Andy Worthington's Blog, page 57

London Terror Attack: I Endorse Simon Jenkins’ Mature and Responsible Assessment of the Media’s Dangerous and Irresponsible Coverage

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

 

Note: This article is largely derived from comments I made on Facebook yesterday — but I realise not everyone who reads my work is necessarily on Facebook, hence my reworked posting here.

In what I intend to be my only comment on Wednesday’s attack in London, which was terrible because people lost their lives or were horribly wounded, I recommend the clip below of Simon Jenkins talking sense on Newsnight about how the media irresponsibly creates frenzies of publicity around incidents of terrorism.

It feeds racism and Islamophobia, it feeds a climate of relentless fear, when there is no justification for such fears, and it gives the terrorists what they want — the oxygen of publicity, the very climate of fear the media stirs up, and, they hope, the disruption of normal, everyday life.

I recall, growing up, when there was a deadly terrorist attack, it was considered inappropriate to indulge in wall-to-wall coverage for days, but now it is the norm, and the more it continues the more I fear subsequently hearing about peaceful, law-abiding Muslims up and down the country being subjected to harassment and abuse as through there is any connection between themselves and the mentally troubled individuals who undertook these kinds of attacks, when no such analogy whatsoever can be legitimately drawn.

The clip of Simon Jenkins is below via YouTube (and it’s here on Facebook):

After I posted my thoughts on Facebook, I also added some additional comments regarding my thoughts on terrorism since 9/11 that I thought were worth mentioning, after a mention that what was particularly worth avoiding was “pretending that soldiers and civilians are terrorists and then torturing and holding them indefinitely without charge or trial, obviously,” as at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “war on terror.”

The first is not to overreact, because that’s what the terrorists – or those who aspire to terrorism — want, as I make clear here, and as Simon Jenkins does, and the other point, which I didn’t mention but which is also hugely important, is to think about how we could have the moral high ground. Going on about our “freedoms” being under attack really doesn’t work when our hands are soaked in blood, so the only way to get the moral high ground back would be to stop occupying Muslim countries and killing Muslims, and then to shine a light on who’s manipulating and encouraging people to blow other people up or stab them or run them over: people with mental health issues, ex-cons, ex-alcoholics, ex-junkies, manipulated by other people who send them out to kill, but stay safe themselves.

I think these cowards and opportunists — as bad as the warmongering politicians of the west, who make sure poor kids serve in the military, but who also make sure their own children don’t — should be called out and ridiculed and condemned. However, we can’t do that because we sacrificed the moral high ground as soon as we set up rendition and “black sites” and Bagram and Kandahar and Guantánamo.

In addition, Simon Jenkins has an excellent update in the Guardian today, ‘The overhyped coverage of the Westminster attack will only encourage others.’

Here are some key excerpts:

Without a shred of evidence, and no “claimed responsibility”, the airwaves and press were flooded with assumptions that it was “Isis-inspired”. It was squeezed for every conceivable ounce of sensation and emotion.

Even if this was indeed a “terrorist” act and not that of a lone madman – I repeat, even if it was – the way to react is to treat it as a crime. Don’t speculate when you know such speculation will cause alarm. Don’t let Downing Street summon Cobra and drag the home secretary back from foreign parts. Don’t flood central London with hundreds of men with machine guns. Once the initial uncertainty is passed, don’t have the police issue interminable empty statements, as they stand in front of wall-to-wall BBC coverage of London “in total lockdown”.

Don’t fill pages of newspapers and hours of television and radio with words like fear, menace, horror, maniac, monster. Don’t let the mayor rush into print, screaming “don’t panic”. Don’t have the media trawl the world for pundits to speculate on “what Isis wants” and “how hard it is to protect ourselves from attack”. Don’t present London as a horror movie set. Don’t crave a home-grown Osama bin Laden. In other words, don’t pretend you are “carrying on as usual” when you are doing the precise opposite. When the prime minister stands up in parliament to announce, “We are not afraid,” the response is “why then is the entire government machine behaving as if it’s shit-scared?”

And this is Simon Jenkins’ conclusion:

When Tony Blair in 2003 sought an easy headline by sending tanks to Heathrow to “counter terrorism”, it was estimated to have cost millions of pounds in instant tourist cancellations. Goodness knows the money and jobs lost by this week’s reckless coverage. Who knows what liberties the cabinet will eagerly curtail, or what million-pound contracts the security-industrial complex will squeeze from terrorised civil servants and ministers?

The actions of the authorities and the media in response to Wednesday have ramped up the hysteria of terror. This was ostensibly a random act by a lone player without access even to a gun. To over-publicise and exaggerate such crimes is to be an accomplice after the act. London’s response to the Westminster attack is an open invitation to every crazed malcontent to try it again.

The last line is really worth considering at some length. Does the media’s coverage encourage or discourage another unhinged individual to seek glory through a random, ham-fisted terrorist attack? Like Simon Jenkins, I believe it is absolutely the latter. It’s time for our media to truly think about what a mature and proportionate response is to an attack like the one on Wednesday.

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.

Paul Lewis, Former Envoy for Guantánamo Closure Under Obama, Urges Donald Trump to Close 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.

 

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

On closing Guantánamo, Paul Lewis, the former Special Envoy for Guantánamo Detention Closure at the Department of Defense under President Obama, recently had an article published on Lawfare, in which he explained why Guantánamo must be closed.

We’re cross-posting the article, “The Continuing Need to Close the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility,” below, because it largely echoes what we at Close Guantánamo think, and because we believe it contributes to a necessary message to Donald Trump — that his proposals to keep Guantánamo open, and to send new prisoners there are ill-conceived, unnecessary and counter-productive.

Lewis began by thanking John Bellinger, a former legal adviser to the Bush administration, for an article he had also written for Lawfare, “Guantánamo Redux: Why It was Opened and Why It Should Be Closed (and not Enlarged).” Bellinger did indeed call for Guantánamo’s closure — and it is always significant when officials who served under George W. Bush, rather than Barack Obama, tell home truths to the Republican Party, but in his article he spent rather too much time, to our liking, trying to defend the reasons why Guantánamo was chosen as the site of a prison in the first place, and distorting some realities.

He wrote, for example, that, “Contrary to revisionist histories written by critics of the facility, Guantanamo was not chosen primarily because it was outside the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts,” although “[t]his was certainly one factor,” whereas we, the alleged “revisionists,” continue to believe that it was indeed chosen primarily to be “Outside the Law,” as the title of the documentary film I co-directed in 2009 declared.

Bellinger also claimed that “[t]he decision to open the detention facility in Guantánamo was not a political decision by senior Bush Administration appointees, but a practical decision based on the analysis and recommendations of career national security officials,” which, again, to our mind, rather rewrites the Bush administration’s role in seeking out a lawless location where torture could be implemented. We recall, for example, that Jim Haynes, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, was actively looking into torture programs, and individuals who would help to implement a specific torture program, in December 2001, a month before Guantánamo opened.

Bellinger also spent considerable time criticizing President Obama for having called Guantánamo “a facility that should never have been opened,” whereas that is exactly right, and we are not convinced that it is useful to claim, as Bellinger also did, that, had Obama been president back in 2001, it is unlikely that his officials “would have made a different decision.”

Where Bellinger is certainly on stronger ground, however, is in his criticism of Donald Trump’s plans. As he stated, “Although it may be politically popular with some of the Administration’s supporters, it would be a mistake for the Trump Administration to try to repopulate Guantánamo with new detainees from the Islamic State or Al Qaida-affiliated groups, as President Trump and Attorney General Sessions have said they want to do. The Trump Administration should learn from the bitter legal and policy experiences of the Bush Administration: adding new detainees to Guantánamo will produce more (and more risky) lawsuits; difficult practical problems down the road as to what to do with the detainees; and unnecessary friction with allies.”

He also noted that, as Jack Goldsmith, Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, during the time of the infamous “torture memos,” has pointed out, “it is easy to imagine a habeas court ruling that the President does not have the authority to detain a member of ISIL because the 2001 AUMF [the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which justifies imprisonment at Guantánamo] does not extend to ISIL.”

As he also explained, Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should seek legislation that would allow the president to “close Guantánamo and transfer the remaining detainees to their own governments and to one or more military and/or federal detention facilities in the United States for continued detention and potential prosecution.” He also stated, “President Trump, Attorney General Sessions, Secretaries Mattis and Kelly, CIA Director Pompeo and DNI-designate Coats should consult with the experienced lawyers and policy experts in their departments about the risks of costs and benefits of Guantánamo. They are likely to find that repopulating Guantánamo will produce more costs and risks than benefits and that it would be both preferable, and possible, to achieve President Bush’s goal of closing Guantánamo without compromising security.”

To turn to Paul Lewis’s article, we are delighted to see our three main recommendations for Guantánamo repeated by the former envoy: namely, to “[t]ransfer the 41 remaining detainees at GTMO to a secure military brig or federal detention facility in the United States”; to “[c]ontinue to transfer those detainees … for whom it is safe to do so”; and to “[r]etain the current Periodic Review Board Process.”

We have long called for the remaining prisoners to be moved to the U.S. mainland, where, we believe, they would be able to file new legal challenges, and we also believe that the Periodic Review Boards — the parole type process that we covered assiduously in 2015-16 — should also continue to be allowed to make decisions about releasing prisoners who were formerly — and often disproportionately — described as “too dangerous to release,” as well as making sure that anyone approved for release is actually freed.

Lewis also correctly summarized the primary arguments for closing Guantánamo: “it costs too much, it is a recruiting tool and propaganda tool for terrorists (a conclusion reached by both President Bush and President Obama), and it is disdained by the international community.” As he also noted, “In the best judgement of both Administrations, GTMO hurt us more than it helped us. Both presidents, five secretaries of Defense (Rumsfeld, Gates, Panetta, Hagel, and Carter), and four secretaries of State (Powell, Rice, Clinton, and Kerry) reached the same conclusion. (Yes, even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ultimately concluded GTMO should be closed — if an alternative location were selected.)”

The article is below. We hope you have time to read it, and to share this whole article if you find it useful:

The Continuing Need to Close the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility

By Paul Lewis, Lawfare, March 14, 2017

On Sunday, John Bellinger forcefully summarized the main arguments for closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Having served as the Department of Defense Special Envoy for Guantánamo Detention Closure in the Obama Administration and as Director of the DOD Office of Legislative Counsel at the end of the Bush Administration, I agree with John’s conclusion. While a safe, humane facility, GTMO hurts us more than it helps us. If we want to protect the country, we should close the GTMO detention facility.

We are all familiar with the primary arguments to close GTMO: it costs too much, it is a recruiting tool and propaganda tool for terrorists (a conclusion reached by both President Bush and President Obama), and it is disdained by the international community. But beyond these individual factors, it is crucially important that the national security leadership of both the Bush and Obama Administration reached the same conclusion. In the best judgement of both Administrations, GTMO hurt us more than it helped us. Both presidents, five secretaries of Defense (Rumsfeld, Gates, Panetta, Hagel, and Carter), and four secretaries of State (Powell, Rice, Clinton, and Kerry) reached the same conclusion. (Yes, even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ultimately concluded GTMO should be closed — if an alternative location were selected.)

I urge the new Administration to reach the same conclusion. As John states, before bringing new detainees to GTMO, the new Administration would be wise to consult with the bipartisan national security experts from both previous Administrations. This list of experts includes a long list of retired military leaders, including former Marine Commandant, Gen. Charles Krulak and former CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Hoar.

This does not mean the United States should not detain new captures or no longer detain those confined at GTMO who are too dangerous to transfer. Detaining those defined by Congress as terrorists keeps them off the battlefield and allows useful interrogation. The Administration can decide which tool to use for each new detainee: detention, prosecution under Article III courts, prosecution under military commissions, or transfer to a foreign country (the home country or a third country) with adequate security assurances vetted by national security professionals.

With that in mind, here’s my advice to the Trump Administration:

Transfer the 41 remaining detainees at GTMO to a secure military brig or federal detention facility in the United States and remove the issues regarding GTMO that hurt us around the world. It will ultimately cost far less to detain these 41 prisoners in the United States (see the closure plan sent to Congress by the Obama Administration in February 2016)—and our allies, who we need in our counterterrorism efforts around the world, will thank us. Terrorists will probably still decry a new facility, but they won’t have the GTMO baggage to argue. Make sure the new facility is as transparent as possible (the media won’t have to queue for limited space on transport planes) and continue the judicial and administrative review already in place. This won’t convince the enemy, but it takes the issue off the table for the reasonable members of the international community.  Also, use this new domestic detention facility for new captures who are not deemed appropriate for federal prosecution.

Continue to transfer those detainees from GTMO or the new facility for whom it is safe to do so. Five detainees at GTMO are currently eligible for transfer if adequate security assurances are obtained. These assurances, as negotiated by the Departments of State and Defense, and reviewed by the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security — who knows GTMO extremely well from his SOUTHCOM days — the Director of National Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have worked well with most recent transfers. Basically, they require the host nation to be able to monitor the former detainee, deny travel documents, share information with the United States government regarding the former detainee, and rehabilitate or integrate the detainee into the new country.

When in doubt, don’t transfer. But keep in mind that the international community has learned how to do this in the fifteen years since GTMO opened.

Retain the current Periodic Review Board Process. This broad interagency administrative process, conceived by the Obama Administration, addressed the international community’s concern that GTMO was a legal black hole. It followed earlier DOD reviews under the Bush Administration. Both Administrations concluded the continuing threat of detainees needs to be reviewed. At a minimum, even if the Trump Administration concludes that GTMO should stay open and add detainees, it must acknowledge that detention by United States authorities is rarely permanent and the ability to review the continuing threat of detainees with the possibility of safe transfer, must be retained. For these reasons, the Bush Administration transferred over 530 detainees from GTMO and the Obama Administration transferred almost 200 detainees.

Detention is lawful when the United States uses force, but GTMO is not the way to do it.

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.

Unite for Europe: Join the National Demo in London on March 25 to Tell Theresa May That 16 Million Of Us Don’t Accept Her “Hard Brexit” Insanity

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

 

This coming Saturday, I hope to see as many of my British friends and readers as possible on the Unite for Europe march in London, the last protest before Theresa May triggers Article 50 (as she has just announced she will, on March 29), starting the two-year process of the UK leaving the EU. The Facebook page is here, and the Twitter page is here.

Unite for Europe is an umbrella group of Remain campaigners, and the march begins at 11am outside the Hilton on Park Lane, with campaigners taking the message of the 16.1 million ignored British Remain voters to Parliament, to let Theresa May know, as forcefully as possible, that her plans for a “hard Brexit” are completely unacceptable, as is her evident contempt for those of us who voted to remain in the EU, who have been shamefully sidelined and silenced since last June’s referendum.

Just to be clear, I will be doing whatever I can, over the next two years, to stop Britain leaving the EU, as I am convinced that it will, otherwise, be the single biggest act of economic suicide committed by any country in my lifetime — as anyone not blinded by patriotic wishful thinking can ascertain by reading Ian Dunt’s excellent book, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? or his more recent article, Everything you need to know about Theresa May’s Article 50 nightmare in five minutes.

The fear of everyone who has not slipped into a delusional state of falsely triumphant blinkered isolationism about Brexit is that the “hard Brexit” we are apparently heading towards, favoured by the would-be tyrant Theresa May (who had to be taken to court to allow Parliament to have a say in negotiations — even though MPs then shamefully gave that right away) and her trio of inept Brexiteers, David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, guarantees to destroy our economy, because, in exchange for leaving the single market and the customs union, we will be unable, in two years, to set up any alternative trade deals, and will, by this time in 2019, be a friendless pariah whose economy will be about to fall of the most enormous cliff.

It doesn’t help, of course, that leaving the EU will not significantly reduce immigration, even though a disproportionate concern about immigration, stoked by the corporate right-wing media and politicians, was clearly what was driving much, if not most of the Leave vote.

In addition, I will, to my dying day, refuse to accept that the outcome of the referendum represented “the will of the people,” when it clearly didn’t. Of those who voted, 17,410,742 (51.9%) voted Leave, while 16,141,241 (48.1%) voted Remain, but 27.8% of eligible voters (12,948,018 people) didn’t even turn out to vote, meaning that just 37.44% of the people expressed this fictitious majority “will” that the Leavers are fond of wielding like a bat.

Moreover, the outcome of the referendum was not legally binding, but was, instead, just advisory, and, in addition, constitutional experts agree that any referendum that involves major constitutional change shouldn’t be decided on a simple majority vote, but should involve a 60% or two-thirds majority.

On top of this, the so-called “will of the people” — the 37% — may have been for leaving the EU, but the referendum failed to ask how this departure should take place, and although, ever since, the tunnel-visioned Brexiteers have monotonously banged on relentlessly about how “we’re leaving, get over it,” they seem unable to comprehend that we have to actually work out how to leave the EU, what to do with 43 years of laws and treaties that we have been part of, and for which we have no replacements, and whether we should crash out of all trade agreements to protect our alleged desire to close our borders, even though there is no evidence that we will actually be able to stem immigration.

Below are the aims of Unite for Europe march’s organisers, which I more or less share, although they are, to be blunt, considerably more polite than me. As I put it, Brexit must be stopped, the — mostly — Little England isolationists who make up so many of my fellow citizens represent the worst of Britain, Theresa May is a dangerous racist and Islamophobic authoritarian Christian Little Englander, David Davis is hideously out of his depth, Boris Johnson is a dangerous self-seeking clown, who should never be forgiven for having led the Leave campaign to victory without even believing in it, and Liam Fox is a dangerous and unpleasant far right ideologue. I also want to see David Cameron hauled back to accountability, and humiliated for the crime of having, with complete irresponsibility, called the EU referendum in the first place.

Was is the march about?

Fundamentally, we never wanted Brexit and this march is about making our voices heard. The voices of those who believe:

1. It’s not okay to ignore us.

2. It’s not okay to incite hate and divide communities.

3. It’s not okay to fail to protect EU nationals who work and pay taxes in the UK.

4. It’s not okay for a handful of people to decide the future of many behind closed doors.

5. It’s not okay to lie and put futures at risk for political gain.

6. It’s not okay for the old to decide the future of the young.

If Article 50 is triggered we’ll do everything we can to limit the damage this government will be causing.

What do we want?

The government has asked for our opinion, and now they’ve closed the doors. This is not okay.

1. We want our voices to be listened to: an open conversation where the UK’s civil society is consulted and where Parliament or the people have the final say on our future.

2. We want to remain a member of the Single Market.

3. We want to secure the benefits that the EU membership brings us.

4. We want a guarantee that the EU citizens already here will have the right to stay.

See you on Saturday!

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Week Two: Still Seeking $2000 (£1600), As I Celebrate Publication of 2800 Articles, Mostly About Guantánamo, Since 2007

Please support my work and my efforts to raise $2000 (£1600) to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

 

This is my 2800th article since I first began writing here, on an almost daily basis, back in May 2007. Nearly three-quarters of those articles have been about Guantánamo, with others covering related topics, and, when I have found time, the political situation in the UK, which is my home.

Most of my work is unpaid — or, rather, is reader-funded, meaning that I rely on you, my readers, to make donations to support what I do if you find it useful, and if you recognize that, as the traditional model of advertiser-funded, pay-per-newspaper  print journalism steadily fades away, trustworthy online voices are increasingly important. This is what I have been trying to do here for the last ten years (in direct contrast to the growth of right-wing websites and, recently, fake news sites), and I’m grateful to everyone who has supported me throughout many years of fundraisers, which I run every three months.

Last week, I launched my latest fundraiser, hoping to raise money to maintain the struggle to close Guantánamo in light of Barack Obama’s failure to close it for good, despite promising to do so, and Donald Trump’s desire to keep it open and to expand it. However, although over 20 supporters and monthly sustainers have donated nearly $500 ($400) to keep me working for the next three months, I’m still a long way from my target of $2500 (£2000) — not a huge amount, I’m sure you’ll agree, for the 50 or so articles I write and publish here very quarter. A donation of $25 ($20) is just $2 (£1.50) a week for the next three months, but any donation, however large or small, will be greatly appreciated.

So if you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal). And if you’re intrigued by my mention of monthly sustainers, above, you can make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly)” on the PayPal page. If you’re able to do so, it would be very much appreciated. I currently have a number of monthly sustainers, and it’s always reassuring to know that some money is guaranteed every month.

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

I leave the final word, for now, to my friend, the US academic Diana Coleman, who, last week, encouraging people to donate to support my work, wrote the following kind and supportive message:

Andy Worthington’s daily work is more important than ever. He is an independent journalist who has worked on the issue of Guantanamo with a sustained and committed focus. (He also does some great writing on the NHS, and plays in a cool band). I am fortunate to call him friend, but I would ask you to support his work even if I didn’t know him personally. His commitment to parsing narrative truths out of the constant deluge of misinformation is inspiring. Please help out if you can.

Thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington

London

March 20, 2017

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose 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.

Karen Greenberg on Why America, and Its Values, Remain Imprisoned at Guantánamo As Long As The Prison Stays Open

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.

 

As we mark 60 days of Donald Trump’s reign as the clown-in-chief of the United States, those of us who care about the rule of law and America’s reputation will be breathing only a small sign of relief that, amongst the many appalling policies introduced by Trump in his first two months in office, an executive order officially keeping Guantánamo open and committing to sending new prisoners there has not yet been issued, despite being threatened (as I reported here and here).

However, the very fact that Guantánamo is still open is a cause for sorrow, overshadowing any relative sense of relief that Trump has, evidently, found it harder than anticipated to sell the expansion of Guantánamo to the grown-ups in his administration.

Below, I’m very pleased to be cross-posting an article encapsulating that sense of sorrow, written by one of the few writers I know who, like myself, has lived with, and agonized over the continued existence of Guantánamo for many long years — Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, published in 2010, and Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, published in 2016.

Karen is a former colleague of my old college friend Peter Bergen (now at New America, in Washington, D.C.), and I first met her when she showed “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the film I co-directed with Polly Nash, in New York in October 2009. Karen also took part in a panel discussion about Guantánamo at New America on January 11, 2016 (the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo), at which I was also a speaker, along with the attorney Tom Wilner, with whom I co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in 2012.

This is a powerful lament for America’s ongoing flight from the law, and from, essentially, all common notions of decency, and it captures well what I have always noticed about Karen, as with all the dedicated opponents of Guantánamo — that they feel very personally the injustice of the prison’s ongoing existence. The article functions well as a round-up of what went wrong under eight years of Obama, as well as presenting a cogent case for why the existence of Guantánamo is so fundamentally damaging for the US, backed up by examples of opposition to the continued existence of the prison from many high-ranking individuals across the whole political spectrum (apart from, of course, the lunatic right of Donald Trump, and, before him, of Dick Cheney and his followers), and, as she concludes, “For as long as Gitmo remains open, whether we know it or not, we’re imprisoned there, too, and so is the American way of life.”

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

Guantánamo’s Last 100 Days: The Story That Never Was

By Karen J. Greenberg, Tom Dispatch, March 2, 2017

In the spring of 2016, I asked a student of mine to do me a favor and figure out which day would be the 100th before Barack Obama’s presidency ended. October 12th, he reported back, and then asked me the obvious question: Why in the world did I want to know?

The answer was simple. Years before I had written a book about Guantánamo’s first 100 days and I was looking forward to writing an essay highlighting that detention camp’s last 100 days. I had been waiting for this moment almost eight years, since on the first day of his presidency Obama signed an executive order to close that already infamous offshore prison within a year.

I knew exactly what I would write. The piece would narrate the unraveling of that infamous detention facility, detail by detail, like a film running in reverse. I would have the chance to describe how the last detainees were marched onto planes (though not, as when they arrived, shackled to the floor, diapered, and wearing sensory-deprivation goggles as well). I would mention the dismantling of the kitchen, the emptying of the garrison, and the halting of all activities.

Fifteen years after it was first opened by the Bush administration as a crucial site in its Global War on Terror, I would get to learn the parting thoughts of both the last U.S. military personnel stationed there and the final detainees, just as I had once recorded the initial impressions of the first detainees and their captors when Gitmo opened in January 2002. I would be able to dramatize the inevitable interagency dialogues about security and safety, post-Guantánamo, and about preparing some of those detainees for American prison life. Though it had long been a distant dream, I was looking forward with particular relish to writing about the gates slamming shut on that symbol of the way the Bush administration had sent injustice offshore and about the re-opening of the federal courts to Guantánamo detainees, including some of those involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.

I was eager to describe the sighs of relief of those who had fought against the very existence of that prison and what it had been like, year after year, to continue what had long seemed to many of them like a losing battle. I could almost envision the relief on the worn faces of the defense attorneys and psychologists who had come to know firsthand the torment of the Gitmo prisoners, some still in their teens, who had been consigned to that state of endless limbo, many of them tortured psychologically and sometimes physically. I also looked forward — and call me the dreamiest of optimists here — to collecting statements of remorse from government and military types who had at one time or another shared responsibility for the Gitmo enterprise.

Unlike me, most critics and activist opponents of that detention facility had long ago given up hope that Obama would ever follow through on his initial executive order. Across the years, the reasons for doing so were manifold. Some turned pessimistic in the spring of 2009 when, five months after he took the oath of office, the president let it be known that indefinite detention — the holding of individuals without either charges or plans to try or release them — would remain a key aspect of Washington’s policy going forward. A collective cry of outrage came from the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and other organizations that had long focused on the legal, moral, and political black hole of Gitmo. From there, it seemed like an endless slide to the idea that even closing Guantánamo wouldn’t finish off indefinite detention. (The heart and soul of Guantánamo, in other words, would simply be transposed to prisons in the U.S.)

Some lost hope over the years as the process of challenging the detention of Gitmo’s prisoners in federal court — known as filing a writ of habeas corpus — increasingly proved a dead-end. After a couple of years in which detainees were granted release by the lower court approximately 75% of the time, reversals and denials began to predominate, bringing the habeas process to a virtual halt in 2011, a sorry situation Brian Foster, a prominent habeas lawyer from Covington and Burling LLP, has laid out clearly.

Then, in the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress instituted a ban on the transfer of any Gitmo detainee to the United States for any purpose whatsoever — trial, further detention, or release. If federal courts wouldn’t deal with them and federal prisons couldn’t hold them, then how in the world could Guantánamo ever close?

Still others lost hope as, in the Obama years, newly constituted military commissions that were meant to try the prisoners at Guantánamo became a collective fool’s errand. Since 2002, more prisoners (nine) have died there than have been successfully tried by those military commissions (eight). And of the eight convictions they got, two by trial and six by plea bargain, four have already been thrown out in whole or in part.

In other words, those commissions, the Obama administration’s answer to detention without trial, never worked. Pre-trial hearings, underway for years, in the cases still pending are expected to continue well into the 16th year since the attacks for which the defendants are to be tried took place. The chief prosecutor for the five 9/11 defendants who were brought to Gitmo in 2006 and charged in 2012, has recently — without the slightest sense of irony or remorse — proposed that their trials begin in March 2018. With appeals, they might conceivably conclude in the third decade of this century.

The Last 100 Days That Weren’t

Add it all up and you had a steamroller of beyond-ominous facts suggesting that Guantánamo would never shut down. As the last days of the Obama presidency approached, it seemed as if I were the only person left with any faith that our 44th president would keep his day-one promise before leaving office. At times, I found my own optimism disturbing, but I couldn’t give it up and, to be fair to myself, I wasn’t just stubbornly refusing to add to the negativity around me. There were reasons for my optimism, however Pollyanna-ish it might have been.

After all, it was obvious that Gitmo was utterly shutdownable. After a century of tackling issues related to national security, the federal courts were more than up to dealing with whatever was involved in such cases (despite the claims of congressional Republicans). There was never any excuse for Guantánamo. By the end of the Obama years, there had been federal prosecutions of nearly 500 individuals accused of terrorism, including both the perpetrators of lethal attacks and individuals who had trained with the al-Qaeda leadership, and unlike at Gitmo, federal courts had lawfully and effectively put the guilty behind bars.

Classified evidence had been handled in a way that disclosed no sensitive information and yet allowed public trials to proceed. Juries had been repeatedly convened without risk to their well being, while perfectly reasonable security measures had been taken to protect courtrooms and court officers. True, the federal courts had largely run away from dealing with the widespread abuse and torture of prisoners in the war on terror, but in the one case in which a Guantánamo detainee, tortured at a CIA black site, had come into federal court, a judge had ruled that evidence obtained through torture could not be introduced and the trial had nevertheless proceeded swiftly to its conclusion.

In addition, although habeas proceedings had been yielding ever fewer releases of Gitmo prisoners, the tempo of hearings elsewhere to determine whether such individuals could be cleared and freed without trial had speeded up radically. In 2011, President Obama had initiated periodic review boards meant to identify individual detainees who no longer (or, in a number of cases, had never) posed a danger for release.

Then, in the fall of 2015, he appointed Lee Wolosky as special envoy for Guantánamo closure, again raising my hopes. I knew Wolosky, a no-nonsense lawyer who had served on the national security councils of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and he seemed like the sort of man who would know how to broker the sensitive diplomatic deals that would get the job done. In fact, his work would result in the release to various willing countries of 75 prisoners, nearly 40% of the Gitmo population Obama had inherited. By the time he left office and Donald Trump entered it, the prison population had dwindled to 41: five prisoners cleared for release who still remained there when Wolosky went off the job; 10 military commissions cases; and 26 detainees whom Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg aptly termed “forever prisoners” (to be held in indefinite detention because they were considered too dangerous for release and yet there wasn’t enough evidence to bring them to trial).

One more factor seemed to speak in favor of the logic of the prison being closed: the financial piece of the puzzle. The price per prisoner of keeping Guantánamo open kept soaring with each successful transfer of detainees. When Obama first took office, with 174 detainees in custody, the government was spending $4 million per detainee annually. With 41 detainees remaining, the cost has shot up to nearly $11 million per prisoner per year. This seemed to be potentially the most convincing argument of all, but as it turned out, Congress was unfazed by the extraordinary expense. It mattered not at all that transferring such prisoners to, say, the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where the most notorious terrorism convicts are commonly held, would have dropped that cost to approximately $78,000 per year.

And then there were those rumors that Obama might circumvent Congress entirely and simply close the prison by executive order. In fact, in February 2016 Congress rejected a closure plan submitted by the Pentagon and by July the Obama administration had decided not to pursue the option of an executive order to close the base.

Above all, I knew one thing: if Obama ever actually made that decision, especially with President-elect Donald Trump intent on keeping the place open, it could be done remarkably rapidly. As I’d found out while researching my book on Guantánamo’s early days, the military unit assigned to open Guantánamo Bay in January 2002 had been given only 96 hours to put together an initial facility consisting of open cages, interrogation huts, latrines, showers, and guard quarters, as well as food services, equipment, and telecommunications set-ups, most of which had to come from the mainland. There was no reason the prison couldn’t be similarly dismantled in a few days, especially since closure would initially only involve moving prisoners and guards, not taking apart the facility itself.

It was easy enough to imagine the steps to closure: speed up the review process; convince Congress that $11 million per prisoner was an unacceptable price tag; and yes, even perhaps swallow for the moment the idea of indefinite detention in the United States. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the president.

A Utopian Op-Ed on Gitmo’s Closing

As it turned out, of course, the pessimists couldn’t have been more on target. On Inauguration Day, Gitmo was still open, awaiting a new president who seems determined to fill it up all over again, ensuring that in the rest of the world — and the Islamic world in particular — the United States would forever be associated with a place into whose DNA was etched abuse, torture, and injustice. The war on terror, the forever war, would now have its forever prisoners as well.

Today, Gitmo’s closure appears to be as inconceivable as shutting down the unending war on terror that birthed it. I will never, it seems, have the opportunity to compare the departure of its prisoners to their arrival, never be able to run that terrible film, that blot on our country, backwards. The legislative path is already being set for Gitmo to be eternally ours. In mid-February, 11 Republican senators wrote a letter requesting that President Trump suspend the periodic review boards and turn Guantánamo back into a prison that accepts detainees. (The last new detainee had been brought there in 2008, during the waning days of the presidency of George W. Bush.)  Now, the new administration has reportedly identified its first potential new detainee in nine years.

It’s easy enough to see why this is a bad idea. The backlash in the Muslim world (and not only there) will be intense and long lasting. Even a number of top-ranking officials from the Bush administration have come to this conclusion, including President Bush himself who noted that Guantánamo “had become a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.” Former CIA Director David Petraeus has similarly pointed out that “the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us.” Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen noted that Guantánamo “has been a recruiting symbol for those extremists and jihadists who would fight us.” Emphasizing America’s “dismal reputation,” former Republican Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and James Baker joined their Democratic peers Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright in recommending its closure.

For 15 years, opponents of Guantánamo have insisted that its existence could change the character — and destiny — of the country. In its refusal to honor domestic, military, or international law, it has already opened the door to a new exceptionalist vision of the law. Unfortunately, Guantánamo is now a fixture of our landscape, as much an institution as new standards for the surveillance of American citizens, which means I may never get to write that piece about its last 100 days unless I resort to fiction.

If I did, I’d skip all the details about the prosaic negotiations that would undoubtedly have to go on to close it. Instead, in my vision, the old-fashioned spirit of American justice and law would simply rise up organically from the body politic and reframe Guantánamo as the place of sadness and shame that it’s been from its earliest days.

What I’d write would be too succinct for even the shortest utopian novel. Think of it instead as the utopian op-ed that no paper will ever publish, the one in which the desire to be lawful and a deep belief that decency and security go hand in hand prevailed. In my utopian fantasy, in the world I fear I will never see, in the American world whose absence I mourn to this day, Guantánamo will be closed not because of calculations related to its cost or the inefficiency of its military commissions or even global realpolitik. It will be closed because it’s the only right thing to do. Otherwise there will be another set of forever prisoners — and I’m not thinking about the future terror suspects that Donald Trump will send there, presumably forever. I’m thinking about us. For as long as Gitmo remains open, whether we know it or not, we’re imprisoned there, too, and so is the American way of life.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

My Heartfelt Defence of the Wonderful NHS, Exactly Six Years After My Major Illness

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

 

Exactly six years ago, my life changed drastically when I was hospitalised, for 12 days, as doctors with the NHS tried — and eventually succeeded — in working out how to save a number of my toes, which, over the preceding months, had gone black and were causing me truly extraordinary pain. It is also important because, as I prepared to admit myself to hospital, at noon on March 18, 2011, I smoked the last cigarette in 29 years of enthusiastic addiction, a move that counts as one of the single most important things I have ever done on my life. As a chain-smoker of roll-ups, I was, very genuinely, killing myself by the time of my illness, and I am thankful that I not only carried on living, but also recovered my lung capacity, and began singing again (I come from a long line of singers, stretching back as far as my family’s memory reaches).

As for my illness, at the start of the year, I had first noticed what appeared to be a painful bruise on the big toe of my right foot, although I had no recollection of hitting it on anything to cause such a bruise. I then made a visit to the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo (for the first time on the anniversary of the prison’s opening), where I was in pain but still able to function, and, at the end of the month, I visited Poland for a week, to show a Polish-subtitled version of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the film I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash, where the pain grew much more severe.

On my return to the UK, my big toe was turning back, and was soon joined by my middle toe, and yet I was failed by both GPs and doctors at my local hospital, who didn’t understand the severity of what was happening to me. For the entire month before I was finally hospitalised, at my wife’s instance, when I was finally given morphine, the only effective painkiller for truly severe pain, I suffered the most horrible sleep deprivation, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, as every time I managed to fall asleep the pain would wake me up just minutes later. Just once, I managed to get locum doctors to give me two painkillers stronger than over the counter medications, and on the first occasion I actually got one good night’s sleep, but by the time I took the second its strength was insufficient to combat the ever-growing pain.

Throughout this time, when I continued working (you can find my obsessive writing here), it was also not lost on me how ironic it was for someone who had spent five years researching and writing about prisoners of the “war on terror” being subjected to sleep deprivation, amongst other forms of torture, to end up suffering sleep deprivation because of what turned out to be a rare blood disease — Essential thrombocythaemia (ET), if that’s of interest.

This was not immediately apparent when I was first hospitalised, on March 18, 2011, although doctors had ascertained that what had turned my toes black was a blood clot. After a few days, however, my wife worked out that the hospital didn’t seem to be capable of addressing my needs, and insisted that I be moved to St. Thomas’s, opposite the Houses of Parliament, where I spent the next ten days, and where doctors successfully worked out how to save my toes, eventually pumping me full of what felt like cement, for five hours a day for five days. That last session was extraordinarily painful, despite the ever-present morphine, but the treatment, designed to open up my arteries to allow the flow of blood to resume unimpeded, was ultimately successful. I have since been treated by wonderful doctors at St. Thomas’s partner hospital, St. Guy’s, by London Bridge, and also have my blood monitored on a regular basis at Lewisham Hospital.

Throughout the period I was hospitalised, I also continued writing, as the staff allowed me to find a corner of an office with wi-fi reception, where I hammered away day and night, on the articles you can find in the list I linked to previously, numbered from 102 to 109. They include my reflections on my illness, Intimations of Mortality — And Why This Is the View From My Bedroom, and my report about the huge anti-austerity march that I watched from my hospital room, entitled, On the Anti-Cuts Protest in London, 500,000 Say No to the Coalition Government’s Arrogant, Ideological Butchery of the British State, the first great protest against the particularly true and inept Tory governments that we’ve been plagued by since May 2010.

It may be something of an exaggeration to say that I owe the NHS my life, rather than just my toes, but it doesn’t feel like it — and I can categorically say that both my wife and my son would not be alive without the swift Caesarian and acute post-natal care offered by the NHS at the time of his birth (in 1999, at King’s College Hospital, in Camberwell, in a department that, unfortunately, was later given the PFI treatment).

As with all serious treatment performed by the NHS, I — and my wife in 1999 — benefited from a system paid for by general taxation, rather than being burdened for years, decades, or for life with repaying the costs of a private medical system, or being mired in the profiteering that seems to be the hallmark of insurance-based systems (when they’re not, one way or another, signing death warrants for those who can’t pay).

Essentially, with the exception of the old and the poor, the NHS is funded by taxpayers, and works as the first and purest insurance systems always did, with everyone chipping in to ensure that, whoever gets ill, everyone is covered. It is a huge, huge relief to know that, when you’re extremely ill, no one will ask you for money either on arrival or departure from a hospital, and no one will be hunting you down afterwards, and there is, quite simply, no excuse for not maintaining this system and funding it adequately.

Since my illness, however, the Tories, with the unacceptable connivance of senior NHS managers, have been strangling the NHS, insisting on cuts that threaten the NHS’s very survival, secure in the knowledge that their 2011 reforms have already paved the way for ever-increasing privatisation. I have no doubt whatsoever that their ultimate aim, if they can get away with it, is to replace the NHS with a bloated insurance-based system like the US, in which senior medical professionals and the insurance companies make insane amounts of money, but the financial burden on individuals is much higher, and those who are not well-off live in constant fear of getting ill, and the costs that entails, particularly those who simply cannot afford insurance.

The answer is to get rid of this vile government, audit the NHS properly and ask the British people to pay more in taxes to fund it. That is clearly required, as this LSE report from January 2016 demonstrated (and see the graph above), revealing that, “For most of the period between 1980 and 2013, the UK spent a lower proportion of its GDP on health care than any other country.”

This is not to say that the NHS was failing, however. Despite shock stories about failing hospitals and the cost of health tourism, and despite unprincipled attacks on doctors by the wretched health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, detailed comparison and analysis of all the west’s health systems, conducted in 2014 by the Commonwealth Fund, a US-based foundation, found that, as the Independent described it, British healthcare was “rated top out of 11 western countries, with [the] US coming last” (and also see the graph to the left), although the current crisis, inflicted by the government, must surely mean that position is at risk.

So today, as I celebrate being alive — and my 2,192 days without smoking! — I leave you with just one message: please, please, please do all you can to support the NHS! If the Tories destroy it, you will miss it more than you could ever know, unless, like me and my family, you have ever experienced its care first-hand at times of great need.

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.

Rebel Music: Memories of St. Patrick’s Day in London, 1986

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

 

31 years ago, I made a discovery that had some serious resonance for me — the existence of St. Patrick’s Day. It was March 17, 1986. I’d moved into a flat in London three months earlier, in December 1985, opposite the George Canning pub, where I had ventured on my first night, meeting up with squatters, from the roads behind the junction of Tulse Hill and Brixton Water Lane, who soon became my friends.

After three years in Oxford, I wanted as big a change as possible — somewhere in the real world, as far removed as possible from Oxford’s dreaming spires and the endless reminders (to someone from a northern, working class, Methodist background) that it was basically a finishing school for the public schoolboys who would soon go on to run everything.

Seduced by my love for roots reggae music and the Clash, I decided there was no better place than Brixton to sign on and to learn to play the guitar and write songs, inspired by two of my other musical heroes, Bob Dylan and, recently discovered, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, whose rattling bender of an album, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, had recently been released.

See below for ‘The Old Main Drag’, off ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’, an unparalleled portrait of drink, drugs and dissolution in central London:

In Brixton in 1986, there was certainly, it seemed to me, no reason to go looking for a job. This period of British history was, after all, the equivalent of a country being burned to the ground, as Margaret Thatcher — the hated, detested Margaret Thatcher — fresh from her victories destroying the miners, and trashing the new age travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield, had basically set fire to the whole country (apart from the traditional pockets of impervious wealth, obviously, and those she empowered through her wholesale privatisations), burning Britain’s manufacturing base, burning the traditional job market, and burning any of the working class who wouldn’t buy into her vision of a self-centred, free market future. In retaliation, the only flames of response came with the riots of 1981, which hit Brixton hard, and again, to a lesser degree, in September 1985, just before I moved there (I was later given a fridge that, I was told, had been “liberated” during the 1985 unrest).

And so, holed up in Brixton, on the dole with a cheap acoustic guitar, fuelled by the demon drink and roll-ups, I taught myself a raft of basic chords, listened to my heroes and began writing songs, and on St. Patrick’s Day 1986 I walked all the way to the other end of Tulse Hill, where the post office was that would cash my giro — which, If I recall correctly, was just over £50 to live on for two weeks.

As I came out of the post office, I heard the most astonishing racket coming from the Tulse Hill Tavern, the pub across the road, which was unusual, as, back in 1986, pubs still closed for three or four hours in the afternoon. On close inspection, I found the pub absolutely rammed with high-spirited drunks, celebrating, it transpired, St. Patrick’s Day, and as the Guinness flowed, and the sounds of the Chieftains and the Pogues and countless other Irish musicians filled the pub’s smoky interior, blasting out from a jukebox, I felt at home and liberated.

Back then, because of The Troubles, the Irish were regarded as the Muslims are today — as outsiders, potential terrorists out to destroy Queen and Country. It was less than a year and a half since the IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party Conference, on October 12, 1984, which was intended to kill Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet, and while some British people understood the long history of British oppression in Ireland, the more recent torture tactics, and the hunger strikes that, in some cases, had led to deaths — of Bobby Sands, for example, who died in May 1981 — the official British narrative was still that the British were “good” and the Irish “bad.“

To me, however, the Irish were not a threat. The threat, instead, came from Margaret Thatcher and her Tories, selling off the family jewels (the industries nationalised in the preceding decades), selling off council housing, destroying Britain’s manufacturing base in what was — correctly — perceived as a war on the unions, opportunistically going to war in the Falklands (in 1982), defending South Africa’s apartheid regime, allowing Ronald Reagan to set up a cruise missile base at Greenham Common, using the police as a paramilitary force against the miners in 1984, and against the travellers, festival goers, anarchists and green activists who were evicted at the peace camp they had established at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire (the proposed site of a second cruise missile base), and were then violently decommissioned when they attempted to get to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, an extraordinary alternative to Thatcher’s Britain that attracted tens of thousands of young people every June to the fields opposite Stonehenge.

Thatcher, of course, also liberalised the financial markets, six months after my St. Patrick’s Day awakening, with repercussions that led to an ever-growing chasm between the rich and the poor that continues to grow, and that also fed eventually into the financial crash of 2008, the trigger for a malevolent austerity programme that continues to cast the darkest of shadows over modern life, in turn feeding into Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump, and the misplaced (and cynically encouraged) scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims for the ills of neo-liberalism that Margaret Thatcher did so much to introduce.

Back in 1986, in my Britain, in my Brixton, the Irish rebel music and the wild spirit of that St. Patrick’s Day in 1986 joined all the other signifiers of dissent in SW2 and SW9 — the rebel music of the Rastafarians, the misfits and outsiders from all over the country, including the large numbers of gay men and lesbians who had fled small town homophobia, and the drifters from mainland Europe, especially Italy and the Basque Country, who also congregated in the pubs and squats of Brixton.

I hope you enjoyed these belief memories of life under the occupation, in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, the template for all that is dull, divided and rotten today, and a time when strenuous efforts were made to destroy the spirit of assertive, unquenchable dissent that, today, is hunted almost to extinction. I haven’t had a drink for eight years and eight months, but I’ll join you in a virtual toast today: Sláinte!

And as a farewell, for now, here’s ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ by The Pogues. This is one of The Pogues’ songs that I sometimes play, and I’d love to record a version of me singing it, but no one’s around right now to make a video. I also sometimes play Eric Bogle’s classic anti-war song, ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, which The Pogues brought to a whole new audience, and I also sometimes play, with my band, The Four Fathers, ‘Dirty Old Town’ (a cover of Ewan MacColl’s song about Salford, my birthplace, that was popularised by The Pogues), the wonderful ‘Broad Majestic Shannon’, from ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’, 1987’s follow-up to ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’, and, from that same album, when I can find a female vocalist to sing it with, the equally wonderful ‘Fairytale of New York’, the greatest Christmas song of all. For Four Fathers’ songs specific to this period of my life, check out Rebel Soldier and City of Dreams, and for Four Fathers’ songs railing against Thatcher and her legacy, check out Tory Bullshit Blues (2016 mix) and Fighting Injustice (2016 mix).

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.

Another Legal Hero in the Struggle Against Trump’s Bigotry: Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson Issues Nationwide Restraining Order on Immigration Ban

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.

 

Congratulations to District Judge Derrick K. Watson, in Hawaii, who, on Wednesday, issued what the Washington Post described as “a sweeping freeze of President Trump’s new executive order hours before it would have temporarily barred the issuance of new visas to citizens of six Muslim-majority countries and suspended the admission of new refugees.” I wrote about the original ban here, and the rulings shutting it down here and here, and wrote a follow-up about the reissued ban here, on March 7.

With some accuracy, the Post described Judge Watson’s 43-page opinion as “blistering,” adding that it “pointed to Trump’s own comments and those of his close advisers as evidence that his order was meant to discriminate against Muslims,” and noting that Judge Watson “declared there was a ‘strong likelihood of success’ that those suing would prove the directive violated the Constitution.”

In particularly damning language, Judge Watson declared that “a reasonable, objective observer — enlightened by the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance — would conclude that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.”

He then, as the Post put it, “lambasted the government,” in particular, for arguing that the executive order “could not have been religiously motivated because ‘the six countries represent only a small fraction of the world’s 50 Muslim-majority nations, and are home to less than 9% of the global Muslim population,” whereas the “suspension covers every national of those countries, including millions of non-Muslim individuals[.]”

In response to this claim, Judge Watson stated, “The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable. The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed.”

As the Post also explained, lawyers for the State of Hawaii argued that “the new entry ban, much like the old, violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment because it was essentially a Muslim ban, hurt the ability of state businesses and universities to recruit top talent, and damaged the state’s robust tourism industry.” An additional plaintiff was Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, and “a US citizen of Egyptian descent who has been a resident of Hawaii for over a decade.” His wife is of Syrian descent (and also a resident of Hawaii), and her mother’s application for an immigrant visa was still being processed. Under the new executive order, attorneys said, Elshikh “feared that his mother-in-law, a Syrian national, would ultimately be banned from entering the United States.”

Although Justice Department lawyers “argued that Trump was well within his authority to impose the ban,” which, they claimed, “was necessary for national security,” even though that is completely untrue, Judge Watson “agreed with the state on virtually all the points,” ruling that the state “had preliminarily demonstrated its universities and tourism industry would be hurt, and that harm could be traced to the executive order,” and that Elshikh had alleged “direct, concrete injuries to both himself and his immediate family.”

He also called the government’s national security claims “at the very least, ‘secondary to a religious objective’ of temporarily suspending the entry of Muslims,” and extensively quoted from Trump’s own comments on the campaign trail and public statements made by his advisers as evidence.

In one passage, he stated, “For instance, there is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release: ‘Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’ Nor is there anything ‘secret’ about the Executive’s motive specific to the issuance of the Executive Order. Rudolph Giuliani explained on television how the Executive Order came to be. He said: ‘When [Mr. Trump] first announced it, he said, ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.’”

As if that was not damning enough, Judge Watson also made reference to a recent Fox News appearance by the alarming white nationalist Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to Trump, who said the new ban would have “mostly minor technical differences” from the previous version stopped by the courts, and that US citizens would see “the same basic policy outcome for the country.”

As he put it, “These plainly-worded statements, made in the months leading up to and contemporaneous with the signing of the Executive Order, and, in many cases, made by the Executive himself, betray the Executive Order’s stated secular purpose.”

Opponents of the ban were, of course, delighted with the ruling. Bob Ferguson, the Attorney General of Washington State, who had brought the case against the first ban, which was upheld by Judge James Robart, called it “fantastic news.”

At a rally in Nashville, however, Donald Trump demonstrated, yet again why he is unfit for high office. He called it a “terrible” ruling, and, as the Post described it, “asked a cheering crowd whether the ruling was ‘done by a judge for political reasons,’” a familiar attempt to undermine a ruling made on a legal basis, and with concern for the Constitution, not at all “for political reasons.”

He then said that his administration “would fight the case ‘as far as it needs to go,’ including up to the Supreme Court,” and said he regretted that he “had been persuaded to sign a ‘watered-down version’ of his first travel ban.”

He then said, “Let me tell you something, I think we ought to go back to the first one and go all the way,” adding, “The danger is clear, the law is clear, the need for my executive order is clear,” even though he was wrong on all three counts. The danger is, of course, unclear, as no credible evidence has ever been presented that individuals from any of the six nations banned poses any kind of threat to the US that would warrant such a sweeping ban. On the law, as we have seen, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about, and on the alleged “need” for his executive order, we need only return to the first point, and assert once more that there is no threat to justify this insulting and unconstitutional ban.

While we wait to see what kind of tantrum Trump will demonstrate next, two more rulings on the ban are also pending — in Maryland, and with Judge Robart in Washington State — and it is clear that, yet again, the law, the Constitution and common decency have all come together to thwart some of the most worrying tendencies towards executive overreach so far revealed by this most wretched of presidents.

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: On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Former Guantánamo Prisoner, Torture Victim and Best-Selling Author Mohamedou Ould Slahi Tells His Story

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

 

If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to watch the first full-length, post-release interview with former Guantánamo prisoner, torture victim and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi, freed last October, which was shown on CBS’s 60 Minutes show on Sunday. A transcript is here.

Slahi was handed over to the CIA in November 2001, on the mistaken basis that he possessed important information about al-Qaeda, and was then tortured in Guantánamo, in a special program approved by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, until, after being taken out on a boat and beaten for hours while freezing from ice packed into his clothing, and after being told that his mother was being brought to Guantánamo, he was “broken” and began telling his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear — lies, but lies that were somehow regarded as credible.

Moved into separate housing with another perceived informant, he was then allowed to write the memoir that was eventually published as Guantánamo Diary in 2015, a devastating account of US torture and incompetence that was profoundly shocking despite its many redactions, and that also revealed Slahi as a witty, perceptive and thoroughly likeable human being. I should note also that I find it ironic that Slahi was only allowed to write a memoir in the first place because of his torture and his subsequent cooperation.

At Guantánamo, despite his torture and his cooperation, the separate housing and the supply of writing materials, the Bush administration still intended to prosecute him in its broken military commission trial system, and when Obama took over there was little improvement for Slahi. As I explained at the time of his release, although “he had no involvement with terrorism, as a US judge concluded when ruling on his habeas corpus petition in 2010, [t]he government appealed, a politically biased appeals court backed that appeal, and Slahi slipped into a legal limbo that only came to an end in July [2016], when a Periodic Review Board — the most recent of several review processes that have punctuated Guantánamo’s long and generally lawless history — approved him for release after a review in June.”

Slahi is wonderfully engaging in the 60 Minutes program, enthusiastic, warm and funny, exactly what is needed to demonstrate how the dark propaganda about Guantánamo being full of terrorists is such a dangerous exaggeration, hiding the truth — that very few people genuinely accused of terrorism have been held at the prison, which, instead, largely contained hapless foot soldiers for the Taliban, or civilians seized by mistake.

In the program, Slahi runs through much of the story described above, including his account of his torture, with Holly Williams, who is a sensitive host. His mother, unfortunately, died in 2013 without him being able to see her, of course, and there is a poignant moment when Slahi and Williams find his car, now wrecked, still parked outside the secret police building, where he left it on the day in November 2001 when, as he put it so memorably many years ago, “my country turned me over, short-cutting all kinds of due process, like a candy bar to the United States.”

Slahi also makes some poignant comments during the film, telling Williams that “pain and suffering is part of growing up, and I grew up,” and that “getting out of Guantánamo was like being born again.”

For me, however, his most poignant comment came soon after his release, when, in a video made for the ACLU, he said, “I wholeheartedly forgive everyone who wronged me during my detention, and I forgive because forgiveness is my inexhaustible resource.”

An extraordinary individual, I hope you agree, and as his editor, Larry Siems, recently explained, Slahi recently elaborated on his theory of forgiveness, explaining that, if people do not forgive those who have wronged them, then they cannot let go of their pain, and it will, essentially, eat away at them or drag them down, whereas he, as he said, is absolutely free.

Note: Please also see this short additional video, which includes Slahi’s lawyer Nancy Hollander and Larry Siems.

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.

Worthless MPs Refuse to Challenge Tyrannical Theresa May on Their Own Right to Vote on Final Brexit Deal or on the Rights of EU Nationals in the UK

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

 

Another day, another thoroughly depressing example of why, in the post-EU referendum era, the House of Commons seems intent on proving that it no longer has any worth.

In the last two weeks, peers in the House of Lords have voted for two important amendments to the government’s brief bill to allow Theresa May to trigger Article 50, beginning the two-year process of the UK leaving the EU — the first defending the right of the 3.3m EU nationals living and working in the UK to stay here, as I wrote about in my article, House of Lords Defends Right of EU Nationals to Stay in the UK Post-Brexit, as the Tyrant Theresa May Vows to Overturn Amendment, and the second guaranteeing MPs a final vote on the final Brexit deal in 2019, as I wrote about in my article, On Brexit, the House of Lords Do What MPs Wouldn’t Do, and Pass An Amendment Guaranteeing Them A Final, Meaningful Vote on Any Deal to Leave the EU.

Last night, however, MPs voted to drop those amendments, and the House of Lords then complied, paving the way for Theresa May to trigger Article 50 by the end of the month.

And yet both these amendments were hugely important examples of politicians resisting the tendency towards tyranny shown by Theresa May and her pro-Brexit ministers since last June’s EU referendum, when a narrow majority of those who could be bothered to vote called for us to leave the EU — in a referendum that was not legally binding, and that should not have been regarded as such, although the government has persistently behaved as though it was, This is in spite of the facts that referendums involving major constitutional change generally require a two-thirds majority, and not a simple majority like that in the EU referendum, when 51.9% of those who turned up to vote backed the Leave campaign.

Just as alarming is the fact that the simple question asked in the referendum didn’t deal with what leaving the EU would entail — whether we should prioritize efforts to restrict immigration, even though most observers seem to regard any significant effort to restrict immigration as impossible, and even if that means us crashing out of the single market and the customs union, which experts regard as economically disastrous.

And yet, Theresa May, who only became Prime Minister after the referendum, and has no mandate from the people, decided that MPs shouldn’t be consulted about Brexit, and had to be taken to court to be reminded that sovereignty in the UK resides with Parliament, and not just the Prime Minister.

Despite this, MPs then gave away the power the courts reminded them was theirs, voting to pass, without amendments, the derisory little bill allowing May to trigger Article 50, which she and her ministers had put together after their second court defeat in the Supreme Court in January. This was a profoundly disturbing betrayal by MPs, as I reported at the time in my article, On Brexit, MPs Give Away Sovereignty, Vote to Allow Theresa May to Do Whatever She Wants, because, as I stated:

75% of MPs supported staying in the EU at the time of the referendum, including 185 Tory MPs and 218 Labour MPs, and to represent the 16.1m of us who voted to stay in the EU (48.1% of those who voted), at least 294 MPs should have voted against this bill, not just 114 of them.

And yet, once again, MPs have failed to challenge the government sufficiently, although last night their turnout was at least closer to the percentages in the referendum. On the first amendment, guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals to stay in the UK, MPs voted by 335 votes to 287 to drop the amendment, and on the second amendment, on giving MPs a meaningful final vote on any deal after the conclusion of Brexit talks, MPs voted to drop it by 331 votes to 286.

Nevertheless, both topics are far too important not to have been insisted upon at this stage in negotiations — the first for reasons of decency, to prevent EU nationals living and working here from being treated as “bargaining chips,” and the second to prevent the kind of executive overreach that, alarmingly, Theresa May has been demonstrating relentlessly since taking office, and on last night’s turnout Tory MPs who represent constituencies that voted to remain ought to face deselection from their voters.

In its report on last night’s vote, the Guardian noted that the House of Lords “then accepted that decision by 274 to 118,” with Labour leader Lady Smith explaining that “continuing to oppose the government would be playing politics because MPs would not be persuaded to change their minds.”

“If I thought there was a foot in the door or a glimmer of hope that we could change this bill, I would fight it tooth and nail, but it doesn’t seem to be the case,” she said, realistically, unfortunately, given MPs’ obstinacy.

Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, was less understanding, complaining, perhaps rather unfairly, that “Labour had the chance to block Theresa May’s hard Brexit but chose to sit on their hands,” although his addition comments certainly summed up the absolutely unacceptable situation faced by the 3.3m, many of whom, of course, are married to British citizens, and have lived and worked here for decades, as much a part of the fabric of British do society as anyone else. As farrow said, “Tonight there will be families fearful that they are going to be torn apart and feeling they are no longer welcome in Britain. Shame on the government for using people as chips in a casino, and shame on Labour for letting them.”

The Guardian also quoted Nicolas Hatton, the founder of The3million, which lobbies for the rights of EU citizens in the UK, who said, “The hearts of 3 million EU citizens living in the UK will have sunken today when they heard that MPs had voted down the amendment to article 50 giving them guarantees. This was the last chance and I struggle to find words to express my utter desperation that EU citizens will now be used by the government as bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiation.”

The Guardian also described “angry reaction from British people living on the continent.” Dave Spokes for Expat Citizen Rights in EU, which has more than 7,600 members in 27 EU countries, said, “It is worrying that our government chooses to ignore the concerns of its own citizens and the evidence put to its select committees that citizens’ rights should be confirmed immediately.” he added, “The government’s own white paper said it had engaged with citizens’ groups in Europe, but we have yet to find one group that has been approached by the Department for Exiting the EU. We do wonder what the outcome might have been had they actually done so.”

Showing the scale of the government’s delusion, however, David Davis, the Brexit secretary, put out this statement following the final votes in the Lords, which features the Tories’ new branding of the UK as “Global Britain,” rather than the imbecilic friendless reality, as the Tories press ahead with removing us from the myriad benefits of EU membership with still no case made for why it is so important for us to remove ourselves from a trading bloc that has been extremely helpful for the UK.

Davis’ fantasy statement was as follows: “Parliament has today backed the government in its determination to get on with the job of leaving the EU and negotiating a positive new partnership with its remaining member states. We are now on the threshold of the most important negotiation for our country in a generation. We have a plan to build a Global Britain, and take advantage of its new place in the world by forging new trading links. So we will trigger article 50 by the end of this month as planned and deliver an outcome that works in the interests of the whole of the UK.”

For the 16.1 million of us who are still abandoned by our elected representatives, it is hugely important that we do not give up. We need to be organised to resist the Tories’ nonsense as Article 50 is triggered and negotiations begin, and we need to make the case as forcefully as possible and as often as possible over the next two years that Brexit will be a self-inflicted economic disaster on a scale that is simply unacceptable, and that thinking it isn’t — primarily because of misplaced notions about the significance of the UK, and simplistic efforts to play down the scale of the challenge in cutting ourselves off from 43 years of laws and treaties within the EU — is wishful thinking of the most dangerous and deluded kind.

How MPs voted (via the Guardian )

On amendment 1, covering EU nationals

Against the amendment (335)

Conservatives: 319

DUP: 8

Labour: 6 (Frank Field, Kate Hoey, Kelvin Hopkins, Rob Marris, Graham Stringer, Gisela Stuart)

UKIP: 1

Independent: 1

For the amendment (287)

Labour: 210

SNP: 54

Lib Dems: 9

Independents: 3

SDLP: 3

Plaid Cymru: 3

Conservatives: 2 (Alex Chalk and Tania Mathias)

UUP: 2

Greens: 1

On amendment 2, giving Parliament a vote on the outcome of the Brexit talks

Against the amendment (331)

Conservatives: 313

DUP: 8

Labour: 6 (Ronnie Campbell, Frank Field, Kate Hoey, Kelvin Hopkins, Graham Stringer and Gisela Stuart)

UUP: 2

UKIP: 1

Independent: 1

For the amendment (286)

Labour: 213

SNP: 54

Lib Dems: 9

Independents: 3

SDLP: 3

Plaid Cyrmu: 3

Greens: 1

The Guardian later noted that eight Tory rebels had abstained: former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who “accused the government of a ‘frankly deranged’ plan not to guarantee MPs a vote on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations,” plus Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan, Ben Howlett, Neil Carmichael, Bob Neill, Antoinette Sandbach and Andrew Tyrie.

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.