Andy Worthington's Blog, page 58

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 1: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Work on Guantánamo

Please support my work and my efforts to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

 

It’s that time of the year, when I ask you, my friends and supporters, to make a donation to support my work, primarily on Guantánamo, which I have been researching, writing about and campaigning to close for eleven years. This website — and the 50 or so articles I publish here very three months — is entirely reader-supported, so I need your support if I am to continue the work I have been doing since 2006.

My target for this quarter — $2500 (£2000) — works out at just $50 an article, so if you can donate $50 you will know that you have paid for one of my articles. Otherwise, a donation of $25 (£20), for example, is just $2 (£1.50) a week — not too much, I hope, for the work that I do, reminding the world on a non-stop basis about the existence of Guantánamo, telling the stories of the men held there, and pointing out the unrelenting need for the prison to be shut down once and for all. However, any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $10, $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£5, £15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

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). You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are 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, but 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.

With Donald Trump in the White House, the problem for Guantánamo campaigners — and the 41 men still held in the prison — is that Guantánamo is in danger of slipping off the radar, as it has so often throughout its long and lamentable history — through much of the Bush administration, when the American public were in general too cowed to properly scrutinize what was happening at Guantánamo (torture, kangaroo courts and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, all hallmarks of dictatorships), and between 2010 and 2013, when Barack Obama gave up on Guantánamo after facing opposition in Congress, reviving his interest in the prison (and his promise to close it) only after the prisoners themselves had embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike.

With Trump, there have been murmurings of the unthinkable — a revival of the torture program, new prisoners to be sent to Guantánamo, the official scrapping of President Obama’s intention to close the prison — but nothing has yet materialized. However, as must be obvious to anyone paying attention, on so many other issues Trump is pursuing a bigoted, belligerent trajectory — in his immigration ban, for example — that it is unwise to think that he is anything but bad news for this most wretched of outposts of US violence, racism and overreach, and all decent people must continue to call for the prison’s closure.

With your help, I will continue to call for Guantánamo to be closed, to call for accountability for those who implemented the programs of torture and imprisonment without charge or trial over the last 15 years, as well as photographing protests, keeping an eye on Donald Trump in general, and also keeping an eye on his counterpart in the UK, Theresa May, and her suicidal obsession with removing Britain from the EU, even if, as is certain, it will destroy our economy. I also hope to be focusing more on protest music in the months to come, which I hope will be of interest.

In closing, thanks, as ever, for your support, and if we’re not yet connected via social media, why not follow me on Facebook and Twitter, check out the Close Guantánamo campaign (also on Facebook and Twitter), and check out my band The Four Fathers (also on Facebook and Twitter).

Andy Worthington

London

March 13, 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 Join the March Against Racism National Demo in London This Saturday, March 18, 2017

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

 

This Saturday (March 18), if you’re in London or able to get to the capital, I do hope you’ll come to a national March Against Racism demo, beginning at noon by the BBC in Portland Place, London W1A 1AA, with other demos taking place in Glasgow, beginning at 11am in Holland St, and Cardiff, beginning at 11am in Grange Gardens. The Facebook page for the London event is here.

The protests have been called to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (which is on March 21), and also because it is the week before Theresa May intends, suicidally, to trigger Article 50, beginning the disastrous two-year process of us leaving the EU. Please also note that there is another national demo, against Brexit, on Saturday March 25, which I’ll be writing more about soon.

Standing up to racism is hugely important, as was made clear last June with the narrow victory for the Leave campaign in the EU referendum. Amongst the misplaced reasons for the Leave vote, which included some spurious notion of British sovereignty, was a toxic mix of racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia, stirred up for years by politicians and the media, and by fears and misconceptions prompted by increased immigration — a phenomenon not unique to the UK, of course, but shared by all the richer countries of the west — that were, lamentably, unchallenged.

Unfortunately, as the cynical efforts to cement hatred of immigrants took root, so too did a cold-hearted response to the greatest humanitarian crisis most people had seen in their lifetimes, as millions of refugees arrived in Europe — primarily via Greece and Italy — fleeing the war in Syria (where the world’s great powers have been playing a proxy version of World War III for several years), the fallout from western wars and intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and the intolerable situation in countries like Eritrea, which, unknown to most Europeans, has one of the worst human rights records in the world.

It’s also particularly important for people to stand up for the rights of refugees and migrants against the politician who has done so little to help them — Theresa May, the inadequate individual who became Prime Minister last July when no one else was left standing in the wake of the EU referendum that former Prime Minister David Cameron arrogantly thought he would win.

For six years, before her undeserved rise to the top position in British politics, May was a hideously authoritarian home secretary, known in particular for her Islamophobia, but also for her undisguised disgust for immigrants and refugees, as I explained in my article last July, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration, in which I discussed her enthusiasm for sending Muslims back to countries where they face the risk of torture, extraditing British Muslims to the US, extrajudicially stripping British citizens of their citizenship, and revealing an obsession with stripping the UK of human rights legislation that seems to be one of her main reasons for wanting to leave the EU, as well as her lack of interest in the refugee crisis, her racist vans telling immigrants to go home, her refusal to grant visas to the foreign spouses of UK nationals if the latter do not earn £18,600 a year, and her obsession with snooping and surveillance.

The current unforgivable scandal of May’s government involves her refusal to honour the agreement made under Cameron to accept thousands of unaccompanied refugee children into the UK. The Dubs amendment, named after Lord Dubs, the Labour peer who came to the UK as a child from Nazi Germany, has been capped at 350, even though, as the Guardian described it, “3,000 children were originally expected to come to the UK under the scheme but the home secretary, Amber Rudd, has said the cap was set far lower because councils did not have enough capacity.”

As the Guardian added, “However, evidence given to the select committee casts doubt on how thoroughly the government had consulted councils, and suggests that as many as 4,000 extra children could be sheltered if central funding is provided.”

Today’s Observer added to the story, reporting that Andy Elvin, chief executive of Tact Care, the UK’s largest fostering and adoption charity, has explained how the Home Office “turned down repeated offers from fostering agencies that would have allowed up to 100 child refugees a week to be given sanctuary in Britain,” in a series of meetings between September 2015 and June 2016.

As if further proof were needed of this government’s heartlessness, check out the self-explanatory Refugees applying to live in UK face being sent home after five years, with its horrific implications for the most vulnerable people feeling for the lives, and, in today’s Observer, UK sending Syrians back to countries where they were beaten and abused, reporting how “Britain is using EU rules to send asylum seekers from Syria and other countries back to eastern European states,” including Hungary and Romania, “where they were beaten, incarcerated and abused.”

In conclusion, then, I hope to see you on next week’s march. As the organisers Stand Up to Racism state on their website:

Amid a vitriolic atmosphere of anti-migrant hysteria following the EU referendum, Prime Minister Theresa May has announced she will trigger article 50 by the end of March 2017 in order to “have the freedom to choose the way we control immigration.”

In a situation where migrants, Muslim women and anyone considered to be “foreign” are being attacked on a daily basis and refugees are being abandoned by Britain and Europe to destitution, drowning and exploitation, there has never been a more important time in recent history to stand up to racism.

On March 18th, let’s make the Stand Up To Racism demonstration for UN Anti-Racism Day the biggest yet, to show that Theresa May does not speak for us when she blames migrants and refugees for the problems cause by austerity and the financial crisis, and that we are united against racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

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.

Donald Trump’s Latest Outrageous Guantánamo Lie

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 first 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 the morning of March 7, Donald Trump tweeted an outrageous lie about Guantánamo — “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!”

That number, 122, was taken from a two-page “Summary of the Reengagement of Detainees Formerly Held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in July 2016. The summaries are issued twice a year, and, crucially, what Trump neglected to mention is that 113 of the 122 men referred to in that summary were released under President Bush, and just nine were released under President Obama. In the latest ODNI summary, just released, the total has been reduced to 121, with just eight men released under President Obama.

This is a disgraceful lie to be circulated by the President of the United States, and it is depressing to note that it was liked by over 85,000 Twitter users, and that Trump apparently has no intention of withdrawing it.

It is also worth noting that, although the ODNI issues these summaries every six month, no evidence is provided to justify the claims, and other analysts believe that the figures are exaggerated. In 2013, for example, when the DNI had a figure of 16.1 percent of released prisoners as “confirmed” recidivists, the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. came up with a figure of just 4 percent.

This is not the first time that Donald Trump has provided misleading information about Guantánamo. On the campaign trail, he spoke about keeping Guantánamo open, and “load[ing] it up with some bad dudes,” misunderstanding quite who has been held at Guantánamo over the years, and under what circumstances (mostly, low-level soldiers and civilians, held, fundamentally, without any rights whatsoever, in defiance of domestic and international norms), and on January 3 he tweeted, “There should be no further releases from Guantánamo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield,” failing to recognize that those approved for release had had those decisions taken unanimously by representatives of major government departments and the intelligence agencies.

And then, in his first week in office, a leaked draft executive order was circulated, which contained another outrageous lie — that “[o]ver 30 percent of detainees released from Guantánamo have returned to armed conflict.” As I explained at the time, in this he was following the lead of much of the mainstream media, which, for years, had been adding up the figures in the ODNI reports that dealt with “confirmed” and “suspected” recidivists and publishing and publicizing them as though they were all “confirmed.”

However, even on this point Trump’s people couldn’t resist exaggerating. As I explained, in the DNI report from July 2016, the ODNI claimed that those “confirmed of reengaging” was 17.6%, while those “suspected of reengaging” was 12.4% — a total of 30%, not “[o]ver 30%.”

On March 8, the day after Trump’s lie, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, muddied the waters further, telling reporters that Trump “meant that the total number of people released from Gitmo was 122. Just to be clear, there’s a big difference: under the Bush administration, most of those were court ordered.”

Politico’s Josh Gerstein quoted verbatim Spicer’s confused efforts to defend his boss. “The Obama administration took great steps, they talked about — it was a campaign promise frankly from day one to close Gitmo,” he said, adding, “The reason the Bush administration did it was in many cases they were under court order … The Obama administration made it actually a priority to let people go and to actively desire to close that camp and to release more and more of those people especially in the waning days. There’s a huge contrast between the posture and the policy of the last two administrations on how they were dealing with Gitmo.”

In the first place, it is absolutely unfair to single out President Obama for having wanted to close Guantánamo, when, in George W. Bush’s second term, stung by unprecedented criticism at home and abroad, that was what he too intended to do. However, Spicer’s main mistake was to assert that “most” or even “many” of the releases under Bush “were court-ordered.”

Sabin Willett, who represented a number of prisoners at Guantánamo, and wrote a very powerful piece when the court of appeals in Washington, D.C. gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners in 2011, said, “That’s loony … That’s just flat out not true. You can count on one hand, and not even use all your fingers, the number of people a district court ordered released where that was not reversed on appeal.”

Although 28 men were approved for release by the courts between 2008 and 2010, after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights (in June 2008), and the D.C. Circuit Court’s rewriting of the rules, which meant that, from July 2010, no more prisoners were able to get their habeas corpus petitions granted, and six additional successful habeas petitions were reversed or vacated, legal experts pointed out to Josh Gerstein that “no more than three of the 532 Guantánamo detainees transferred out under Bush were moved because they won a court challenge.”

Greg Craig, the White House Counsel in President Obama’s first year, who was “deeply involved in Obama’s early Guantánamo policy,” responded to Spicer’s claims by stating, “The truth is that Sean Spicer doesn’t know what he is talking about and doesn’t care enough to take the time to find out.”

David Remes, an attorney who has represented numerous Yemeni prisoners, told Gerstein, “It’s nonsense. There were cases where the rulings went against the government and the government chose not to appeal and let the guy go, but the D.C. Circuit held that the courts cannot force the president to release anybody.”

Most of the 532 men released by George W. Bush were released before the Supreme Court’s habeas ruling, in Boumediene v. Bush, in June 2008, just seven months before Bush left office. Those Gerstein spoke to told him that, “In the months between that ruling and the end of Bush’s term, judges ordered the release of 23 Guantánamo detainees. However, only three were actually transferred out before Bush left office.”

My definitive Guantánamo habeas corpus list confirms that this is the case. As Gerstein reported, “In October 2008, a federal judge ordered the transfer of 17 Uighur prisoners from Guantánamo to his D.C. courtroom for potential release into the US. The ruling was stayed, the Uighurs were never brought to the US and were not released until the Obama era.”

Gerstein added, “Another judge granted relief to five more prisoners the following month, three of whom were released in December 2008.” These five were Algerians who had been living in Bosnia, and who, without any evidence of wrongdoing being provided, had been kidnapped by the US in January 2002 and brought to Guantánamo.

Gerstein also noted, “An additional prisoner won his habeas case In January 2009, before Bush left office, but wasn’t released until June of that year.” That man was Mohammed El-Gharani, a former child prisoner, who had grown up in Saudi Arabia, to parents who were Chadian nationals, and who, on his release, was returned to Chad, where he knew almost nobody. In 2015, he was the subject of an acclaimed installation in New York by the artist Laurie Anderson.

On Guantánamo, as the above shows, the Trump administration cannot be trusted. Donald Trump lies, his press secretary Sean Spicer lies, and so too does Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Trump, who previously worked for Breitbart News and is worryingly Islamophobic. On Fox News, on February 22, speaking about Jamal al-Harith, the former British prisoner who had reportedly blown himself up in Iraq, Gorka made two false claims, as FactCheck.org explained: that al-Harith had been released under Obama, when he had been released by George W. Bush in 2004; and that, amongst the prisoners released by Obama, “almost half the time, they returned to the battlefield.”

To return to where we started, the ODNI’s “confirmed” release rate of those who have “returned to the battlefield” under President Obama is just 4.4%, compared to a “confirmed” rate of 21.2% under President Bush, revealing that Gorka not only lied, but did so by deliberately reinterpreting 4.4% as nearly 50%.

On Guantánamo, then, it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump and his advisors have no idea what the truth is about Guantánamo, are dismissive of the truth, and are not to be trusted. In a world where every criticism is deflected as “fake news,” however, I can only wonder how many people are actually paying attention.

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.

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

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

 

Congratulations to the House of Lords, where peers, by 366 votes to 268, have voted to give Parliament a veto over the final outcome of Theresa May’s Brexit negotiations, while voting against another amendment to allow a second referendum.

This is the second amendment to the government’s derisorily short Brexit bill, authorising Theresa May to trigger Article 50 and start the two years of negotiating time that is provided for the UK to leave the EU.

Last week, the Lords backed an amendment telling the government to respect the rights of the 3.3m EU citizens living and working in the UK to stay here, and not to treat them as “bargaining chips” in negotiations with the EU, a principled move that 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.

When the House of Commons debated the Brexit bill, a number of amendments, including guaranteeing the rights of EU citizens, and guaranteeing Parliament a final say on any deal, failed to pass — betrayals for which I will never forgive the many MPs who capitulated to arguments about respecting “the will of the people,” as I explained in my article, On Brexit, MPs Give Away Sovereignty, Vote to Allow Theresa May to Do Whatever She Wants. It is crucial to remember that the referendum last June was not legally binding, and no constitutional change this significant has ever been voted for in a referendum that only required a simple majority.

In addition, 75% of MPs support staying in the EU (in contrast to the 51.9% of voters who voted to leave the EU in the referendum), but when it came to defending the rights of EU nationals, MPs refused to take the moral high ground, guaranteeing them the right to stay, and thereby requiring the EU to do the same for the 1.2m British nationals living and working in EU countries. In addition, on Parliament’s role, the betrayal was just as sickening, although for other reasons.

Since becoming Prime Minister after the referendum, Theresa May has treated Parliament with contempt, refusing to allow MPs to have any involvement in negotiating Brexit, and requiring those who saw this as a sign of tyranny to have to go to the courts to get judges to tell her that her behaviour was unacceptable, and to remind her that, in the UK, sovereignty — the sovereignty the Leave campaigners were supposed to want to take back from the EU — resides not with the Prime Minister, but with Parliament. And yet, just weeks after the Supreme Court confirmed that MPs had this right, the majority of them gave it away without a fight, and it is not adequate for them to explain that the issues will be tackled after Article 50 has been triggered, as all Theresa May has seen so far is compliance.

Hence my support for the amendments voted for by the House of Lords, and I’m pleased to note that, of the 98 Lords who voted for this second amendment, 13 were Tories, and the most prominent Tory rebel was Michael Heseltine, a former deputy prime minister, who, with his colleagues, joined Labour, Liberal Democrat and crossbench peers.

Heseltine’s words reveal how immature those who currently claim to lead the party are. “Everyone in this House knows that we now face the most momentous peacetime decision of our time,” he said, adding, “And this amendment secures in law the government’s commitment … to ensure that Parliament is the ultimate custodian of our national sovereignty. It ensures that Parliament has the critical role in determining the future that we will bequeath to generations of young people.”

Other Tory peers were, to be frank, hysterical in their efforts to derail the amendment, as is sadly typical. While we Remainers are understandably angry about the colossal economic damage that Brexit will do if it goes ahead, these who voted to Leave, far too often, are intolerant of even the vaguest suggestion that any kind of debate is anything less than treason.

And so, as the Guardian reported, Lord Forsyth, a former Scotland secretary, hysterically stated, “These amendments are trying to tie down the prime minister. Tie her down by her hair, by her arms, by her legs, in every conceivable way in order to prevent her getting an agreement, and in order to prevent us leaving the European Union.”

And Nigel Lawson, a former Chancellor, called the amendment an “unconscionable rejection of the referendum result, which would drive a far greater wedge between the political class and the British people than the dangerous gulf that already exists.”

It was up to Douglas Hogg, another former minister, to point out that supporters of the amendment were not trying to stand in the way of the bill.

“The sole purpose is to ensure the outcome – agreed terms or no agreed terms – is subject to the unfettered discretion of Parliament,” Hogg said, adding, “It is Parliament, not the executive, which should be the final arbiter of our country’s future.”

That phrase is absolutely key to understanding Parliament’s role — and Theresa May’s intended overreach — and Hogg also pointed out that the amendment would not only enable Parliament to reject a “bad deal,” but would also allow MPs and the Lords, if necessary, to “prevent Brexit altogether by refusing to allow the UK to leave the EU without agreement” — a reference to the nightmare scenario that some are indicating might happen, whereby no new trade deals are finalised in the next two years, and the UK decides instead to fall back on World Trade Organisation rules, which, it seems abundantly clear, would wreak havoc on the British economy.

So again, in conclusion, my thanks to the House of Lords for, yet again, demonstrating wisdom and principles that are sorely lacking in the government and the Tory party, and, it must be noted, in the leadership of the Labour Party and in those Labour MPs who support remaining in the EU but who bowed to Jeremy Corbyn’s unacceptable three-line whip last month, compelling MPs to support the government.

For anyone who can clearly see Brexit for what it is — the most insane act of economic suicide in our living memory, and a doorway to unfettered racism, xenophobia and isolation — this is, to be frank, no time for supporting the government at all.

Unfortunately, it has always seemed likely that, despite the amendments, the Lords will not insist on obstructing the government if MPs overturn the amendments when the bill returns to the Commons. That said, the Guardian reported that, last night, Labour “indicated that the Lords will not back down immediately if the Commons next week reverses the two amendments to the bill passed in the upper house.”

The report continued, “A vote in the Commons to take out the amendments will lead to the bill going back to the Lords, and then shuttling back and forth until one side backs down, a process known as ‘ping pong’. Originally opposition peers indicated that they would fold quite quickly. But this evening Angela Smith, the Labour leader in the Lords, said she did not expect to see ‘extended ping pong’, implying that the Lords could send the bill back to the Commons at least once with the amendments still in. A Labour source said the Lords would want to be sure the government and the Commons had given ‘serious consideration’ to its proposals before accepting the will of the Commons.”

Note: For his perceived treachery, Michael Heseltine was sacked by the government from five advisory roles after the vote. In an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme, explaining that he was going to keep opposing Brexit, he said, “I believe the referendum result is the most disastrous peacetime result we have seen in this country.” He added that he had been “‘meticulous’ in not speaking to the press since the referendum result,” but also stated, “The point comes in life that you have to do what I believe to be right. I know these Brexiteers backwards. I have lived with them in government and opposition. They never give up. Why shouldn’t people like me argue in the other camp?” Well said, Michael Heseltine and how strange for me to be commending you, 32 years after you led the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in British history against the peace camp at RAF Molesworth, which directly led to the violent suppression of the British traveller movement four months later at the Battle of the Beanfield.

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.

Donald Trump’s New Immigration Ban Is Still Unconstitutional, Barring Muslims From Six Countries Despite No Evidence That They Pose a Security Threat

[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 first two months of the Trump administration.

 

Donald Trump’s alarming presidency began with a blizzard of disgraceful executive orders, of which the most prominent was the immigration ban preventing visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — from coming to the US for a 90-day period. Refugees from these countries were banned for 120 days, and refugees from Syria were banned permanently. The ban was so chaotic that legal US residents — who had left the US for a vacation, for example, or on business —  were also banned, as were dual nationals, and, of course, it was unconstitutional because it was effectively a ban on Muslims, and, as David Cole, National Legal Director of the ACLU and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, has explained, as such it “violates the first principle of the Establishment Clause, which forbids the government from singling out particular religions for favor or disfavor (Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228, 247 (1982)).”

Trump’s original executive order, which I wrote about in my article Trump’s Dystopian America: The Unforgivable First Ten Days, was almost immediately subjected to successful legal challenges, as I explained in my articles, Heroes of the Resistance: Judge James Robart, Who Has Suspended Donald Trump’s Unacceptable Immigration Ban, and Washington State AG Bob Ferguson (on February 5), As 9th Circuit Judges Uphold Stay on Donald Trump’s Disgraceful Immigration Ban, 29 Experts from The Constitution Project Condemn Spate of Executive Orders (on February 10) and Court Rules That Donald Trump’s Disgraceful Immigration Ban Discriminates Against Muslims (on February 14).

With some thought having gone into this revised executive order, some of the worst aspects of the original have been removed — an exception has been made for legal residents and dual nationals, and the ban on Iraq has also been lifted, because, as Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute from 1993-2012 and a founder of Human Rights Watch, explained in a Guardian column, “Apparently, officials of the administration persuaded the president that it is not a good idea to stigmatize Iraqis as terrorists at a time when Iraqi forces, with American assistance, are fighting to expel the Islamic State from Mosul.” Neier added, “Also, some of the most damaging publicity resulting from the previous version of the order involved the exclusion of Iraqis. Those detained by federal agents as they tried to enter the United States included Iraqis who had assisted US forces when they occupied the country after the 2003 invasion by acting as translators.”

In addition, as the Guardian described it, “language that granted priority to religious minorities for refugee resettlement, which had been viewed as targeting Muslims,” has also been removed. The Guardian added that the new executive order states that Trump’s original order “was not motivated by animus toward any religion”, but noted that this was a remark that was “rejected instantly by refugee advocates and civil liberty groups, who said they planned to challenge the second order on similar grounds.”

A final change is a delay in the implementation of the executive order, which does not come into effect until March 16. As the Guardian noted, “The first order was implemented immediately and prompted confusion and chaos at US airports and consulates abroad.”

Nevertheless, as David Cole noted for Just Security, “it’s still religious discrimination in the pre-textual guise of national security. And it’s still unconstitutional.” Cole began by running through Trump’s discrimination against Muslims, noting how, on the campaign trail, “he stated several times that he intended, if elected, to ban Muslim immigrants from entering the United States,” and also noting that he “has never repudiated that commitment.”

“When confronted with the fact that his proposal would violate the Constitution,” Cole added, “Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press in July, that he would use territory as a proxy for religion,” and “when asked after his election victory whether he still intended to ban Muslim immigrants from the United States, [he] confirmed that was still his plan.” Cole also pointed out how, “Two days after the original Executive Order was issued, former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an advisor to President Trump, stated that then-candidate Trump had asked him for help in ‘legally’ creating a ‘Muslim ban’; and that, in response, Mr. Giuliani and others decided to use territory as a proxy; and that this idea is reflected in the signed Order.”

Cole proceeded to point out that there is “overwhelming evidence that the most recent Executive Order was likewise intended to discriminate against Muslims.” As he put it, not only does it continue to “target only countries that are predominantly Muslim,” but “it does so without a valid security justification.”

He added, definitively, that “Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security recently concluded that an individual’s ‘country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity’ and that ‘few of the impacted countries [under the EO] have terrorist groups that threaten the West.’ he also explained how, on February 21, White House advisor Stephen Miller “explained that any changes to the first executive order would be ‘mostly minor, technical differences … Fundamentally, you are still going to have the same, basic policy outcome for the country.’”

Cole’s accurate conclusion was that “[e]xempting lawful permanent residents, and others with visas, does nothing to alter the purpose or design of disfavoring a specific religion,” and so, as a result, “the new executive order is, like the old executive order, intended to target Muslims.” It also, noticeably, only targets certain Muslim-majority countries, and not those with which Trump has business ties, but which have histories involving terrorism — like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example.

Cole also took careful aim at another of the new executive order’s unchanged examples of executive overreach — the reduction in the number of refugees that Trump intends to accept. As Cole put it, the new executive order “maintains the first executive order’s unilateral reduction to the annual level of refugee admissions, cutting it from 110,000 to 50,000.” However, “That reduction, imposed unilaterally by the president without consultation with Congress, is unauthorized. The immigration statute does not allow the president to order a mid-year reduction in the level of refugee admissions — an action no president has ever done before — much less to do so without consulting Congress.”

And so, 38 days after his first attempt at an immigration ban, Donald Trump’s new executive order looks like it will land the president back where his first order  did — in court, where, it must be presumed, judges will be no more likely to accept his unconstitutional actions than they were the first time around.

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.

Life After Guantánamo: Yemeni Released in Serbia Struggles to Cope with Loneliness and Harassment

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 first two months of the Trump administration.

 

Last week, I posted an article about Hedi Hammami, a Tunisian national held in Guantánamo for eight years, who was released in 2010, but is suffering in his homeland, where he is subjected to persecution by the authorities.

I drew on an article in the New York Times by Carlotta Gall, and I’m pleased to note that, two weeks ago, NPR also focused on the story of a former Guantánamo prisoner as part of a two-hour special on Guantánamo.

I’m glad to see these reports, because Guantánamo has, in general, slipped off the radar right now, as Donald Trump weighs up whether or not to issue an executive order scrapping President Obama’s unfulfilled promise to close the prison, and ordering new prisoners to be sent there, but the stories of the former prisoners provide a powerful reminder of how wrong Guantánamo has always been, and how much damage it has caused to so many of the men held there.

As part of NPR’s coverage, correspondent Arun Rath traveled to Serbia to meet Mansoor al-Dayfi (aka Mansoor al-Zahari), a Yemeni citizen released in July 2016, who was not repatriated because the US refuses to send any Yemenis home, citing security concerns. He was one of 41 prisoners who had been recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by a high-level task force set up by President Obama shortly after he first took office in January 2009, but who had then been made eligible for a Periodic Review Board, a process akin to parole boards that began in 2013. His case was reviewed in September 2015, and he was recommended for release the month after.

At the time of his review, I described how he had probably been nothing more than “a low-level foot soldier of the Taliban who, in US custody, had become an enthusiastic fan of American culture, becoming a fan of Taylor Swift, Shakira, Game of Thrones (although he felt there was too much bloodshed), US sitcoms, Christopher Nolan movies and Little House on the Prairie, which ‘remind[ed] him of his very rural home with few modern conveniences.’”

Approving his release, the board members stated that they found him “credible in his desire to pursue non-extremist goals and higher education as well as his embrace of western culture,” and “noted his candor regarding his past activities and acknowledgement of mistakes that led to his detention and his willingness to be resettled in a third country and understanding and acceptance of his need for social support after detention.”

He also told the board he wanted to go to college, get a degree in information technology and “marry an educated lovely woman who can be my friend and my wife.”

Instead, however, as Rath explained in “‘Out Of Gitmo’: Released Guantánamo Detainee Struggles In His New Home,” he traveled to Serbia to meet al-Dayfi, finding him in “a sparsely furnished apartment in Belgrade,” which is “small, but with a separate bedroom and kitchen and a living room with a nice view of the city.” Rath noted that, although the Serbian government also set him up with “a monthly stipend and the opportunity for Serbian-language classes,” and, after 14 years in Guantánamo, he was, nominally, free, he told Rath that he felt like he was still in prison.

“When they brought me to Serbia they make my life worse,” he said, adding, “They totally kill my dreams. It’s making my life worse. … Not because I like Guantánamo, but my life become worse here. I feel I am in another jail.”

See below for Arun Rath’s broadcast about Mansoor al-Dayfi:

Rath noted that, although al-Dayfi taught himself English at Guantánamo, “he didn’t make it far in his language classes in Serbia,” and explained that “his prospects for an education, a job, a social life and marriage” were all “derailed by the stigma of being an accused terrorist.” He said that he wanted to be sent to an Arab country, and to protest his conditions he embarked on a hunger strike, just as he had at Guantánamo.

As he said, “What I am asking [is] to be sent to another country [where] I can start my life. That [is] what I want, to start a family, start to finish my college education and to live like a normal person. That [is] what I want in my life. Not more. Simple dream … I hope to leave here, where I can start my life, this [is] my hope. Where I can get some support and [go to an]other country where I can least make something of my life, move on with my life, that [is] what I want.”

Arun Rath proceeded to explain that he had come to Serbia “to find out why transferring former Guantánamo inmates deemed ready to re-enter society was so difficult,” and immediately “got a sense of the problem.” As he wrote, “Moments after speaking with Dayfi for the first time, I was stopped by the police and questioned. Even though the Serbian government had agreed to give him a home, it still seemed uncomfortable” with him living in its capital city. Rath actually wrote that the Serbian government “still seemed uncomfortable with an accused terrorist living in its capital city,” but that is an unhelpful description, because al-Dayfi was never credibly accused of having any involvement with terrorism.

Rath noted that he had spoken to officials, up to the Serbian prime minister, who had said that al-Dayfi “was adjusting well,” but that did not seem to be the case. After his first interview, al-Dayfi disappeared. “For two days,” Rath wrote, “he didn’t answer his phone or his door. He then appeared at my hotel, looking terrified, with a fresh bruise on his head. He was certain he had been followed and that we were being watched in the hotel lobby, so we went to my room to talk.”

Rath added, “He told me that the day after our first interview several Serbian men wearing masks had forced their way into his apartment, and pinned him to the floor. While the others searched his apartment, the man holding him down yelled at him, saying things like, ‘If you want to stay here, you have to keep your mouth shut. You are lying. You are playing games.’”

Al-Dayfi told Rath that he “felt humiliated, and he broke down as he told the story.” He said, “They told me basically just shut your mouth and I’m lying,” and added that he had been told, “If you don’t stay in this place, we’re going to take you someplace where you don’t like.”

Rath called this “a difficult situation: interviewing an ex-Guantánamo detainee hiding from authorities in a foreign country, now in my hotel room,” and this was understandable, but it occurred to me that he didn’t reflect on what the Periodic Review Board members had noted — that al-Dayfi had a “need for social support after detention,” indicating that he had some established need of mental health support, which didn’t seem to be being provided to him.

Rath proceeded to discuss al-Dayfi’s background, noting that he was captured in Afghanistan and survived a massacre in a fort (the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, which I have written about extensively over the years), and subsequently “told interrogators he trained with al-Qaida and met repeatedly with Osama bin Laden.” He noted that the US government ended up recognizing that he was actually nothing more than “a low-level fighter who exaggerated his role to sound important,” but Rath was not entirely supportive, stating that he had to ask him that, “if he ha[d] lied about being a terrorist … how could I trust what he said now?”

In response, al-Dayfi told him “he did what he needed to survive,” and proceeded to describe the circumstances in which men at Guantánamo lied. “In Guantánamo, when they put you under pressure, under very bad circumstances you are going to tell them what they want. That’s it,” al-Dayfi said, adding, “Say, like 72 hours under very cold air conditioning, and you are tied to the ground and someone came and poured cold water, whatever. Tell him what he want. Just OK, get out of my skin. I will sign anything, I will admit anything!”

Rath proceeded to explain that al-Dayfi “was in rough shape” when he (Rath) left Serbia in November, and that he was, moreover, “more than a dozen pounds lighter than he had been just weeks before.” He added that he “finally ended his hunger strike in December,” but only “under pressure from his mother, who threatened her own hunger strike if he didn’t start eating.”

He continued to communicate with al-Dayfi, on a regular basis, via video and text, but “he was still miserable.” He told Rath that he “was facing his first real winter without a proper coat,” and, on one occasion, called him “via WhatsApp on a Saturday afternoon, tearing through his apartment and ranting, ‘This is crazy!’” Rath explained, “He was ripping the molding off the walls, yanking out wires, and he pulled out three tiny hidden cameras,” and said, “I’m really, really pissed off. I, this is f****** enough … really it’s enough … being watched on camera in the place where I live.”

Rath continued: “As we were on the call, I saw armed men dressed in black ski masks walk into his apartment. Dayfi switched to the front phone camera so I could watch as they searched his apartment. The men demanded he hand over the phone he was using to record our conversation. Dayfi refused. And after a standoff, some unmasked officials who spoke English arrived.”

“So can you tell me why I’m being watched in my apartment? Give me one reason, am I a criminal?” al-Dayfi asked them. Rath noted that they “didn’t have an answer for him, but demanded his phone again,” to which he responded, “I’m not giving you my phone! No! No, don’t talk to me like this!” By this point, he was screaming at the police. “Don’t scare me,” he said, adding, Look, if I was a bad guy — ” He then “stammered, and spat out in frustration,” as Rath put it, “I’m not stupid. I’m very smart. And very dangerous.”

Rath noted that al-Dayfi’s description of himself as dangerous was, of course, alarming to the Serbs, and asked if al-Dayfi was “a real threat or just a desperate man pushed into a corner?” — a slightly loaded assessment, I thought, as it seemed clear to me that al-Dayfi — a man unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by a high-level US government review process — was just verbally lashing out in frustration at the way he was being treated.

After telling the officials, as he told Arun Rath, that “he never wanted to be sent to Serbia, he wanted to be sent to an Arab country instead,” Rath noted that one of the Serbian officials told him, “Did you — did you know, uh, that you don’t probably have [the] opportunity to do [that]?” adding that he had been following the story of Guantánamo, and had noted that Trump wanted to send new prisoners there. “Everything change,” he said.

“Eventually,” Rath noted, “there was a sense of resignation in the conversation, and almost humor. The men fell into a very cordial chat for another hour before Dayfi finally agreed to let them take his phone and laptop, which were returned two days later, Dayfi said, wiped of data.”

Rath also noted that Lee Wolosky, the State Department special envoy for Guantánamo closure under President Obama, who negotiated the deal with Serbia to take in al-Dayfi, said that, nevertheless, he “got a fair deal.” As he put it, while failing to acknowledge al-Dayfi’s complaints, “This is a pretty remarkable thing. An individual is picked up as a fighter by the United States. He spends a period of time in Guantánamo. And then one of our partner countries offers not only to take him in, but to give him a stipend, give him an apartment, give him language training, and to provide two years of educational support, as he tries to get himself educated.”

To some extent that is indeed remarkable, but as I look at Mansoor al-Dayfi’s case, I see a man subjected also to a certain amount of harassment, for no good reason, who is also quite significantly alone, in a country without any noticeable Muslim population, and with no one he knows apart from Muhammadi Davliatov, the last Tajik in Guantánamo, who was freed with him., and I understand why he would be frustrated, and why, in the end, he wants to be sent to an Arab country, where he might finally be able to begin to rebuild his life.

Is that too much to ask for?

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.

“Wake Up People! Save Our NHS!” Photos from the National March and Rally in London, March 4, 2017

See my photos on Flickr here!
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.

 

On Saturday March 4, 2017, tens of thousands of campaigners marched through central London to defend the NHS from the Tory government, which has been responsible for alarming cuts to NHS funding since first getting back into power in 2010, and which, in 2012’s Health and Social Care Act, facilitated increased privatisation of the NHS that is already undermining the integrity of the health service, as private providers take over more and more services, putting profits before care.

In an article last week promoting the march, I wrote about my involvement in the successful campaign to save Lewisham Hospital in 2012-13, but explained that now, “with the hardest of Brexits being pushed by Theresa May, and being used as a screen to hide anything else that the Tories want hidden, and with May herself revealed — to those who can see beyond the Brexit lies and the endless spinning of the bent right-wing media — as the most dangerous right-wing ideologue in modern British history, it seems reasonable to assume that, with no serious opposition, she will preside over the destruction of the NHS on a scale previously unrealisable, a process which, if not stopped, will actually kill off the NHS, the country’s greatest single institution, which works to save the lives of everyone who needs it, regardless of their income.”

The cuts to the NHS have been so savage that, in the first three quarters of the latest financial year, the deficit was £886 million, and, out of 238 NHS trusts, 135 ended the year in deficit.

I was delighted to see tens of thousands of people on the march, and pleased to see that it was apparently the largest ever protest for the NHS (although I don’t share organisers’ claims that 200,000 or 250,000 people took part), but I must also add that I think the destruction of the NHS under the Tories is so serious that a million people should be marching to save it. I hope that, next time there’s a march, many more people remember how important the NHS is, and get out on the streets to tell Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt to immediately provide more funding to the NHS — from us, the taxpayers who pay for it in the first place.

Today, Larry Sanders, the brother of US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is a spokesman for the Green Party of England and Wales, wrote a commendable article for the Guardian, ‘Stop pretending we can’t afford the NHS: that’s the message of our march today,’ in which he stated:

We are living in a world in which the politics of the leaders of two of the world’s great nations – America and Britain – is built on broken promises. During Donald Trump’s election campaign he promised to “take on Wall Street”. So when just weeks later the president announced a cabinet full of banker billionaires, my brother, Senator Bernie Sanders, said: “With all due respect, Donald Trump is a fraud.”

Meanwhile, here in the UK Theresa May took up her post as prime minister on the commitment to “work for all, not just the privileged few”. Well, it is just weeks since our NHS descended into a humanitarian crisis, and we are already looking at another round of privatisation and cuts. Which is why at midday today we will be marching on parliament in support of the NHS.

We don’t need reminding of the horrors we saw over the winter, with people dying on trolleys and turned away from hospitals, and the British Medical Association warning our most cherished institution has been pushed to breaking point. The NHS is facing a £22bn funding gap, with the demand for care set to rise 4% a year while the health service’s budget will go up by only 0.2% every year between now and 2020.

This crisis in healthcare has been exacerbated by the current Tory government – but its foundations were laid by New Labour and further strengthened by the coalition with the Health and Social Care Act of 2012. The creeping privatisation of the past quarter of a century has introduced vast fragmentation and inefficiency into our health service, and, combined with chronic underfunding, has left the NHS on the brink. Anyone who has visited a hospital recently knows how hard doctors, nurses and all the staff are working to make sure patients are cared for with dignity and compassion, despite the strain on the system. It is time we listened to their concerns.

Larry’s article ended with the following paragraph:

Today thousands of people will march in support of the NHS, unwilling to stand by and watch while this government dismantles public healthcare – and I’m proud to be among their number. The government tells us there isn’t enough money but this isn’t true. We are the fifth [actually, since Theresa May became PM, the sixth] richest country in the world – we have the money to stop our health service turning into a humanitarian crisis, and to care for people when they grow old: in hospitals, the community and homes. We have the money for a fully funded public health service. If Theresa May is to keep her promise to “work for all, not just the privileged few”, she must not let the NHS and social care crumble on her watch.

Also see the photo set here:

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

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

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

House of Lords Defends Right of EU Nationals to Stay in the UK Post-Brexit, as the Tyrant Theresa May Vows to Overturn Amendment

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The image above is of campaigners for a new initiative, Stop the Silence (also on Twitter), launching a nationwide poster campaign outside Parliament calling for the Lords to make amendments to the Article 50 bill and for the public to speak out over the government’s “hard Brexit” policy. Check out the video here, and see here for ‘I’m voting against Theresa May’s hard Brexit in the House of Lords this week – go ahead and call me an enemy of the people’, an article by Liberal Democrat peer William Wallace.

Congratulations to the House of Lords for doing what MPs in the House of Commons so dismally failed to do three weeks ago — guaranteeing the rights of EU citizens living and working in the UK to stay in the country as Theresa May prepares to trigger Article 50, beginning two years of negotiations that will, apparently, end up with us no longer a member of the EU.

For May, the would-be tyrant who inherited Brexit as the unelected leader of the Tories after every other senior Tory resigned or was discredited after the EU referendum last June, the 3.3m EU citizens living and working in the UK are to be treated as “bargaining chips” in negotiations with the EU, allegedly to protect the rights of the 1.2m UK citizens living and working in other EU countries, but in reality because of the tendencies of May and her advisers towards xenophobia and unprovoked belligerence towards our fellow citizens in Europe.

A decent leader would, immediately after the referendum, have guaranteed EU nationals’ right to stay here, taking the moral high ground and exerting pressure on the EU to do the same for UK nationals in other EU countries, but decency no longer exists, I am ashamed to say, and is one of many reasons that the Britain I live in today is turning into a blinkered, inward-looking, self-pitying, isolationist little nation, hopelessly deluded about Britain’s significance in the world, aggressive towards everyone that disagrees with the alleged “will of the people” expressed last June in what was legally nothing more than an advisory referendum, and ruthlessly dedicated to cutting all ties with the EU, even though that will be the single most insane act of economic suicide in the lifetimes of anyone born after the end of the Second World War.

Last night’s amendment passed by 358 votes to 256, in what the Guardian described as “a heavy defeat” for the government. A breakdown showing how peers voted revealed that peers has voted as follows:

For the amendment

Labour: 165

Lib Dems: 93

Crossbenchers: 78

Conservatives: 7 (Lady Altmann, Lord Bowness, Lord Cormack, Viscount Hailsham, Lord Livingston of Parkhead, Earl Selborne and Lady Wheatcroft)

Bishops: 2

Others: 13

Against the amendment

Conservatives: 213

Crossbenchers: 30

Bishops: 3

Others: 10

The amendment, noticeably, did not call for the immediate protection of the rights of EU nationals, but only that, within three months of triggering Article 50, proposals be brought forward ensuring their protection. The exact wording of the amendment is as follows: “Within three months of exercising the power under section 1(1), Ministers of the Crown must bring forward proposals to ensure that citizens of another European Union or European Economic Area country and their family members, who are legally resident in the United Kingdom on the day on which this Act is passed, continue to be treated in the same way with regards to their EU derived-rights and, in the case of residency, their potential to acquire such rights in the future.”

As the Guardian proceeded to explain, peers who backed the amendment “urged Conservative MPs in the House of Commons to support the change when the bill returns,” although the government immediately vowed to overturn it, once more demonstrating that the moral high ground is anathema to the petty, vindictive, flag-waving, self-obsessed, xenophobic Prime Minister and her Brexiteer ministers.

However, Molly Meacher, a crossbench peer who backed the bill nevertheless said she was “hopeful” that Tory rebels — up to 30, in her estimate — would defy the whip “on the basis of morality and principle” when the bill returns to the Commons with the amendment.

On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Meacher tackled the lie that “giving EU citizens guarantees would leave UK citizens living in the EU vulnerable.” As she said, “UK nationals in the EU have been getting together and putting pressure on us in the House of Lords to pass this amendment to keep this issue outside and ahead of the negotiations. They believe and I share the belief that their only hope of getting their situation sorted out ahead of the negotiation is precisely if the British government act morally to do a deal on EU citizens.”

As the Guardian also noted, campaigners will also “point to the fact that significant cabinet members including Boris Johnson and Andrea Leadsom have all suggested that EU citizens should have their rights protected.”

The government’s bill for triggering Article 50, passed by craven MPs three weeks ago, as I explained in my article, On Brexit, MPs Give Away Sovereignty, Vote to Allow Theresa May to Do Whatever She Wants, is a derisory two-paragraph affair that was only reluctantly allowed by Theresa May after a Supreme Court ruling ironically reminding her that, in the UK, sovereignty resides with Parliament as a whole and not just with the Prime Minister, but despite MPs’ failures three week ago, and the likelihood that rebels will fail to materialise, the passage of the amendment will delay its passage into law by at least one week, until 14 March, as a result of what is known as parliamentary ping pong between the Houses of Commons and Lords.

The Guardian noted that lobbying of Tory MPs “is already under way, with cross-party talks likely as Labour and the Lib Dems urge Conservative colleagues to push for a second government defeat on the issue.” Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, said there was “a growing consensus” in support of EU nationals’ rights being defended before Article 50 is triggered, despite the failure of MPs to pass the amendment in the Commons. “The prime minister is now increasingly isolated,” he said, adding, “Labour will continue to support this simple but effective amendment when it returns to the Commons, and urge MPs on all sides of the house to do so.”

In the debate in the House of Lords, a number of peers “gave short shrift to the government’s suggestion that a one-sided guarantee could be damaging for the rights of British people living in other European countries.”

Labour’s Lady Hayter, opening the debate, pointed out that the government “had the power to act now over the issue.” As she said, “In 1985, my noble friend Lord Kinnock had to say to his own party: ‘You can’t play politics with people’s jobs.’ I now want to say to the government: you can’t do negotiations with people’s futures.”

Lady Hayter was “backed by a number of high-profile peers including the former Lib Dem leader Lord Campbell and the former lord chief justice Lord Woolf,” and Lord Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, called the government’s argument that “an offer to EU citizens would weaken its hand in European negotiations” a  “questionable” stance, adding, importantly, that, “However you think about that argument it is using them as bargaining chips.”

Lord Hailsham, the most high-profile Tory backing the amendment, said denying European citizens the right to remain in Britain could lead to a legal challenge, but he also pointed out that it was “a matter of principle.” As the Guardian put it, he “described how a French waitress in parliament had asked him what would happen to her when Brexit took place.” He said, “I gave her my personal opinion, which was that there would be no problem for her, but I was not able to give her the guarantee that I think she was entitled to deserve.”

Other peers, including, shockingly, the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who had fled Uganda under Idi Amin, refused to back the amendment, comparing it to “the start of a race,” but failing to acknowledge what message it would send to EU nationals to not address their rights upfront.

The loss for the government in the House of Lords came about “despite a last-minute effort by Amber Rudd to reassure peers about the government’s intentions on the issue.” Rudd had “insisted there was no question of treating European citizens with ‘anything other than the utmost respect’, and said their status would be top priority in EU negotiations,” but peers were not convinced. As the Guardian put it, “The decision of peers to force a vote at committee stage was unusual, but came when it became clear the government would not make concessions on this issue.”

Responding to the vote, Paddy Ashdown, the Lib Dem peer and former party leader, said there had been a “collective release of emotion” from peers, as the Guardian described it.

He said, “This House has sat cowering, with its hands behind its head, refusing to speak, shelled daily by the government and suddenly the House of Lords says ‘no!’. This is a matter of honour, of principle, and we will insist. At last this beast of parliament has found a voice.”

He added that “he hoped it would send a signal to the EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens abroad that they were being heard,” and that “he believed the defeat would galvanise opposition to the government,” stating, “I hope every individual will now examine their conscience and realise that a parliament that allows a government to ride roughshod over it is in dereliction of its duty.”

The Labour MP Peter Kyle also issued a statement on behalf of Open Britain, which is campaigning for a “soft” Brexit, particularly in relation to the UK staying in the single market. He said, “I’m delighted that the House of Lords have stood up to the government and voted to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living in Britain. I proudly voted for the amendment a few weeks ago and I will do the same again. I urge MPs of all parties to do the decent thing and support the amendment when it returns to the House of Commons. No matter what party you are in or whether you campaigned to leave or remain, there is both a practical and a moral imperative to protect the rights of three million people who now face crippling uncertainty about their future as British residents.”

The Guardian also spoke to Monique Hawkins, a Dutch woman “who highlighted the plight of EU citizens when she revealed last December she had been asked to ‘prepare to leave’ the country after 24 years.” She said she was “‘heartened’” to hear so many moving and inspiring speeches” in the Lords, but sounded a note of caution, explaining that “she feared the successful amendment still did not cover stay-at-home parents, carers, disabled people and students whose residence status was uncertain because they decided to continue their lives in Britain but did not take out health insurance when they arrived in the country.”

As the Lords continue to debate the Brexit bill, the government faces the prospect of a second defeat next week, when peers “vote on an amendment guaranteeing parliament a vote on the final Brexit deal,” an amendment that, shockingly, MPs voted against last week, thereby capitulating to Theresa May’s tyrannical ambitions.

Unfortunately, as the Guardian noted, the government “is determined to reverse the defeats when the bill returns to the Commons, probably on Monday 13 March, and it is expected that at that point the House of Lords will back down and let the elected chamber have its way.”

I think the Lords should resist, but more than that I think the majority of MPs who supported remaining in the EU should find their voices, and insist that the rights of EU nationals and the right of Parliament to vote on the final Brexit deal be guaranteed instead of, as it currently stands, bowing down in abject servitude to the anti-democratic and intolerant Theresa May, and granting her unfettered power to do whatever she wants, however ruinous it will be for Britain’s economy and for what remains of our tattered reputation as a tolerant and welcoming country.

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.

The Anguish of Hedi Hammami, A Tunisian Released from Guantánamo in 2010, But Persecuted in His Homeland

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

The media circus has currently taken one of its darker turns regarding Guantánamo, after an evidently troubled former prisoner, Jamal al-Harith, a British citizen released 13 years ago, blew himself up in Iraq. Too much of the coverage has focused on the UK’s alleged failure to keep him under surveillance, and on the financial settlement he (and all the other released British prisoners) received from the British government in 2010, and not enough on how disgraceful and unacceptable his treatment was in the first place, and how that might have caused lasting damage.

The full-time surveillance of individuals is an expensive matter, and not one that states that respect the rule of law undertake lightly, especially in relation to individuals against whom no case for wrongdoing was ever established. Al-Harith is one of a number of individuals who were only sent to Guantánamo after they had been liberated by the US from a Taliban prison, where they had been held — and abused — because the Taliban thought they were spies, and it is inconceivable that these men were not damaged in some way by being subsequently sent to Guantánamo to be “held in extrajudicial detention for years and subjected to torture on a regular basis,” as the Guardian described it, adding, in al-Harith’s case, that this was “with the complicity of the UK.”

As the Guardian spelled out, the official reason given for al-Harith’s transfer to Guantánamo was “because the US thought he might have useful information on the treatment of prisoners by the Taliban – who had held him as a suspected British spy – not because he was considered dangerous,” and in the end, although the US authorities “thought some questions remained” about al-Harith, they “concluded he had no links to the Taliban or al-Qaida,” an assessment that seems accurate. It is not yet certain what led him to travel to Syria in 2014 to join Islamic State fighters, but it would be unwise to rule out the effects of the time spent in brutal prisons run by both the Taliban and the United States.

If Western countries have shown an important unwillingness not to persecute former Guantánamo prisoners when no proof was ever presented of their engagement in wrongdoing, the same is not, unfortunately, true of everywhere else in the world, and as the story of al-Harith’s death was being reported, the New York Times ran an important article by Carlotta Gall, with whom I wrote a front-page story in 2008 about a prisoner who had died at Guantánamo in December 2007.

The story of Hedi Hammami

Carlotta Gall’s story, “After Eight Years in Guantánamo, He Yearns to Return,” was about Hedi Hammami (known in Guantánamo as Abdulhadi Bin Hadiddi), a 47-year old Tunisian who was released from Guantánamo in March 2010, but who is now so depressed at the extent to which he is persecuted by the authorities in his homeland that he has said he would prefer to be back in Guantánamo.

As Carlotta Gall put it, “the pressures of living in Tunisia’s faltering democracy, under harassment and enduring repeated raids by the police, have driven him to make an extreme request.” As he described it, “It would be better for me to go back to that single cell and to be left alone. Two or three weeks ago I went to the Red Cross and asked them to connect me to the US foreign ministry to ask to go back to Guantánamo.”

As Gall proceeded to explain, Hammami said that the Red Cross “refused to take his request,” but “he insist[ed] nevertheless that at this point, that would be best for him.” As he stated, “I have lost my hope. There is no future in this country for me.”

Hammami is married with two children, and is employed as a nighttime ambulance driver, and as Gall explained, on the surface, he “seems to have rebuilt his life,” but “he walks with a limp and sometimes pauses midspeech and screws up his face in pain,” explaining, “That’s Guantánamo.” After eight years as a prisoner at Guantánamo, he says, “he still suffers from headaches, depression and anxiety attacks from the torture and other mistreatment he says he suffered there.”

The son of a farmer from the poor northwest of Tunisia, Hammami’s journey to Guantánamo was far from straightforward. He originally left for Italy in 1986 in search of work, where he became involved with Tablighi Jamaat, a huge missionary organization that the Bush administration accused of being a front for terrorism, even though it has millions of members worldwide. As a result of his involvement with Tablighi Jamaat, he subsequently “traveled to Pakistan, where he obtained refugee status,” but in 2002 he was seized by Pakistani forces — almost certainly for reasons connected with the bounty payments that the US was making to its allies in exchange for handing over al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects — and transferred to Guantánamo, where he was accused of training in Afghanistan and being involved with al-Qaeda, accusations that he denied, and that he continues to deny.

Hammami’s journey back to Tunisia was also far from straightforward. As Carlotta Gall explained, at the time of his release, “Tunisia was still a dictatorship under the rule of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and notorious for torturing prisoners, in particular Islamists.” Instead of sending him home, therefore, the Obama administration, having approved him for release via the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office, sent him to the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Gall added that, “After the popular uprising in 2011 that overthrew Mr. Ben Ali and set off the Arab Spring, Mr. Hammami negotiated his return to Tunisia. He timed it well, benefiting from a national amnesty for political prisoners and a program of compensation that gave him a job in the Ministry of Health.”

In one of several interviews conducted “in his rented home in a working-class suburb of Tunis,” Hammami told Gall, “I hoped very much that after the revolution everything would get better.”

However, as Gall reported, “soon after he began work in 2013, the police raided his apartment with dogs at 3 a.m., breaking the door and hauling him down to the police station.” Adding insult to injury, Hammami noted, the police “made me crawl on all fours down the stairs.”

At the police station, he reported that the police “said they just wanted to get to know him, and let him go after 15 minutes,” but, as he put it, “That was just the beginning.”

Since then, as Gall explained, he “has lived under a constant regimen of police surveillance, raids and harassment. His cellphone and computer were confiscated. When he moved to a new house, the police followed him, turning up at all hours to question him.” Just over a year ago, in December 2015, the harassment increased. Hammami “was placed under house arrest, told he no longer had the right to work and ordered to sign in at the police station morning and evening for six weeks.”

This punitive and unfair regime remains in place. Gall noted that Hammami is under what is described as “administrative control,” and that the police “enforce the order at will.” He is not allowed to travel outside Tunis, and “[e]very so often, like on Sept. 11, the police order him to sign in with them.” Hammami described this last particularly charged humiliation as follows: “I feel someone is doing it for revenge.” It is hard not to escape that conclusion, when his harassment increases on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, even though Hammami, of course, had nothing to do with those attacks.

Hammami also told Gall that the police have “scared landlords from renting to him, forcing him to move six times in three years,” and that his Algerian wife’s residency card has been confiscated, which has prevented her from working to supplement his meager salary. She asked not to be named “for fear of further police harassment,” but told Gall that the family was “barely managing” to get by.

As Gall described it, “Stress and tension from the police actions have intensified the psychological problems Mr. Hammami brought with him from Guantánamo.” Describing it to her, he rubbed his temples, and said, “I feel too much pressure,” adding, “All that blackness comes back.”

Rim Ben Ismail, a psychologist working for the World Organization Against Torture in Tunisia, who has provided counseling to the 12 Tunisians who have been returned from Guantánamo, described his wish to return to his cell as being “fairly typical of the Guantánamo detainees.”

“They lived with suffering, physical suffering,” she said, adding that “now there is a psychic suffering, and often they say, ‘Take me back there.’” She also stated, “Because of their past they are all presumed guilty and it is unlivable for all of them and their families. The families are being threatened and harassed.” She further explained that the former prisoners’ parents, in particular, “fear the Tunisian security forces and say they think their sons would be safer in Guantánamo.”

Ben Ismail also noted that raids on former prisoners’ homes “have often been needlessly violent,” and that “police officials break down doors and wake a suspect with a gun to his head, often in front of his wife and children.” As she said, “Everything is being done to create aggression in a person. They do not need to raid the house at 2 a.m.”

She also explained that one of the former Guantánamo prisoners, who she treated, “was harassed so relentlessly by police that he became suicidal and ran off to Syria, where he was killed.” Far from portraying him as a terrorist, however, she said, “He was such a gentle person. By treating these people like this you create a climate of revenge and the sense that they have no place at home.”

No one would deny that there is a problem with terrorism in Tunisia — which, in 2015 and 2016, led to attacks on foreign tourists at a national museum and at a beach resort hotel that contributed to a death toll of over 70 people — and it is also noteworthy that Tunisians “reportedly make up the largest number of foreign fighters to have joined the Islamic State and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq” — but the kind of random persecution to which Hedi Hammami is subjected serves no useful purpose.

After an attack on the Presidential Guard in November 2015, in which 12 soldiers were killed, a state of emergency was declared, and at least 139 Tunisians “have been placed under house arrest since, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the cases in a report released in September,” in which it was also noted that, although these responses “have been justified in the context of countering terrorism,” they have also “left people facing stigmatization and unable to pursue studies and work.”

Rights groups are becoming increasingly concerned by reports of increasing repression in Tunisia, which had an appalling human rights record before the Arab Spring and the toppling of the dictator Ben Ali. In “‘We want an end to the fear’: Abuses under Tunisia’s state of emergency,” a report , Amnesty International “accused the Tunisian police and security forces of employing repressive measures used by past dictatorships, including torture, deaths in custody, arbitrary house raids and often unlawful harassment of suspects, their families and communities,” and, on a recent trip to Tunisia, Ben Emmerson, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights while countering terrorism, reminded the Tunisian government that “human rights should be central to counterterrorism operations, noting that torture and other repressive measures fuel radicalism.”

For Hedi Hammami, however, the Tunisian authorities’ counter-terrorism measures are making his life intolerable. “I never committed a crime,” he said, adding, “I don’t have a record, no theft, no ethics problems, nothing. My only demand is to be stable, but they don’t let me live my life in stability. They are pushing you towards death.”

Note: Hedi Hammami was also recently interviewed by Fairfax Media, which publishes the Sydney Morning Herald, and, discussing the harassment he faces from Tunisia’s security services, he told reporter Farid Farid that “each time he is detained, his interrogators repeat inane questions for several hours about the times when he prays and which mosques he frequents.” Comparing the situation to the US, he added, “At least Trump has to abide by the law, but here there is no rule of law or anything resembling it.”

Hammami also spoke about how “his mental health is deteriorating from the stress of feeling under constant surveillance, invoking haunting memories of his time in Guantánamo.” As he explained, “I am talking to myself when I am with my kids. They tug at me and say ‘Baba, who are you talking to?’. It is demeaning that we cannot even go for short walks anymore for fear of being arrested. My country has hurt me more than anybody else.”

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.

Save the NHS From Its Would-Be Killers, Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt: Please Join the National Protest in London This Saturday, March 4, 2017

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Please join the march for the NHS in London this Saturday!

Four years ago, I was involved in a struggle to save Lewisham Hospital, my local hospital in south east London, from destruction by senior NHS managers working closely with the government of David Cameron. It was an extraordinary grass-roots campaign, at one point involving 25,000 Lewisham residents taking to the streets, and, I’m very glad to note, it was ultimately successful.

Four years on, however, the political situation in the country is far worse than we could have imagined back in 2013, and, it is fair to say, the entire NHS is now at risk. Back then, the outrageous cost of a PFI development in Woolwich had led NHS managers to conclude that they could get away with a long-planned attempt to reduce the number of A&E departments in south east London from five to four, with Lewisham being the intended victim.

In overcoming these plans — which involved a successful judicial review — we were, I think, able to demonstrate that it was disgraceful for the government and NHS managers to suggest that 750,000 Londoners should be served by just one A&E, when Lewisham itself, with a population of 270,000, deserves its own fully-functioning hospital, as does every population centre of a quarter of a million people.

At the time, there were similar threats to other hospitals — in north west London, for example — but it was not yet clear that the entire future of the NHS was in the government’s sights, even though the warning signs were clear — the top-down reorganisation that David Cameron lied about, which was intended to take responsibility for the running of the NHS out of the government’s hands (and into the hands of private companies), and the insane PFI burden (mostly initiated under Gordon Brown) that was taking up far too much of the NHS’s  budget.

Even so, it was still possible to believe in 2013 that the NHS as a whole was too big and too beloved to be felled by the Tories — but now, with the hardest of Brexits being pushed by Theresa May, and being used as a screen to hide anything else that the Tories want hidden, and with May herself revealed — to those who can see beyond the Brexit lies and the endless spinning of the bent right-wing media — as the most dangerous right-wing ideologue in modern British history, it seems reasonable to assume that, with no serious opposition, she will preside over the destruction of the NHS on a scale previously unrealisable, a process which, if not stopped, will actually kill off the NHS, the country’s greatest single institution, paid for through general taxation, which works to save the lives of everyone who needs it, regardless of their income.

The NHS is currently starved of cash to an unprecedented degree, a suffocation  explained by homicidal cuts agreed to by NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, in October 2014, when he suggested, implausibly, that, to address a forecast £30bn gap in 2020 between expected demand and what the NHS could deliver, £22bn could come from efficiency savings.

In fact, the NHS has been struggling to cope within its existing budget, as the year-on-year figures show. A surplus of £592m in 2012-13 had turned into a £91m deficit in 2013-14, and a deficit of £843m in 2014-15. For 2015-16, base don the first three quarters, the deficit is £886 million, and, as ITV News explained in a report just last week, out of 238 NHS trusts, 135 ended the year in deficit. That was 44 fewer than in the same period last year, but these are horrendous statistics for both years, and it is a sign of how heartless and triumphant Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt are that they seem to be getting away with it.

The Guardian, whose coverage of the Tory-engineered NHS crisis is not generally what it should be, last week only ran a Press Association story that, although it featured the BMA talking about how the NHS was at “breaking point” with “a decline in the number of hospital beds leading to delays and cancelled operations,” failed to convey the full horror of what the “breaking point” really means.

ITV News, for example, reported that a senior A&E consultant stated that “the pressure the NHS has been under this winter is ‘the worst’ he has ever known,” and as he explained, “For the first time ever I’ve had to phone the executive on-call to say I can no longer guarantee patient safety. This is down to us being completely overwhelmed.”

NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson, speaking of the NHS deficit, said that it was “largely because of winter pressures. Trusts spent more than they planned and they lost income from cancelled operations — both were needed to create the extra bed capacity to meet record emergency winter demand.” He added, “This shows the danger of planning with no margin for unexpected extra demand. We can’t expect to run NHS finances on wafer-thin margins year after year and keep getting away with it. The NHS’s underlying financial position is not sustainable.”

The situation is so bad that, just two weeks ago, it was reported that the latest shake-up for the NHS as part of the ongoing effort to save £22bn — Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) — will involve the closure of 19 hospitals, including five major acute hospitals, and countless other troubling reorganisations. I wrote about the STPs in November, in an article entitled, Save the NHS: Tories’ Own Auditor Finds “Financial Problems are Endemic and This is Not Sustainable” for NHS’s Survival, which I hope you also have time to read.

So please, if you care about the future of the NHS, come along on Saturday, and show that you’re prepared to fight for it. We’re meeting at noon in Tavistock Square, London WC1 and marching to Parliament. The website for the march is here, and the Facebook page is here, and as the organisers — Health Campaigns Together and The People’s Assembly — state:

Our National Health Service is at breaking point.

On the backdrop of continued cuts and closures, private companies seek to gain even more of a foothold within the NHS.

Continued pay restraint has meant the value of NHS staff salaries has fallen by 14% since 2010. There are now 25,000 nursing and 3,500 midwifery vacancies in NHS England alone.

Theresa May’s demands for yet more austerity in the NHS represent a real risk to the safety of patients and the service. The Government’s latest plans for Sustainability and Transformation Plans are in reality just a smokescreen for further cuts and its latest instrument of privatisation.

The NHS is the single greatest achievement of working class people in Britain. We cannot allow it to be undermined and ultimately destroyed. We must march together, sending a clear message to the government; “the NHS will last as long as there are folk with the faith to fight for 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.