Andy Worthington's Blog, page 63

Brexit Hits Voters Where It Hurts – In Their Wallets – As Majority Reveal They Don’t Want to Be Worse Off By Leaving the EU

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In an update from Brexit Britain, the powerful news this week is that some of those who voted for the UK to leave the EU in the June referendum are how clearly having second thoughts, as the economic impact of their suicidal vote starts to become apparent.

Because we have not yet left the EU and the economy has not gone into freefall as we drive ourselves voluntarily off the highest cliff imaginable, in the single most self-destructive act by a nation state in modern history, the chief fantasists of the Brexit camp — those Tory MPs and media commentators obsessed in a deranged manner with an illusory notion of Britain’s sovereignty — are still free to pretend that Brexit will not be a disaster, but is instead some sort of fabulous opportunity.

But two stories this week suggest that this colossal act of self-deception is under threat.

The first involves two polls undertaken last week. The first, conducted by YouGov for Open Britain, the organisation that rose from the ashes of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign, revealed that, as the Guardian described it, “The British public will not accept a Brexit deal that leaves them worse off financially … In a sign that a majority of the public would be unwilling to accept an economically damaging hard Brexit, half of those who voted to leave the EU in June, including 62% of Labour voters and 59% of those in the north, would not be willing to lose any money at all as a consequence of Britain’s withdrawal.”

Just one in 10 of those who responded to questions from YouGov said that they “would be willing to lose more than £100 a month,” and Peter Kellner, the former president of YouGov, said that the results suggested that Theresa May “could have real difficulty in delivering a Brexit that satisfies those who voted for it.” He added, “This is the first poll to look specifically at whether leave voters are willing to accept any financial loss as a result of Brexit. The answer is that few are prepared to.”

The poll showed that 28% of voters expect to lose money as a result of Brexit, and that only 1 in 20 expect to be better off as a result, while just over 1 in 5 (22%) don’t expect that Brexit will have any impact on their finances.

Alarmingly, 45% have no idea what to expect – even though a significant boost to the Leave campaign’s popularity was its unfounded claim that leaving the EU would mean that £350m a week would be returned to the UK — to be spent, the Leave campaigners lied, on the NHS.

Another poll was undertaken by the consumer magazine Which?, revealing that “almost half the population (47%) are worried about Brexit, up eight points since September, with nearly two-thirds concerned about its potential impact on food prices.”

Interestingly, the Which? poll revealed that those who voted to leave the EU in areas where a majority of people voted to leave “are among those most unhappy to be left worse off, according to the study – including 59% in the north and 54% in Wales and the Midlands,” and even UKIP supporters are demonstrating an awareness of reality, with 39% not wanting to be worse off because of Brexit.

The Guardian noted that those opposing a “hard Brexit,” favoured by Theresa May, who has become a tyrannical Leave supporter since the referendum, “believe the findings could convince the government to think again on potential plans to pull out of the single market – and could reignite a contentious debate over whether Brexit voters were aware that their ballots meant leaving the single market,” something that voters weren’t aware of, of course, because the referendum was a ridiculously simplistic binary process: a simple yes or no, on an issue that is actually one of mind-bending complexity, with 43 years of laws and treaties tying us to the EU like the circulatory system of the human body.

In response to the polls, Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, who have adopted a clear anti-Brexit position, unlike the conflicted Labour Party, said, “It’s clear the British public don’t want a hard Brexit at any cost, despite what the Tories might think. They no longer support membership of the single market and have given up on people who don’t wish to sign away a blank cheque Brexit.”

The Guardian also noted that Open Britain’s poll also suggests that “the prolonged period of uncertainty since the 23 June referendum has chipped away at the pro-Brexit majority,” noting that, “If a rerun of the vote were held tomorrow, remain and leave would be tied at 44% each, with 5% not voting at all and 7% undecided.”

On another front, as London suffers from flood after flood as a result of burst water mains, Aditya Chakrabortty in the Guardian has been asking how the economic blow that will undoubtedly be delivered if we leave the EU will be received by those who voted for it on the basis of lies — and points out how the government’s ongoing obsession with selling off British assets is relentlessly continuing, even though it is actually exactly what Leave voters don’t want, and even though part of the problem is revealed through an examination of who owns Thames Water, and how they’ve been plundering it financially.

In ‘A Brexit betrayal is coming – but who will get the blame?’ Chakrabortty asks, “What happens when 17 million people get the feeling they’ve been cheated?” adding, “That will be the most profound question in British politics, not just in 2017 but for many years to come. As the broken promises of Brexit pile up one on top of the other, so that they are visible from Sunderland, from Great Yarmouth, from Newport, what will the leave voters do then?”

He then explains that he isn’t talking about the £350m NHS lie, but about the promises “that went far deeper. The vow to ‘take back control’. To stop being the human punchline to someone else’s macroeconomic joke. To – as our north of England editor Helen Pidd wrote last week – no longer live on crumbs, while others in London enjoy entire loaves.”

As he proceeds to explain, “The Brexiteers were explicitly offering voters a once-in-a-lifetime shot at changing the status quo,” except that “change, in our new prime minister’s dictionary, just means more of the same. “[W]hatever is promised – hard or soft, red white or blue – it’s clear that the terms of Brexit will be dictated by Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel and the other 27 members of the EU, rather than by our dream team of May, Boris Johnson and David Davis,” Chakrabortty notes, adding, “We can also see much else of what the next few years will bring. The economic plan for the rest of this decade has been laid out by Philip Hammond, and it equals austerity-lite – but for even longer. The forecasts for wages and living standards are in, and they indicate Britain will suffer its first lost decade since Karl Marx was alive.”

He then runs through May’s broken promises — reversing her promise to “call off the expensive disaster of Hinkley C,” dropping her vow to install workers on company boards, and promising to stick up for “just about managing” families, then allowing Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, to “carry on slashing taxes for multinationals” instead.

Then Chakrabortty reaches his key point — “the foreign ownership of Britain’s infrastructure,” and delivers the following condemnation of one deal in particular, involving Macquarie, the Australian investment bank that heads the consortium that bought Thames Water in 2006 — and which announced its intention to sell its stake earlier this year. While water pipes are bursting all over London causing immense damage, because of neglect by Thames Water, Chakrabortty reveals that an academic study revealed that, in four out of the five years up to 2012, “Macquarie and its fellow investors took out more money from the company than it made in post-tax profits.” No wonder no neighbourhood is safe from watery destruction. As Chakrabortty also notes, some analysts cite the sell-off of Thames Water as “being among the greatest debacles in all of Britain’s history of privatisation.

Last week, while the tabloids and the majority of the now degenerate liberal mainstream media were encouraging everyone to look the other way (at the Supreme Court’s deliberations about the need for Parliament to be consulted before we leave the EU), the National Grid agreed to sell a a 61% shareholding in its gas pipe network to a consortium led by Macquarie, “also backed by China Investment Corporation (CIC) and Qatar Investment Authority, along with fund managers including Hermes and Allianz.”

As Chakrabortty describes Macquarie’s predatory role:

Remember how May promised to scrutinise any proposed takeovers of such strategic assets as water, energy and transport? Well, last week, while the rightwing commentators were diligently huffing and puffing over Gina Miller at the supreme court, another kind of sovereignty was being covered on the City pages. The National Grid announced it would sell a majority of its gas pipelines to a consortium of largely overseas investors, including China and Qatar, and led by an Australian investment bank, Macquarie.

You may never have heard of Macquarie, but my guess is you’ve probably been one of its customers. The bank is known as the “millionaires’ factory” or the “vampire kangaroo” – and it owns a lot of the most prosaic parts of British life. You’ve been Macquaried if you’ve left your car in a National Car Park, or flown out of Glasgow, Southampton or Aberdeen or if you’re among its 14 million customers in Thames Water. And as of next spring, it will lead an international group with a 61% share in our biggest gas distribution network: that’s 82,000 miles of pipe, serving 11m homes and businesses across eastern England, the north-west and the West Midlands.

I have come across Macquarie before, through its handling of Thames Water, which some analysts cite as being among the greatest debacles in all of Britain’s history of privatisation. Just as with National Grid, it led a consortium to buy Thames. Two academics at the Open University examined the accounts between 2007 and 2012 and found that in four out of those five years, Macquarie and its fellow investors took out more money from the company than it made in post-tax profits. They crippled the firm with billions in debt, while Thames customers paid ever more in water bills and got among the worst service offered by any water company.

And if you think this is bad, bear in mind that Macquarie and other non-UK, non-EU corporations, China, Qatar and other Gulf states, unaccountable hedge funds and other leech-like or vampiric enemies of British well-being and economic prosperity are exactly who the Brexiteers in government are turning to to sell what has not already been sold in an effort to stave off the worst of the disaster that leaving the EU will entail. From living in a peaceful lagoon in which our fellow fish are, more or less, just like us (the EU), we are now plunging into inhospitable waters full of sharks just waiting to feast on what is left of the corpse of the UK.

When, or if, I wonder, will people wake up to the true cost of Brexit, and the reality that our so-called leaders are actually preparing to sell us off even more disgracefully than they have been doing for the last 30 years?

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

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

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

Please Write to the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo in Obama’s Last Month in Office

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $3000 (£2400) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo into the new year.

 

Twice a year, since 2010, I’ve asked those who oppose the ongoing existence of Guantánamo to write to the prisoners still held there, to let them — and the US authorities — know that they have not been forgotten. For the last letter-writing campaign, in March, I expressed my hope that President Obama might fulfill the promise he made on his second day in office in January 2009, to close the prison for good, but that has not happened, of course, and now the specter of Donald Trump hovers over the wretched facility, with his promises to keep it open, and to send new prisoners there.

Whether the prisoners are worried is unclear. Eight years ago, they cheered President Obama’s victory, thinking that it meant Guantánamo would soon be closed, but eight years later many of them are still held, and presumably have every reason to believe that there is little to hope for. The day after the election, the Miami Herald reported that Army Lt. Col. John Parks, the spokesman for the prison, said that “[m]any detainees did stay up and watch the election results,” although they showed no reaction that he could discern. However, on December 1, on “CBS This Morning,” Margaret Brennan spoke to David Remes, the attorney for the Pakistani prisoner Saifullah Paracha, who “said that many detainees thought that it was the end of the world and felt terrible [and] asked for tranquilizers, sleeping pills, because they were so distraught.”

The letter-writing campaign was started six and a half years ago by two Facebook friends, Shahrina and Mahfuja Ahmed, and, as I mentioned above, it has been repeated every six months, more or less (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for my other articles encouraging people to write to the prisoners).

Since I last encouraged people to write to the prisoners, President Obama has continued his progress in working towards the closure of the prison by releasing 32 men. The prison now holds 59 men, and 21 of these men have been approved for release — 7 in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009, and 14 others since January 2014 by a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards, which function like parole boards — but without the men in question ever having been convicted of a crime, of course.

In the list below, I have divided the remaining 59 prisoners into those approved for release (21), those whose ongoing imprisonment has been approved by Periodic Review Boards (28), two more men awaiting PRB decisions and those charged or tried in the military commissions system (10).

Please note that I have largely kept the spelling used by the US authorities in the “Final Dispositions” of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was released through FOIA legislation in June 2013. Even though these names are often inaccurate, they are the names by which the men are officially known in Guantánamo — although, primarily, it should be noted, those held are not referred to by any name at all, but are instead identified solely by their prisoner numbers (ISNs, which stands for “internment serial numbers”).

Writing to the prisoners

If you are an Arabic speaker, or speak any other languages spoken by the prisoners besides English, feel free to write in those languages. Do please note that any messages that can be construed as political should be avoided, as they may lead to the letters not making it past the Pentagon’s censors, but be aware that your messages may not get through anyway — although please don’t let that put you off.

When writing to the prisoners please ensure you include their full name and ISN (internment serial number) below (these are the numbers before their names).

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name

Detainee ISN

U.S. Naval Station

Guantánamo Bay

Washington, D.C. 20355

United States of America

Please also include a return address on the envelope.

The 21 prisoners approved for release

Below are the names of the 21 prisoners in Guantánamo — out of the remaining 59 — who have been cleared for release — or “approved for transfer,” as the authorities prefer. The phrase used by the task force to describe the recommendations for the first two of these men was “[t]ransfer to a country outside the United States that will implement appropriate security measures.” Their identities were first revealed in September 2012. See below for five other Yemenis recommended for “conditional detention,” and also for the 14 men recommended for release since January 2014 by Periodic Review Boards but still held (21 others have been freed).

The 2 non-Yemeni prisoners approved for release since 2010

ISN 038 Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi (Tunisia)

ISN 309 Muieen A Deen Jamal A Deen Abd al Fusal Abd al Sattar (UAE)

The 5 Yemeni prisoners approved for release but designated for “conditional detention”

These men were cleared for release by the task force, although the task force members conjured up a new category for them, “conditional detention,” which it described as being “based on the current security environment in that country.” The task force added, “They are not approved for repatriation to Yemen at this time, but may be transferred to third countries, or repatriated to Yemen in the future if the current moratorium on transfers to Yemen is lifted and other security conditions are met.” 25 of the 30 have been released since the fall of 2015.

ISN 240 Abdallah Yahya Yusif Al Shibli (Yemen)

ISN 440 Muhammad Ali Abdallah Muhammad Bwazir (Yemen) aka Bawazir

ISN 498 Mohammed Ahmen Said Haider (Yemen)

ISN 550 Walid Said bin Said Zaid (Yemen)

ISN 893 Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani (Yemen)

The 14 prisoners approved for release by Periodic Review Boards

ISN 044 Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim (Yemen)

ISN 128 Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani (Yemen)

ISN 131 Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (Yemen)

ISN 244 Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN 434 Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd al-Aziz al-Shamiri (Yemen)

ISN 508 Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (Yemen)

ISN 560 Haji Wali Muhammed (Afghanistan)

ISN 694 Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria)

ISN 696 Jabran Al Qahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 702 Ravil Mingazov (Russia)

ISN 753 Abdul Sahir (Afghanistan) aka Zahir

ISN 839 Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani (Yemen)

ISN 840 Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (Yemen)

ISN 975 Karim Bostan (Afghanistan)

The 28 prisoners whose ongoing imprisonment has been approved by Periodic Review Boards

The 28 remaining prisoners — notified that they were eligible for Periodic Review Boards in April 2013 — were recommended for continued imprisonment by their review boards.

ISN 027 Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 028 Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 029 Mohammed al-Ansi (Yemen)

ISN 063 Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 242 Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 522 Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (Yemen)

ISN 569 Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi (Yemen)

ISN 682 Abdullah Al Sharbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 685 Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush (Algeria) aka Abdelrazak Ali

ISN 708 Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN 841 Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN 1017 Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN 1094 Saifullah Paracha (Pakistan)

ISN 1453 Sanad Al Kazimi (Yemen)

ISN 1456 Hassan Bin Attash (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 1457 Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj (Yemen)

ISN 1460 Abdul Rabbani (Pakistan)

ISN 1461 Mohammed Rabbani (Pakistan) aka Ahmad Rabbani

ISN 1463 Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN 10016 Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn aka Abu Zubaydah

ISN 10017 Mustafa Faraj Muhammed Masud al-Jadid al-Usaybi (Libya) akka Abu Faraj al-Libi

ISN 10019 Encep Nurjaman (Hambali) (Indonesia)

ISN 10021 Mohd Farik bin Amin (Malaysia)

ISN 10022 Bashir bin Lap (Malaysia)

ISN 10023 Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN 10025 Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

ISN 3148 Haroon al-Afghani (Afghanistan)

ISN 10029 Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

The 10 prisoners charged or tried

The seven prisoners currently facing charges

ISN 10011 Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10013 Ramzi Bin Al Shibh (Yemen)

ISN 10014 Walid Mohammed Bin Attash (Yemen)

ISN 10015 Mohammed al Nashiri (Saudi Arabia) aka Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri

ISN 10018 Ali abd al Aziz Ali (Pakistan)

ISN 10024 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Kuwait)

ISN 10026 Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi (Hadi) (Iraq)

The two prisoners already convicted via plea deal

ISN 768 Ahmed Al-Darbi (Saudi Arabia)

ISN 10020 Majid Khan (Pakistan)

One other prisoner convicted under President Bush

ISN 039 Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (Yemen)

He was not included in the task force’s deliberations, as he had been tried and convicted in a one-sided trial by military commission in October 2008, at which he refused to mount a defense. His conviction was dismissed by an appeals court in January 2013, although the government is appealing that ruling.

Note: For further information about the prisoners, see my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six).

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.

In Final Counter-Terrorism Speech, Obama Targets Trump But Fails to Acknowledge His Own Mistakes on Guantánamo and War

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

On Tuesday, at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, the home of US Special Operations Command and Central Command, President Obama made what is expected to be his final speech on counter-terrorism before he leaves office in just six weeks’ time.

As Jessica Schulberg noted for the Huffington Post, in his speech he “defended his legacy ― both from hawks who have accused him of withdrawing from the Middle East, and from liberals who have criticized his reliance on expansive surveillance and drones to fight wars,” and “sought to convince the country that he had struck the correct balance.”

Spying and drones

However, as Spencer Ackerman noted for the Guardian, this was “a highly selective account of his record, particularly about the mass surveillance architecture he embraced and the drone strikes that will be synonymous with his name.”

Ackerman proceeded to explain how Obama “dismissed concerns about the scale of global mass surveillance revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, saying he had made ‘extensive reforms’ and that the surveillance was ‘just targeted at folks who may be trying to do us harm.’” In fact, as Ackerman pointed out, Obama only “reluctantly helped pass only one law curtailing bulk surveillance, a provision that left untouched the National Security Agency’s ability to collect Americans’ international communications without warrants and the FBI’s unrestrained ability to warrantlessly search through them.”

On drone strikes, Obama attempted to silence his many critics by claiming that they have failed to “weigh the alternatives.” He claimed that drone strikes “allow us to deny terrorists a safe haven without airstrikes, which are less precise, or invasions that are much more likely to kill innocent civilians as well as American service members.”

In a further effort to defend his reliance on drone strikes, President Obama also pointed that, “under rules that I put in place and that I made public, before any strike is taken outside of a war zone, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured. And while nothing is certain in any strike, and we have acknowledged that there are tragic instances where innocents have been killed by our strikes, this is the highest standard that we can set.”

As Spencer Ackerman noted, however, although Obama “insisted that he had placed appropriate safeguards around what he called ‘targeted strikes’ [he] did not discuss the number of drone strikes he permitted the CIA to launch without a requirement to even know the targeted person’s name – something the rules he has put around drone strikes still do not prohibit.”

More generally, as the New York Times explained when the drone program was analyzed in its pages in June 2012, Obama “embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties,” which “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent” — convenient for allowing the president to sleep easily at night, but irresponsible when it comes to asking how accurate the intelligence is in the first place, as further studies have made clear.

Obama also added that any successful counter-terrorism policy must “not create more terrorists,” but Ackerman noted that, as a survivor of his very first drone strike told the Guardian in January, “If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program.”

Obama on Donald Trump

Discussing Obama’s references to Donald Trump, the Huffington Post noted that, “[alt]hough he never mentioned president-elect by name, it was clear that Donald Trump was the intended recipient of some of his remarks.”

Spencer Ackerman described Obama making “an impassioned plea not to embrace the mass suspicion of US Muslims that Trump and his emerging national-security team have proposed.” As the president put it, “We are fighting terrorists who claim to fight on behalf of Islam. But they do not speak for over a billion Muslims around the world, and they do not speak for American Muslims, including many who wear the uniform of the United States of America’s military. If we stigmatize good, patriotic Muslims, that just feeds the terrorists’ narrative. It fuels the same false grievances that they use to motivate people to kill. If we act like this is a war between the United States and Islam, we’re not just going to lose more Americans to terrorist attacks, but we’ll also lose sight of the very principles we claim to defend. We’re a country that was founded so that people could practice their faiths as they choose. The United States of America is not a place where some citizens have to withstand greater scrutiny, or carry a special ID card, or prove that they’re not an enemy from within.”

Most of the above is worthy, of course, but those under the type of surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden might legitimately question quite how “free” the “land of the free” really is.

Ackerman also noted that, “in what sounded like a rebuke of Trump’s enthusiasm for walling off America and ‘bombing the sh*t’ out of Isis, Obama attacked the ‘false promises that we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs or deploying more and more troops or fencing ourselves off from the rest of the world,’” and, in an evident plea for gun control, the president added that individual terrorist attacks would continue in the US as long as the lack of any gun control allowed any would-be terrorist to “buy a very powerful weapon.”

Obama on torture

President Obama also repudiated the use of torture, which, in part, was a criticism of Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for it on the campaign trail — although it is to be hoped that the president-elect is now listening to advisers, like retired Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, his choice for defence secretary, who opposes the use of torture. Trump said, after a meeting with Gen. Mattis, that he had asked, “What do you think of waterboarding?” and Mattis “said — I was surprised — he said, ‘I’ve never found it to be useful.’ He said, ‘I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.'”

In his speech, Obama made his own position clear: “We prohibited torture, everywhere, at all times — and that includes tactics like waterboarding.  And at no time has anybody who has worked with me told me that doing so has cost us good intelligence.”

He added, “When we do capture terrorists, despite all the political rhetoric about the need to strip terrorists of their rights, our interrogation teams have obtained valuable information from terrorists without resorting to torture, without operating outside the law. Our Article III courts have delivered justice faster than military trials. And our prisons have proven more than capable of holding the most dangerous terrorists.”

It is not entirely true that President Obama outlawed torture. He certainly issued an executive order prohibiting its use, but torture techniques are still allowed at the discretion of military commanders in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual — and, of course, by failing to hold anyone in the Bush administration accountable for approving or engaging in torture, he has allowed high-profile individuals like the president-elect to think that it is acceptable.

Obama on Guantánamo

President Obama also spoke about Guantánamo, explaining that “our success in dealing with terrorists through our justice system reinforces why it is past time to shut down the detention facility at Guantanamo,” and adding, “This is not just my opinion, it’s the opinion of many military leaders.”

He also stated, “During my administration, we have responsibly transferred over 175 detainees to foreign governments, with safeguards to reduce the risk of them returning to the battlefield. And we’ve cut the population in Gitmo from 242 to 59.” However, as he also explained, “The politics of fear has led Congress to prevent any detainees from being transferred to prisons in the United States — even though, as we speak, we imprison dangerous terrorists in our prisons, and we have even more dangerous criminals in all of our prisons across the country; even though our allies oftentimes will not turn over a terrorist if they think that terrorist could end up in Gitmo; even though groups like ISIL use Gitmo in their propaganda.”

In conclusion, he said, “So we’re wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to keep fewer than 60 people in a detention facility in Cuba. That’s not strength. Until Congress changes course, it will be judged harshly by history, and I will continue to do all that I can to remove this blot on our national honor.”

Obama has always spoken eloquently about the chronic injustice of Guantánamo, and the counter-productive nature of the prison and its affront to the values on which the US prides itself.

However, he also holds Congress solely responsible for Guantánamo remaining open, which is not strictly true. Although Congress has, since 2010, imposed serious restrictions on his efforts to close Guantánamo, raising barriers to the release of prisoners, and preventing any prisoner from being transferred to the US for any reason, a waiver was long ago introduced into the annual legislation relating to Guantánamo (as part of the National Defense Authorization Act), allowing him to bypass Congress if he wanted to, but he has never used it.

And now, of course, he has almost run out of time. We will continue to call for him to close the prison before he leaves office — even if he is required to do so by executive order — via the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative that we launched in January, which is continuing with posters every five days until the end of his presidency.

However, failing to close the prison will not only tarnish his legacy; it also allows his successor to, if he wishes, expand it, something that Obama himself always resisted doing, because he recognized, as he put it in his speech, that federal courts “have delivered justice faster than military trials.”

This is certainly true, but it also ignores how it was Obama himself who allowed military commissions to resume in his first year in office, which is part of the reason that the men facing trials — including the men allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks — are stuck in a broken system that seems incapable of ever delivering justice.

Obama on war authorizations

President Obama also blamed Congress for not having explicitly authorized a war against Islamic State (Isis). As he said, “Two years ago, I asked Congress, let’s update the authorization, provide us a new authorization for the war against ISIL, reflecting the changing nature of the threats, reflecting the lessons that we’ve learned from the last decade. So far, Congress has refused to take a vote.”

Asa result, the US operation in Syria and Iraq is being conducted under the Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed just days after the 9/11 attacks against those responsible and “associated forces.”

Yet, as Spencer Ackerman put it, “Obama did not mention that his own administration argued to Congress against passing a new authorization to use military force in 2011, long before Isis came into existence, out of fear that Congress would pass a law that was too broadly drawn. Nor did he mention his heavy reliance on the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force – including against Isis – and his administration’s decision not to seek the repeal he suggested in a 2013 speech.”

In the end, it is also worth bearing in mind that the 2001 AUMF is the continuing justification for holding prisoners at Guantánamo, and should be repealed, as I argued five years ago.

In conclusion, then, President Obama’s speech, while providing some moral high ground from which to preach to his successor, more generally revealed, through omissions, the scale of his own counter-terrorism failures over the last eight years, not the least of which is the prison at Guantánamo Bay remaining open.

Not for nothing will his failure to close it — despite promising to do so on his second day in office in January 2009 — be regarded as a black mark on his legacy.

Note: The quote about Guantánamo in the photo at the top of this article is from a speech President Obama made about “security reviews” on January 5, 2010.

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

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

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

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: $3400 (£2700) Urgently Needed to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work and my efforts to raise $3400 (£2700) for the next three months!

 

Since launching my latest quarterly fundraiser on Monday, I’ve had four donations, for which I’m very grateful, but I’m still a very long way from my target of $3500 (£2750) for the next three months. As a reader-funded journalist, the work I do on Guantánamo — researching, writing, campaigning, making media appearances, making personal appearances, maintaining this website, running the admin, and replying to myriad emails — is mostly unpaid; or, in other words, is only possible with your generous support.

I have no institutional backing, so if you value my independence as a journalist, commentator and activist — as I know many of you do — then please, if you can, donate to enable me to keep working to get Guantánamo closed. A donation of just $25 (£20), for example, is just $2 (£1.50) a week, not a huge amount, I hope, for the work that I do.

So please 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.

Any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $10, $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£10, £20, £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.

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.

Since my last fundraiser in September, when I raised around $1500 of the $3500 I hoped to raise, the situation at Guantánamo appears to have taken a turn for the worse with the election of Donald Trump, who, on the campaign trail, promised to keep Guantánamo open, to bring back torture, and even to send US citizens to Guantánamo to face military commission trials.

With your support, I will be able to continue resisting any efforts to keep Guantánamo open, to add to its population or to revive torture, as I remain committed to bringing to an end indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial as a policy of the United States, and I continue to believe that those who authorized and implemented the post-9/11 programs of extraordinary rendition, torture and arbitrary detention must be held accountable for their actions.

I do hope that, if you can, you will support my particular experiment in reader-funded journalism and activism, which has been ongoing now for over ten years. I fully respect mainstream media outlets when they do justice to Guantánamo, but often they do not, either because their reporting is too sporadic, or too watered down by the liberal obsession with “objectivity,” which, more often than not, ends up giving credibility to those who do not deserve it.

On Guantánamo, I have never pandered to those in power, and the excuses they make to try to justify their unjustifiable policies and actions, and I have never wavered in my opinion that the prison is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and that every day it remains open is an insult to the values that the US claims to hold dear. I am profoundly disappointed that Barack Obama has not managed to close it despite promising to do so nearly eight years ago, and I will continue to push him to remedy that before he leaves office, but time is running out, of course, and all of us who care about decency and the rule of law need to be prepared to stand up and be counted if Donald Trump takes advantage of Obama’s failures — to close the prison and to throughly repudiate all the crimes of the Bush administration — to embark on a new era of dangerous and counter-productive lawlessness.

I hope you will be with me.

Andy Worthington

London

December 7, 2016

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser: With Trump Presidency Looming, Please Support My Work on Guantánamo – $3500 (£2750) Needed

Please support my work and my efforts to raise $3500 (£2750) for the next three months!

 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year again, when I ask you, if you can, to support my independent research, writing and commentary on Guantánamo and related issues. This is work I’ve been doing, largely as a reader-supported independent writer, for over ten years, but whilst it was reasonable to suppose, until recently, that Guantánamo might close, if not under President Obama, then under Hillary Clinton as his successor, the election of Donald Trump indicates, alarmingly, that the prison may gain a new lease of life from January onwards. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to keep Guantánamo open, to bring back torture, and even to send US citizens to Guantánamo to face military commission trials — all developments that are completely unacceptable.

I need your support to be able to continue the struggle to get Guantánamo closed (to bring to an end indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial), to make sure that no efforts to revive torture will be successful, and to continue to call for those who authorized and implemented the post-9/11 programs of extraordinary rendition, torture and arbitrary detention to be held accountable for their actions. It is hugely important that Donald Trump — and those he is appointing to key positions — are resisted every step of the way if they attempt to revive Guantánamo in any way, or to revisit any of the other lawless excesses of the Bush years.

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). I’m hoping to raise $3,500 (£2,700) for the next three months, which is just $270 (£200) a week for my constant work campaigning on behalf of the Guantánamo prisoners.

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.

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.

Since my last fundraiser in September, through which I raised around $1500 of the $3500 I hoped to raise, I have continued to try to educate people about Guantanamo and the men held there, and to campaign for the closure of the prison, through the 60 or so articles I have written over the last 90 days, in which I have also written about issues relating to politics in the UK, and have also undertaken media appearance and personal appearances, all of which, like most of my writing, is unpaid and only possible through your support.

I hope that you can help support my work at this particularly dangerous time for liberty and the rule of law, and I thank you, as always, for your interest in my work.

Andy Worthington

London

December 5, 2016

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.

Yemeni Freed in Cape Verde: 59 Men Left in Guantánamo

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo into the new year.

 

Good news from Guantánamo, as the first prisoner to be released since Donald Trump won the Presidential Election last month has been freed in Cape Verde, an island nation off the west coast of Africa.

Shawki Awad Balzuhair (aka Shawqi Balzuhair), a 35-year old Yemeni prisoner, was approved for release in July, by a Periodic Review Board, a high-level government review process set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners still held who are not facing trials and had not already been approved for release.

Seized in one of a series of house raids in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002, Balzuhair and five other men were originally — and mistakenly — regarded as members of an al-Qaeda cell-in-waiting, and described as the “Karachi Six.” By the time the six had their cases reviewed this year, however, the US government had walked back from its claims, after “a review of all available reporting,” accepting that “this label more accurately reflects the common circumstances of their arrest and that it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations,” and describing Balzuhair as “probably awaiting a chance to return to Yemen when he was arrested at the Karachi safe house.” Of the six men, five have been approved for release, and Balzuhair is the third to be freed.

Since arriving at Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, Balzuhair had been “highly compliant with the guard force” and had “not expressed or demonstrated any sympathy or support for al-Qa’ida, its global ideology, or other radical Islamic views.”

With Balzuhair’s release, 59 men remain at Guantánamo, 20 of whom have been recommended for release —seven by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, to review the cases of all the men he had inherited from George W. Bush, and 13 by the PRBs. Ten other men are facing trials, while the 29 others, who had their ongoing imprisonment upheld by Periodic Review Boards, are eligible for further reviews — unless they are abandoned by Donald Trump.

Speaking after Balzuhair’s release, his attorney Angela Viramontes, a federal public defender in Riverside, California, said, “Shawqi is a private man who seeks anonymity upon his release. He looks forward to having a wife, children, and a job, the experiences most young men hope for that Shawqi has yet to experience.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg, who described Balzuhair as “a long-held, mistakenly profiled Yemeni captive,” reported that a US Air Force cargo plane flew him out of Guantánamo on Friday morning. He could not be repatriated, because of the entire US establishment’s refusal to send any Yemeni prisoners home, citing security concerns, and before he could be freed, defense secretary Ashton Carter also had to provide Congress with notice of his “intent to transfer this individual and of the secretary’s determination that this transfer meets the statutory standard,” as a  Pentagon statement explained.

Also reporting on the release, Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported that Ashton Carter “recently gave a 30-day notice to Congress that eight detainees” — out of the 20 approved for release — “would be transferred several weeks from now, according to officials who discussed the notices on the condition of anonymity because they are not yet public.”

The Times also noted that White House spokesman Josh Earnest said last week that the Obama administration “intended to continue transferring detainees approved for release, in cases in which diplomats can strike appropriate security arrangements, until Mr. Trump’s inauguration,” as Charlie Savage described it. Earnest said, “That’s difficult work, but that’s work that we’ve been doing for almost eight years now. And that’s work that will continue at least through January 20th. After that, the president-elect’s team will have to decide how they want to handle that situation.”

Cape Verde, as Carol Rosenberg explained, is “a predominantly Roman Catholic island nation of about 550,000 people, with a Muslim population of just 1.8 percent” (about 10,000 people).

Balzuhair is not the first Guantánamo prisoner to be resettled in Cape Verde. Back in 2010, Abdul Nasser Khantumani, a Syrian, was resettled there, while his son Muhammed was given a new home in Portugal. As Carol Rosenberg noted, his lawyer Pardiss Kebriaei (of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights) recently said that “[t]he elder Khantumani is still in Cape Verde … and the son is still in Portugal. They have never been reunited after Guantánamo. Nor has Abdul Nasser’s wife, Muhammed’s mother, been allowed to join her husband.” Kebriaei explained accurately that “[i]t was cruel of the United States to resettle Muhammed and his father apart. It is long past time for the family to be reunited.” Kebriaei told their story in an article in Harper’s Magazine in 2015, which I cross-posted and wrote about here.

As I wish Shawki Balzuhair best wishes for his new life — and also hope that he will not be prevented from having meaningful contact with his family — I also hope to hear soon about some of the other planned releases from Guantánamo.

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 177 prisoners released from February 2009 to October 2016 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, 1 Palestinian and 1 Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer); November 2015 — 5 Yemenis to the United Arab Emirates; January 2016 — 2 Yemenis to Ghana; 1 Kuwaiti (Fayiz al-Kandari) and 1 Saudi; 10 Yemenis to Oman; 1 Egyptian to Bosnia and 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; April 2016 — 2 Libyans to Senegal; 9 Yemenis to Saudi Arabia; June 2016 — 1 Yemeni to Montenegro; July 2016 — 1 Tajik and 1 Yemeni to Serbia, 1 Yemeni to Italy; August 2016 — 12 Yemenis and 3 Afghans to the United Arab Emirates (see here and here); October 2016 — 1 Mauritanian (Mohammedou Ould Slahi).

Brexit: Opposition to Leaving the EU Builds, While Theresa May Reminds EU Citizens Living and Working in the UK That They Are Pawns in Her Inept Game

Please support my work as a freelance investigative journalist and commentator.

 

On Brexit, the Tory government is still flailing around like the most drunk person at a wedding.

Last week, the home secretary Philip Hammond delivered a forgettable Budget dominated by the largest elephant in the room — the continuing fallout from the EU referendum in June, which he conveniently forget to mention. In the meantime, the  Office for Budget Responsibility, the government body set up by George Osborne to impartially assess the UK economy, provided a reality check. As the Independent described it, “A shadow has been cast over Brexit Britain as the country faces a £122 billion budget black hole, dwindling growth, slow trade, lower pay and austerity stretching into the late 2020s.” In particular the newspaper noted, the OBR “set out how Brexit was driving the UK’s public finances deep into the red, with a key factor being the cost of losing valuable foreign workers.”

Brexiteers, in a constant state of denial about the suicidal cost of their enthusiasm for leaving the EU, even though they still cannot summon up a single compelling reason for this life-threatening rupture to take place, took aim at the OBR, as they do everyone and every organisation that threatens their costs delusions out sovereignty. Martin Kettle’s take on it was that the OBR had been “kneecapped in a back alley by Brexit provos and its brand has been trashed in the anti-European press’s embrace of post-truth politics.”

However, the pretence that all is well continues to come unstuck, even as Theresa May, an authoritarian out of her depth, and her three Brexit ministers — the clown Boris Johnson, David Davis, also out of his depth, and the unhinged, corrupt and dangerous right-winger Liam Fox — continue to try and maintain the illusion that all is fine.

Just before the Budget, 90 Labour MPs wrote a letter to the Guardian pointing out how a “hard Brexit,” which the government seemed to be favouring, would be a disaster (although John Harris also pointed out how Labour lacks leadership on the question of opposing the Tories’ recklessness), and on November 28 a study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, one of the UK’s leading economics consultancies, which had been commissioned by an alliance of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians opposed to the “hard Brexit” option, revealed how “[l]eaving the single market would be damaging to almost every sector of the British economy, from manufacturing and energy to retail and financial services.”

The report also “found that every major wealth-creating sector would be affected negatively, with manufacturing hit if there were tariff barriers to EU trade and the creative industries suffering a ‘body blow’ if there were strict controls on immigration.”

Examining “the consequences of leaving the single market in favour of a free trade agreement struck on a bespoke basis for individual industries,” which Theresa May has hinted she favours, the CEBR warned that “all major sectors are linked to the EU and could be harmed if the UK government sought a free trade agreement which prioritised some sectors over others”.

The Guardian noted that the release of the report “comes at a time of growing mobilisation among MPs and political figures trying to stop the UK heading for a clean break with the EU single market and customs union, which is favoured by the most Eurosceptic cabinet ministers and leading Brexit campaigners such as Michael Gove,” and also noted that, for the first time since the referendum, a cross-party alliance of MPs – including Labour’s Chuka Umunna, the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg and the Tory Anna Soubry – appeared together at an press conference called by Open Britain, the organisation that emerged from the ashes of the Stronger In campaign, who have made their focus continued membership of the single market.

At the press conference, Chuka Umunna said he “was concerned about the tone of the debate when it came to the practicalities of leaving” the EU, as the Guardian described it. He explained, “There are those who want to muzzle any debate; they don’t want to see a debate on the terms of our leaving, as if we live in some dictatorship,” he said, and referred to recent attacks on the Bank of England governor, the judiciary, and the Office of Budget Responsibility. He added, “If we allow this to go unchallenged we will be going down a very dangerous path indeed as a country, betraying our history and our tradition of promoting lively discussion and free speech. Those under attack are public servants.”

Open Britain also defended the involvement of former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major in the debate about how — or indeed, if — the UK should leave the EU. Blair had been criticised for stating in an interview that leaving the EU could be stopped if the British people changed their minds. “It can be stopped if the British people decide that, having seen what it means, the pain-gain, cost-benefit analysis doesn’t stack up,” he said, adding, as the Guardian described it, that this process “could take place in one of two ways, hinging on negotiations over access to the EU’s single market.”

As Blair put it, “Either you get maximum access to the single market, in which case you’ll end up accepting a significant number of the rules on immigration, on payment into the budget, on the European court’s jurisdiction. People may then say, ‘Well, hang on, why are we leaving then?’ Or alternatively, you’ll be out of the single market and the economic pain may be very great, because beyond doubt if you do that you’ll have years, maybe a decade, of economic restructuring.” Brexit, Blair added, was “like agreeing to a house swap without having seen the other house”, and he also hoped that eventually those who voted Leave would “look at this in a practical way, not an ideological way.”

In a Facebook post, I explained my belief that “here, in a nutshell, is Britain’s problem. The war criminal Tony Blair, whose enthusiasm for the rich destroyed oppositional politics and turned the UK into the country it is today, with an ever-growing chasm between the rich and poor, and money as the only arbiter of success, is, in contrast, absolutely spot-on when it comes to Brexit and why and how it should be stopped.” I hope that what we’re starting to see is a broadly centrist coalition, although one that also includes figures on the left and the right, because the tragedy of Britons’ suicidal enthusiasm for Brexit is three-fold: most predictably, the right-wing Tories and UKIP supporters who support it, but also the disaffected people whose politics are more fluid, to whom no one is providing any kind of helpful advice, and, last but to least, those on the left who, in general, are also cheerleading our departure from the EU.

Fortunately, legal challenges are also continuing. Last month, the High Court’s ruling that “Parliament alone has the power to trigger Brexit by notifying Brussels of the UK’s intention to leave the European Union,” and that Theresa May cannot, like a tyrant, make us leave the EU without consulting Parliament, attracted unprecedented criticism and even threats from Brexiteers, who, like petulant children, throw a hissy fit — or worse — every time someone points out that we cannot actually leave the EU without working out what that means, and how it should be achieved. The government appealed, and this week the Supreme Court is expected to back the High Court, prompting, in advance, further petulance from the increasingly inept Theresa May.

The government also faces a second legal challenge, “over whether it should seek to retain membership of the single market during the Brexit process,” as the Guardian described it, explaining that lawyers “will argue that June’s referendum asked the public a single question over whether the UK should leave the EU, and did not delve into the more complex issue of economic access. The group British Influence will use a judicial review to suggest the government could be acting unlawfully if it uses Brexit to also leave the wider European Economic Area – through which non-EU countries such as Norway are inside the single market.”

Jonathan Lis, the deputy director of British Influence, said, “The single market wasn’t on the ballot paper. To leave it would be devastating for the economy, smash our free trading arrangement and put thousands of jobs at risk. Why should people not only throw the baby out with the bath water, but the bath out of the window?”

In my recent Facebook post, I explained how “[m]y hope is that, if the Supreme Court upholds the constitutional obligation for MPs to be involved in discussions about our departure from the EU, those who place our economic survival above pointless arguments about sovereignty will not let the result (in an advisory referendum that won with a very narrow majority) go ahead if it becomes apparent that we cannot do anything about immigration without leaving the single market, and that leaving the single market will be too high a cost for nominal control of our borders (control that, I suspect, would be spectral anyway). “

As I added, “Three-quarters of MPs supported Remain. Those of us who urge resistance to leaving the EU because it is the most stupid idea we could conceive of — and actually has no redeeming features whatsoever — need to work out how to encourage them to make sure they are not steamrollered into silence, or to allow them to silence themselves for political expediency.” The Independent reckons that, to date, “around 80 MPs will vote against the legislation in the Commons,” including “the newly elected Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney.”

I hope that number increases — or, at the very least, that MPs will refuse to be cowed by the bullying stupidity of Theresa May and her ministers.

And in the meantime, demonstrating, yet again, how little regard she has for anyone who is not British, Theresa May refused this week to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living and working in the UK, as part of an inter-EU row about reciprocal rights for UK citizens in other EU countries, and EU citizens here.

In response, Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, said, as the Guardian put it, that Theresa May “should unilaterally pass legislation to secure the rights of up to 3 million European Union citizens to stay in Britain or risk souring the tone of the Brexit talks,” adding that she “should act immediately and abandon her increasingly controversial position of refusing to make any concession over the rights of EU citizens in the UK without securing equivalent guarantees for the 1.2 million UK citizens living elsewhere in the EU.”

As Starmer said, “It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me from my discussions in Brussels with those that are likely to be involved in the negotiations that they are very concerned about the fact that we are not giving comfort and status to their citizens. They have said to me, pretty well in terms, the UK should sort this out before March, and that would ensure that the article 50 negotiations got off to a much better start than they will otherwise do.”

Despite his intervention, the current situation is appalling for the EU citizens living and working here, as was explained by The 3 Million, a grassroots organisation by EU citizens for EU citizens, which “takes its name from the estimated number of EU citizens who moved from another member state and live and work, and have generally established their life in the UK, many for a very long time.”

On their website, The 3 Million state, “”We are not bargaining chips, we are people,” and, in a letter to home secretary Amber Rudd, Nicolas Hatton, the chair of The 3 Million, warned the government that “up to 1 million EU citizens living in the UK could be at risk of deportation if it does not come up with a simple way of recognising their status in the country,” in the Guardian’s words. The letter added that the organization “has told the home secretary it would take the Home Office 47 years to process applications from EU citizens for permanent residency (PR).”

The 3 Million’s letter stated, “We are people with families, children, friends and work colleagues, and we are rightly worried about a very uncertain future. EU citizens have been feeling very anxious about their future since the referendum, and this set of data will not reassure them. We call on you to remove the threat of deportation without notice and give us, today, guarantees that all EU citizens living legally in the UK will be able to exercise their right to remain before the UK leaves the EU.”

For further information, please read the moving stories in the Guardian’s article, “EU citizens in Britain post Brexit vote: ‘I feel betrayed, not at home, sad.’”

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.

Final Two Review Board Decisions Announced: 21 Men Now Approved for Release from Guantánamo

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo into the new year.

 

On September 9, as I reported at the time, the last of 64 Guantánamo prisoners to face a Periodic Review Board— Hassan bin Attash, who was just 17 when he was seized in September 2002 — had his case reviewed. A month later, a decision was taken in his case (to continue holding him), bringing the first round of the PRBs to an end, with two exceptions.

In the cases of two men whose cases were reviewed in April and May, the board members had been unable to reach a unanimous decision, and. for these two men, decisions were not reached until last week — November 21, to be exact. In the case of one man, Jabran al-Qahtani, a Saudi, the board members approved his release, while in the case of the other man, Said Nashir, a Yemeni, a decision was taken to recommend his continued imprisonment.

The decisions mean that, of the remaining 60 prisoners, 21 have been recommended for release —seven by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, to review the cases of all the men he had inherited from George W. Bush, and 14 by the PRBs. For further information, see my definitive Periodic Review Board list on the Close Guantánamo website.

The PRBs — which include representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who review the cases after speaking to prisoners via video link from a facility in Virginia— were conceived of in 2009, when the Guantánamo Review Task Force identified 48 men as “too dangerous to release,” whilst conceding that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

This meant, of course that the so-called evidence was actually profoundly unreliable, but as throughout Guantánamo’s history, everyone involved worried that, despite the chaotic and generally lawless circumstances in which most of the prisoners had been seized, and the lack of anything resembling plausible evidence against most of them, it was not worth risking letting someone go who might — just might— turn out to pose some sort of threat to the US after release.

It took until March 2011 for President Obama to issue an executive order authorizing the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of these 48 men, whilst also promising that they would have periodic reviews of their cases, and that these reviews would be complete within a year.

Despite the promise, the reviews did not even begin until November 2013 — a years and eight months after he promised they would end — and they did not end until four and a half years after he promised they would, a shamefully slow pace that would be inexcusable under any circumstances, but which ended up seeming particular harsh because the review boards’ deliberations — akin to parole hearings, although without anyone ever having been tried or convicted of anything — led to decisions that 35 of the 64 men overcautiously described as “too dangerous to release” in 2009 should be released.

The 29 others are entitled to further reviews —file reviews take place every six months, to which prisoners can submit any additional information they think is relevant, and full reviews, at which the prisoners can once more participate directly, are guaranteed every three years, although the first four that took place — which led to recommendations for the prisoners’ release — took place within two years.

It is not known at present whether the future of the PRBs will be secure under President Trump. It is to be hoped so, as this high-level, inter-agency process, which requires unanimous decisions, is doing a decent job of cutting through the scaremongering with which Guantánamo’s cheerleaders permanently describe all the prisoners, and moving towards the closure of the prison, which all decent, law-abiding people should welcome, in a manner that is careful and considered.

I hope that Donald Trump and his advisors recognize that the PRBs — far from being some sort of liberal conspiracy to free as many prisoners as possible — actually face considerable criticism from many of the prisoners’ attorneys, who accuse the boards of demonstrating too much caution, and uncritically accepting unreliable evidence as trustworthy.

In a second article to follow, I’ll look at the current state of affairs regarding the file reviews and full reviews for some of the 29 men recommended for ongoing imprisonment — including Said Nasher, who has already been put forward for a full review, which is taking place next week, on December 8 — and I hope that advocates for the closure of Guantánamo, and for justice for those still held, frame a good argument to try to persuade Trump and his advisors not to consider scrapping the review process when the businessman and reality TV star takes office in just seven weeks’ time.

Below are the decisions taken in the cases of Jabran al-Qahtani and Said Nashir.

Jabran al-Qahtani approved for release

Jabran al-Qahtani (ISN 696), as I noted at the time of his PRB, in May, was seized in the house raid in Pakistan in March 2002 that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the Bush administration’s torture program was set up, but who, in reality, was not the prominent al-Qaeda figure he was described as. A supposed bomb-maker, he had been put forward for a trial by military commission under President Bush, but the charges against him were dropped in October 2008. New charges were filed in January 2009, but were once again dismissed in January 2013, just a few months before the Periodic Review Boards were set up.

The PRB noted that, although he had received some training for bomb-making, he had been a “mostly compliant” prisoner at Guantánamo, and, as his attorney said, he “has come to deeply regret what he did while he was young, ignorant, and swept away by a movement he did not understand.”

In their Final Determination, the board members described how, by consensus, they had “determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The board members “considered” al-Qahtani’s “credible desire to participate in the Saudi rehabilitation program” — at the Mohammed bin Naif Counselling and Care Center — and his desire to “reintegrate into society,” and his “willingness to submit to the authority of the Saudi government.” The board members also expressed their “confidence in the efficacy of the Saudi rehabilitation program, and Saudi Arabia’s ability to implement security assurances after completion of the program.”

The board members also noted al-Qahtani’s “candor with the Board, including regarding his presence on the battlefield and his worldviews, [his] expressed egret ad commitment to not repeat his past mistakes, [his] family’s commitment to support [him] on transfer, and [his] recent positive change in behavior and mindset while in detention.”

Whilst acknowledging his “past terrorist-related activities and connections, specifically [his] admission of support for the Taliban, association with two al-Qa’ida leaders, and his training in building electronic circuit boards,” the board members “found the risk [he] presents can be adequately mitigated by transfer for prosecution and rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia.”

The last line was surprising, as there had been no earlier mention of transfer for prosecution; merely, transfer to rehabilitation. Nevertheless, I presume that al-Qahtani would prefer prosecution and prison time in Saudi Arabia — if, indeed, that comes to pass — to endless imprisonment without charge or trial in Guantánamo, and it only remains now to be seen if his transfer can be completed before Obama leaves office, or, if not, if Donald Trump will honor it.

Said Nashir’s ongoing imprisonment approved

In the case of Said Nashir (ISN 841), as I wrote at the time of his PRB in April, he is one of six men swept up in raids in Karachi on September 11, 2002, and initially suspected of being part of a plot that led to them being described as the “Karachi Six.” By the time o their PRBs, however, the US government had walked back from its claims, conceding that, although the men had been “labeled as the ‘Karachi Six,’ based on concerns that they were part of an al Qa’ida operational cell intended to support a future attack,” it had become apparent, through “a review of all available reporting,” that “this label more accurately reflects the common circumstances of their arrest and that it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”

The other five men were all approved for release by PRBs — and two have been freed (in the UAE in August), while the other three are awaiting release, as third countries must be found for Yemenis because of an unwillingness, across the whole of the US establishment, to consider sending any of them home, because of the security situation in Yemen.

Nashir, however — or, as he is known to his attorneys, Hani Abdullah — failed to convince the board members that he was nothing more than part of “a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.” Although the government stated that he “was probably intended by al-Qa’ida senior leaders to return to Yemen to support eventual attacks in Saudi Arabia, but [he] may not have been witting of these plans,” his perceived support for violent jihad seems to have convinced the board members to approve his ongoing imprisonment — although his scheduled file review next week suggests that his attorneys may have made available mitigating information that  could lead to a reversal of that decision.

In their Final Determination, the board members “determined that continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” having “considered [his] past ties with al-Qa’ida’s external operations planner and senior leadership, including 9/11 conspirator Walid bin Attash.” The board members also “considered [his] lack of credibility due to his lack of candor and inconsistency in response to questions from the Board, including: reasons for going to an leaving Afghanistan, and his views on violence.”

The board members also noted what they described as his “recent expressions of continued support for jihad against ‘legitimate’ military or government targets and statements celebrating the idea of Muslims killing invaders, including continued interest in seeing footage of past al-Qa’ida attacks,” and also noted “his lack of detail regarding a lan for the future and his susceptibility to recruitment,” adding that, “[d]ue to his lack of credibility, truthfulness, evasiveness and cage answers lacking specifics,” they were “unable to assess [his] intentions for the future.”

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 Countdown to Close Guantánamo: With Just 50 Days Left for President Obama to Close the Prison, Please Send Us A Photo

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 November 30, President Obama will have just 50 days left to close the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which he inherited from George W. Bush, but which has been open under his watch for longer than under his predecessor.

To mark the occasion — and spurred on by the threat posed by the president-elect, Donald Trump, who promised on the campaign trial to keep Guantánamo open — we’re urging you to please print off a poster, take a photo with it, and send it to us — with a message to President Obama, if you wish (and to president-elect Trump as well, if you like).

You can also let us know where you are if you’d like to help us show how opposition to the existence of Guantánamo — which is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and should never have opened — comes from across the US and around the world.

Since our co-founder Andy Worthington launched the Countdown to Close Guantánamo on Democracy Now! in January, with music legend Roger Waters, we have received over 500 photos from celebrities and from concerned citizens, counting down every 50 days towards the end of the Obama presidency, and as the clock runs out for Barack Obama we’re stepping up the pressure.

Below are posters for every five days counting down through December into January. Please take photos with all of them if you wish, and send them to us for the dates shown.

For Dec. 5, marking 45 days to go.

For Dec .10, marking 40 days to go.

For Dec. 15, marking 35 days to go.

For Dec. 20, marking 30 days to go.

For Dec. 25, marking 25 days to go.

For Dec. 30, marking 20 days to go.

For Jan. 4, marking 15 days to go.

And for Jan. 9, marking 10 days to go.

We’ll make posters for the last days of the countdown available closer to the time.

We do hope you can join us. As noted above, the election of Donald Trump came as a shock to many people working on Guantánamo issues, who had expected that, if Hillary Clinton were elected, Guantánamo would have closed for good. As it is, we can only hope that Donald Trump’s outrageous campaign rhetoric — also threatening to send Americans to Guantánamo to be tried by military commissions, and promising to reintroduce torture — prove to be bluster that he cannot proceed to fulfill, but we must be vigilant and prepared to resist if his rhetoric becomes real.

We commend President Obama for the progress he has made on Guantánamo in the last year, releasing prisoners approved for release by multi-agency government review processes, and putting resources into the Periodic Review Boards that have been assessing whether other men can also be freed — with 34 more men securing recommendations for release in the last three years that would not otherwise have happened.

60 men are still held, and 20 of those men have been approved for release. We particularly hope to hear about the release of these men before the inauguration of the next president on Jan. 20, because we regard it as unlikely that Donald Trump will necessarily honor any commitments made by President Obama across a range of issues, including Guantánamo.

We look forward to your participation in the last stages of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, and we promise you that, if President Obama cannot manage to close the prison before he leaves office, we will be first in the queue demanding that Donald Trump closes it on Jan. 20, and we’ll keep you posted on that.

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.

Demonising the ‘Other’: Tackling the Rise of Racism and Xenophobia

Please support my work as a freelance investigative journalist and commentator.

 

Last week, I took part in a fascinating event , the Brockley Festival of Ideas for Change , just a few minutes’ walk from my home in south east London, which was organised by two local organisations, the Brockley Society and the St. John’s Society. This was the talk I gave, which I wrote in a 90-minute burst of concentrated creative energy just beforehand. It distils my feelings about the current rise of racism and xenophobia in the UK, the narrow victory for leaving the EU in the referendum in June, and the terrible indifference to the current refugee crisis, which is taking place on a scale that is unprecedented in most of our lives, and I examine the dangers posed by an “us” and “them” mentality, laying the blame on cynical politicians and our largely corrupt corporate media, whilst also asking how and why, on an individual basis, people are becoming more and more insular, and what, if anything, can be done to counter these dangerous trends.

I was asked to join this event today because I’ve spent the last ten years — nearly eleven now — researching and writing about the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the men held there and working to get the prison shut down, because it is, to be frank, a legal, moral and ethical abomination that should ever have existed.

Discussing Guantánamo here today wasn’t of particular relevance to most of the problems facing people in Britain right now, as the last British resident in Guantánamo — a rather lovely man named Shaker Aamer — was released over a year ago. I could have talked about Britain’s complicity in the existence of Guantánamo, and how we replicated part of its lawlessness here in the UK, holding foreign nationals without charge or trial, on the basis of secret evidence, and subjecting British nationals to a form of house arrest and/or internal exile, but I thought it would be useful to look at a key aspect of Guantánamo that has relevance to so many of the things happening in Britain today that are so deeply troubling to so many of us; namely, the rise of racism.

It doesn’t take a genius to look at Guantánamo and to realise that everyone held there since the prison opened in January 2002 is a Muslim. And because of all the disgraceful rhetoric about terrorists and the “worst of the worst,” Americans have been encouraged to accept that. But imagine if there was a prison run by the United States where people were held without charge or trial, and subjected to torture, and everyone held there was a Christian, or Jewish. There would be an unprecedented uproar.

So Guantánamo represents somewhere that a particular form of racism — Islamophobia — has been normalised since the prison opened nearly 15 years ago.

And that Islamophobia has not only taken root in the US, where the lesson of how Japanese Americans were treated in the Second World War should always be a salutary warning about overreacting, but also here in the UK, and it is at least as disgraceful as the situation was in the 1970s and the 1980s, at the time of the Troubles, when Irish people were treated much as Muslims are nowadays because of the IRA’s bombing campaigns against British targets.

In both cases, demonising an entire population because of the actions of the few was unacceptable — and, noticeably, doesn’t apply to “our” own actions. Terrible actions committed by white westerners don’t lead us to tar ourselves with the same brush.

But that, of course, is how racism works, and I’m profoundly disappointed to now be living in a country that I don’t recognise from the one I grew up in at the end of the 1970s, when Rock Against Racism became a huge movement, part of three major movements for social change that took root primarily in the 1960s and 70s and into the 80s, the others being the struggle for equality for women, and the struggle against homophobia.

As well as everyday Islamophobia, modern Britain has also seen the steady rise — over the last ten years, in particular — of racism towards other ethnic groups, and also, more broadly, of xenophobia, which includes other white people, primarily from Eastern Europe.

And this has led to talk of “us” and “them” coming out of the shadows, no longer whispered, as UKIP (the UK Independence Party), under the leadership of Nigel Farage, a former commodities broker and racist who has had the nerve to portray himself as a “man of the people,” gained in popularity, railing against the EU and immigration. And, disgracefully, Nigel Farage has been courted by the mainstream media in a completely unacceptable manner. In the run-up to the 2015 General Election, for example, a visitor from Outer Space tuning into the British TV news — including the BBC — would have concluded that he was actually the Prime Minister, as he was given so much time to spout his thinly-veiled racist filth.

Of course, it’s not just Farage and UKIP. The media’s failure to stem the growing tide of racism and xenophobia, and politicians’ failure to address it has also been matched by a more broad failure of moral leadership in the country as a whole. People like Jeremy Clarkson and Katie Hopkins have huge audiences, when they should be shunned, and the decent Christian values I grew up surrounded by are almost mute by comparison.

I was brought up a Methodist, from a  northern working class background, and although I’m not a practising Christian, having lost my faith as a teenager, the moral values I learnt through Christianity have never left me. Above all, I have spent my life concerned by injustice, and concerned for the underdog.

Christianity, I believed, teaches us that we must look after those less fortunate than ourselves, but everywhere I look in modern Britain, people who are nominally Christian, if not regular church-goers, betray their faith — senior political figures like Iain Duncan Smith, for example, who was in charge of welfare in the last Tory government, who believes that poverty is caused by dysfunctional families, and not because of larger economic trends that sweep individuals along like flood tides. Duncan Smith’s beliefs are, unfortunately, those of the unenlightened Victorians who believed there were two types of poor — the deserving poor and the undeserving poor — and that kind of twisted perspective also helps to foster the racism and xenophobia that is now so prevalent.

So what has happened in particular to stoke the racist fires that are currently blazing, and what can be done about it?

It is clear that, in the last decade, all the rich countries of the west — and some of the poorer countries of the EU — have faced an influx of refugees and migrants on a scale that is unprecedented in most of our lives. The reasons are many. Number one is the war in Syria, where all the great powers seem to be engaged in a proxy version of World War III in which the poor Syrian people are being sacrificed. Millions have fled the country, joined by other victims of our post-9/11 wars — in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — as well as those fleeing horrendous regimes — in Eritrea, for example, which currently has the world’s worst human rights record.

We are supposed to care for refugees, to welcome those fleeing death and destruction, to welcome those fleeing for they lives, but our empathy has become corroded, or choked, and, with the help of much of the media, we have been encouraged to think of refugees as migrants, and to view them as undeserving of our support.

This is a betrayal of our obligations towards refugees, enshrined in legislation in the 1950s, when, appalled by the collective bloodbath of the Second World War, the great powers came together to create new rules designed to make the world a better and fairer place. Britain had a leadership role in that process, but it is one that our current leaders have no interest in whatsoever, as they strive, like Theresa May, our latest Prime Minister, chosen by just 199 of her fellow MPs, to stop as much immigration as possible, even of skilled workers whose contribution to our society is immense.

And in all the talk of the deserving and the undeserving, of migrants (i.e refugees) and economic migrants, we are forgetting that the economic migrants are coming to the west because of the poverty of options in their home countries, which, in most cases, did not end up poor in isolation, but because of interference — economic exploitation — by the west.

The truth is that immigration has been rising across the west, and we should all take on board the demands of a new world, in which those of us who are trying to be decent human beings, and who recognise that we come from countries that, for too long, have waged war on so many other countries and devoted ourselves to their economic plunder, must take our fair share of those suffering.

There are, it seems to me, broadly speaking two groups of disaffected people in the UK currently who are dangerously obsessed with racism and xenophobia — those who have very little, and a recent survey established that a quarter of British people have savings of less than £100 — and those who are actually considerably better off, but have become blinded to the reality of their own competitive wealth.

With regard to the first group, we need to be able to demonstrate that it is neoliberalism that has caused their poverty and unemployment, and not immigrants. No immigrant ever held a gun to a potential employer’s head and forced them to pay them less than a British citizen; it is always the employers who do that — but more importantly, it is western companies and governments who have been outsourcing jobs to other parts of the world for the last quarter-century, entrenching unemployment in the west.

Politicians and the media now routinely blame the unemployed for being unemployed, when they are not stirring up hatred against immigrants, but we now need to find a way to create new jobs here in the UK — through a Green economic revolution, for example, unimaginable under the current clowns who pretend to be our leaders — and to open a discussion about what used to be called protectionism, which has been eradicated by neoliberalism.

The second group — the complaining rich — I confess I have little sympathy for, except for how they are also, in some sense, the victims of a totally unsavoury aspect of modern life who malignant influence is growing — a culture of relentless self-obsession and a disproportionate and unwarranted sense of entitlement. There are many, many people in this country — ordinary people, not the privileged by birth — in well-paid jobs or on unaffordably generous pensions, rattling around in homes that are too big for their needs, complaining that there is no room for immigrants, that the country is full.

In contrast, the truth, I believe, is that there is no room for this sort of selfishness, and it needs tackling with a reiteration of what morality is, what empathy is, and why, without it — as with the reasons we face a pressing need for a post-neoliberal return to decency and fairness — we face an ever-darkening future in which demonisation of the “other” doesn’t remain abstract, but eventually leads to discussions of how certain unwanted people can be disposed of. And that, of course, is somewhere that no one should ever want to go again.

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

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