her, adding, “Instead, we went from the small Guantánamo to here — a bigger Guantánamo.” As she also explained, he has “a large family back in Yemen and would like to see them again,” but he “is a permanent resident alien, not a refugee or an asylum seeker, so Slovakia is not legally obligated to reunite him with his mother, sisters or brothers.”

Life After Guantánamo: Former Detainees Live in Limbo

By Alex Potter, Newsweek, September 1, 2016

It’s early Sunday morning, and the streets of Zvolen are empty. Most in this midsize town in Slovakia are attending church, while others battle hangovers from the previous night. Hussein al-Merfedy has a bad headache too, but it’s a migraine, not something alcohol-related. He’s a Muslim and former detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Two years ago, al-Merfedy was one of dozens of detainees the U.S. kept locked up at Gitmo, even though they were never charged with a crime. Though he had been cleared for release in 2008, he spent more than a decade in prison without explanation. That changed on November 14, 2014, when the military handcuffed and blindfolded al-Merfedy and put him on a plane. When he landed, however, he was not home in Yemen; he was thousands of miles away in Slovakia, a stranger in a new country.

Al-Merfedy pulls himself out of bed and trudges toward the bathroom, his baggy beige pajama pants hanging low on his hips. He received these pants at Gitmo and still wears them around the house. It’s a habit, he says, that’s hard to change. Standing in front of the mirror, he runs his hands through his hair; until a month ago, it fell past his shoulders. Now it’s cropped short, “so I could fit in. So people don’t stare at me so much.”

Soon al-Merfedy makes his way to the kitchen. It looks almost new: a few dishes are stacked neatly in the drying rack, the countertops are spotless, and the fridge is nearly empty. The apartment is silent, save for the ticking of a clock and the chirping of his pet finch, which sits in a cage. Al-Merfedy has few visitors. His only friends are his caseworkers and a handful of Gitmo detainees who live elsewhere in town. Today will be just like any other for him. There is nothing to do, no one to see.

“I am almost 40 years old,” he says. “I imagined having a family and children one day. But here I am, still alone.”

‘Islam Has No Place in Slovakia’

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has renewed its push to close Gitmo and release detainees it no longer deems a threat. Of the roughly 780 original prisoners, 61 remain behind bars, 20 of whom are cleared for release. But detainees from war-torn countries like Yemen, Libya and Syria cannot return home; the U.S. government fears they might join or rejoin extremist groups.

Instead, the Defense Department has released 55 former detainees to Gulf states rather than their home nations. But these countries will take only so many men, so others were forced to go to Kazakhstan and Slovakia, where they’ve struggled to adjust. “The idea seemed to be to get them out of Guantánamo at almost any cost,” says David Remes, a lawyer to many present and former detainees, including al-Merfedy. “They were dropped into strange lands, with cultures, religions and language far different from their own, and where they were bound to be treated like pariahs.”

Adapting to life in Slovakia has been difficult for al-Merfedy. In his new town, aside from four other former Guantánamo detainees, the only other Muslim he knows is a Turkish man who owns a kebab shop. He sometimes goes to Martin, a city about two hours away where a small group of Muslims hold Friday prayers in the back of a coffee shop. (Slovakia is the only EU member state without a real mosque.) “The people here are maskeen,” al-Merfedy says, using the Yemeni word for “kind” or “good-hearted.” “The problem is with the government.”

The refugee crisis that began in 2015 brought hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Middle East to Europe. That brought a backlash over fears the newcomers will compete for jobs and resort to terrorism. “Islam,” the country’s prime minister, Robert Fico, recently told a Slovak news agency, “has no place in Slovakia.”

Men like al-Merfedy are seemingly stuck in limbo, neither behind bars nor completely free. They are not banned from working, but no one will hire them; they want to marry, but Muslim women are scarce; they long to reunite with their families, but more than a year after release, they are still alone. “Each day, I walk through Tbilisi,” says Salah al-Dhaby, a Yemeni former detainee who was transferred to Georgia. “I live a silent life, wandering the streets, then going back to a silent apartment.”

That silence, al-Merfedy says, feels like a cage. “We thought we would be free when we left Guantánamo,” he says. “Instead, we went from the small Guantánamo to here — a bigger Guantánamo.”

Sold to the Afghans

Al-Merfedy’s troubles began when he traveled from Yemen to Pakistan to look for work in 2001. After connecting with an Islamic missionary organization, he decided to travel to Europe to find work. Yet in the wake of 9/11, visas for Yemenis, even those registered with legitimate organizations, were difficult to obtain. Al-Merfedy was undeterred. He paid someone to smuggle him across Pakistan and Afghanistan, through Iran and into Turkey, where he hoped to find a way to Europe. He was captured in Iran, accused of being an Al-Qaeda recruiter and sold to Afghan authorities. The Afghans sent him to the Americans, who then transferred him to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003. His missionary group, the U.S. believes, was often used a front for extremists.

For five years, al-Merfedy remained behind bars, maintaining his innocence. His attorney points out that local groups often exploited lucrative American bounties for those connected to Al-Qaeda and sometimes delivered innocent men. Others seemed to be marginal players in the war on terror. “Few ‘combatants’ are even accused of having fought,” according to a 2006 report by Human Rights Watch. “Many are held simply because they were living in a house associated with the Taliban or working for a charity linked to the group.”

Whether al-Merfedy is innocent remains unclear; the Defense Department and the State Department’s Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure do not discuss the details of individual cases. But the U.S. cleared him for release in 2008, no longer deeming him a threat. After American intelligence officials discovered that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the “Underwear Bomber”) was trained in Yemen, however, the U.S. refused to transfer al-Merfedy or any of his countrymen back there. “The decision to transfer a detainee is made only after detailed, specific conversations with the receiving country about the potential threat a detainee may pose after transfer and the measures the receiving country will take in order to sufficiently mitigate that threat, and to ensure humane treatment,” says Lt. Col Valerie Henderson, a Defense Department spokesperson.

Some six years later, after more than a decade of intermittent “enhanced interrogations,” hunger strikes and solitary confinement, he was called into an office at Gitmo. There he met liaisons from Slovakia, who promised him a new life, and al-Merfedy was excited. “I wanted to leave Guantánamo,” he says.

Now that he is free, al-Merfedy is part of a two-year program run by the International Organization for Migration to make him feel more comfortable. This includes paid housing and a monthly stipend, Slovak language teachers, a psychologist and a social worker. Yet, so far, al-Merfedy has struggled to find a job and is worried what will happen next year, when the IOM cuts his stipend in half. The group says it would consider an extension, but only if it can prove to the government he is learning Slovak. Al-Merfedy says he is trying, but his classes are in English, a language he doesn’t speak well, which makes the learning process slow. He knows the basic greetings: dobry den (good morning), prosim (please) and dakujem (thank you). He can pass for a tourist, but nothing more.

Who’d Marry an Ex-Gitmo Man?

Around lunchtime, al-Merfedy strolls into town, gazing at the ground, occasionally looking up and smiling as he sees young couples holding hands or fathers playing with their children. Some pass him with a slight smile. Others eye him with suspicion or curiosity.

The 39-year-old had a large family back in Yemen and would like to see them again. But al-Merfedy is a permanent resident alien, not a refugee or an asylum seeker, so Slovakia is not legally obligated to reunite him with his mother, sisters or brothers. He wants to raise a family, but in a country with few Muslims and fewer who would marry a former Gitmo detainee, his prospects are bleak. According to Pooja Jhunjhunwala, a spokesperson for the State Department, “We support family reunification because we believe it leads to successful outcomes, successful integration.” However, the receiving countries actions do not always match State Department views.

Hussein is still waiting for the government to approve a visa allowing his family to visit. “Maybe if I was with my family, it would be OK,” he says, “but … I am a stranger. I am in exile. I have been longing for things my whole life, but they have all been decided for me.”

Later that day, as the sunlight fades, so too does Hussein’s headache, and by the time fog descends onto the streets, he feels better. He walks the solitary mile to his apartment, taking backstreets to avoid revelers spilling out of local bars. When he arrives, the sun is setting over Zvolen, and al-Merfedy pulls down his shades.

Once again, his apartment is silent, save for the ticking of the clock and the sound of the finch singing its evening song. “I hate to see anything in a cage,” he says as he fills the bird’s water and food containers. “I was in a cage my whole life.”

He pulls out a thin blanket and places it gently over the cage. After a moment, the bird goes silent.

This piece was produced with the support of the IWMF Howard G. Buffet Fund for Women Journalists.

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.

DIY Cultures 2017: The Counter-Culture Is Alive and Well at a Zine Fair in Shoreditch

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

 

Last week I paid a visit to DIY Cultures, a wonderful — and wonderfully packed — one-day event celebrating zines and the DIY ethos at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, curated by a core collective of Sofia Niazi, my friend Hamja Ahsan and Helena Wee, and was pleasantly reminded of the presence of the counter-culture, perhaps best summed up as an oppositional force to the prevailing culture, which has long fascinated me, and in search of which I am currently bouncing around ideas for a writing project I’d like to undertake.

Next week it will be exactly ten years since I started publishing articles here — on an almost daily basis — relating, for the most part, to Guantánamo and related issues. Roll back another year, to March 2006, and my Guantánamo project began in earnest, with 14 months of research and writing for my book The Guantánamo Files.

Before that, however, I had been interested more in notions of the counter-culture than championing and trying to reinforce the notion that there are absolute lines that societies that claim to respect the law must not cross — involving torture and imprisoning people indefinitely without charge or trial.

Before Guantánamo took over my life, I had spent the previous ten years looking at ancient sacred sites of the neolithic and Bronze Age, and, particularly, Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, making countless visits to these two sites and to numerous others — not just across the length and breadth of the UK, but also in Malta and Brittany. After years spent trying to write a book about my experiences — particularly focused on three long-distance walks I undertook with friends in 1997 and 1998 — it was suggested to me that a book looking specifically at the Stonehenge Free Festival, which I had visited in 1983 and 1984, and had included in my writing, might make a publishable book, and so I embarked on the life-changing process of researching and writing what became my first published book, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion, in June 2004. See my archive of subsequent articles about Stonehenge here.

Interweaving the archaeologists’ story of Stonehenge with that of the various outsiders drawn to the monument over the years, the book was, at some fundamental level, a counter-cultural history of post-war Britain — something that had always interested me. Growing up, my cultural reference points were the 1960s, and I was drawn to the hippie movement — the music, the fashion, and the hippies’ anti-establishment position — even as homegrown dissidents, the punks, were railing against the legacy of the 1960s.

What interested me — and the punks were no different, fundamentally — was the energy of a life established in defiance of the status quo, and this was clearly something that had happened in the 60s, when the existing culture was challenged in terms of music, fashion and politics, and a distinctive counter-culture developed, with the creation of underground magazines and newspapers, free festivals, free food kitchens, squatting, cooperatives and communes.

By the mid-70s, the punks responded to what they saw as the bloated failure of the 60s, but they were only partly right, and they were only partly in revolt. The punk movement also brought its own DIY ethos, and a whole raft of fanzines too and other graphic output, like the poster reproduced here, from a series that was on display at Rich Mix, made by Rock Against Racism in Hull in the late 70s, when I lived there. I actually saw some of the gigs, and was also a founder member of Human Zoo, one of the bands featured on this poster.

What had happened in the early 70s, I later realised, was that the hippies’ two main impulses — the political desire for change, and the more metaphysical desire for self-knowledge — had become separated, and while the influence of the former dwindled, after manifesting itself in some genuinely revolutionary movements in the late 60s and early 70s, the latter became the all-consuming monster that it is today — the quest for self-knowledge having turned into the most cynical and all-encompassing cult of the individual, in which everyone’s individual desires are regarded as “needs” and we are all encouraged to believe that we are entitled to whatever we want — or whatever cynical marketing types try to convince us we want, because, as the saying goes, “we’re worth it.”

In the 80s, under Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, the establishment pushed back in a concerted and often violent manner against the counter-culture — see, for example, The Battle of the Beanfield in the UK, when Thatcher used the police as a paramilitary force against the travellers, anarchists and environmental activists planning to set up the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. Despite this and other assaults on the counter-culture, however, Thatcher’s obsession with stifling dissent and creating a population of pliant homeowners was only partly successful.

Acid house and the road protest movement — both emerging completely unexpectedly in the late 80s and early 90s — revealed the counter-culture to be both surprisingly adaptable and, at the time, fundamentally uncrushable, and the pre-Blair 90s, in hindsight, following on from 1990’s Poll Tax Riot and Thatcher’s resignation, were memorable as the time when the Tories’ control of society, under John Major, was close to tenuous. For millions of people, myself included, mutiny was an almost permanent facet of life.

Then came Tony Blair, and what I describe as the psychic cosh with which he pummelled the British counter-culture into submission. “Unless you’re rich, go to bed early and don’t make too much noise”, Blair seemed to say, as he led the second wave of Thatcherism, the exultation of greed above all else, the commodification of everything, the dull primacy of money above the endless fascinations of a life where money is explicitly NOT the defining motivation of existence.

Since then, the counter-culture has struggled to survive, as the mainstream corporate world now eats up everything that shows the faintest signs of challenging late capitalism’s control freak omni-presence. Added to this, the rapid evolution of technology — in particular via the so-called smartphone — has ushered in a new, and as yet incompletely understood era of mass communication and interconnectivity, whose positives, it seems, threaten to be outweighed by its negatives.

Although, on the one hand, we can make friends around the world and the internet has created the opportunity for an extraordinary abundance of DIY publishing and all manner of creation online, there are profound problems too: far too much money is concentrated in a handful of tech companies, while creators are squeezed, and, of course, there are the problems of search engines and their dodgy algorithms, and echo chambers dumbing down politics and creating ghettoes of the like-minded, as well as the existence of cyber-bullies, individuals who spread hatred and encourage violence while hiding behind convenient pseudonyms.

In a world where everything is online and ephemeral, the counter-culture, it seems, is partly reasserting itself by taking back the means of manufacture and creating artefacts. That’s partly visible in the resurgence of vinyl, although, cynically, the major corporate labels have tried to take that over, and it’s also visible in the return of the audio cassette, a few of which were available at DIY Cultures. Primarily, however, there was an ocean of zines, posters and postcards, printed using real printing presses, or photocopied — some dealing very explicitly with politics (left-wing, anarchist and sexual, for example), while others dealt with the more whimsical and fantastical, but all of it, it seemed to me, was reasserting the counter-cultural necessity of reclaiming our creativity, and expressing it in forms and venues that are outside of corporate control.

And to add to this printed output, the day also featured several panel discussions, with themes including how to deal with Theresa May, how to deal with Brexit, and guests including the Artist Taxi Driver, who is raising funds for a “Brexshit” film, and Saffiyah Khan, the activist who recently stood up to the EDL in Birmingham.

Next year I hope to find a way to take part, but in the meantime I hope to find the time to further develop my project to analyse and curate a history of the counter-culture from the 60s to now. Any suggestions or leads will be very gratefully received.

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.

Witness Against Torture Launch “Forever Human Beings,” a 41-Day Campaign for the 41 “Forever Prisoners” Still Held at Guantánamo

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.

 

Since Donald Trump became president just over four months ago, the aggressive, and often unconstitutional incompetence emanating from the White House every day, on so many fronts, has unfortunately meant that long-standing injustices like the prison at Guantánamo Bay are in danger of disappearing off the radar completely, even more comprehensively than during the particular lulls in the presidency of Barack Obama, who largely sat on his hands between 2011 and 2013, when confronted by cynical obstruction in Congress to his hopes of closing the prison, doing very little until the prisoners forced his hand, embarking on a prison-wide hunger strike that drew the world’s attention, and embarrassed him into renewed action.

Through the Close Guantánamo campaign that I established with the attorney Tom Wilner in 2012 I have tried to keep Trump’s responsibility for Guantánamo in the public eye. Since this inauguration, opponents of Guantánamo have been sending in photos of themselves holding posters calling for Trump to close Guantánamo, which I’ve been posting on the website, and on social media — particularly through Facebook — ever since. Over 40 photos have now been published, with many more to come. Please join us. This Wednesday marks 125 days of Trump’s presidency, a suitable occasion to remind him that Guantánamo must be closed.

I’m pleased also to endorse a new initiative by Witness Against Torture, the campaigning group whose work is very close to my heart. Every January, on my annual visits to call for the closure of Guantánamo on an around the anniversary of its opening (on January 11), I spend time with members of Witness, many of whom have, over the years, become my friends, and I was delighted, a few days ago, to receive an email notifying me about “Forever Human Beings,” a 41-Day Campaign for the 41 “Forever Prisoners” Still Held at Guantánamo, launching this Friday, May 26.

Below is their article announcing the new initiative, with many planned actions listed, including, in the first instance, a rolling fast in which you are invited to take part. To contact them please also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

#foreverhumanbeings: A Campaign to Close Guantánamo

“Are we going to pretend they’re less than men and walk away?”

– Luke Nephew (Peace Poet), “There is a Man Under the Hood”

Forty-one human beings remain incarcerated in the prison at Guantánamo. All potentially face lifetimes of detention. Five have been cleared for release by the US government itself. But they were still in Guantánamo when Trump took office, and Trump has halted all transfers from the prison.

Many more are “forever prisoners,” who have not been charged with crimes, and never will be. A small handful of men are facing charges in the illegitimate and unworkable Military Commissions. If convicted, they could receive lengthy sentences, likely served at Guantánamo, or even the death penalty.

Guantánamo has always been a place of torture and the violation of human rights. It must close, no matter who is president. President Obama failed in his pledge to shutter the prison. Trump has threatened to bring new captives there. The thought of Trump — whose reckless disregard for the US Constitution is every day revealed — having Guantánamo as his private, offshore gulag is terrifying. Any day, we could learn that the Trump administration has sent a new captive to Guantánamo.

The continued existence of Guantánamo also feeds a resurgent Islamophobia and politics of fear and hate, typified by Trump’s unconstitutional “Muslim travel ban.” Guantánamo never housed simply the “worst of the worst” terrorists, as the Bush administration claimed. The vast majority of men held there never engaged in hostilities against the United States. By staying open, Guantánamo reinforces the terrible lie that all Muslims are dangerous, to be feared or even cut out of American life. To work to close Guantánamo is to support tolerance, pluralism, and respect for the rule of law.

Witness Against Torture is launching on Friday May 26: #foreverhumanbeings – A Campaign to Close Guantánamo. For a period of 41 days, spanning the holy month of Ramadan and beyond, the campaign will bring awareness to the fate of each of the 41 men detained in Guantanamo Bay Prison, coordinate public action aimed at closing Guantánamo, and draw links between Guantánamo, institutionalized Islamophobia, all forms of racism, and abuses in the US criminal justice and prison systems.

The Witness Against Torture campaign will include:

– an international and interfaith “rolling fast” throughout the campaign’s 41 days. Fasters are encouraged to incorporate concern for the abuse of men in Guantánamo during their day. If you are observing Ramadan, you may leave an empty seat at the dinner table in remembrance of the men who are in Guantánamo rather than at home with their families, during Iftar. Sign up for the Rolling Fast here. More details to come.

– phone calls, emails, and letters to relevant governmental and military offices.

– creative direct action and vigils in Washington, D.C. and other places.

– scheduled blogposts on such topics as Islamophobia, the current situation at Guantánamo, religious objections to torture, and the use of Communication Management Units in “war on terror” detentions.

– daily profiles on social media of each of the 41 detained men.

– participation on June 23 in the all-day vigil at the White House organized by the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition.

– the creation and distribution of art addressing Guantánamo, torture, and the US prisons.

Please join us in remembering the men locked away, now forever, at Guantánamo and working to close the prison!

Please also check out the video below, How to Close Guantánamo Under Trump, by Justin Norman, who does all Witness Against Torture’s photos and videos, and also designed the We Stand With Shaker website and the Gitmo Clock for Close Guantánamo.

Witness Against Torture formed in 2005 when 25 Americans went to Guantánamo Bay and attempted to visit the detention facility. They began to organize more broadly to shut down Guantánamo, end indefinite detention and torture and call out Islamophobia. During our demonstrations, we lift up the words of the detainees themselves, bringing them to public spaces they are not permitted to access. Witness Against Torture will carry on in its activities until torture is decisively ended, its victims are fully acknowledged,Guantánamo and similar facilities are closed, and those who ordered and committed torture are held to account.

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.

Video: “Zone of Non-Being: Guantánamo,” Featuring Andy Worthington, Omar Deghayes, Clive Stafford Smith, Michael Ratner

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.

 

Several years ago (actually, way back in December 2012), I was interviewed at my home for a documentary produced by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which was directed by the filmmaker Turab Shah. For some reason, I never heard about the film being completed (I think its initial screening was in January 2014, when I was in the US), but after Donald Trump became president of the United States, I received an email from the IHRC stating that they were screening the film, which prompted me to look it up, and to discover that it had been put online in July 2014.

The film features a fascinating array of contributors, including myself, former prisoners including Omar Deghayes, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, the late Michael Ratner, the founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the author and academic Arun Kundnani, Ramon Grosfoguel, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the journalist Victoria Brittain, the writer Amrit Wilson, and Massoud Shadjareh of the ICRC.

The ICRC described the film as follows:

‘Zone of Non-Being: Guantánamo’ looks at how the process of Guantanamisation has taken place over the last decade in the USA, and through US and allied foreign policy from the introduction of the NDAA to the use of drones. It argues that rather than being the exceptional event of the so-called War on Terror, Guantánamo is a continuation of a colonial policy that runs from 1492 and the conquest of the Americas and the destruction of Granada.

Guantánamo symbolises in a public and brutal fashion the creation of Fanon’s Zone of Non-Being – “an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity” where violence reigns and those deemed non-beings are trapped by the on-going colonial process.

The film is posted below via YouTube, and I hope you have time to watch it and to share it if you find it useful. It’s also on Vimeo 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.

Abu Zubaydah Will Not Testify at Guantánamo Military Court Because the US Government Has “Stacked the Deck” Against Him

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, for Close Guantánamo, the campaign I co-founded in January 2012 with the attorney Tom Wilner, I published an article, Abu Zubaydah Waives Immunity to Testify About His Torture in a Military Commission Trial at Guantánamo, explaining how Zubydah (aka Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), a Saudi-born Palestinian, an alleged “high value detainee,” and the unfortunate first victim of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 torture program, was planning to appear as a witness today a pre-trial hearing at Guantánamo involving Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of five men accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Zubaydah was planning to discuss bin al-Shibh’s claims that “somebody is intentionally harassing him with noises and vibrations to disrupt his sleep,” as Carol Rosenberg described it for the Miami Herald, but as Mark Denbeaux, one of his lawyers, explained, by taking the stand his intention was for the truth to emerge, and for the world “to know that he has committed no crimes and the United States has no basis to fear him and no justification to hold him for 15 years, much to less subject him to the torture that the world has so roundly condemned.”

Denbeaux also explained how “the Prosecution here in the Military Commissions is afraid to try him or even charge him with any crime,” adding, “The failure to charge him, after 15 years of torture and detention, speaks eloquently. To charge him would be to reveal the truth about the creation of America’s torture program.”

Denbeaux also noted that for Abu Zubaydah testifying would be a way “to celebrate his survival and to let the world hear his voice and to see him.”

However, late yesterday evening, after nearly three hours of meetings with Zubaydah, it was revealed that he would not be testifying after all. One of bin al-Shibh’s legal team, Jim Harrington, said, “On the advice of his attorneys he has made a decision that he will not testify because the risks to him in the future from cross examination prohibit him from being able to give important testimony on the issue before the court.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg explained that Zubaydah “made the decision in tandem with his lawyers after his attorney Mark Denbeaux arrived at this remote Navy base Thursday afternoon.” She stated, “At issue was material Sept. 11 trial prosecutors planned to use in court to demonstrate Zubaydah’s bias against the United States, including a video showing the Palestinian before his capture in Pakistan in March 2002 praising the Sept. 11 attacks.”

This would be an unacceptable example of the US government trying to blacken Zubaydah’s name, despite having no case against him. As Rosenberg explained, although Zubaydah has admitted to having been a jihadist, “he has insisted, and US intelligence analysts have concluded, that he was not a sworn member of al-Qaida and there is no evidence he knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.”

Speaking of what Zubaydah was supposed to be discussing, Harrington said Zubaydah had “heard the noises but [had] not felt the vibration,” but he added that the issue at stake was that prosecutor Ed Ryan intended to undertake “a sweeping cross-examination” of Zubaydah, even though the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, had specifically cautioned Ryan against “turning the testimony into ‘a United States versus Zubaydah case.’”

Harrington’s co-counsel, reserve Army Maj. Alaina Wichner, said, “We’re very disappointed that he’s not going to testify. But we understand the circumstance. The only people who can obviously testify for Ramzi are people who are in the camps with us, and this was an important witness for us.” She added that her team “was considering whether to call other witnesses who might validate Bin al Shibh’s claim of the disruptions.”

While this is a disappointment for bin al-Shibh, it is also a major blow for Abu Zubaydah, and his efforts to hold the US government to account of this torture, and for their failure to charge him or release him. Mark Denbeaux issued a statement to the press, which I’m cross-posting below in its entirety, as it perfectly captures the disgraceful position taken by the government. As Denbeaux describes it, they have “stacked the deck” against Zubaydah, because “the court gave virtual free reign to the prosecution in search of proving bias — while extremely limiting my client’s ability to respond meaningfully about his experience.”

Statement to the Press

By Mark P. Denbeaux

On May 19, 2017 counsel for the detainee known as Abu Zubaydah chose to not allow their client to testify.

We could not allow our client to testify; the Government stacked the deck. We stipulated to bias against the US. but the court gave virtual free reign to the prosecution in search of proving bias — while extremely limiting my client’s ability to respond meaningfully about his experience.

Faced with overwhelming evidence that they tortured the wrong man, the Government wanted to cherrypick statements to paint a picture of prejudice under this cloak of “bias” without telling the whole story.

We invaded this man’s country, waterboarded him 83 times and tortured him for 4 years in secret prisons where he lost an eye. Of course he’s biased. He’s been imprisoned for 15 years without being charged and while he was being tortured, the CIA officially directed that he be silenced as long as he lived, forever and without fail. And if that wasn’t enough, they ordered his body cremated — assuring his silence even beyond the grave.

Tell me, what kind of people burn the bodies of their victims? Not innocent ones. And not people who want their victims to talk. These proceedings ultimately turned out to be just a continuation of that campaign of silence. We, perhaps foolishly, had hoped for better.

Before being captured, my client made a video extremely critical of the United States. My client fought against the Soviets and their agents as a mujahadeen, and then vowed to fight again against anyone who invaded his country, and to stand in solidarity with anyone who defended it. It was a response to battle. He essentially made a pledge of allegiance to his country and his beliefs. How is that a crime in America? Millions of American soldiers and schoolchildren take oaths and make a pledge of allegiance every day — does that mean they’re all guilty of the horrific torture that the CIA performed against my client? Expressing allegiance to one’s beliefs is not a crime in America. Maybe that’s why the prosecution in Guantánamo refuses to charge him.

The Government sought not truth, but stacked the deck in a way that made it impossible for my client to be presented fairly and accurately. For those reasons, we have respectfully abstained from taking part in this dog and pony show.

Mark P. Denbeaux

Lead Civilian Military Defense Counsel for Zayn Abu Zubaydah

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.

Ismail Einashe, British Citizen of Somali Origin, Describes How The Status of Migrants is “Permanently Up for Review” in the New Intolerant UK

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

 

What strange, and almost unbelievably infuriating times we live in, as Donald Trump somehow remains president in the US, and Britain continues to be bludgeoned by a phoney demonstration of democracy. The latest example is the General Election on June 8, which follows a previous example just two years ago, despite the Tories introducing legislation to ensure that elections only take place every five years. In between, there was, of course, the lamentable EU referendum that is the reason for this General Election, as Theresa May struggles to provide endless distractions from the reality that leaving the EU will be an unmitigated disaster, the single greatest instance of a nation declaring economic suicide in most, if not all of our lifetimes.

For Theresa May, this is an election in which nothing must be discussed, just the endless repetition of soundbites about being “strong and stable,” and lies about how an increased Tory majority will improve our Brexit negotiations. In fact, the size of the government’s majority means nothing at all in the negotiations with the EU that the Tories want to avoid discussing because they have no idea what they are doing, and while this is ostensibly good for the opposition parties, the Brexit blanket, like a thick fog, is tending to obscure any serious discussion of the government’s many other failings — on the economy, on the NHS, on all manner of fronts — and this, of course, is being aided by the generally biased, right-wing media that is such a drag on anything resembling progressive politics in this country

What is also being forgotten, or overlooked, is how Theresa May, a soft Remainer who has, cynically, turned herself into the hardest of hard Brexiteers, is so dangerous not only because her actions reveal how she has no principles whatsoever that she will not sacrifice to stay in power, but also because, in her previous job, as the home secretary, she was dangerously racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic. I discussed her record in detail at the time of her leadership victory, in an article entitled, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration, and I was reminded of it a few months ago in a detailed article by the journalist Ismail Einashe, a British citizen of Somali origin, which he wrote for the spring 2017 edition of the New Humanist magazine, and which was then picked up by the Guardian.

I’ve been meaning to cross-post it ever since, and am taking the opportunity to do so now because racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia are actually at the heart of Britain’s current suicidal woes — and are also a key part of the worldview of our wretched Prime Minister.

Einashe, who arrived in the UK from Somalia in 1994 and got a British passport in 2002, points out how, over the last 15 years, the key concept of citizenship has been eroded, and he reminds those who had forgotten — or perhaps never even knew in the first place — how central a role Theresa May has played in this.

He traces the problem with the perception of Muslims in the UK back to two events in 2001 — 9/11, of course, but also the race riots in the north of England, which, he notes, “provoked a fraught public conversation on Muslims’ perceived lack of integration, and how we could live together in a multi-ethnic society.” Interestingly, one of the first public events I took part in as a speaker on Guantánamo, in 2007, was with Arun Kundnani, who had written an excellent book, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain, which included analysis of the riots, demonstrating that it was unemployment that had led to friction between different cultures. In the past, different cultures met on the factory floor, but with no work in neo-liberal Britain, Muslims in the northern towns where the riots took place had ended up accidentally ghettoised, although the white British saw that as deliberate isolation.

As the hysteria mounted, Einashe notes, “the Blair government decided to use a little-known law – the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act – to revoke the citizenship of naturalised British persons, largely in terrorism cases.”

Of key concern are the following two paragraphs, making reference to the stripping of citizenship under Theresa May that I discussed in 2014 in two articles, The UK’s Unacceptable Obsession with Stripping British Citizens of Their UK Nationality and MPs Support Alarming Citizenship-Stripping Measures Introduced by Theresa May. As Einashe states:

In 2006, the home secretary was given further powers to revoke British citizenship. At the time, the government sought to allay concerns about misuse of these powers. “The secretary of state cannot make an order on a whim,” the home office minister Angela Eagle had said when the law was first proposed, “and he[/she] will be subject to judicial oversight when he[/she] makes an order.”

Although the post-9/11 measures were initially presented as temporary, they have become permanent. And the home secretary can strip people of their citizenship without giving a clear reason. No court approval is required, and the person concerned does not need to have committed a crime. The practice is growing. Under Labour, just five people had their citizenship removed, but when Theresa May was at the Home Office, 70 people were stripped of their citizenship, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Yet these near-arbitrary powers have caused remarkably little concern.

In his conclusion, Einashe writes that, in the UK today, “becoming a naturalised citizen is no longer a guarantee against the political whims of the day: you are, in effect, a second-class citizen.” He adds that “[c]itizenship-stripping is now a fixture of the state,” and correctly describes it as an unacceptable move by the government to “empower” itself “at the expense of ordinary people.” He cites Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, who “memorably described citizenship as ‘the right to have rights,’” but adds that “for people of migrant background such as myself, this is being eroded. We are not a small group: according to the 2011 census, there are 3.4 million naturalised Brits.”

With Trump in power in the US, having attempted to implement a ban on Muslims from seven countries, Einashe notes that he “happened to be visiting New York at the time,” and the ban “left me wondering if I will ever be allowed to again.” With the virus of intolerance spreading so easily form country to country, Trump’s ban — though subject to massive legal challenges in the US — has nevertheless resonated with those seeking to defend intolerance in other countries, and not for nothing does Einashe end his article by stating that, “In other liberal democracies such as Australia and Canada, moves are under way to enable citizenship-stripping – sending people like me a clear message that our citizenship is permanently up for review.”

I hope you have time to read there article, and that you will share it if you find it useful.

The struggle to be British: my life as a second-class citizen

By Ismail Einashe, the Guardian, March 2, 2017

After arriving in Britain as a child, I fought hard to feel like I belonged. Now it feels that the status of migrants like me is permanently up for review.

I used my British passport for the first time on a January morning in 2002, to board a Eurostar train to Paris. I was taking a paper on the French Revolution for my history A-level and was on a trip to explore the key sites of the period, including a visit to Louis XIV’s chateau at Versailles. When I arrived at Gare du Nord I felt a tingle of nerves cascade through my body: I had become a naturalised British citizen only the year before. As I got closer to border control my palms became sweaty, clutching my new passport. A voice inside told me the severe-looking French officers would not accept that I really was British and would not allow me to enter France. To my great surprise, they did.

Back then, becoming a British citizen was a dull bureaucratic procedure. When my family arrived as refugees from Somalia’s civil war, a few days after Christmas 1994, we were processed at the airport, and then largely forgotten. A few years after I got my passport all that changed. From 2004, adults who applied for British citizenship were required to attend a ceremony; to take an oath of allegiance to the monarch and make a pledge to the UK.

These ceremonies, organised by local authorities in town halls up and down the country, marked a shift in how the British state viewed citizenship. Before, it was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain – now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society. In 2002, the government had also introduced a “life in the UK” test for prospective citizens. The tests point to something important: being a citizen on paper is not the same as truly belonging. Official Britain has been happy to celebrate symbols of multiculturalism – the curry house and the Notting Hill carnival – while ignoring the divisions between communities. Nor did the state give much of a helping hand to newcomers: there was little effort made to help families like mine learn English.

But in the last 15 years, citizenship, participation and “shared values” have been given ever more emphasis. They have also been accompanied by a deepening atmosphere of suspicion around people of Muslim background, particularly those who were born overseas or hold dual nationality. This is making people like me, who have struggled to become British, feel like second-class citizens.

*****

When I arrived in Britain aged nine, I spoke no English and knew virtually nothing about this island. My family was moved into a run-down hostel on London’s Camden Road, which housed refugees – Kurds, Bosnians, Kosovans. Spending my first few months in Britain among other new arrivals was an interesting experience. Although, like my family, they were Muslim, their habits were different to ours. The Balkan refugees liked to drink vodka. After some months we had to move, this time to Colindale in north London.

Colindale was home to a large white working-class community, and our arrival was met with hostility. There were no warm welcomes from the locals, just a cold thud. None of my family spoke English, but I had soon mastered a few phrases in my new tongue: “Excuse me”, “How much is this?”, “Can I have …?”, “Thank you”. It was enough to allow us to navigate our way through the maze of shops in Grahame Park, the largest council estate in Barnet. This estate had opened in 1971, conceived as a garden city, but by the mid-1990s it had fallen into decay and isolation. This brick city became our home. As with other refugee communities before us, Britain had been generous in giving Somalis sanctuary, but was too indifferent to help us truly join in. Families like mine were plunged into unfamiliar cities, alienated and unable to make sense of our new homes. For us, there were no guidebooks on how to fit into British society or a map of how to become a citizen.

My family – the only black family on our street – stuck out like a sore thumb. Some neighbours would throw rubbish into our garden, perhaps because they disapproved of our presence. That first winter in Britain was brutal for us. We had never experienced anything like it and my lips cracked. But whenever it snowed I would run out to the street, stand in the cold, chest out and palms ready to meet the sky, and for the first time feel the sensation of snowflakes on my hands. The following summer I spent my days blasting Shaggy’s Boombastic on my cherished cassette player. But I also realised just how different I was from the children around me. Though most of them were polite, others called me names I did not understand. At the playground they would not let me join in their games – instead they would stare at me. I knew then, aged 11, that there was a distance between them and me, which even childhood curiosity could not overcome.

Although it was hard for me to fit in and make new friends, at least my English was improving. This was not the case for the rest of my family, so they held on to each other, afraid of what was outside our four walls. It was mundane growing up in working-class suburbia: we rarely left our street, except for occasional visits to the Indian cash-and-carry in Kingsbury to buy lamb, cumin and basmati rice. Sometimes one of our neighbours would swerve his van close to the pavement edge if it rained and he happened to spot my mother walking past, so he could splash her long dirac and hijab with dirty water. If he succeeded, he would lean out of the window, thumbs up, laughing hysterically. My mother’s response was always the same. She would walk back to the house, grab a towel and dry herself.

At secondary school in Edgware, the children were still mostly white, but there was a sizeable minority of Sikhs and Hindus. My new classmates would laugh at how I pronounced certain English words. I couldn’t say “congratulations” properly, the difficult part being the “gra”. I would perform saying that word, much to the amusement of my classmates. As the end of term approached, my classmates would ask where I was going on holiday. I would tell them, “Nowhere”, adding, “I don’t have a passport”.

When I was in my early teens, we were rehoused and I had to move to the south Camden Community school in Somers Town. There, a dozen languages were spoken and you could count the number of white students in my year on two hands. There was tension in the air and pupils were mostly segregated along ethnic lines – Turks, Bengalis, English, Somalis, Portuguese. Turf wars were not uncommon and fights broke out at the school gates. The British National party targeted the area in the mid-1990s, seeking to exploit the murder of a white teenager by a Bengali gang. At one point a halal butcher was firebombed.

Though I grew up minutes from the centre of Europe’s biggest city, I rarely ventured far beyond my own community. For us, there were no trips to museums, seaside excursions or cinema visits. MTV Base, the chicken shop and McDonald’s marked my teen years. I had little connection to other parts of Britain, beyond the snippets of middle-class life I observed via my white teachers. And I was still living with refugee documents, given “indefinite leave to remain” that could still be revoked at some future point. I realised then that no amount of identification with my new-found culture could make up for the reality that, without naturalisation, I was not considered British.

At 16, I took my GCSEs and got the grades to leave behind one of the worst state schools in London for one of the best: the mixed sixth form at Camden School for Girls. Most of the teens at my new school had previously attended some of Britain’s best private schools – City of London, Westminster, Highgate – and were in the majority white and middle-class.

It was strange to go from a Muslim-majority school to a sixth form where the children of London’s liberal set attended: only a mile apart, but worlds removed. I am not certain my family understood this change. My cousins thought it was weird that I did not attend the local college, but my old teachers insisted I go to the sixth form if I wanted to get into a good university. A few days after starting there, I got my naturalisation certificate, which opened the way for me to apply for my British passport.

*****

Around the time I became a British citizen, the political mood had started to shift. In the summer of 2001, Britain experienced its worst race riots in a generation. These riots, involving white and Asian communities in towns in the north-west of England, were short but violent. They provoked a fraught public conversation on Muslims’ perceived lack of integration, and how we could live together in a multi-ethnic society. This conversation was intensified by the 9/11 attacks in the US. President George W Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” created a binary between the good and the bad immigrant, and the moderate and the radical Muslim. The London bombings of 7 July 2005 added yet more intensity to the conversation in Britain.

Politicians from across the spectrum agreed that a shared British identity was important, but they couldn’t agree on what that might be. In 2004, the Conservative leader Michael Howard had referred to “The British dream” when speaking about his Jewish immigrant roots. After 2005, he wrote in the Guardian that the tube attacks had “shattered” complacency about Britain’s record on integration. Britain had to face “the terrible truth of being the first western country to have suffered terrorist attacks perpetrated by ‘home-grown’ suicide bombers – born and educated in Britain”. Many commentators questioned whether being a Muslim and British were consistent identities; indeed whether Islam itself was compatible with liberal democracy.

Howard defined a shared identity through institutions such as democracy, monarchy, the rule of law and a national history. But others argued that making a checklist was a very un-British thing to do. Labour’s Gordon Brown, in a 2004 article for the Guardian, wrote that liberty, tolerance and fair play were the core values of Britishness. While acknowledging such values exist in other cultures and countries, he went on to say that when these values are combined together they make a “distinctive Britishness that has been manifest throughout our history and has shaped it”.

For me, at least, becoming a British citizen was a major milestone. It not only signalled that I felt increasingly British but that I now had the legal right to feel this way.

But my new identity was less secure than I realised. Only a few months after my trip to Paris, the Blair government decided to use a little-known law – the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act – to revoke the citizenship of naturalised British persons, largely in terrorism cases. Before 1914, British citizenship, once obtained, could only be given up voluntarily by an individual, but that changed with the advent of the first world war. According to the Oxford politics professor Matthew Gibney, the 1914 act was a response to anti-German sentiment and fears about the loyalty of people with dual British-German citizenship. A further law, passed in 1918, created new and wide-ranging grounds to revoke citizenship.

In theory, since 1918, the home secretary has had the power to remove a naturalised person or dual-nationality-holder’s British citizenship if it was considered “conducive to the public good”, but a 1981 law prevented them from doing so if it made the person stateless. Since 9/11, that restraint has been gradually abandoned.

In 2006, the home secretary was given further powers to revoke British citizenship. At the time, the government sought to allay concerns about misuse of these powers. “The secretary of state cannot make an order on a whim,” the home office minister Angela Eagle had said when the law was first proposed, “and he will be subject to judicial oversight when he makes an order”.

Although the post-9/11 measures were initially presented as temporary, they have become permanent. And the home secretary can strip people of their citizenship without giving a clear reason. No court approval is required, and the person concerned does not need to have committed a crime. The practice is growing. Under Labour, just five people had their citizenship removed, but when Theresa May was at the Home Office, 70 people were stripped of their citizenship, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Yet these near-arbitrary powers have caused remarkably little concern.

*****

People have largely accepted these new powers because they are presented as a way to keep the country safe from terrorism. After 9/11, the public became more aware of the Islamist preachers who had made London their home in the preceding decades. Abu Hamza, who was then the imam of Finsbury Park mosque, and became a notorious figure in the media, was, like me, a naturalised British citizen. For several years as a teenager, I attended the Finsbury Park mosque. It was small; I remember the smell of tea, incense and feet that greeted you every time you walked in. I also remember the eclectic mix of worshippers who visited – Algerians, Afghans, Somalis and Moroccans. Unlike Muslims of south-Asian background, few of these people had longstanding colonial ties to Britain. Most had fled civil war in their home countries, while some of the North Africans had left France because they felt it treated Muslims too harshly. The mosque was not affiliated with the Muslim Association of Britain, and its preachers promoted a Salafi form of Islam.

I remember Abu Hamza as a larger-than-life character, whose presence dominated mosque life, especially at Friday prayers when he would go into very long sermons – usually about the dangers of becoming too British. Attending this mosque was like being cocooned from the realities of modern life. I recall Abu Hamza once going off about how, as young Muslim teens, we were not to follow the “kuffar” in their habit of engaging in premarital sex. For much of my teens, this mosque held a kind of control over me, based on fear. That changed when I moved to my new sixth form and felt able to start exploring the world for myself, and began to realise that I could be secular, liberal and humanist.

I went in one direction, but other people I knew chose different paths. Before 2001, I don’t recall many women wearing the niqab, but as the years wore on it became a more common sight on the streets of London. My sister even began to wear one – contrary to media stereotypes of women being coerced, she chose to, as did many of the young women I had gone to school with. The way that young Muslims practised Islam in Britain changed, in line with global developments. They dropped the varied cultural baggage of their parents’ versions of the religion and began a journey to a distinct British Islam – something that connected the Somali refugee and the second-generation Bangladeshi, the Irish and Jamaican converts.

Some of the white working-class kids I grew up with converted to Islam. Daniel became Yusef and Emma became Khadija. Before I knew it, they were giving me advice about how Muslims should behave. I observed this role reversal with amusement. One boy in particular would preach to me while incessantly saying “bruv”. I also saw the young men I had grown up with move away from a life sat on bikes wearing hoods under bridges in Camden listening to grime, to practising their Islam more visibly. Out went the sneaky pints, spliffs and casual sex. Now it was beards, sermons about the faith and handing out Islamic leaflets on street corners. But I did not heed their words. When I was 16 I stopped attending the mosque and I began to question my faith.

Mahdi Hashi was one of the young men I grew up with. Hashi was another child refugee from Somalia. As a teenager he used to complain that he was being followed by the British security services. He said they wanted to make him an informant. Hashi was not alone. In 2009, he and other young Muslim men from Camden took their allegations to the press. One said that a man posing as a postal worker turned up at his door and told him that if he did not cooperate with the security services, then his safety could not be guaranteed if he ever left Britain.

*****

For most newcomers, citizenship is not just confirmation of an identity, it is also about protection: that you will be guaranteed rights and treated according to the law. Hashi lost that protection. In 2009, he left for Somalia because, his family say, of harassment by the security services. In June 2012, his family received a letter informing them that he was to lose his British citizenship. Later that summer Hashi turned up in Djibouti, a tiny former French colony on the Red Sea. He was arrested. He alleges that he was threatened with physical abuse and rape if he did not cooperate with authorities in Djibouti – and he alleges that US officials questioned him. In November 2012, he was given over to the Americans and taken to the US without any formal extradition proceedings. In 2016, Hashi was sentenced in New York to nine years in prison for allegedly supporting the jihadist group al-Shabaab. He will be deported to Somalia upon his release.

Hashi’s case is not unique. Bilal Berjawi, who came to Britain from Lebanon as a child, had his British citizenship revoked in 2012 and was killed in a US drone strike on the outskirts of Mogadishu. His friend Mohamed Sakr, who held dual British-Egyptian nationality, was also killed by a drone strike in Somalia after he had been stripped of his UK citizenship. Together with a third friend, the two young men had visited Tanzania in 2009 on what they claimed was a safari trip, but were arrested, accused of trying to reach Somalia and returned to the UK. The third friend was Mohammed Emwazi, now better known as the Isis executioner “Jihadi John”.

The war in Syria, and the attraction that Isis and other jihadist groups hold for a small minority of British Muslims, has led to a further increase in citizenship-stripping. In 2013 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, removed the citizenship of 13 people who had left for Syria. The government has a duty to protect people, but the tool it is using will have wider, damaging consequences.

*****

The right of newcomers to be considered fully British has been a long struggle. The first border controls of the 20th century were introduced to stop the movement of “alien” Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave citizenship to anyone who had been a subject of empire, but those black and Asian migrants who took up the offer – indeed, who often thought of themselves as British – were met with shocking racism: with “no Irish, no blacks, no dogs”. The 1962 Immigration Act began to limit the citizenship rights of people from the non-white colonies, and by the 1982 Act it was all over.

Now we are caught in a paradox, where the state is demanding more effort than ever on the part of the migrant to integrate, but your citizenship is never fully guaranteed. Fifteen years on from the events of 9/11, gaining British citizenship is a much tougher process. And becoming a naturalised citizen is no longer a guarantee against the political whims of the day: you are, in effect, a second-class citizen. Citizenship-stripping is now a fixture of the state, and it is defended in the usual vein, which is to say: “If you have not done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” The usual caveat is that this concerns terrorists and criminals – a red herring that masks the true purpose of such laws, which is to empower the state at the expense of ordinary people. The philosopher Hannah Arendt memorably described citizenship as “the right to have rights”, but for people of migrant background such as myself, this is being eroded. We are not a small group: according to the 2011 census, there are 3.4 million naturalised Brits.

As I was writing this piece, Donald Trump issued his executive order that bans people from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Somalia, from entering the US – even if they hold dual nationality. I happened to be visiting New York at the time, and the ban has left me wondering if I will ever be allowed to again. Despite assurances from Britain’s government, it remains unclear whether the ban applies to people who hold a British passport, but were born overseas. Trump’s ban did not happen in a vacuum: there is a thread linking the anti-terror policies of western governments and this extreme new step.

Today, I no longer feel so safe in my status as a naturalised British citizen, and it is not just the UK. In other liberal democracies such as Australia and Canada, moves are under way to enable citizenship-stripping – sending people like me a clear message that our citizenship is permanently up for review.

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.

Prior to Chelsea Manning’s Release on Wednesday, Here’s What She Wrote to President Obama

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.

 

This Wednesday, May 17, Chelsea Manning — formerly known as Bradley Manning — will be released from prison, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she has been held for the last seven years. her role as a whistleblower was immense. As a private, she was responsible for the largest ever leak of classified documents, including the “Collateral Murder” video, featuring US personnel indiscriminately killing civilians and two Reuters reporters in Iraq, 500,000 army reports (the Afghan War logs and the Iraq War logs), 250,000 US diplomatic cables, and the Guantánamo files, released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, on which I worked as a media partner. See my archive of articles based on those files here.

By that time, Manning was already in US custody in a military brig in Quantico, Virginia, which I first wrote about in December 2010, in an article entitled, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”? I continued to follow his story closely into 2011 (see here and here), which included President Obama’s indifference to criticism by the United Nations, and when Manning’s trial finally took place, in 2013, I made a particular point of dealing with those parts of the trial in which the significance of the Guantánamo files was examined.

As I stated just before his trial began, “Bradley’s key statement on the Guantánamo files is when he says, ‘the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low-level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would’ve been released if they were held in theater.’”

I added:

This is absolutely the case, and I can only take exception to his belief that they were “not a detailed assessment.” They were indeed only a round-up of the available information from a variety of military sources, but, crucially, they provide the names of the men making the statements about their fellow prisoners, which were not available previously, providing a compelling insight into the full range of unreliable witnesses, to the extent that pages and pages of information that, on the surface, might look acceptable, are revealed under scrutiny to be completely worthless.

Although Manning received a 35-year sentence, President Obama commuted it just before he left office in January, as I wrote about at the time, in an article entitled, Obama Commutes Chelsea Manning’s 35-Year Sentence; Whistleblower Who Leaked Hugely Important Guantánamo Files Will Be Freed in May 2017, Not 2045 (actually, her sentence was due to end in November 2039, because it took into account time already served).

Speaking from her prison cell, Manning said, “I’m looking forward to breathing the warm spring air again. I want that indescribable feeling of connection with people and nature again, without razor wire or a visitation booth. I want to be able to hug my family and friends again. And swimming – I want to go swimming!”

On Facebook, one of her lawyers, Nancy Hollander, wrote, “As we approach our client Chelsea Manning’s release, it is good to remember what she, her lawyers and her supporters wrote to urge President Obama to grant her clemency. Now we will finally be able to hug her, to walk in the sun with her, and to see her smile as a free woman. And we thank everyone who stood by her during these long years.”

Hollander posted a link to that document, and I’m cross-posting it below so we can all remember how Manning argued the case for having her sentence commuted.

Wednesday will be a great day for justice, and I’m pleased that, despite his many failures — including the failure to close Guantánamo and to hold anyone in the Bush administration accountable for implementing torture —  President Obama made amends, at least to some extent, by commuting Manning’s sentence in the dying days of his presidency.

Manning’s petition for clemency was sent to Robert Zauzmer, the Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department, and was prefaced with a letter from Vincent J. Ward, another of Manning’s lawyers, and Nancy Hollander, dated November 10, 2016. I’m delighted to be posting both below. As the lawyers note, the petition also includes letters of support from Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of Guantánamo’s military commissions, Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and the journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Re: Clemency Application for Ms. Chelsea Manning

Dear Mr. Zauzmer,

On behalf of our client, Ms. Chelsea Manning, please find the enclosed application for the commutation of Ms. Manning’s court-martial sentence to time served. Included in the application are letters of support from Daniel Ellsberg, Morris Davis, and Glenn Greenwald, the unclassified portions of her appellate brief to the Army appellate court, and excerpts from the court-martial, including her statement of apology to the military judge. As you will see in the application, Ms. Manning is well into the sixth year of a thirty-five year sentence for disclosing classified information to the media with the intention of raising public awareness about issues she found concerning, including the impact of war on innocent civilians.

We acknowledge that this is Ms. Manning’s second clemency application and that her appeal is still pending, but we urge the President to carefully consider and grant her request. President Obama has taken admirable steps to provide many criminal offenders with a “second chance” through his clemency powers. If approved, Ms. Manning will have a first chance to live a real, meaningful life.

Ms. Manning has never made excuses for disclosing classified materials to the news media. She accepted responsibility at trial by pleading guilty without the benefit ofa plea agreement, an unusual act of courage in a case such as hers. Despite pleading guilty, the military prosecutors sought to characterize Ms. Manning’s behavior as treasonous, an effort that ultimately failed. Unfortunately the trial had become a public spectacle, and with the Army under great scrutiny, the active duty military judge sentenced Ms. Manning to thirty-five years confinement.

Unlike in federal criminal cases, military judges in courts-martial do not have the benefit of sentencing guidelines and do not rely on historical precedent for sentencing decisions. It is a vestige of an outdated military justice system that in most cases is non-prejudicial because the vast majority of courts-martial concern routine offenses or uniquely military misconduct. In a case like Ms. Manning’s, however, a military judge has no way of knowing what constitutes fair and reasonable punishment.

Nor did the military judge appreciate the context in which Ms. Manning committed these offenses. Ms. Manning is transgender. When she entered the military she was, as a young adult, attempting to make sense ofher feelings and place in the world. Ms. Manning’s difficulties were compounded by the reality that the military at the time was not a welcoming place for transgender men and women. This caused Ms. Manning considerable grief because she wanted to serve her country, but to do so she had to suppress her true self and feelings. Also during this time many of Ms. Manning’s fellow soldiers teased and bullied her because she was “different.”

While the military culture has improved since then, these events had a detrimental effect on her mentally and emotionally leading to the disclosures.

Ms. Manning is currently involved in litigation over her access to therapy for gender dysphoria. She merely wants to live openly as a woman, and even though the military has finally opened its doors to transgender men and women, the government has flercely fought Ms. Manning’s efforts. The Army even opposed Ms. Manning’s request to use her legal name, Chelsea, and to refer to her with female pronouns, during the course of the appeal. Thankfully the military appellate court rejected the Army’s draconian position. Even after the Administration’s efforts to diversify and bring tolerance to the military, Ms. Manning still fights daily for her right to be identified as a woman. This fight has taken a great toll on her.

Since Ms. Manning’s arrest she has been subjected to torturous conditions while in military confinement. For nearly a year Ms. Manning was held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, and since her conviction, has been placed in solitary confinement for an attempted suicide. This conflicts with the President’s mandate to halt the use of solitary confinement for any purpose. The United Nations has taken up the fight against the use of solitary confinement. As the former U.N. special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, explained, “[solitary confinement] was a practice that was banned in the 19th century because it was cruel, but it made a comeback in the last few decades.” This Administration should consider Ms. Manning’s prison conditions, including the significant time she spent in solitary confinement, as a reason for reducing her sentence to time served.

Our military leaders often say that their most important job is to take care of their service members, but no one in the military has ever truly taken care of Ms. Manning. This application presents an opportunity for the President, as Commander in Chief, to take care of one of his soldiers. Ms. Manning’s request is reasonable — she is merely asking for a time served sentence — the result of which would still place her off the charts for an offense of this nature. She will be left with all of the other consequences of the conviction, including a punitive discharge, a reduction in rank, and the loss of veteran’s benefits.

The government has wasted considerable resources on Ms. Manning’s prosecution, including by proceeding in a months long trial that resulted in a not-guilty verdict as to the most serious allegations, and by fighting Ms. Manning’s efforts to obtain treatment and therapy for gender dysphoria. She has spent over six years in confinement for an offense that in any other civilized judicial system would have resulted in at most a few years of prison time.

Therefore, we urge you to grant Ms. Manning’s request for the commutation of her court-martial sentence to time served.

Additional Information in Support of Manning’s Application for Clemency

By Chelsea Manning

Three years ago I requested a pardon related to my conviction for disclosing classified and other sensitive information to the media out of concern for my country, the innocent civilians whose lives were lost as a result of war, and in support of two values that our country holds dear- transparency and public accountability. As I reflect on the prior clemency petition I fear my request was misunderstood.

As I explained to the military judge who presided over my trial, and as I have reiterated in numerous public statements since these offenses occurred, I take full and complete responsibility for my decision to disclose these materials to the public. I have never made any excuses for what I did. I pleaded guilty without the protection of a plea agreement because I believed the military justice system would understand my motivation for the disclosure and sentence me fairly. I was wrong.

The military judge sentenced me to thirty-five years confinement — far more than I could have ever imagined possible, as there was no historical precedent for such an extreme sentence under similar facts. My supporters and legal counsel encouraged me to submit a clemency petition because they believed the conviction itself coupled with the unprecedented sentence was unreasonable, outrageous and out of line with what I had done. In a state of shock, I sought a pardon.

Sitting here today I understand why the petition was not acted on. It was too soon, and the requested relief was too much. I should have waited. I needed time to absorb the conviction, and to reflect on my actions. I also needed time to grow and mature as a person.

I have been confined for over six years — longer than any person accused of similar crimes ever has. I have spent countless hours revisiting those events, pretending as though I did not disclose those materials and therefore was free. This is in part because of the mistreatment I have been subjected to while confined.

The Army kept me in solitary confinement for nearly a year before formal charges were brought against me. It was a humiliating and degrading experience — one that altered my mind, body and spirit. I have since been placed in solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure for an attempted suicide despite a growing effort — led by the President of the United States — to stop the use of solitary confinement for any purpose. These experiences have broken me and made me feel less than human.

I have been fighting for years to be treated respectfully and with dignity; a battle I fear is lost. I do not understand why. This administration has transformed the military through the reversal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the inclusion of transgender men and women in the armed forces. I wonder what I could have been had these policies been implemented before I joined the Army. Would I have joined? Would I still be serving on active duty? I cannot say for sure.

But what I do know is that I am a far different person than I was in 2010. I am not Bradley Manning. I really never was. I am Chelsea Manning, a proud woman who is transgender and who, through this application, is, respectfully requesting a first chance at life. I wish I were strong and mature enough to realize this back then.

This journey has been difficult. You see, I have struggled with my gender identity throughout my entire life. I have — for many years — been overcome with intense feelings of loss, frustration, loneliness, and discomfort with my body and role in society. When I was younger, I did not understand. But from an early age I had a vague sense that I was somehow “different.”

Growing up in the small town of Crescent, Oklahoma, I was often picked on and made fun of at home, at school, and on the school bus for my effeminate mannerisms and speech. I was called “girly-boy,” “faggy,” “bent,” and “crooked” by other kids in town. The adults had veiled phrases that I did not understand at the time, such as being “light in the loafers,” or “special.” It was clear that I was different, especially from what my boy peers expected, and even from what parents and teachers expected.

By middle school, I desperately wanted to fit in. I volunteered for virtually everything that was considered traditionally masculine at school and by my friends. I spent a lot of time focused on fitting in, and presenting myself as a real “boy,” and then a real “dude.” Through all of this, I learned how to suppress a lot of my more feminine features from my personality. I focused on academics, especially the social sciences, history, science, mathematics, and — later — computer science.

After my parents divorced when I was 11 or 12, I moved in with my mother to the United Kingdom. While there, my sense of alienation during my teenage years was further exacerbated. Every single day, I was an American in a British school — and, more than that — I was a “feminine” American guy.

However, during these years, I had a secret. I was cross-dressing on an almost weekly basis at times. After “indulging” myself with looking feminine in the mirror, I would feel ashamed. I would get angry at myself. Then I would purge all of the cosmetics, clothing, and accessories. I would throw them away into a random dumpster in my neighborhood. I would swear to myself that I would never do it again, only to return to it a few weeks later.

By the time I finished school, I accepted that I had an attraction to guys and identified as an openly gay kid. Unfortunately, even after coming out, I still felt unsettled. I started experimenting with looking more androgynous, trying to push the boundaries of what I could get away with through fashion. I dyed my hair black and let it grow longer. I started wearing eyeliner in public. Despite crossing these boundaries, though, I was still trying to fit in as a male.

After I moved back to the United States, I was living with my father and his new wife. While experimenting, friction developed between me — an increasingly flamboyant and showy young adult — and my father’s wife. She was not accepting of me. We had many arguments and fights. Eventually, I was kicked out of the house. I became homeless.

I lived a somewhat nomadic life for the next several months. I roamed through the mid-west. This included Tulsa, Oklahoma; Joplin, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; Springfield, Illinois; Rockford, Illinois; and finally Chicago, Illinois. These times were rough. There were many nights that I was afraid of getting robbed of what little I had, or raped, or even worse.

Thankfully, after a few stressful months of surviving on the streets, my paternal aunt in Maryland found me. She called dozens ofpeople, eventually tracking down someone who had my cell phone number that I was using in Chicago. She offered to let me live with her. I accepted her generous offer. But, I did not have enough money to travel. She wired me just enough money to drive to Maryland. She saved me.

After settling in Maryland, I started going to a local community college and working odd-hours jobs in food and sales. I was a barista, a clothing store associate, and a full time student — all at the same time. I worked or studied over 100 hours each week. I tried very hard to get ahead, but I soon burned out.

While going through another phase of experimentation, I started seeing a psychologist to discuss my gender identity. I knew what “transgender” meant, but I had incorrect assumptions about trans women. Terrified, even after seeing her for a few sessions, I avoided the topic entirely. I kept suppressing my restlessness.

By this time, I was seriously contemplating the possibility of a gender transition. I had the rough idea of a plan. I mulled over the idea of living full-time as a woman and starting hormones. I had only a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and virtually no resources readily available to me. After years of harassment growing up, I was socially conditioned to avoid even talking to a psychologist. I knew I needed help. I was afraid to get it. I also worried it might not be available to me. I was terrified. I was afraid I would lose the support of my aunt. I did not recognize unconditional love when it was right in front of me.

This was the summer of the “surge” in Iraq. Major developments in the conflict received blanket coverage on my aunt’s television every night. I began to wonder about joining the military. When things were looking bleak, I thought, “maybe I can help out.” One day, with a little nudging from my father over the phone, who served in the U.S. Navy many years before, I walked into a joint military recruiting center in Rockville, Maryland.

During the recruitment process, I chose the military job of “all-source intelligence analyst” for the U.S. Army. I chose this field because of my interest in international politics, foreign policy, counterterrorism tactics, and counterinsurgency strategy. I was also trying to avoid being pigeonholed into an information technology job, largely a support role. I wanted to be more involved in the actual operations of the conflict.

I officially enlisted in the U.S. Army in secret. I did not tell anyone in my family until after I had enlisted. Over a long, emotional dinner, I told my aunt. She was devastated, but she accepted my decision. After in-processing at Fort Meade, Maryland, I reported for basic combat training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

I was woefully unprepared for the military. I was neither physically nor mentally prepared for the training. I developed a neurological issue in my right arm and left foot. I was placed into a medical hold status for several weeks. This extended my basic training by a couple of months. At one point, I was offered the option of being discharged but I balked at this option. I instead waited because I wanted to continue my training, which I eventually returned to and finished.

My intelligence training was at the military intelligence school in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. My interests in geopolitics and statistical mathematics, as well as my familiarity with databases and computer networks, suited the job. I quickly adapted and learned the trade with enthusiasm. After finishing my training, I moved to Fort Drum, New York, for my first active duty assignment.

Even during the basic training process, my military peers knew about my vulnerability. In close quarters, they tried to find out which buttons to push. I often ignored the rumors, the taunts, and the loaded comments. The institution as a whole didn’t help.

This was the era of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law and policy. It seemed that even title 10 of the U.S. Code was teasing me. I lived through it all. I did not complain. I rarely fought back. The few times I did fight back, I ended up being the bad guy. Some pointed the finger and said “angry,” “crazy,” “unstable.” The truth is that I was hurt. I did not yet realize just how much, though. I just knew I had to “suck it up” and “drive on.”

I hoped that the military would somehow “cure” me, or “fix” me. Instead, my feelings did not go away. They became much more intense, and much more difficult to act on. I just placed myself into an even more difficult situation. Now I was being cut off from the few resources and treatments that I was merely embarrassed about seeking previously. Now, it had the potential to ruin my career; to ruin my life.

I desperately wanted to succeed. I wanted to do great things. I wanted to finish my time in the military with dignity and respect. But, I just did not fit in anywhere. I was not very great at being a male. I failed to meet the expectations of a male. This came at an enormous cost to my emotional, spiritual and physical well-being.

I trained and prepared for nearly a year for a deployment to one of the combat theaters of the era. First, we were told it was Afghanistan. Suddenly, there was a change in orders for Iraq. This pivot required a rapid shift in our training and preparations.

Throughout these preparations, I had a boyfriend. I essentially lived two separate lives. They did not schedule very well together. There were many moments when I had to leave him on sudden notice from Ithaca, New York, and later Boston, Massachusetts.

On a Global Reaction Force and Homeland Security mission I was supposed to be “on call” at all times. So, I had to juggle to keep my secret. My colleagues were curious. They noticed things. They wanted to know where I was going; who I was seeing. I had to stall. I couldn’t lie — but I couldn’t exactly tell the truth either. It was a difficult balance to keep.

Since that time, though, the world has changed. More people know about trans people. We are more visible and open and active in the world. It was far too early for the world to understand who I am. Now, I feel left out. I feel alone. I feel lost. I wish I had received a fair shot at a better life. I wish I could take part in the changes that are happening now.

Shortly after arriving at the Theater Field Confinement Facility at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, I had trouble. At this point in my life, I knew who I was and that I needed medical and mental health assistance. Yet I was told, this was unavailable. Instead, they worked off the incorrect assumption that I was “gay,” and not transgender. This had the immediate consequence of being moved into solitary confinement in a metal cage, inside a tent.

I was completely cut off from the world. I was unsure what was going on, not even major events, like the status ofthe Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the World Cup were available to me. I also had no idea what I was facing, or whether anyone knew I was there. I was terrified that I was going to be treated as a male forever. I feared that I could have disappeared.

The Navy personnel that ran the facility did not help matters. Some of them made fun of me. Some of them said nasty things that aren’t worth repeating. Others tried to convince me that I was going to be shipped off to Guantánamo Bay, or inside the brig of a U.S. Navy cruiser.

I left Kuwait for the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. I spent the entire time at the now shut down brig. For over nine months, I was subjected to harsh total surveillance and control, and lived in solitary confinement. Two U.S. Marines watched me from behind a one-way window at all times.

Instead of clothing, I was given a “suicide proof’ smock and blanket, which were incredibly uncomfortable. I had no personal items in my cell. If I wanted to use toilet paper, I had to ask for it from one of the Marines — then I had to return it when I was finished. I had no soap. I had limited access to toothpaste and a toothbrush — my teeth have been permanently damaged by this time period. And I had limited access to legal documents, books, or any other printed material.

I repeatedly asked for help for my gender dysphoria. This was one of the issues that caused me to spiral out of control in Kuwait. Instead, I believe they used my diagnosis as a weapon against me. I feel that they used it as a tool to justify their harsh treatment.

Eventually I was transferred from Quantico to the Joint Regional Correctional Facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, I was no longer subjected to any conditions remotely like those of Quantico.

After my final sentencing at my court-martial, I publicly came out as a transgender woman, and started using my new name, which I legally changed a few months later. I also again requested treatment for my gender dysphoria.

Initially, the Department of the Army fought my request, but after filing a lawsuit with the assistance ofthe ACLU, the military prison began providing me with some access to treatment- specifically partial access to a “real-life experience” and hormone replacement therapy.

At first I was only given access to female undergarments. This was an awful and embarrassing experience for me. It felt like the prison wanted to have this hidden away. I began to spiral into anxiety shortly afterward. Then I was provided access to cosmetics. This was the first visible improvement of my status at the prison. Though it was a little awkward having short hair, I felt a lot better, but I still needed more. A few months later, I was provided access to hormone therapy in the form of estrogen and testosterone blockers. Having access to hormones was a profound and fundamental change in my life. I finally started to feel like myself.

However, one of the primary issues surrounding my treatment is that I am required to keep my hair at the male standard. Hair is the most important signifier of femininity in American society, and it is especially important to me as a person confined in an all-male environment, so not being given access to this, while receiving other treatment, has been a never-ending nightmare. This has extended the lawsuit by years now.

The USDB has made some vague assurances that I will continue to be given treatment, but I still do not know what this means and it almost certainly will not include the ability to grow my hair to female standards.

The bottom-line is this: I need help and I am still not getting it. I am living through a cycle of anxiety, anger, hopelessness, loss, and depression. I cannot focus. I cannot sleep. I attempted to take my own life. When the USDB placed me in solitary confinement as punishment for the attempted suicide, I tried it again because the feeling of hopelessness was so immense. This has served as a reminder to me that any lack of treatment can kill me, so I must keep fighting a battle that I wish every day would just end.

I have served a sufficiently long sentence. I am not asking for a pardon ofmy conviction. I understand that the various collateral consequences of the court-martial conviction will stay on my record forever. The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests ofthe United States or harm any service members.

I am merely asking for a first chance to live my life outside the USDB as the person I was born to be.

Thank you for your consideration of my petition.

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.

Andy Worthington Celebrates Five Years of Photographing London for His Project, ‘The State of London’

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

 

Please like ‘The State of London’ on Facebook. Please also note that the photos accompanying this article are all from May 11, and were taken from 2012 to 2017. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Five years ago, on May 11, 2017, I began a bike-based project to record London in photos that has ended up with me visiting all 120 of London’s postcodes (those that begin EC and WC, NW, N, E, SE, SW and W), as well as some — but not all — of the areas that make up Greater London, with a population of 8,673,713 in 2016 in the 32 boroughs (and the City of London) that make up the capital.

On these journeys, I have taken tens of thousands of photos of whatever attracts me, architecturally, historically, culturally, as well as photos of the changing seasons and the changing weather, and the changing face of the city as greed and regeneration remake whole swathes of the capital, often in what I regard implacably as an ugly and divisive manner.

The project arose as a response to a difficult time in my life. Contracting a rare blood disease in 2011 led to me giving up smoking and piling on the pounds in response. A year after my illness, it was clear that the way I’d been living for five years prior to my illness — and that had largely continued in the year since (although, crucially, with the consumption of sweet and salty fatty things replacing the cigarettes) — was not a healthy way to proceed. My life was too much on a laptop, and largely sedentary, and something had to change.

As a result, I thoroughly reacquainted myself with what was possibly my oldest hobby — cycling, which I began as a child, and which I had always done, although not as regularly as I should have after I began researching and writing (about Guantánamo) on a full-time basis in 2006. I had started cycling regularly around south east London in the early months of 2012, often with my son Tyler, who was 12 at the time, and on May 11, 2012, I decided to start taking photos of my meanderings by bike, and to consciously wander further afield.

I don’t think that, at the beginning, I had worked out that I would conceive of a plan to visit all London’s postcodes, but gradually that idea dawned, and from autumn 2014 to January 2015 I worked, sporadically, with a web designer, Harry Graham, to create ‘The State of London’, a website for my photos and accompanying essays that I have simply not had the time to develop — yet — but that, in its skeletal form, gives some indication of what I was hoping to achieve.

As I finally try to get the website up and running, check out the Facebook page that I’ve just established, where I’ll be posting some of my work over the last five years on what I intend to be a daily basis.

The spring and summer of 2012 was a good time to begin my photo project, as, with ludicrous overkill, all bikes were banned from all trains in the long run-up to the Olympics, so to get anywhere I had to cycle. Since then, I have cycled every day — sometimes for a few hours, sometimes more — managing to visit all 120 postcodes by September 2014, and continuing to visit new places and to revisit old ones ever since. Of necessity, south east London, where I live, has secured the most visits, with north west and west London securing the least number of visits, but although there are geographical imbalances I hope to have built up a worthwhile archive of photos that reflects how much London has changed in the last five years — to quite a surprising degree, I think, as “gentrification” and a largely unfettered world of “luxury” apartment blocks has been priapically climbing to ever more ludicrous heights as Boris Johnson stopped even pretending to care about London’s built environment in his second term as Mayor.

[image error]These changes, the ridiculous “lifestyle” advertising used to sell these properties, and the language of the market — with its “bespoke” and “boutique” elements — never fails to engage me, especially as, in recent years, it has also become apparent that part of the way in which new, insanely expensive properties are being foisted on the market is that existing social housing estates are being knocked down on the basis — or  under the pretence  — that it is unaffordable to refurbish them, a claim that, more often than not, is untrue.

I intend to highlight the blight of the housing bubble and the social cleansing that the demolition of social housing estates is contributing to, along with unregulated rents and endemic greed, in the photos and essays that I’ll be posting as ‘The State of London’ project develops, but I will also make sure that i have time for the beauty of London as well — when the sun shines, in the rain and snow, under the changing seasons, and at night, when, largely devoid of people, it becomes another entity entirely. For my archive of articles about the housing crisis, see here, here, here and here.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride — and please feel free to donate to support my work if it’s of interest.

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.

Under Trump, Periodic Review Boards Continue at Guantánamo, But At A Glacial Pace

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.

 

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.

Since taking office nearly four months ago, Donald Trump has threatened much, but delivered little on Guantánamo. Leaked draft executive orders showed him wanting to revive the use of torture and to set up new CIA “black sites,” as well as sending captured Islamic State fighters to Guantánamo, but it seems that wiser heads talked him down. There was a deluge of open criticism about his torture plans, including from the CIA and some of his own appointees for senior government roles, and while the plan to bring IS members to Guantánamo didn’t become a headline issue, it seems certain that, behind the scenes, sober advisers told him that he would need a new military authorization to do so, and, in any case, the best venue for prosecuting alleged terrorists is in federal court.

Nevertheless, Trump has failed to release anyone from Guantánamo, despite holding five men approved for release under Barack Obama out of the 41 men still held. Just ten are facing, or have faced trials, while the 26 others are eligible for Periodic Review Boards, a process that was first dreamt up in the early months of Obama’s presidency, but that only began in November 2013.

A high-level review process consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the PRBs were set up as a parole-type process to review the cases of men regarded by the previous review process — 2009’s Guantánamo Review Task Force — as being too dangerous to release, even though the task force members also conceded that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, meaning that the so-called evidence was unreliable. 

By the time the PRBs began, there were 41 men in this category, and to these were added 23 others, who had been recommended for prosecution by the task force, until the basis for prosecutions rather embarrassingly collapsed under scrutiny before appeals court judges.

Of the 64 men eligible for PRBs, 38 were approved for release before Obama left office, and all but two were freed. For the 26 others, recommended for ongoing imprisonment, the PRBs continue to review their cases — every six months in file reviews, which are purely administrative, although the prisoners’ lawyers are able to submit any new material they think might be helpful, and every three years via full reviews, in which, as with the initial reviews, the prisoners are questioned by video link by the board members.

In practice, full reviews have been taking place between one and two years after the initial reviews, and when I last wrote about the PRBs, nearly three months ago, eleven full reviews had taken place. The first seven had led to the men in question being approved for release (including two in December 2016), but the last three (another in December and two in January, just before Obama left office) had approved the men’s ongoing imprisonment. The eleventh review, which took place on February 9, was for Omar al-Rammah (ISN 1017), a Yemeni kidnapped in 2002 in Georgia, who had only recently managed to get in touch with his family.

Al-Rammah had his case reviewed in July 2016 and was approved for ongoing imprisonment in August, but he then had a file review in November, which led to his second full review. As in all cases when second full reviews have been recommended, this was because the board members decided that “a significant question [was] raised as to whether [his] continued detention [was] warranted.”

However, in a sign of how everything seems to have slowed down at Guantánamo since Trump took office, no decision has yet been taken in al-Rammah’s case — or, at least, no decision has been publicly announced.

In addition, since I last wrote about the PRBs, three other full reviews have taken place — on February 28, for Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (ISN 1457), a Yemeni, on March 21 for Saifullah Paracha (ISN 1094) , a Pakistani, and on March 28 for Haroon al-Afghani (ISN 3148), an Afghan.

Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj’s second full review

Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj, described by the government as “a prominent financial and travel facilitator for al-Qa’ida,” had his case reviewed last March leading to a recommendation for his ongoing imprisonment on April 14, 2016. A file review took place in November, leading to his second full review. The only statement on his behalf included in the publicly released documents was from his personal representative (a member of the military assigned to represent him), who discussed how he “made the decision to not attend his first board” — which doomed his chances of release — “because he did not feel confident sitting before the board … without having his lawyer present.” It was not explained why his attorney had not been present.

The personal representative also described how he “has learned to appreciate other people’s cultures which he had not before,” adding that he is “actively participating in classes to prepare for life after Guantánamo and he speaks English quite well.” He also noted that his attorney “has been in contact with his family to confirm that they will support him after his departure from GTMO,” adding, “He is open to repatriation anywhere and feels he is capable of working in other cultures since he has learned to work with other detainees in GTMO.”

Saifullah Paracha’s second full review

Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman described by the government as a “facilitator on behalf of al-Qa’ida senior leaders and operational planners,” had his case reviewed last March and was approved for ongoing imprisonment on April 7, 2016. A file review took place in September, leading to his second review.

In the submissions on his behalf, his attorney, David Remes, addressed two issues that arose in his first review that led to his ongoing imprisonment being recommended: firstly, as Remes put it, “he did not persuade the Board that if he resumed his business career, he could or would avoid dealings with nefarious business contacts,” and secondly “he did not indicate a sense of responsibility for his involvement with al-Qaeda or an awareness of the impact of his actions.”

On the first point, Remes noted, “To meet the Board’s first concern, Mr. Paracha will wind down his business affairs and retire when he returns to Pakistan. Mr. Paracha resolved to retire even apart from the Board’s concern. He accepts that he is too old and his health too precarious to go back into business. He feels the tug of family. Mr. Paracha is understandably concerned for the financial security of his family, but he has indicated that he has sufficient assets to allow him and his wife to live comfortably. His family members in Pakistan and America are ready, willing, and able to provide financial support. Reprieve, with its UN-funded ‘Life after Guantánamo’ program and strong presence in Pakistan, will also help support him.”

On the second point, Remes noted that, “When the Board probed to determine whether Mr. Paracha accepts responsibility for his actions and recognizes their impact, Mr. Paracha did not understand what the Board was driving at. He never intended to promote what happened. But he fully accepts that he may have helped enable Al Qaeda to carry out the 9/11 attacks, and, as he says, this possibility will haunt him for the rest of his life.”

On the work front, his personal representative added further information about why Paracha had said at his first review that he wanted to continue working. The representative explained that he was concerned because certain people have been “taking advantage of his family due to his detention.” He added that Paracha “has declared on numerous occasions to me that he does not want to return home to become a businessman out of sheer drive for success, but instead wants to get his family’s life in order.”

The representative also stated, “A letter he received from his wife gave details of a civil case brought against Mr. Paracha, which has obviously distressed him. The case occurred as a result of his wife being conned into selling their family home. There are many debts as well as a Guantánamo related stigma facing the Paracha family, as long-term friends and neighbors have abandoned them, making it even more difficult for Paracha’s wife to succeed as the head-of-household in a male-centric society. Mr. Paracha wants to settle the court case and help his children get situated so they can take over as the supporters for the family. He wants to be there for his wife and live a retired life.”

He also stated, “He does not plan to make contacts with people he knew before GTMO but instead plans to be a father and supporter for his wife and children. This support does not have to be solely financial but can also present itself in the form of knowledge or emotional strength. The elderly are valued for holding the knowledge and experience of society, and Mr. Paracha intends to teach his children so they can become the family breadwinners. All three of his children have graduated from college. He would like to return home to help strengthen his family and is willing to comply with any conditions placed on him.”

Haroon al-Afghani’s second full review

Haroon al-Afghani, described by the government as “a Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin commander who organized and led attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan and for a time served as an intermediary between senior al-Qa’ida members and other anti-coalition fighters,” was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo (in 2007). He had his case reviewed last June and was approved for ongoing imprisonment on July 14, 2016. A file review took place on January 11, 2017, leading to his second full review, for which a detailed submission was made by Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, his attorney, who works with Reprieve.

She explained that “a lot has happened” since she wrote a statement for his initial Board in June 2016, because, at that time, “I had not yet met him in person.”

Having representation has obviously been helpful for al-Afghani, but it remains to be seen if this will be enough to secure a recommendation for his release — and, of course, it is unknown right now if Donald Trump would honor such a decision.

As she stated, however, “Since that point, Haroon and I have met over a dozen times in person. We have had many unclassified and classified phone calls in which we discussed the details of his case, his personal history, aspirations for his future, his view on American, Afghan, and Pakistani politics, his daughter [name redacted] and others he left behind, and how best to proceed.”

She added, “I have had conversations not only with his family members but also with academic experts, whose focus is the geopolitics of the region in which he grew up. I have familiarized myself with his personal history and family life as well as the government’s case against him. I have filed a habeas case in his name, requested, received, and reviewed both unclassified and classified factual returns produced by the government and upon which it relies to justify his detention. I write this statement now with the full weight of that information behind me. Haroon does not pose a threat to the security of our country. Haroon had never had an attorney before he met me, had never appeared before a single review board for any type of hearing before the one in which you met him. You first met him in a circumstance where he was admittedly intimidated and blatantly scared. We are grateful today for another bite at this all-important apple.”

Aiming to fill in any gaps from his first hearing, she continued, “We have a plan for the future, an open explanation of the past, and several existing resources that were not presented previously.”

She proceeded to describe al-Afghani as an “educated man,” who “uses his time in Guantanamo as wisely as one can: learning. For his File Review, you will have seen his nearly hundred-page business proposal that he has spent the last couple of years researching. For this hearing, he submits yet another proposed project, an addendum, if you will, to his original plan for a honey bee farm named after his daughter.”

She also noted, “With these submissions comes an important revelation: Haroon is productively and actively thinking about how to help himself up from a place we can all agree is quite low. He is not embittered, he is determined.”

She also noted how Reprieve “has the unique capacity to follow Haroon after he is released, to wherever he may land, and facilitate the start-up capital to make his business dreams a reality. We have done this in the past for former detainees and are well-positioned to do the same for Haroon in the future.”

She also stated, “As far as there being any possibility that Haroon would join a hostile organization or become a threat to the nation, I think a simple look through his communications over the past nearly 10 years will assuage those fears. A reflective man, the Haroon that I know talks of little else beside his daughter [name redacted] and the guilt he feels at having left her effectively fatherless. If the Board does not believe, as I do, that Haroon would reject violence for his own sake. it is clear that he would for hers.”

Conclusion

Whilst it is reassuring that Donald Trump has not scrapped the PRBs, as eleven notoriously right-wing Republican Senators urged him to do shortly after taking office, it is dispiriting to see the whole process moving so slowly. The PRBs were never ideal, of course. Setting up a parole-type system to review the cases of men who have never been charged, tried or convicted of anything is obviously far from adequate, but they were useful in bypassing the obstacles to the release of prisoners that had been raised by Republican lawmakers, and in dealing with the evident caution exercised by the 2009 task force, which had described as “too dangerous to release” men who the PRBs could find no good reason to continue holding.

But fundamentally the PRBs were only ever acceptable when they led to recommendations for prisoners’ release — to get insignificant men out of Guantánamo when there seemed to be no other way of doing so. For the men whose ongoing imprisonment was recommended, it was not a vindication of their imprisonment without charge or trial, because nobody should be held without charge or trial, and it only adds insult to injury that the ongoing reviews are now proceeding at such a glacial pace.

Note: Since our last article about the PRBs in February, 15 prisoners have had file reviews, and 11 have had their ongoing imprisonment upheld: Said Bakush (ISN 685) on February 3, Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani (ISN 63) on February 22, Abdullah Al Sharbi ( ISN 682) on February 28, Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani (ISN 1460) on February 1, and Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (ISN 708) February 8.

And just last week, six more decisions were announced, although they were taken in March: Mohd Farik bin Amin (ISN 10021) on March 8, Bashir bin Lap (ISN 10022) on March 8, Encep Nurjaman Hambali (ISN 10019) on March 20, Muhammad Rahim (ISN 10029) on March 20, Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn (ISN 10016) on March 29, and Guleed Hassan Ahmed (ISN 10023) on March 29.

Four decisions have yet to be taken: Mustafa Faraj Muhammad Masud al-Jadid al-Uzaybi (ISN 10017), reviewed on March 8, Mohammed Ahmad Rabbani (ISN 1461), reviewed on March 29, Hassan Muhammad Ali Bin Attash (ISN 1456), reviewed on April 5, and Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi (ISN 569), reviewed on April 19.

Two more reviews are forthcoming: Khalid Ahmed Qasim (ISN 242) on May 24, and Sanad Ali Yislam Al Kazimi (ISN 1453) on May 31.

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.

 

Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release ‘Riot’, New Online Single Tackling Austerity and Inequality

Listen to ‘Riot’ here!

Today my band The Four Fathers are releasing ‘Riot’, our third online single from our forthcoming album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ following the release of ‘Close Guantánamo’ (2017 mix)’ in February, and ‘Dreamers’ last month.

I initially wrote ‘Riot’ in 1986, while living in Brixton, as a punky reggae song that dealt with how parents and society mess up kids’ minds and emotions — themes of youthful alienation that didn’t survive when I revived the song for The Four Fathers at the end of 2015. We’ve been playing it live since then, and we recorded it last summer in the first session for our new album.

Musically, our version of my old tune is the closest we’ve come to date to echoing the minor key tunes and armagideon themes of classic late 70s roots reggae, which remains my favourite music, nearly 35 years after it first blew my mind at university in Oxford.

Listen to ‘Riot’ below:

Riot by The Four Fathers

Lyrically, I rewrote it as a commentary on some of the key themes of economic alienation in modern Britain, and the ever-growing chasm between the rich, whose enrichment continues to be the primary aim of government, and the poor, who are now punished for their poverty, even though it is not their fault. The trigger for this was the global economic crash of 2008, when criminally greedy investment bankers — facilitated by the western world’s political leaders — nearly destroyed the world economy. This was followed, in the UK, by the implementation of a cynically manufactured “age of austerity” by the Tory-led coalition government that took office in May 2010, ending Labour’s 13-year run.

A particular trigger for the song was the social unrest in August 2011, and the establishment’s punitive response to it — in the courts, as well as in Parliament. For a week, up and down the country, riots broke out after, in Tottenham, a local man, Mark Duggan, was shot dead by police. Buildings and vehicles were set on fire, there was widespread looting, and, afterwards, the police systematically hunted down everyone they could find that was involved — particularly through an analysis of CCTV records — and the courts duly delivered punitive sentences as a heavy-handed deterrent. I wrote about the riots at the time, in an article entitled, The UK “Riots” and Why the Vile and Disproportionate Response to It Made Me Ashamed to be British.

However, no effort was made to address the reasons why people were so ready to revolt, and comments like those made by David Cameron, who called the rioters “broken” and “sick,” and Ken Clarke, then the Justice Secretary, who called them “feral,” were unhelpful. In fact, as Reading the Riots, a collaboration between the Guardian and the LSE established, the key reasons for the unrest were “[w]idespread anger and frustration at people’s every day treatment at the hands of police,” including the “use of stop and search, which was felt to be unfairly targeted and often undertaken in an aggressive and discourteous manner”, and “perceived social and economic injustices,” including “the increase in tuition fees, … the closure of youth services and the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance.”

University tuition fees had been trebled at the end of 2010, in a move that had seen the first widespread acts of civil disobedience under the coalition government, and youth services across the country had largely been cut almost as soon as the government took office in May 2010. In addition, the government had scrapped the EMA, which had provided financial support to pupils from poor backgrounds. All were understandable grievances as a response to the clear attack on poorer members of society through the government’s austerity programme.

I wrote about these protests at the time in a series of articles — see, for example, 50,000 Students Revolt: A Sign of Much Greater Anger to Come in Neo-Con Britain, Did You Miss This? 100 Percent Funding Cuts to Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Courses at UK Universities and Cameron’s Britain: “Kettling” Children for Protesting Against Savage Cuts to University Funding.

The report into the 2011 riots also found that gang involvement had been overstated by the authorities, as had the use of social media, and that rioters’ “involvement in looting was simply down to opportunism.”

The response of the courts was so heavy-handed that, I believe, it has left a permanent recognition amongst the less privileged members of society that there are two rules in play — one for the rioters, who, in one case, received a six-month prison sentence for stealing £3.50-worth of mineral water from an already looted store, and another for the bankers, the self-styled “Masters of the Universe,” who were not punished at all for their crimes that led to the global crash of 2008.

As I put it in ‘Riot’:

The establishment want us to believe everything is fine

But they’re brutal and intolerant if they think we step out of line

In 2011 when there was unrest in the streets

They hunted down those who stole a bottle of water while the bankers all walked free

They stole billions, they crashed the system and lost money for millions

But they never paid nothing and it’s the stench of this hypocrisy

That means that there must be a

Riot Riot Riot

Till you treat us all with decency

The second and third verses deal with other aspects of the “age of austerity” that has been plaguing us since 2009 — the Tories’ aim of destroying the state provision of almost all services, while maintaining an eye-watering amount of corporate subsidies; the exploitation of young workers, the programme of finding physically and mentally disabled people for for work, when they are not, in order to cut their financial support, which has led to numerous deaths, and the artificially stimulated and sustained housing bubble that, except for a brief dip after the 2008 crash, has been making housing unaffordable for all but the rich throughout the whole of the 21st century, since the Blair-backed bubble first grew beyond the reach of ordinary workers, and which, in addition, guarantees huge profits for those who, having got on the housing ladder in the 20th century, choose to exploit tenants for rent, or to cash in for their retirement by selling their assets for insane multiples of what they paid in the first place.

These are all recurring themes that — familiar to some listeners from my songs ‘Fighting Injustice’ and ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’ — and I hope you like the song.

Insurrection of various kinds has long fascinated me, as is evident from my exploration of Britain’s counter-culture — from the 1950s to the early 21st century — in my books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, which looked at the clashes between the establishment and various pagans, anarchists, free festival goers, travellers and environmental activists, particularly during the time of the Stonehenge Free Festival, from 1974 to 1984, and the subsequent protest movements of the 90s and into the early 20th century — the rave scene, the road protest movement, including Reclaim the Streets, and the anti-globalization movement that partly grew out of these examples of British insurrection.

In addition, there were, throughout this time, other examples of oppression leading to violence — most noticeably, in the 1981 riots, in Brixton, Birmingham, Chapeltown in Leeds and Toxteth in Liverpool, which were a response to police racism and economic deprivation, in the Brixton and Broadwater Farm riots of 1985, and in the resistance to Margaret Thatcher’s stunningly unfair Poll Tax, which led to a largely police-provoked riot in central London in March 1990.

Police brutality — and a general clampdown on civil liberties in the opportunistic “war on terror” declared after the 9/11 attacks, plus, I believe, a general conservatism as a result of the materialism that dominates the current culture to an unhealthy degree — mean that, with the exception of the odd eruption like the student protests and the August 2011 unrest, the notion of dissent that can threaten the status quo — however heavy-handed and corrupt that status quo may be — currently seems unimaginable, but my song remains a warning, especially after a recent poll of 18- to 34-year-olds in a number of EU countries (including Wales, but not England) were asked the question,” Would you actively participate in large-scale uprising against the generation in power if it happened in the next days or months?” when more than half said yes.

I hope you enjoy the song, and will share it — and even, perhaps, buy it as a download — if you do.

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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).

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