Andy Worthington's Blog, page 64

Guantánamo Lawyer’s Moving Memories of Her Client Obaidullah, an Afghan Released in the UAE in August

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

 

In August, a long-suffering Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo, Obaidullah, was finally released after 14 years of imprisonment without charge or trial, sent to the United Arab Emirates rather than to his home village, because the US Congress had, with a rather hysterical disregard for any sense of proportion, passed a law preventing any Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo from being repatriated. Below I’m cross-posting a moving account of Obaidullah himself, and of his wrongful imprisonment, by one of his attorneys, Anne Richardson. Other civilian lawyers who worked on his case include Dan Stormer and Cindy Pánuco of Hadsell Stormer & Renick LLP in Pasadena, CA, where Richardson worked before moving to Public Counsel, the US’s largest pro bono firm, where she is the directing attorney of the Consumer Law Project.

Obaidullah, who has just one name like many Afghans, was seized in July 2002, when he was around 22 years old (he doesn’t know his exact year of birth), and was accused of having “stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment,” and it was also claimed that he “concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices”; and that he “knew or intended” that his “material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.”

The charges were listed when he was, absurdly, put forward for a trial by military commission in September 2008. Even if the allegations were true, putting forward a minor insurgent for a war crimes trial was a disgracefully overblown response to his alleged activities, but as an investigation by his military lawyers found in 2011, it appears that the US authorities were mistaken about Obaidullah’s role in any kind of plot against US forces. His wife had just given birth, and blood found in his car, interpreted as being a sign that someone was wounded in an attack, seems to have been from his wife’s labor, which he failed to mention because speaking about such things is not something an Afghan man does.

Nevertheless, Obaidullah’s efforts to secure his release from Guantánamo by having a judge rule on his habeas corpus petition was unsuccessful, when, in October 2010, the judge in question, Judge Richard Leon of the District Court in Washington, D.C. concluded, as I described it at the time, that “his account was full of evasions and inconstancies,” and, although his military commission charges were finally abandoned in June 2011 (but only after he had been charged for a second time under President Obama, he had to wait until April 2016 to have his case reviewed again — this time by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process set up in 2013, which was reviewing the cases of 64 men who were not facing trials but had not already been approved for release — and he was finally approved for release in May 2016.

Anne Richardson’s article, via the Huffington Post, is cross-posted below, and I hope you find it useful, and will share it if you do. Richardson runs through his story, including the torture he was subjected to after capture, which led to him making false, self-incriminating statements, and how her relationship with him developed, despite the difficulties of establishing trust in a place like Guantánamo. When she eventually gained his trust, and he asked why she was helping him, she said, “I told him that I believed that everyone should have the right to present his or her evidence in court, that I understood he had little hope that my government would do the right thing but that I was committed to doing everything I could to allow him to have a hearing.” As she added, “It sounded pretty pie-in-the-sky, even to me.”

She also establishes poignantly Obaidullah’s character, noting the movies he liked, and the food, but also his “compassion, his ability to express empathy and appreciation, even humor.” As she states, “He began our visits with inquiries into the wellbeing of our families, and recalled what we’d told him about their interests in soccer and science. When one of our lawyers dropped her cell phone into the bay he found that a rich vein for relentless teasing, as he did if we were late to a meeting. He loved it when my dog barked when we were talking on the phone. It was a small but vivid reminder of the real world.”

Sometimes, she wrote, she and Obaidullah “talked about having a proper meal together outside the prison, after he was free,” and I look forward to hearing about that when it happens; when, eventually, she and her family will be allowed to visit him in the Emirates, where, currently, he is in “a government rehabilitation program” — another example of the US authorities (again, particularly inspired by hysterical Republican lawmakers) not wanting to finally let go of men they have wrongly held for longer than the First World War and the Second World War combined.

Wrongfully Imprisoned in Gitmo for Years, This Man Finally Won His Freedom

By Anne Richardson, Huffington Post, November 21, 2016

I first visited Obaidullah at Guantánamo Bay in the spring of 2009. Before that first meeting, all I knew were the disturbing accusations against him, that he had fired his last habeas attorney and that I wasn’t sure why.

Prior to the visit, my family and colleagues were supportive. When I confessed to a close friend that I was nervous, he said, “Time to get out of your comfort zone.” That was an understatement. My law partner gave me the pep talk about everyone being entitled to representation, but I wasn’t even a criminal defense attorney. Hardly any of us in the “Gitmo Bar” were.

According to what had been scared up through a Freedom of Information Act request, Obaidullah was accused of being part of an al Qaeda-affiliated cell that was preparing roadside bombs against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. Official reports said he confessed while in custody in Afghanistan. Later, at Guantánamo, he’d recanted, saying he’d been tortured and the confession coerced. Was my client guilty of terrorism? There had never been any test of guilt or innocence, just six years of reported interrogations and torture.

My first day on the base, after being thoroughly patted down and every piece of paper removed of its staples, I met Obaidullah in a small concrete bunker. He wore a simple tan smock and trousers, and his ankles were shackled to the floor. He was about five-feet-seven and 150 pounds. He seemed young. Captured at age 22 or so (he doesn’t know exactly what year he was born), he had grown into a man in this prison. He told me he was not guilty of the claims made against him. He was polite but skeptical that I or anyone else could help him. He spoke his native Pashto in a soft voice with an occasional strain that would end in a note of incredulity. “Tell your government that all I want is to go back to my family,” he said through an interpreter. “Why do they keep us here, without giving us a chance to prove we are not guilty?”

In those days, most of the Americans he met were military or intelligence personnel. His first attorney had failed to gain his confidence. So many lawyers were fired by their clients at Gitmo that it was a running joke among the attorneys. Just stay hired, I told myself. That’s the first step.

For me, this journey to Gitmo had started with a simple request. My law firm was asked by the Center for Constitutional Rights to represent a single detainee in Guantánamo Bay in his habeas proceedings. CCR had filed the first lawsuit on behalf of the roughly 780 men detained there as enemy combatants and was co-counsel in the 2008 Supreme Court decision securing their right to judicial review. But a large number of these men, who had been detained for up to six years, still did not have attorneys who were willing, pro bono, to contest their imprisonment. CCR was reaching out to law firms nationwide, building a “Gitmo bar” to take these cases. Would our small firm be willing to handle one?

Obaidullah (like many Afghans, he has only one name) had been arrested at his home, during a raid in the middle of the night. No charges were leveled against him until 2008 (after six years of detention). They included conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Later, in 2011, a military lawyer assigned to his defense team found evidence to support Obaidullah’s claims of innocence, including substantiating his family’s claims that the seemingly incriminating mines had actually been left there during the Soviet occupation, while he and his family were in Pakistan. Although his military lawyers sought a speedy trial, the U.S. government simply dropped the charges. The government didn’t need them. They could rely on indefinite detention instead, as they did with most of the other Guantanamo detainees ― detention without charge.

How do you establish rapport with someone without any shared cultural reference points? Obaidullah had been living on a small farm and working in a general store in rural Afghanistan outside of Khost, a 4-hour drive from Kabul. His family had no love for the Taliban. He had an 11th grade education and had learned a little English in school.

Once captured, he had no access to any outside information about his fate; he relied on what other detainees, guards or interrogators told him. He also had no way to find out anything about me. It wasn’t until after our habeas hearing ― in which he had been allowed to listen remotely to my public opening statement (the rest was classified and not even he was allowed to hear it), and saw how hard we had worked for him ― that I think he let himself believe in me.

For my part, meeting Obaidullah face-to-face removed any doubt about what I was doing. At the time of his capture he was recently married — his daughter had been born just days before U.S. forces took him from his home. My own son had been born the same month.

Obaidullah told me he was tortured at Bagram Air Base and that the abuse continued in interrogations at Guantánamo. Not until later, after we’d known each other for several years, did he tell me what happened. He signed a statement that we filed in court describing what the judge called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” International law calls it torture. Obaidullah described being beaten on the head with a gun and threatened with death by a guard who was sharpening a long knife. He was forced to carry sandbags all night and not allowed to sleep. He was kept in a small barbed-wire cage. His hands were tied above his head for hours. He was subjected to extreme heat and cold over many months.

Obaidullah asked me why I was trying to help him. I told him that I believed that everyone should have the right to present his or her evidence in court, that I understood he had little hope that my government would do the right thing but that I was committed to doing everything I could to allow him to have a hearing. It sounded pretty pie-in-the-sky, even to me. We talked about President Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo Bay, which had been delivered just months before my first visit. We talked about the political battles that made it hard for Obama to fulfill that promise.

Over the next seven years, I went to Guantánamo Bay a dozen times to meet with Obaidullah. For his habeas hearing we coordinated multiple attorneys and expert witnesses and pulled together a brief that was over a hundred pages long with more than a hundred exhibits. But we still lost.

My colleagues and I were the only ones allowed to meet with Obaidullah. We talked about movies, children, pets, family, books. He liked “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and the “Fast and Furious” franchise. He was a fan of “How I Met Your Mother.” Over the years, we had shared with tales of honeymoons, camping trips and trekking tours around the world, and in one of our last conversations before his release, he told me that he liked our habit of taking vacations with our families. Family travel, he told me, was not something he had heard of. He looked forward to trying it with his.

We lawyers were sometimes allowed to bring in food, and we tried to anticipate what he might like — mocha ice cream was a favorite (though it nearly melted by the time we got it to him). Nutella spread onto a biscuit with a military-issue spork was also a hit. Sometimes we talked about having a proper meal together outside the prison, after he was free.

What amazed me the most was Obaidullah’s compassion, his ability to express empathy and appreciation, even humor. He began our visits with inquiries into the wellbeing of our families, and recalled what we’d told him about their interests in soccer and science. When one of our lawyers dropped her cell phone into the bay he found that a rich vein for relentless teasing, as he did if we were late to a meeting. He loved it when my dog barked when we were talking on the phone. It was a small but vivid reminder of the real world.

Since 2002, nine detainees have died at Guantanamo. In 2013, with the situation looking hopeless, with transfers out at a complete standstill, the prisoners felt that refusing to eat was the one means they had to register their protest. The majority of the men in the camp began a hunger strike. In part as a result of those desperate hunger strikes — my client withered to about 120 pounds — Obama instituted “periodic review board” hearings that would assess whether each detainee currently constituted a threat, regardless of what he may or may not have done in the past.

In December of 2015, Obaidullah was informed that he was scheduled for a hearing. In April 2016, I went down for 10 days to prepare for and participate in the hearing as his private counsel. In May, we were notified that he had been cleared for transfer. This past August, he was finally released from Guantánamo Bay to the United Arab Emirates. He has been placed in a government rehabilitation program there.

I won’t be able to hear from him for months. It will not be easy for him to readjust to the world after suffering what he has been through, or to live as an Afghan immigrant in the UAE. His future is unclear — after a few years he should be able to return to Afghanistan.

But one thing is clear. The minute I am given the go-ahead, I plan to take my son and husband, go meet his family and share that meal outside the prison walls.

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.

Great New York Times Exposé of How Torture, Abuse and Command Indifference Compromised Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo

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

 

A recent detailed New York Times article, “Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo,” provides a powerful review of the horrors of Guantánamo from the perspective of “more than two dozen military medical personnel who served or consulted” at the prison.

The Times article, written by Sheri Fink, explains how some prisoners were disturbed when they arrived at the prison, others “struggled with despair” as their imprisonment without charge or trial dragged on, and some “had developed symptoms including hallucinations, nightmares, anxiety or depression after undergoing brutal interrogations” by US personnel — sometime in CIA “black sites,” sometimes at Guantánamo — who had themselves been advised by other health personnel. Those who were tortured — although the Times refused to mention the word “torture,” as has been the paper’s wont over the years, coyly referring to dozens of men who “underwent agonizing treatment” — “were left with psychological problems that persisted for years, despite government lawyers’ assurances that the practices did not constitute torture and would cause no lasting harm.”

The result, Fink concluded, was that “a willful blindness to the consequences emerged. Those equipped to diagnose, document and treat the effects — psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health teams — were often unaware of what had happened.” Doctors told the Times that, “[s]ometimes by instruction and sometimes by choice, they typically did not ask what the prisoners had experienced in interrogations,” a situation that seriously compromised their care.

Of particular interest is the participation of Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney, who, with an Army psychologist, Maj. John Leso, “were assigned to devise interrogation techniques” in June 2002, despite having been “deployed to Guantánamo to tend to the troops.” In a memo, as Fink described it, they “listed escalating pressure tactics, including extended isolation, 20-hour interrogations, painful stress positions, yelling, hooding, and manipulation of diet, environment and sleep,” although, as Fink added, “they also expressed caution,” about how “[p]hysical and/or emotional harm” might take years to show, and “added that the most effective interrogation strategy was developing a bond.”

Nevertheless, “A version of the memo, stripped of its warnings, reached Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,” who, in December 2002, “approved many of the methods for Guantánamo,” some of which were similar to the torture techniques used by the CIA in its “black sites,” and the techniques “later migrated to military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Abu Ghraib.”

Burney spoke to the Times, and said of the approved techniques, “I think it was the absolute wrong way to proceed. I so wish I could go back and do things differently.”

Burney, the Times added, “assisted the interrogators” and “said he had seen many detainees’ intelligence files.” Crucially, he explained, “It seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot of evidence about anything for a whole lot of those folks,” a comment that chimes with what my research and that of others seeking to close Guantánamo has established over the years.

The Times claimed that Maj. Burney “has not previously commented publicly,” although that is not entirely true. When the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a detailed and compelling inquiry into detainee treatment, published in April 2009, Burney acknowledged that “[n]obody really knew what we were supposed to do.” He and Leso had led the team involved in the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, and in July 2010 the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability filed a complaint against Leso with his state licensing board in New York, which Mother Jones reported, and which I mentioned here.

The complaint was dismissed without an investigation, but in 2011 the CJA and the NYCLU (the New York Civil Liberties Union Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union ) “petitioned the New York State Supreme Court to review the allegations in our complaint,” as the CJA’s website notes. This was “the first time a US court had considered whether a psychologist’s participation in abusive interrogations could violate professional standards,” but the court “dismissed the complaint on a narrow, procedural ground.” The CJA then called on the American Psychological Association (APA) to expel Dr. Leso from its association, but on New Year’s Eve 2013, the APA “quietly declined to rebuke” Leso, as the Guardian described it.

Noting the techniques Leso and Burney proposed, the Times stated that the government “has never quantified how many prisoners underwent that treatment,” although back in January 2005, in an important article by Neil A. Lewis, “Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo,” one former interrogator estimated that “about one in six” of the prisoners held were subjected to the torture techniques — what the Times at the time described as “being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial.” Interestingly, Lewis also picked up on the fact that “some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment,” something that wasn’t noticed at the time, but which was the most shocking aspect of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report when its executive summary was published in December 2014.

The article also mentions how the prisoners themselves were often unable to trust the medical personnel. Some former prisoners spoke to the Times, and I can also confirm, from discussions over the years with prisoners, including, in particular, Omar Deghayes, a British resident released in December 2007, that these suspicions were widespread. Deghayes, in fact, made it clear to me how the prisoners could not trust the medical personnel, and told me horror stories of the psychiatric block, and he also explained how the prevailing feeling in Guantánamo was that no one could be trusted — it was widely considered that all the cells were bugged, that meeting rooms, where the men met their attorneys, were bugged, and that some attorneys were government plants, and Deghayes also said that even the guards were constantly under surveillance, as though the authorities themselves had created a place where nothing and no one could be depended upon for anything.

The article also looks at the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, subjected to a specific torture program (like Mohammed al-Qahtani) and also the 14 “high-value detainees” who arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, noting that “[v]irtually everything about these captives was classified until a Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2014 disclosed grisly details about torture.”

Also addressed are mental health issues —and the general silence regarding what took place in interrogations for those who had no involvement. What went on “was mostly a mystery to the mental health personnel,” some said, and “[e]ven when patients returned from sessions ‘looking terrible,’” as one former psychiatric technician, Daniel Lakemacher, said, “that was not to be addressed.”

Hunger strikes — and force-feeding — are also discussed in the article, as are suicides, because nine men have died at Guantánamo, and seven of them are classed as suicides (the article describes the number as six), although the article notes that “critics have raised questions about foul play in some cases,” and on that topic I’d like to direct readers to psychologist Jeffrey Kaye’s recently published report on two of those deaths, “Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation into the ‘Suicides’ of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri,” which is available as a Kindle book from Amazon.

Below I’m cross-posting the whole New York Times article, and I hope you have time to read it, if you have not already done so, as the doctors’ recollections and criticisms are an important contribution to the story of Guantánamo.

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo

By Sheri Fink, New York Times, November 12, 2016

Secrecy, mistrust and the shadow of interrogation at the American prison limited doctors’ ability to treat mental illness among detainees.

Every day when Lt. Cmdr. Shay Rosecrans crossed into the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, she tucked her medical school class ring into her bra, covered the name on her uniform with tape and hid her necklace under her T-shirt, especially if she was wearing a cross.

She tried to block out thoughts of her 4-year-old daughter. Dr. Rosecrans, a Navy psychiatrist, had been warned not to speak about her family or display anything personal, clues that might allow a terrorism suspect to identify her.

Patients called her “torture bitch,” spat at her co-workers and shouted death threats, she said. One hurled a cup of urine, feces and other fluids at a psychologist working with her. Even interviewing prisoners to assess their mental health set off recriminations and claims that she was torturing them. “What would your Jesus think?” they demanded.

Dr. Rosecrans, now retired from the Navy, led one of the mental health teams assigned to care for detainees at the island prison over the past 15 years. Some prisoners had arrived disturbed — traumatized adolescents hauled in from the battlefield, unstable adults who disrupted the cellblocks. Others, facing years of indefinite confinement, struggled with despair.

Then there were prisoners who had developed symptoms including hallucinations, nightmares, anxiety or depression after undergoing brutal interrogations at the hands of Americans who were advised by other health personnel.

At Guantánamo, a willful blindness to the consequences emerged. Those equipped to diagnose, document and treat the effects — psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health teams — were often unaware of what had happened.

Sometimes by instruction and sometimes by choice, they typically did not ask what the prisoners had experienced in interrogations, current and former military doctors said. That compromised care, according to outside physicians working with legal defense teams, previously undisclosed medical records and court filings.

Dozens of men who underwent agonizing treatment in secret C.I.A. prisons or at Guantánamo were left with psychological problems that persisted for years, despite government lawyers’ assurances that the practices did not constitute torture and would cause no lasting harm, the New York Times has reported. Some men should never have been held, government investigators concluded. Donald J. Trump, the president-elect, declared during the political campaign that he would bring back banned interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, and authorize others that were “much worse.”

In recent interviews, more than two dozen military medical personnel who served or consulted at Guantánamo provided the most detailed account to date of mental health care there. Almost from the start, they said, the shadow of interrogation and mutual suspicion tainted the mission of those treating prisoners. That limited their effectiveness for years to come.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and technicians received little training for the assignment and, they said, felt unprepared to tend to men they were told were “the worst of the worst.” Doctors felt pushed to cross ethical boundaries, and were warned that their actions, at an institution roiled by detainees’ organized resistance, could have political and national security implications.

Rotations lasted only three to nine months, making it difficult to establish rapport. In a field that requires intimacy, the psychiatrists and their teams long used pseudonyms like Major Psych, Dr. Crocodile, Superman and Big Momma, and referred to patients by serial numbers, not names. They frequently had to speak through fences or slits in cell doors, using interpreters who also worked with interrogators.

Wary patients often declined to talk to the mental health teams. (“Detainee refused to interact,” medical records note repeatedly.) At a place so shrouded in secrecy that for years any information learned from a detainee was to be treated as classified, what went on in interrogations “was completely restricted territory,” said Karen Thurman, a Navy commander, now retired, who served as a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Guantánamo. “‘How did it go?’” Or “‘Did they hit you?’ We were not allowed to ask that,” she said.

Dr. Rosecrans said she held back on such questions when she was there in 2004, not suspecting abuse and feeling constrained by the prison environment. “From a surgical perspective, you never open up a wound you cannot close,” she said. “Unless you have months, years, to help this person and help them get out of this hole, why would you ever do this?”

The United States military defends the quality of mental health care at Guantánamo as humane and appropriate. Detainees, human rights groups and doctors consulting for defense teams offer more critical assessments, describing it as negligent or ineffective in many cases.

Those who served at the prison, most of whom had never spoken publicly about their experiences before, said they had helped their patients and had done the best they could. Given the circumstances, many of them focused on the most basic of duties.

“My goal was to keep everyone alive,” Dr. Rosecrans said.

“We tried to keep the water as smooth as possible,” Ms. Thurman said.

“My job was to keep them going,” said Andy Davidson, a Navy captain, now retired, and psychologist.

Conflicted Care

When Dr. Rosecrans worked briefly at the Navy’s hospital at Guantánamo as a young psychiatrist in 1999, it was a sleepy assignment. She saw only a few outpatients each week, and there was no psychiatric ward on the base, which was being downsized.

But after Al Qaeda’s 2001 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent American-led invasion of Afghanistan, detainees began pouring into the island in early 2002 — airplane loads of 20 to 30 men in shackles and blacked-out goggles. “We were seeing prisoners arriving with mental problems,” said Capt. Albert Shimkus, then the hospital’s commanding officer.

There were no clear protocols for treating patients considered to be “enemy combatants,” rather than prisoners of war, said Captain Shimkus, who is now retired. But he set out, with the tacit support of his commanders, to provide a level of care equivalent to that for American service members. He transformed a cellblock into a spartan inpatient unit for up to 20 patients and brought in Navy psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses and technicians to be available around the clock.

Many of them had little or no predeployment training, experience working in a detention facility or familiarity with the captives’ languages, cultures or religious beliefs. They soon heard talk of the threat the prisoners posed.

“The crew that was there before us scared the heck out of us,” said Dr. Christopher Kowalsky, who as a Navy captain led the mental health unit in 2004. He and Dr. Rosecrans said colleagues had admonished them for getting too close to patients. “‘Don’t forget they’re criminals,’” she was told.

Those arriving in later years attended a training program at a military base in Washington State. “You heard all these things about how terrible they are: Not only will they gouge your eyes out, but they’ll somehow tell their cohorts to go after your family,” said Daniel Lakemacher, who served as a Navy psychiatric technician. “I became extremely hateful and spiteful.”

Peering through small openings in cell doors, he and other technicians handed out medications, watched to see prisoners swallow them and ran through a checklist of safety questions — “Are you having thoughts of hurting yourself?” “Are you seeing things that aren’t there?” — through interpreters or English-speaking detainees in neighboring cells. (“Talk about confidentiality!” Dr. Davidson said. “It’s just a whole other set of rules.”)

Conflicts arose between health professionals aiding interrogators and those trying to provide care. Army psychologists working with military intelligence teams showed up in 2002 and asked to be credentialed to treat detainees. “I said no, because they were there for interrogations,” Captain Shimkus said.

In June of that year, Maj. Paul Burney, an Army psychiatrist, and Maj. John Leso, an Army psychologist, both of whom had deployed to Guantánamo to tend to the troops, instead were assigned to devise interrogation techniques. The two men, in a memo, listed escalating pressure tactics, including extended isolation, 20-hour interrogations, painful stress positions, yelling, hooding, and manipulation of diet, environment and sleep.

But they also expressed caution. “Physical and/or emotional harm from the above techniques may emerge months or even years after their use,” the two men warned in their memo, later excerpted in a Senate Armed Services Committee report. They added that the most effective interrogation strategy was developing a bond.

A version of the memo, stripped of its warnings, reached Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In December 2002, he approved many of the methods for Guantánamo, some of them similar to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the C.I.A. at secret prisons overseas. After objections from military lawyers, he made some modifications but gave commanders license to use 24 techniques. Some of them later migrated to military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, where they morphed into horrific abuses.

“I think it was the absolute wrong way to proceed,” Dr. Burney, who has not previously commented publicly, said of the approved techniques. “I so wish I could go back and do things differently.”

He and Dr. Leso created the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or BSCT (pronounced “biscuit”), to advise and sometimes rein in military interrogators, many of them young enlisted soldiers with little experience even interviewing people. The interrogators subjected some detainees at Guantánamo to loud music, strobe lights, cold temperatures, isolation, painful shackling, threats against family members and prolonged sleep deprivation, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The government has never quantified how many prisoners underwent that treatment. In four cases, military leaders approved special interrogation plans that were even harsher. At least two were carried out.

Dr. Burney said he and Dr. Leso took turns observing the questioning in 2002 of Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was accused of being an intended hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks and, it later emerged, had a history of psychosis. Among other things, he was menaced with military dogs, draped in women’s underwear, injected with intravenous fluids to make him urinate on himself, put on a leash and forced to bark like a dog, and interrogated for 18 to 20 hours at least 48 times, government investigators found.

Mr. Qahtani was led to believe that he might die if he did not cooperate, Dr. Burney said in a statement provided to the Senate committee. When Mr. Qahtani asked for a doctor to relieve psychological symptoms, the interrogators instead performed an exorcism for “jinns” — supernatural creatures that he believed caused his problems.

In 2009, a Department of Defense official overseeing military commissions refused to prosecute Mr. Qahtani, telling the Washington Post that his mistreatment had amounted to torture. In 2012, a federal judge found Mr. Qahtani incompetent to help lawyers challenging his detention.

Those providing mental health care at Guantánamo quickly aroused the suspicions of some prisoners, who called them devils, criminals and dogs.

“Nobody trusted them,” said Lutfi bin Ali, a Tunisian who was sent to Guantánamo after being subjected to harsh conditions at what he described as an American jail overseas. “There was skepticism that they were psychiatrists and that they were trying to help us,” he said in a phone interview from Kazakhstan, where the United States transferred him in 2014. He still suffers intermittently from depression.

Dr. Davidson, who treated prisoners at Guantánamo during part of 2003, recalled the hostility. “I can tell the guy until the cows come home, ‘Hey, I’m just here for mental health,’” he said. “‘No, you’re not,’” he imagined the patient thinking, “‘you’re the enemy.’”

One day on the cellblocks, Dr. Rosecrans heard detainees warn others that she could not be trusted. “Some of my patients hated me,” she said. “They saw me as a representative of the government.”

She and other clinicians who felt uncomfortable walking around the prison grounds relied mostly on guards to identify detainees who needed help and to take them to an examination room, where they would be chained to the floor.

Interpreters were in such short supply at times that they worked with both the mental health teams and the interrogators. “See where that could be a problem?” Dr. Rosecrans asked.

All of that fed the conviction among detainees that information about their mental health was being exploited by interrogators. “If you complain about your weak point to a doctor, they told that to the interrogators,” said Younous Chekkouri, a Moroccan who has been released.

He recalled seeing one psychologist working alongside interrogators and then treating detainees at the prison. Only years later, he said, did he feel he could trust certain psychiatrists there. He said he still suffered from flashbacks and anxiety after being beaten at a military prison in Afghanistan, and kept in isolation and shown execution photos at Guantánamo.

Captain Shimkus, who oversaw patient care, said some clinicians had expressed concerns about the blurred lines between medical care and interrogation. He said he had allowed one psychiatrist, who was disturbed by the lack of confidentiality, to temporarily recuse himself from caring for patients because the doctor believed “the patient-physician relationship was compromised.”

The United States Southern Command told health care providers at Guantánamo in 2002 that their communications with patients were “not confidential.” At first, interrogators had direct access to medical and mental health information. Then, the BSCT psychologists acted as liaisons.

They regularly read patient records in the psychiatry ward, said Dr. Frances Stewart, a retired Navy captain and psychiatrist who treated detainees in 2003 and 2004. As a consequence, she said in an interview, “I tried to document just the things that really needed to be documented — things like ‘the patient has a headache; we treated it with Tylenol’ — not anything terribly sensitive. It was not a perfect solution, but it was probably the best solution I could come up with at the time.”

Dr. Kowalsky, a psychiatrist, said patients had begged him not to record their diagnoses. “They’re going to use that,” some detainees told him.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, during a visit in June 2004, documented the same complaint. Medical files, the group said in confidential remarks later revealed in the Times, were regularly used to devise strategies for interrogations that it called “tantamount to torture.” Interrogators’ access to medical records, it found, was a “flagrant violation of medical ethics.” The Pentagon disputed that the records were used to harm detainees.

Dr. Kowalsky said he clashed with a BSCT psychologist, Diane Zierhoffer, who showed up in the psychiatric unit to look at patient records in 2004. (Dr. Zierhoffer, in an email, said her intent in accessing records had been to “ensure health care was not interfered with.”)

“We’re here to help people,” Dr. Kowalsky recalled once telling her.

“We’re here to protect our country,” he said she had responded, later asking: “Whose side are you on?”

They Didn’t Ask

Sometimes it wasn’t clear what was forbidden or what had just become practice, but it had the same effect: Psychiatrists and psychologists said they had almost never asked a detainee about his treatment by interrogators, either at Guantánamo or at the C.I.A. prisons.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was released to his native Mauritania in October after 14 years at Guantánamo, told a doctor on his legal team that military mental health providers did not ask him about possible mistreatment, according to a sealed court report obtained by the Times. Mr. Slahi did not volunteer the information because he was afraid of retaliation, he wrote in his prison memoir, “Guantánamo Diary.”

Mr. Slahi endured some of the most brutal treatment at the prison. Investigations by the Army, the Justice Department and the Senate largely corroborated his account of being deprived of sleep; beaten; shackled for hours in painful positions; forced to drink large amounts of water; isolated in darkness and exposed to extreme temperatures; stripped and soaked in cold water; told that his mother might be sent to Guantánamo; and sexually assaulted by female interrogators.

Decades earlier, he had joined the insurgency against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, a cause supported by the United States. In 1991, he attended a Qaeda training camp, and was later suspected of recruiting for the terrorist group. A federal judge ordered him freed in 2010 for lack of evidence, but an appeals court overturned the decision. In July, a military review board recommended his transfer.

Prison medical records show that Mr. Slahi, a computer specialist with no history of mental illness, received anti-anxiety medicine, antidepressants, sleeping pills and psychotherapy, and that he had recurring nightmares of being tortured in the years after his ordeal.

Dr. Vincent Iacopino, a civilian physician who evaluated Mr. Slahi in 2007 for his defense team, criticized psychologists and psychiatrists at Guantánamo for failing “to adequately pursue the obvious possibility of PTSD,” or post-traumatic stress disorder, linked to severe physical and mental harm, the records show. Dr. Iacopino said military doctors had medicated Mr. Slahi for his symptoms instead of trying to treat his underlying disorder, which had “profound long-term and debilitating psychological effects.” Last year, one of Mr. Slahi’s lawyers described him as “damaged.”

He was one of nearly 800 men incarcerated at Guantánamo over the years and one of several whose confessions were tainted by mistreatment and disallowed as evidence by the United States. Many of the prisoners were Qaeda and Taliban foot soldiers later deemed to pose little threat. Some were victims of mistaken identity or held on flimsy evidence.

Dr. Burney, who assisted the interrogators, said he had seen many detainees’ intelligence files. “It seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot of evidence about anything for a whole lot of those folks,” he said.

After the C.I.A.’s secret prisons were shut in 2006, Guantánamo took in more than a dozen so-called high-value detainees, including those accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Some doctors at Guantánamo said they had been instructed, in briefings or by colleagues, not to ask these former “black site” prisoners about what had happened there. Virtually everything about these captives was classified until a Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2014 disclosed grisly details about torture.

“You just weren’t allowed to talk about those things, even with them,” said Dr. Michael Fahey Traver, an Army psychiatrist at Guantánamo in 2013 and 2014. He was assigned to treat only high-value detainees kept in Camp 7, Guantánamo’s most restricted area, so that he did not inadvertently pass sensitive information to other prisoners.

If a detainee raised the subject of his prior treatment, Dr. Traver was to redirect the conversation, he said his predecessor had told him. Among his patients were Ramzi bin al-Shibh, accused of helping plot the Sept. 11 attacks, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was charged in the 2000 bombing of the American destroyer Cole and endured some of the C.I.A.’s most extreme interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.

At the request of prosecutors, a military psychiatrist and two military psychologists went to Guantánamo in 2013 to assess Mr. Nashiri’s competency to assist in his defense. The panel concluded that, while competent, he suffered from PTSD and major depression.

The military commission trying Mr. Nashiri held a hearing in 2014 on the adequacy of his mental health care. Shortly before the hearing, Dr. Traver removed a previous diagnosis by another Guantánamo psychiatrist that Mr. Nashiri had PTSD. “I didn’t think he met that diagnosis,” Dr. Traver said in an interview.

Dr. Sondra Crosby, an expert on torture who consulted for Mr. Nashiri’s defense, disagreed. Dr. Crosby, an internist, said his treatment had been inadequate. “He suffers chronic nightmares,” she testified in an affidavit, which “directly relate to the specific physical, emotional and sexual torture inflicted upon Mr. al-Nashiri while in U.S. custody.” The content of his nightmares, she wrote, was classified.

The commission judge, citing a Supreme Court ruling that prisons must provide health care, found insufficient evidence of “deliberate indifference” to his medical needs.

What went on after prisoners were summoned for interrogations at Guantánamo was mostly a mystery to the mental health personnel, some of them said. Even when patients returned from sessions “looking terrible,” said Mr. Lakemacher, the former psychiatric technician, “that was not to be addressed.” (After his deployment, Mr. Lakemacher said, he regretted taking part in what he came to consider the unjust, indefinite detention of prisoners. He later was discharged from the Navy as a conscientious objector.)

Some doctors, on their own, shied away from the subject of interrogation tactics. “I didn’t want to get near that stuff,” Dr. Rosecrans said. “Men would say, ‘When I got here, they treated me like a dog,’” or that they were humiliated, she said, but she refrained from inquiring, in part, “to preserve their dignity.”

When detainees claimed to have been tortured or maltreated, “you didn’t know if it was true or not,” she said.

“Is it PTSD, or is it delusional disorder?” she said, adding, “I was in such a vacuum.”

But Dr. Rosecrans had little reason to suspect abusive treatment, she said, because some prisoners seemed eager to go to interrogation sessions, which they called “reservations.” Interrogators, working in trailers separate from the structures where detainees were housed, doled out rewards like snack food or magazines; speaking with them broke the boredom for detainees.

“It was a way to get out of their cell,” said Ms. Thurman, the psychiatric nurse practitioner. “They’d do anything, I think, to do something different for the day.”

Dr. Stewart, the Navy captain who treated detainees in 2003 and 2004, said she had never noticed any men in distress after returning from interrogations. But she typically did not ask what had happened there or try to focus on trauma in therapy, she said. “I didn’t want to stir up anything that might make things worse,” she said.

PTSD, generally thought to be the most common psychiatric illness resulting from torture, was rarely diagnosed at Guantánamo. Dr. Rosecrans and other doctors who served there said the diagnosis did not matter because they could still treat the symptoms, like depression, anxiety or insomnia.

Standard treatment for the disorder involves building trust and revisiting traumatic experiences, which can sometimes temporarily exacerbate symptoms. That was impractical at Guantánamo, Dr. Rosecrans and others contended, where detainees were under stress and often unwilling to talk about what had happened to them.

“These folks were in acute survival mode,” Dr. Rosecrans said. Most of their concerns were “here-and-now or future-oriented, not backward-looking.”

Dr. Davidson said he had not considered doing full histories to diagnose PTSD. But later, he said, after he mulled over the experiences of American soldiers, “the thought was occurring to me: How come our guys get PTSD and they don’t? Well, probably because I’m not asking the right questions.”

Dr. Jonathan Woodson, a former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, who was the Pentagon’s top health official from 2010 until this spring, said he was unaware that mental health providers at Guantánamo had avoided asking detainees about coercive interrogations. He said his policy was that physicians should not be constrained in what they could ask patients.

“You would take the history of someone who is exhibiting symptoms,” he said. “In PTSD, it’s almost automatic.”

Brig. Gen. Stephen N. Xenakis, a retired Army psychiatrist who consulted for the legal defense teams of many detainees, said, “You cannot provide psychological treatment if you never look into what happened to them when they are tortured.” He added: “The psychologists and psychiatrists at Guantánamo are not meeting the standards of care of the military or the profession.”

Military officials reject that criticism. Capt. John Filostrat, a spokesman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said, “We are doing a tough job, and we are doing it well.”

‘No One Is Dying’

Mental health providers recall troubled men they helped — an Afghan farmer who attempted suicide, a psychotic Yemeni man stabilized and removed from isolation, a traumatized Saudi patient who began opening up. Some doctors describe Guantánamo as their most difficult deployment, one that cast them in unfamiliar roles — recipients of pleas for privileges, inadvertent disciplinarians ordering “self-harm” restrictions like the removal of prayer beads or sheets, enablers of policies that made them deeply uncomfortable.

“Every day was an ethical challenge, quite frankly,” Dr. Davidson said.

Procedures at Guantánamo changed over time. Limits on abusive tactics were tightened by Congress in 2005, then banned by President Obama in 2009.

But even after interrogation conditions eased, and after BSCT personnel were denied access to medical records in 2005, detainees remained distrustful. That made it “a real challenge for the physicians treating them to even determine what was a real problem and what wasn’t,” said Dr. Bruce Meneley, a Navy captain, now retired, who commanded the medical group at Guantánamo from 2007 to 2009.

Many men, worried about being seen as weak or crazy, would disclose only physical complaints like stomach aches, headaches and insomnia. Dr. Traver said sleeping pills had been the sole medication that the high-value detainees he treated would agree to take while he was there.

The doctors were unfamiliar with the ways psychiatric illness could be expressed in some cultures. A number of prisoners, Dr. Rosecrans recalled, described being plagued by jinns. She and others prescribed powerful anti-psychotics, but she remembers wondering, “Are we doing the right thing?”

After years of incarceration at a place that became a symbol of American injustice — a legal black hole where men often did not know what they were accused of and had few avenues of legal recourse — many detainees, seeing themselves as political prisoners, seethed with resentment or were overcome by depression.

Over and over, the psychiatrists recalled, men would ask, “Why am I here?” or “What’s my future?” — questions the doctors could not answer. Sometimes, they said, their work felt futile.

“The environmental factors outweighed so much of what we did,” Dr. Davidson said. “We had so many people who were depressed. Well, I would be really depressed, too, if they stuck me in a place, I had no idea where I was, and I had no idea if or when I was going to leave. That is the definition of depression, I think — not having any control over my situation.”

It was often difficult to discern, doctors said, who was genuinely troubled, who was seeking attention and, most worrisome, who was in danger. “All of the leaders that I met were like, ‘No one is dying on my watch,’” Dr. Rosecrans said.

In 2004, after men began refusing food to protest their detention, she was asked to devise a protocol for evaluating the mental health of those on prolonged hunger strikes. Dr. Rosecrans believed that mentally competent people had the right to choose not to eat — even if that meant they would die. The American Medical Association and international medical organizations endorse that position. But the government has insisted on forced feedings, which are permissible in federal prisons. Detainees have described the procedures used at Guantánamo as particularly painful, with some likening them to torture.

Musa’ab al-Madhwani, a Yemeni captured in Pakistan and suspected in a terrorism plot, the evidence for which the United States eventually largely disavowed, joined a large group of hunger strikers in 2013 protesting conditions at the prison. He had arrived at Guantánamo in 2002, barely out of his teens, after being held at a C.I.A. prison. He had violent nightmares and other psychiatric problems after harsh treatment there, his medical records show.

Over the years, judges threw out his admissions during interrogations, finding they were tainted by mistreatment at the C.I.A. prison and coercive questioning at Guantánamo. His detention stretched on, however, and after both of his parents died, Mr. Madhwani said in a letter to a federal judge that he was “utterly hopeless.” He added: “I have no reason to believe that I will ever leave this prison alive. It feels like death would be a better fate than living in these conditions.”

It was up to the psychiatrists and psychologists to decide how seriously to take such statements, and how to respond to them. “What do you do if they say they’re suicidal?” said Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, an Army colonel, now retired, and psychiatrist who was dispatched to Guantánamo in late 2002 after a spate of attempts. “Are they really suicidal, or are they manipulating the system?”

More than 600 “suicide gestures” had been recorded at Guantánamo by 2009, with more than 40 categorized as suicide attempts, according to a medical article. The doctors had to distinguish genuine attempts — reflecting desperation or, as American officials contended, a desire for martyrdom — from acts aimed at improving their conditions of confinement.

To date, at least six deaths have been have classified as suicides, though critics have raised questions about foul play in some cases. One Guantánamo commander referred to three of them, which were simultaneous, as acts of warfare against America. Several of the dead had been treated by mental health providers for serious disorders.

Only 60 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, and about a third of them [Note: exactly a third of them] have been approved for transfer. Ten have been charged with or convicted of crimes by the military commissions system.

Capt. Richard Quattrone of the Navy, who served until September as the prison’s chief medical officer, said just a small number of detainees had chronic mental health issues. “The things we see are about day-to-day issues, anxiety over their release, and when it will happen, or if it will happen,” he said.

“Whatever happened in the past,” he added, “I think we’ve now built trust with the medical personnel.”

Looking back, Dr. Rosecrans said she and her colleagues had faced many obstacles. For certain prisoners, the very tools that psychiatrists and psychologists most rely on — asking questions — would forever evoke interrogations. And the secrecy complicated everything.

“Did we know what was going on? Or what might have been going on?” Dr. Rosecrans asked. “I didn’t know any of that intel stuff.”

But, she added, “we did the job of treating patients.”

Guantánamo stayed with her in unexpected ways. Relaxing on a cruise soon after leaving the prison assignment, she tried to pose her daughter for a photo. When the child refused to put down a stuffed animal, Dr. Rosecrans threatened to throw it overboard.

“You’re a little terrorist!” she erupted.

Note: Also see the related article, Secret Documents Show a Tortured Prisoner’s Descent, about “high-value detainee” Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

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

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

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

Save the NHS: Tories’ Own Auditor Finds “Financial Problems are Endemic and This is Not Sustainable” for NHS’s Survival

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

 

The NHS faces an unprecedented crisis, and it’s all the Tories’ fault (with the help of some senior NHS officials). A new report by the National Audit Office, the government’s official auditor, has found that “[t]wo-thirds of health trusts in England are now in deficit,” and “their total debt has almost trebled since 2015 to £2.45bn,” as the Guardian described it, adding that auditors “were particularly alarmed by the decision to transfer £950m [out of a total of £4.6bn] from the NHS’s budget for buildings and IT to pay staff’s wages.”

The report follows the revelation on Monday that, as the Guardian described it, “[c]ontroversial plans put forward as a way of improving the health service in England and ensuring its sustainability risk being used as a cover for cuts and running down the NHS,” as Dr. Mark Porter, the chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) council explained. The Guardian added that the BMA stated that the 44 regional Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) put forward in September “amount to £22bn in cuts by 2020-21 to balance the books, which will have a severe impact on patient care” — an understatement if ever I heard one. The impact, if implemented, would be nothing short of disastrous.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, stated that its report found that the NHS’s “financial problems are endemic,” and that this situation “is not sustainable” for a functioning health service. Her analysis of the crisis also included a recognition that “an increasing number of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs)” — the groups set up under the Tories’ complete (and manifesto promise-breaking) overhaul of the NHS —  were “unable to keep their spending within budget.”

The Guardian pointed out that knowledgeable MPs have been saying that the report “amounts to one of the the most critical assessments of NHS finances by official auditors, as their reports usually err on the side of caution,” adding that it “will add to pressure on Theresa May and the chancellor, Philip Hammond, to set aside extra money in the autumn statement on Wednesday to plug the funding gap in the health service.”

Meg Hillier, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said in response to the report’s publication, “I call on the prime minister to address [in the autumn statement] the realities of increasing deficits in NHS trusts, long-term workforce problems, unrealistic efficiency targets and the impact these financial stresses are having on the quality of services.” She added that the Department of Health was making “pie in the sky assumptions” about closing the funding gap.

The National Audit Office also explained, as the Guardian put it, that the NHS “entered the current financial year with a ‘worse than expected starting point,’” and that this “could hamper plans to close the estimated £22bn gap between patients’ needs and resources by 2020/21” via the 44 regional Sustainability and Transformation Plans. The Guardian pointed out that the Department of Health, NHS England and NHS Improvement have estimated that “they can make £6.7bn of efficiency savings through measures including capping public sector pay and renegotiating contracts,” and that “trusts and CCGs can make a further £14.9bn of savings by ‘moderating the growth in demand for healthcare services’ and by making 2% productivity and efficiency improvements.”

However, this is rubbish, as the auditors realised, and as senior figures involved in healthcare have been aware of during the development of the STPs.

In September, Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund think tank, said, “There are concerns that some areas are focusing on plans to reorganise acute hospital services, despite evidence that major reconfigurations of hospital services rarely save money and do not necessarily improve care.” He added that “[p]lans in some STPs to reduce the number of hospital beds are also unlikely to succeed.”

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust think tank, was even more critical. “I’ve been visiting a lot of STPs and nobody I’ve spoken to is confident they can reduce the financial gap,” he said, adding, “One insider said to me: ‘Optimism bias abounds.’”

For their part, the National Audit Office, having examined the estimates for proposed savings, “warned they had not been properly tested,” and stated that this “raises concerns about whether planned savings can be achieved”. In addition, on the Department of Health’s £950m transfer from the capital project budget to cover staff wages, the NAO noted, “The department did not assess the long-term effects of transferring this funding to cover day-to-day spending. This means it does not know what risks trusts may face in future as a result of addressing immediate funding needs.”

A year ago, “amid mounting fears about the pressures” faced by the NHS, the Cameron/Osborne Tory government announced that front-line NHS services in England would “get a £3.8bn, above-inflation cash injection” in 2016, as the BBC put it, but the Guardian noted that “hospital executives said this week that the money was not enough.”

Chris Hopson, of NHS Providers, “said the settlement needed to be redrawn,” and Prof. Jane Dacre, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said that the NHS was not only “struggling to balance today’s books,” but was also “unable to invest in new plans,” in the Guardian’s words. As she said, “We need an NHS budget that meets the demand for health services now and in the future.”

The urgent need to defend the NHS, the UK’s greatest creation

Last November’s recognition by George Osborne that the NHS urgently needed more money was a sign of the urgency of the situation, as the Tories, in general, would like to starve the NHS of funds as much as possible to allow private healthcare providers to take over, thereby thoroughly destroying this county’s greatest creation. However, they are also aware that they cannot be seen to do so, or voters might rebel and destroy them instead.

My description of the NHS as this county’s greatest creation is not a casual one, and it is also one shared by millions of my fellow citizens. Crucially, the NHS is paid for by general taxation, on the basis of which everyone, from the richest to the poorest, is guaranteed free treatment when their lives are at risk, and is also guaranteed free treatment for other significant health issues. The NHS is generally described as “free at the point of entry,” which it is, but it is also “free at the point of exit.” Because all payment is made through taxation, at no point does anyone get asked for payment — or refused treatment if they can’t afford it, or given a bill that will take them years, or decades to pay off, or end up being made homeless if they can’t afford to keep up their repayments.

For the immeasurable peace of mind this gives to all British citizens, the only inconvenience is that those on the higher tax rates (40% and 45%) pay more through general taxation than those on the standard rate (20%), and those who are unemployed or retired pay nothing in taxation. The redistributive element annoys the rich and greedy, but, to be blunt, their selfish obsessions are detrimental for society as a whole.

The Tories, however, disagree — as do those MPs of other parties who have investments in private healthcare providers and who stand to make handsome personal profits the more the taxpayer-funded NHS is destroyed.

Unfortunately, the enemies are not just in Parliament (and, as ever, in parts of the media). As we learned during the successful 2012-13 campaign to save Lewisham Hospital, senior NHS management has also bought into the alleged “need” for huge savings to be made to the NHS — largely through hospital closures, and some idiotic and poorly-conceived notion that people can be trained not to be ill.

For Lewisham, the NHS managers’ long-standing desire has been to downgrade Lewisham Hospital so that it no longer has an A&E Department, which would mean that it could no longer have a maternity department, and this, in turn, would mean that the entire population of Lewisham — 270,000 and rising — would have no maternity services. Try replacing Lewisham with Brighton, Hull or Newcastle, whose populations are similar, and suggesting that they should have their A&E departments shut down, so that anyone with any kind of emergency or potential emergency — first-time mothers, for example — would have to be sent to another city. It’s a ludicrous proposal, and just because the distances are shorter in London doesn’t detract from the reality that any neighbouring boroughs are already struggling to cope wth the demands of they own populations, which, of course, also run into the hundreds of thousands.

As I stated repeatedly at the time of the Lewisham campaign, every borough in London needs its own fully-functioning hospital, whereas the plans for Lewisham would have meant that three London boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley — with a total population of 750,000 would have had only one A&E Department between them, in Woolwich.

Stop the cuts

In the end, the only viable solution for the NHS is for the £22bn efficiency plan to be halted until the NHS is at least able to function once more without being crippled by debts and shortfalls based on unattainable financial targets. At present, we have a ludicrous situation whereby billions of pounds of cuts are being made at the same time that billions of pounds are being put back into the NHS to stop its complete collapse — the kind of bureaucratic idiocy at which politicians and senior business managers excel.

And when the freeze on the £22bn cuts takes place, the only acceptable next step is for the NHS to be audited publicly and openly, and for those who are able to defend its importance honestly to be allowed to point out how much it costs run an adequately funded NHS and, as a result, how much we all will need to pay in increased taxes to ensure its survival.

I am sure that, if implemented honestly, this would be supported by a majority of the British people — although I should note that, when factoring in the demands placed on the NHS by an ever-aging population, I think it is only appropriate for wealthier retirees to accept that means testing should be introduced to assess their ability to continue paying for the NHS even in retirement if they are wealthy enough.

This, I know, is a radical proposal, as wealthier retirees vote in large numbers, and as a result politicians rarely propose anything that would challenge  them. However, on this, as on the need for an open debate to secure the necessary funding for the NHS’s survival, I can see no other way forward that is viable.

In conclusion, I am also prepared to accept that, in the UK as it currently stands, my conclusions mean that, officially, I am in dreamland, because, to bring about the above, we would not only need to get rid of most of our current politicians (including the lying advocates of the campaign to leave the EU, who lied so scandalously about saving £350m a week to be spent on the NHS); we would also need to disable the monstrous biased media operations in this country that persistently seek to destroy public services for malignant ideological reasons.

But, really, what other choice do we have? Do nothing, and moan about irrelevant issues, or distract ourselves with nonsense as the Tories, corrupt Labour MPs, greedy corporations and the corporate media turn back the clock back to a time before the creation of the NHS? I think not. We need to fight. As Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS in the post-war Labour government said, the NHS “will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

Note: The photo at the top of this article is from my second photo set on Flickr from the TUC-led ‘Britain Needs A Pay Rise’ protest on October 18, 2014. The first set is here. Where is the trade union movement’s mass mobilisation against Theresa May’s useless government, I wonder?

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

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

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

Donald Trump, Guantánamo and Torture: What Do We Need to Know?

I wrote the following article (as “Donald Trump and Guantánamo: What Do We Need to Know?)  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.

So the bad news, on Guantánamo, torture, Islamophobia and war, is that, as Charlie Savage explained in the New York Times this week, “As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump vowed to refill the cells of the Guantánamo Bay prison and said American terrorism suspects should be sent there for military prosecution. He called for targeting mosques for surveillance, escalating airstrikes aimed at terrorists and taking out their civilian family members, and bringing back waterboarding and a ‘hell of a lot worse’ — not only because ‘torture works,’ but because even ‘if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.’”

As Savage also noted, “It is hard to know how much of this stark vision for throwing off constraints on the exercise of national security power was merely tough campaign talk,” but it is a disturbing position for Americans — and the rest of the world — to be in, particularly with respect to the noticeable differences between Trump and Barack Obama.

The outgoing president has some significant failures against his name, which will be discussed in detail below, but America’s first black president did not, of course, appoint a white supremacist to be his chief strategist and Senior Counselor, as Trump has done with Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, an alarming far-right US website. Nor did he call for a “total and complete shutdown” of America’s borders to Muslims, as Trump did last December, and nor did he suggest that there should be a registry of all Muslims, as Trump did last November.

The video evidence of Trump calling for the registry of Muslims, by the way, completely undermines his team’s claims in recent days that the president-elect “never advocated” for a registry tracking individuals based on their religion. That claim was made in response to a statement by Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, “reportedly a key member of Trump’s transition team, that the president-elect’s advisers are already considering the Muslim registry,” as the Guardian described it.

On Guantánamo and torture, the situation is rather more complicated for Trump.

It was back in February, after President Obama reiterated his desire to close Guantánamo during a speech at the White House, which coincided with the delivery to Congress of a plan for closing the prison that had been prepared by the Pentagon, that Trump first made alarming threats about how his administration, far from closing Guantánamo, would “load it up with some bad dudes.”

Obama, in contrast, stated, “I’m absolutely committed to closing the detention facility at Guantánamo,” and ran through a list of compelling reasons why Guantánamo must be closed — a list he has delivered eloquently throughout his presidency. He said:

For many years, it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay does not advance our national security — it undermines it. This is not just my opinion. This is the opinion of experts, this is the opinion of many in our military. It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit. It drains military resources, with nearly $450 million spent last year alone to keep it running, and more than $200 million in additional costs needed to keep it open going forward for less than 100 detainees. Guantánamo harms our partnerships with allies and other countries whose cooperation we need against terrorism. When I talk to other world leaders, they bring up the fact that Guantánamo is not resolved.

Moreover, keeping this facility open is contrary to our values. It undermines our standing in the world. It is viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of law. As Americans, we pride ourselves on being a beacon to other nations, a model of the rule of law. But 15 years after 9/11 — 15 years after the worst terrorist attack in American history —we’re still having to defend the existence of a facility and a process where not a single verdict has been reached in those attacks — not a single one.

Nevertheless, as Obama also noted, “Congress has repeatedly imposed restrictions aimed at preventing us from closing this facility” in the form of legislation that has indeed made it difficult for the president to fulfill his promise — although, at Close Guantánamo we have also repeatedly reminded readers that he was able to bypass Congressional obstacles if he wished, but that he unwilling to spend political capital doing so.

“We’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes”

After Obama’s eloquent presentation in the White House, Donald Trump’s response, at a campaign rally in Sparks, Nevada, was to say, “This morning, I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantánamo Bay, which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open … and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”

However, as Ben Wittes, editor-in-chief of the national security blog Lawfare, and not a man known for his liberal opinions, told NPR, “You have to ask the question, [load it up] with whom?” As NPR described it, “Because the U.S. is not fighting ground wars and taking prisoners like it once did, Wittes wonders just how Trump expects to load up Guantánamo with ‘bad dudes.’”

Wittes stated, “Trump’s stated military strategy and ambition are so hard to figure out that it’s not at all clear to me what the captive population that would be subject to being moved to Guantánamo [is], who they would be or where they would come from.”

As Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald noted in an article published soon after Trump’s victory, entitled, “What will President Trump do with Guantánamo?”, Cully Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs under George W. Bush, who also runs the National Security Program at the Heritage Foundation and is a captain in the Navy Reserve Judge Advocate Corps, pointed out that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was described by the Miami Herald as “essentially a declaration of war on Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts,” is the key piece of legislation that “allows the Pentagon to hold al-Qaida and its affiliates as war prisoners at Guantánamo.” Stimson explained how that’s “a narrow class of individuals,” and “he urged a ‘prudent, multi-step analysis’ on whether to pursue wider authority to put Islamic State captives there.”

In addition, the Center for Constitutional Rights’ legal director Baher Azmy said that any effort to try to send an Islamic State prisoner to Guantánamo would be challenged in federal court. “Legally, there is no reasonable way an ISIS detention could be justified under the law that justifies the current detentions. That turns on the AUMF, a connection to 9/11,” Azmy said, also noting, as the Miami Herald described it, that, “based on candidate Trump’s campaign rhetoric, [CCR] might find itself re-litigating already presumed settled questions.”

Azmy also stated that the first order of business, if Trump were to be insistent on sending any new prisoner to Guantánamo, “would be getting access to any new Guantánamo captive, making sure he is not kept incommunicado like the Bush administration did in the first years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo captives do get to challenge their detention in federal courts.”

Sending Americans to Guantánamo?

In August, in an interview with the Miami Herald, when asked if US citizens accused of terrorism should be tried in military commissions at Guantánamo, Trump approved such a policy. “I know that they” — an unspecified “they” — “want to try them in our regular court systems, and I don’t like that at all,” Trump said, adding, “I don’t like that at all. I would say they could be tried there, that’ll be fine.” Writing about Trump’s words this week, NPR noted that, “Under current law, American citizens cannot, in fact, be held in Guantánamo, much less tried there.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg noted that Cully Stimson was also far from enthusiastic about this proposal, encouraging the president-elect’s team to undertake “a very vigorous discussion by the lawyers in the know about whether that would be prudent and how that will affect the other detainees at Gitmo who are not U.S. citizens.”

Again, therefore, it’s worth considering that, if he did decide to pursue this plan, Trump would face serious obstacles from Democrats, lawyers, NGOs and activists, as well as international criticism.

On military commissions in general, however, it is unlikely that anything will change, and the broken system will almost certainly grind on slowly towards as yet unseeable trial dates for the seven men currently facing seemingly interminable pre-trial hearings. Trump can do little about this, although Cully Stimson told the Miami Herald said he had seen nothing “from the candidate Trump that he’s skeptical of commissions; I’m not sure he or his team would have an interest in pausing commissions.”

While not created by Obama, the commissions, which were first dragged out of the history books by Dick Cheney in November 2001, were, ill-advisedly, revived by Obama in his first year in office, as part of what Charlie Savage described as his deliberations about “whether to keep indefinite wartime detentions without trial and to continue using military commission prosecutions — if not at the Guantánamo prison, which he had resolved to close, then at a replacement wartime prison.” As Savage explained, “Told that several dozen detainees could not be tried for any crime but would be particularly risky to release, and that a handful might be prosecutable only under the looser rules governing evidence in a military commission, Mr. Obama decided that the responsible policy was to keep both the tribunals and the indefinite detentions available.”

This lamentable decision meant that, although Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009 that the five men accused of the 9/11 attacks would be tried in federal court in New York, when pressure was exerted on Obama not to pursue a federal court trial, a ready-made but unwanted back-up plan was available instead — and this, of course, is what happened. When numerous high-profile critics made an unholy fuss, Obama dropped the federal court option and, in April 2011, the men were returned to the military commission system, which, throughout Obama’s presidency, has singularly failed to deliver justice to the relatives of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

Keeping Guantánamo open 

President Obama might still be able to close Guantánamo before he leaves office, although it seems ever more unlikely. Here at Close Guantánamo, we will continue to do all we can to encourage him, and we ask you, if you care about the closure of Guantánamo, to join us in the latest stage of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that we launched in January, counting down how many days are left before President Obama leaves office. Last week we launched a new video for the campaign, and for November 30, when Obama will have just 50 days left to close the prison, we’re asking supporters to print off a poster, take a photo with it and send it to us — with a message for President Obama, and even president-elect Donald Trump — if you want.

This week, in “Never mind closing Guantánamo, Trump might make it bigger,” Ben Fox and Deb Riechmann reported for the Associated Press that, at this point, “[i]t would take a bold and unlikely act of defiance, one that would face legal and political challenges, by Obama to shutter the prison before leaving office.” As they noted, Obama “can’t close the detention center because Congress has blocked it, most crucially with a ban on transferring men to facilities in the United States,” and, on Monday, at a news conference, President Obama himself said, “It is true that I have not been able to close the darn thing because of the congressional restrictions that have been placed on us.”

For NPR, Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University constitutional law professor and former Pentagon official, suggested Obama could still close Guantánamo without too much effort. “If President Obama wanted to close Guantánamo tomorrow, he could do it,” she said, explaining that he “should simply ignore the ban Congress has imposed on sending any Guantánamo detainees to the U.S. for detention or trial,” as NPR described it. In Brooks’ words, “If I were President Obama and I wanted to close Guantánamo, I would say, I regard this particular limitation as an unconstitutional infringement on my inherent powers as commander in chief. You know, thank you for your input, Congress, but I’m doin’ it.”

That’s a bold take, but the reality, we suspect, is that any effort to close Guantánamo by executive order would face profound opposition in whichever state he chose to send prisoners to, in order to finally close the prison, and, as the Associated Press suggested in its recent article, Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican who supports keeping Guantánamo open, “said last week that the Defense Department told him months ago that ‘the Obama administration had neither the time nor the money to close Gitmo and move detainees to Fort Leavenworth,’ in Roberts’ home state of Kansas,” the site of the Department of Defense’s only maximum security prison, and the most likely location to which prisoners would be moved.

In his speech on Monday, President Obama further acknowledged the difficulties of unilaterally closing Guantánamo — in terms of his administration’s perceptions of the remaining prisoners, and the obstacles raised by Congress:

There is a group of very dangerous people that we have strong evidence of having been guilty of committing terrorist acts against the United States. But because of the nature of the evidence, in some cases, that evidence being compromised, it’s very difficult to put them before a typical Article III court. And that group has always been the biggest challenge for us. My strong belief and preference is that we would be much better off closing Gitmo, moving them to a different facility that was clearly governed by U.S. jurisdiction. We’d do it a lot cheaper and just as safely.

Congress disagrees with me, and I gather that the President-elect does, as well. We will continue to explore options for doing that. But keep in mind that it’s not just a matter of what I’m willing to do. One of the things you discover about being President is that there are all these rules and norms and laws, and you got to pay attention to them. And the people who work for you are also subject to those rules and norms. And that’s a piece of advice that I gave to the incoming President.

However, despite these caveats, we fully expect President Obama to do all he can to release the 20 men, out of the 60 remaining, who have been approved for release — seven by 2009’s Guantánamo Review Task Force (still held seven years later, disturbingly), and 13 others approved for release in recent years by Periodic Review Boards. An administration official, speaking anonymously, said that “officials expect to complete a ‘substantial number’ of those transfers before Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.”

As for Donald Trump’s intentions, the Miami Herald noted that whether or not he rescinds Obama’s executive order of January 22, 2009 ordering the closure of Guantánamo simply “depends on whether he makes that a priority.”

John Hudak of the Brookings Institution, who, as the Miami Herald noted, has studied executive orders, said that it would simply be “a matter of someone senior in the administration deciding this is a Day One action item for Trump’s desk in the Oval Office soon after he’s sworn in,” adding that it “could be as simple … as drafting a document ‘saying that Guantánamo Bay will remain open and will continue operations there.’” Hudak added, “It could also be as simple as a directive to the Department of Defense: ‘Don’t close it.’”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg also noted that those paying close attention to Guantánamo were “looking for what the White House tells the Pentagon to do about the Periodic Review Board[s] that Obama created with the mandate of reviewing the files of uncleared, uncharged captives.” Rosenberg added that “International Red Cross leadership had been advocating for this for years, especially at the height of a crippling hunger strike [in 2013], to provide the captives not just hope but a Geneva Convention-style format for reviewing their status.”

Torture

On torture, as Charlie Savage reported for the New York Times, repudiating torture was one of “two areas where Mr. Obama broke most cleanly with Bush-era practices” — the other being “the indefinite military detention of Americans and other terrorism suspects arrested on domestic soil.” As Savage noted, “Mr. Obama issued an executive order requiring interrogators to use only techniques approved in the Army Field Manual, and he later signed a bill codifying that rule into statute” — although as some commentators, including the psychologist Jeffrey Kaye, have noted, the Army Field Manual contains an appendix, Appendix M, which “includes numerous abusive techniques, including use of solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation,” that can be authorized by military commanders.

In addition, as Charlie Savage noted in his wide-ranging analysis of President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies, torture was one of several areas in which his administration “ruled out criminal investigations into Bush-era officials … under a sweeping theory that the commander in chief could not be bound by anti-torture laws.”

War

Charlie Savage’s analysis of President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies took as its starting point what he described as Obama’s “have-it-both-ways approach to curbing what he saw as overreaching in the war on terrorism.”

“Over and over,” as Savage described it, “Mr. Obama has imposed limits on his use of such powers but has not closed the door on them — a flexible approach premised on the idea that he and his successors could be trusted to use them prudently.” However, with Donald Trump the unexpected winner in last week’s Presidential Election, he “can now sweep away those limits and open the throttle on policies that Mr. Obama endorsed as lawful and legitimate for sparing use.”

Two areas in which Trump might do this were identified by Savage as “the use of indefinite detention and military tribunals for terrorism suspects” and “targeted killings in drone strikes,” a policy that, it might be said, was President Obama’s main response to the face that Bush’s program of rendition, torture and indefinite detention has been such a disaster.

As Savage explained, “After [Obama’s] use of drones to kill terrorism suspects away from war zones led to mounting concerns over civilian casualties and other matters, he issued a ‘presidential policy guidance’ in May 2013 that set stricter limits. They included a requirement that the target pose a threat to Americans — not just to American interests — and that there would be near certainty of no bystander deaths,” something that it ought to have been obvious was extremely difficult to guarantee, but that, presumably, allowed President Obama to sleep easier at night.

In addition, Savage noted that the Obama administration “also successfully fought in court to establish that judges would not review the legality of such killing operations, even if an American citizen was the target,” as happened, of course, in the contentious case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a skilful anti-US publicist who was regarded as a military threat, and, even more contentiously, in the case of his 16-year old son Abdulrahman, who seems to have been killed because of who his father was and how his father’s death might have affected him rather than because of anything he had done — a disgraceful situation that, I believe, shows how mission creep has dangerously affected the entire drone-killing program.

Charlie Savage also made a point of noting that Donald Trump, “who has said he would ‘bomb the hell out of ISIS,’ beyond what Mr. Obama is doing, and go after civilian relatives of terrorists, prevailing over any military commanders who balked — could scrap the internal limits [on drone strikes] while invoking those precedents to shield his acts from judicial review,” because of the precedents established under Obama.

As Savage also noted, Obama’s decisions on which Bush-era practices to defend in court not only potentially affect the use of torture and drone killings, but also other policy areas — “the detention of Americans and other people arrested on domestic soil as ‘enemy combatants,’” for example, as in the case of Jose Padilla, a US citizen who had been tortured and held incommunicado as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland. As Savage pointed out, the Obama administration “successfully argued that courts should dismiss the litigation without ruling on whether his treatment had been lawful, preventing any clear repudiation of the Bush-era legal theory.”

As Savage explained, because the Obama administration “fought in court to prevent any ruling that the defunct practices had been illegal,” it remains possible that “[t]he absence of a definitive repudiation could make it easier for Trump administration lawyers to revive the policies by invoking the same sweeping theories of executive power that were the basis for them in the Bush years.”

Conclusion

On Obama’s legacy, opinions are divided. Charlie Savage spoke to Bruce Ackerman, a Yale University law professor who he described as “helping with a lawsuit alleging that Mr. Obama is waging an illegal war against the Islamic State because Congress never specifically authorized it,” who suggested that “Mr. Obama had contributed to the growth of executive powers that Mr. Trump would inherit,” including “‘the fundamental institutional legacy’ of relying on executive branch lawyers to produce creative legal opinions clearing the way for preferred policies.”

In contrast, Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago law professor described as “a friend and adviser to Mr. Obama,” defended the president’s approach. He pointed out that, after 2010, “when Republicans took over the House, internal executive branch restraints were the only option because Congress was not going to enact legislation limiting national security powers.” As Savage described it, “He also said that even if Mr. Obama had gotten rid of indefinite detention or military tribunals, Mr. Trump could have brought them back.”

In his own words, Professor Stone said, “Short of legislation that restricts things, there is not much a president could do in these matters to restrain a successor.”

Another commentator was Gregory B. Craig, who was the White House counsel in 2009, and who, more than most, pushed to fulfill the president’s plans to close Guantánamo. Craig said that, in 2009, President Obama “was not thinking about 10 years out, but about 10 days out,” and, as Charlie Savage described it, “he especially did not want to send signals to Republicans that he was a zealot or out for revenge.” Instead, he “was thinking about working with Republicans and developing postpartisan relations on Guantánamo-related national security issues, not about what was going to happen a decade later.”

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which, like Close Guantánamo, has been critical of the Obama administration’s slow approach to closing Guantánamo, said that “it was now clear that Mr. Obama had ‘missed an opportunity’ to fundamentally reject the sort of policies that the Bush administration put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

As he put it, “Obama’s failure to rein in George Bush’s national security policies hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon. The president’s failure to understand that these powers could not be entrusted in the hands of any president, not even his, have now put us in a position where they are in the hands of Donald Trump.”

And that, of course, should worry us all.

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

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

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

Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Play Three London Gigs in New Cross, Deptford and Brockley on Nov. 27, Dec. 10 and 17

Following the recent release of our new song, ‘Close Guantánamo,’ my band The Four Fathers have three gigs forthcoming in London in the coming weeks, and if you’re around we’d love to see you.

The song was featured in a video (on YouTube and Facebook) for the Close Guantánamo campaign, launched last week, just after Donald Trump’s unfortunate election victory, which, sadly, makes it seems less, rather than more likely that Guantánamo will be closed unless, before he leaves office in January, President Obama can fulfill the promise to close the prison that he first made on his second day in office.

As the last verse of the song states:

Obama promised to close the prison for good

On his second day in office

But Republicans resisted his plans

And he lacked the political will to do it

But as the years drag on and on

And the men still held get older and iller

Endless imprisonment without charge or trial

Is what it always was — a form of torture

On Sunday November 27 at 7.45pm, we’re playing at the New Cross Inn, 323 New Cross Road, SE14 6AS, supporting Jake & the Jellyfish, a punk-folk band (with a touch of ska) from Leeds, who have “toured extensively in a beat up old post office van bringing an energetic atmosphere and drunken sing alongs to venues across the UK and mainland Europe.” They’re on at 10.15, preceded by “playful” singer-songwriter Gecko at 9.15 and the rootsy, rock and ska-influenced Dem Bones at 8.30. Preceding us are Sweater Songs at 5.30, The Lone Groover at 6.15 and Asher Baker at 7pm — all for just a fiver. The Facebook page is here.

As well as playing ‘Close Guantánamo,’ we also intend to play other songs from our forthcoming second album — ‘Riot’ and ‘London’, about the need to stem the greed that is eating away at our society, ‘Equal Rights and Justice for All’, about the importance of habeas corpus, and ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, asking how much black lives, Muslim lives and foreign lives are worth to the warmongers of the western powers (and the US police). We’ll also play live favourites ‘Fighting Injustice’ and ‘Tory Bullshit Blues,’ so we hope you can join us.

On Saturday December 10, from 7pm, we’re playing at Vinyl, 4 Tanners Hill, Deptford, London SE8 4PH, supported by teenage beatboxer and spoken word performer, The Wiz-RD. Entry is free. December 10 is Human Rights Day, celebrating the UN’s ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, so we’re planning first to jam on the theme of the UDHR at 7.30 (feel free to come and join in!), followed by The Wiz-RD at 8pm, and The Four Fathers at 8.30. We’ll play a similar set to the New Cross Inn, but with a few love songs also thrown in for good measure. An event page will be along soon, but in the meantime check out Vinyl here. This will be our fourth appearance at this very cool record shop — see here, here, here and here for our earlier shows.

On Saturday December 17, we’re playing at the Brockley Christmas Market, on Coulgate Street by Brockley Station, London SE4. The market, organised by Brockley Cross Action Group, and with dozens of stalls selling food, drink and arts and crafts, runs from 12-6, although times for the various performers have not yet been established, but it’s worth coming along for the afternoon. Entry to the whole event, of course, is free. This will be third time we’ve played at the Christmas Market — check out our earlier appearances here, here and here — and we’ll be playing three or four songs.

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

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

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

Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers Release New Online Single, Close Guantánamo, Prior to Release of Second Album

[image error]Last week, the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded with the US attorney Tom Wilner in January 2012 released a new promotional video for the Countdown to Close Guantánamo. This is an initiative launched at the start of the year to count down President Obama’s last year in office, in an effort to encourage him to fulfill the promise to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay that he made on his second day in office, a mission suddenly made all the more important last week, after Donald Trump won the Presidential Election, to the shock of the Democratic Party and of decent people everywhere. Today, President Obama has just 63 days left to get Guantánamo closed. To encourage him to fulfill his promise, please print off a “50 days to go” poster for November 30, take a photo with it, and send it to the Close Guantánamo campaign, with, if you like, a message for President Obama, and/or advice for Donald Trump.

The video (also on Facebook) featured photos of celebrities and concerned citizens across the US and around the world holding up posters reminding President Obama how many days he had left to close Guantánamo, and also featured “Close Guantánamo,” a song I wrote for my band The Four Fathers, which is available below, via our Bandcamp page, to listen to, and, if you wish to support the band, to buy as a download — for just £1 ($1.25). Drummer Brendan Horstead also deserves thanks for making the campaign video — and the cover of the single.

Close Guantanamo by The Four Fathers

“Close Guantánamo” is the first release from The Four Fathers’ forthcoming second album, which will be released in 2017, featuring eight new songs of mine — ‘Riot’, and ‘London’, about the dangerous and unacceptable greed at the heart of our society, ‘Equal Rights and Justice for All’, about the importance of habeas corpus, three songs that could all, in various ways, be described as love songs (‘Dreamers’, ‘River Run Dry’ and ‘Tell Me Baby’), ‘Close Guantánamo’, and ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, my newest song, which we are recording this Saturday, and which focuses on how the western leaders assess the value of — predominantly — white lives against others, discussed in the song via the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, the current refugee crisis, which is unprecedented in its scale in most of our lives, and the relentless epidemic of young black men murdered by the US police, and the Black Lives Matter movement that has arisen in response to this terrible and unacceptable situation.

The album also features two songs by guitarist Richard Clare — ’She’s Back’, about Pussy Riot, and ‘When He Is Sane’, about mental health issues).

Do get in touch if you want to be kept informed of our releases and of our gigs — and please feel free to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter. Also get in touch if you want us to play a gig — at a venue, a party, a festival, a community festival or a political protest — and please note that we’re also interested in hearing from a record label interested in making our music available to a wider audience, and a dub producer interested in remixing our roots reggae songs.

Note: Please also feel free to check out our first album, ‘Love and War’, available on CD or as a download, and the ‘Fighting Injustice’ EP we released in July: a UK version featuring remixes of live favourites ‘Fighting Injustice’ and ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’ and our best-known song, ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, written for the — successful — campaign to free the last British resident in Guantánamo, and a US version in which ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’ was reworked as ‘Neo-Liberal Bullshit Blues’, changing the mentions of Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage to Ronald Reagan and — topically — Donald Trump.

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.

Podcast: Andy Worthington Discusses Closing Guantánamo and the Rightward Drift of Politics in the US and the UK with Kevin Gosztola for Shadowproof

Last Thursday, just two days after the US Presidential Election, I was delighted to speak to Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof (formerly FireDogLake) for his “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast series. The show was made available on the site on Sunday, but when it was posted the focus was on Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, who was interviewed in the first half-hour of the one-hour show, along with a partial transcript of the interview.

And so, yesterday, Kevin posted an article focusing on my interview with him, including a transcript of much of our interview. The interview is available here, as an MP3, beginning 30 minutes in, and I hope you have time to listen to it and to share it if you find it useful.

Kevin had picked up on a press release I sent him about the video for the Close Guantánamo campaign that I launched last Thursday, in the hope of maintaining pressure on President Obama to do all in his power to close Guantánamo before he leaves office in January. The video is also on Facebook, and anyone wanting to get involved is urged to print off a poster to remind President Obama that, on November 30, he will have just 50 days left to close the prison, to take a photo with it, and to send it to us, to add to the more than 500 photos that have been sent in by celebrities and concerned citizens across the US and around the world since the Countdown to Close Guantánamo was launched in January.

The video, via YouTube, is posted below:

The video also features my band The Four Fathers performing “Close Guantánamo,” a new song I wrote for the campaign, which is available to listen to in its entirety — and to buy as a download — below:

Close Guantanamo by The Four Fathers

Kevin and I also, of course, spoke about Donald Trump, whose election victory last week promises to bring chaos to the United States, in almost every aspect of life. On Guantánamo, of course, there are specific worries because of what Trump said on the campaign trail about keeping it open, sending Americans there to be prosecuted and bringing back torture, but, as I explained to Kevin, he is likely to face serious resistance to all of these plans should he try to implement them, although that may not be the obstacle it should be if he is obsessed enough, or if he gathers around him some of the most far right-leaning and unpleasant members of Congress he can find — and on all of the above the best that can be said yet is that we aren’t exactly sure where we’re heading, but that there’s no reason for us not to worry. As Zoe Williams of the Guardian noted in an excellent article yesterday, The dangerous fantasy behind Trump’s normalisation:

[T]his situation is not normal … When women are lining up for long-term contraception in a mournful, pragmatic farewell to their reproductive autonomy; when the chief strategist is accused of enabling racism and antisemitism; when the vice-president-elect signed legislation requiring women to hold and pay for funerals for miscarried foetuses; when the president-elect has vowed to deport three million immigrants; when he has at least 12 allegations of sexual misconduct outstanding against him; when he has announced a cabinet that includes his own three children: this looks nothing like a democracy. It looks nothing like reconciliation. It looks despotic, inflammatory, extreme and violent: it looks, in short, exactly as Trump promised it would look, as he campaigned on a pledge to imprison his opponent. His adversaries respond that he probably doesn’t mean what he says, a position for which there is precisely no evidence. Their desire to normalise has put them in the fantastical state of seeing the forthcoming presidency as they wish it, and not as it plainly is.

Kevin also asked me to discuss the case of Abu Zubaydah, the so-called “high-value detainee” for whom the Bush administration’s torture program was developed, who recently had his ongoing imprisonment approved by a Periodic Review Board, and the discussion of the PRBs also made me wonder whether they will survive into Trump’s administration.

As Kevin also noted in his introduction, “Later in the interview, we go on a bit of a tangent and spend a few minutes addressing the rise of far-right elements in the United States and the United Kingdom, particularly because Worthington is based in the U.K.”

Below is a partial transcript of the interview:

Kevin Gosztola: What do you plan to do during final days of President Obama’s presidency to push for the closure of Guantánamo, especially now that Donald Trump is president and open to torture and possibly even bringing more prisoners to Guantánamo?

Andy Worthington: I’ve been working on the Guantánamo issue for over ten years, and it’s always been my intention to try and get it closed. So, back in January 2012, when it was the tenth anniversary of the opening of the prison, I set up a campaign and website called “Close Guantánamo” with the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008.

What we did this year, 2016, is we set up a Countdown to Close Guantánamo. So we counted down the last year of the presidency, and every 50 days we had these posters that [supporters] could print off that they could stand with, they could send in to us, and we put them on the website and on social media. We’ve had over 500 celebrities and people across the U.S. and around the world sending in photos every 50 days.

Of course, we’re now into the very last ten weeks of Obama’s presidency so what I am trying to do is just to keep the pressure on as we’ve been doing all year, just to try and keep President Obama aware that people are watching. Obviously, he doesn’t need any telling. After the election result, it’s more urgent than ever. If he really does want to close the prison, he needs to do everything that he can in his power to do it before he leaves office because, as you say, Donald Trump has said on the campaign trail that he wants to keep it open. He wants to send Americans there to be prosecuted. He wants to reintroduce torture.

Now, we also know that Donald Trump, to be generous, is a colossal windbag, and that it’s not necessarily true that the things he says he means. But he is now the president. The Republican Party that he nominally is the president of is in control of the Senate and the House, and there are some very unpleasant characters in the Republican Party, who love Guantánamo and who would love to reinstitute torture.

I think it’s fair enough at this point for people to be genuinely worried that any progress that has been made toward the closure of Guantánamo is going to hit a very sticky patch with the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Kevin Gosztola: I get the real sense that we shouldn’t take any chances here, that perhaps the human rights community could get to Donald Trump and convince him that Guantánamo needs to be closed. We already see figures surrounding him like Rudy Giuliani and also, a quite goonish character, Tom Cotton, who is a senator, and former veteran, who has incredible bloodlust.

Andy Worthington: He’s a dreadful individual. It’s so out of control that kind of massive enthusiasm for Guantánamo and the hysteria and the exaggeration about the people who were held there. Any rational analysis of Guantánamo has always accepted there are a handful of significant people there, but the majority of people there never were. It’s awful the things he’s been saying.

But you know, I’m really worried about the kind of people we’re hearing that are gathering around Donald Trump. I thought we’d seen the last of Rudy Giuliani and people like that. I’m hearing people mention John Bolton. Surely not. Surely, we’re not going to put up with him again. But who knows?

Kevin Gosztola: The neoconservatives, as they call them, ran away from Donald Trump, but it seems they may be coming back, as it’s their only way to have access to power. So let’s talk about the critical issue of the human beings who still remain captive at Guantánamo. I know you’ve done some recent work on Abu Zubaydah. Just so people can have a case within our interview to think about, and to think about the critical importance of closing Guantánamo and what’s at stake, talk about how he was denied release and what we know about how he was treated.

Andy Worthington: I suppose I should really start out by breaking down who is at Guantánamo, these 60 men. Twenty of them have been approved for release by two review boards, one back in 2009. There are still a handful of men approved for release then, who haven’t actually been freed. The rest of them were approved by a review board that’s been taking place over the last few years, the Periodic Review Board, which is like a parole board. People have to demonstrate they show contrition for what they did, and they want to have constructive peaceful lives if they’re released.

That process has been involving, at Guantánamo, who[ever] isn’t already approved for release or facing trial. And just ten men are facing trials. So, at present, of those people held, there are 30 men, who have had these reviews, that have said, on balance, we’ve reviewed their cases and we’re still going to carry on holding them but we’re not putting them on trial.

Abu Zubaydah is one of those people. He was the person that the Bush administration’s CIA torture program was created for. He was the first victim of that. He was someone who was outrageously hyped up by the Bush administration as somebody close to Osama bin Laden, involved in 9/11 attacks. Number three in al-Qaida was what they were saying at the beginning, even though there were people in the intelligence community who knew from the beginning that this simply was not true about him.

But they tortured him abominably, waterboarded him on 83 occasions, destroyed him in some ways. He has fits, is in a pretty terrible way. All of this was for somebody that was not who they said he was. The U.S. government eventually backed down and said they didn’t think he knew about the 9/11 attacks. He wasn’t a member of al-Qaida. They’re still trying to suggest that he was part of some kind of militia that would enable them to say he was an enemy of the United States.

The thing about Zubaydah is, obviously, as with everybody held, the terrible things that happened should not have happened. Skilled interrogators would have been able to sit down with these guys without laying a finger on them and get information from them. Then we would have been able to have trials that would have been acceptable. But this is a kind of revisionism of history that didn’t happen. Terrible things happened instead.

This man was a facilitator for an independent training camp that had some involvement in military training and some people that were trained there it seems went away and became involved in plots. So it’s not that there isn’t a case against him on some level, but whether he actually constituted an enemy of the United States, I couldn’t really say.

But there he is in Guantánamo, and like all these men who, to some degrees, were mistreated, and who may or may not have done things in some way against the United States, he’s had this review process, and they’ve said, well, no, we’re not going to approve him for release. He’s now eligible for further reviews, as are all the other men who had their ongoing imprisonment upheld.

Now, these reviews were initiated several years ago by an executive order that President Obama issued. They involve the Defense Department, the intelligence agencies, all the major government departments. So it’s an ongoing process unless, of course, a new government decided they were not interested in them, and we don’t know where President-To-Be Donald Trump stands on the Periodic Review Boards or where the people gathering around him stand on them. But I think it would be fair to say there will be a certain amount of hostility toward them. What I don’t know is how much within these departments of the kind of unchanging people who do the work, regardless of who the government is, how much there will be feedback within these various departments and agencies about what they think is the usefulness or not of reviewing people.

I think it’s fair to say that we’re fortunate — those of us who want to see Guantánamo closed — that President Obama has done so much in recent years to reduce the population.

Kevin Gosztola: There’s been a lot of promising developments, especially in the last year, but at the same time, you see a real failure because now, with the election of Donald Trump, the Obama administration has left the door open for the military to keep using it as a facility. Right now, as I understand it, some of the camps are being transformed into mental health or hospital facilities. Still, easily, you could put the brakes on that. Donald Trump could use that again for what we already have read about in your reporting and other books.

Andy Worthington: I have to say, although the worst case scenario could happen in anything we think of, when we look at Donald Trump and these figures within the Republican Party who want power and influence, there are very strong arguments I suspect that will be made by career bureaucrats, by lawyers, and certainly of course by NGOs. I would not expect silence from the liberal media. I would think there would be a lot of voices discussing very loudly how inappropriate it would be, for example, to send anyone new to Guantánamo.

President Obama, to his credit, he always treated it as a legacy issue. He never sent anybody new there. Every time that some terrorist suspect was apprehended, pretty much wherever it was, these Republicans, the kind of people now jockeying for power, would have been saying send this person to Guantánamo. Give him the works. Torture them. All of this stuff, ridiculous, and he never did.

This isn’t just some kind of humanitarianism that can be easily dismissed. The truth is if you apprehend a terrorism suspect and want to give them a trial then do it in federal court. Because federal courts have a long and capable history of doing it. What everybody needs to remember and what even the great cheerleaders for Guantánamo actually know when you put them on the spot is that when Guantánamo was set up there were still federal court trials taking place successfully for people accused of terrorism. The same happened throughout the Obama administration.

Really, when you step back and look at it and strip away the hysteria, Guantánamo is an aberration. It’s a broken place that doesn’t work. It would be very hard to make a case. We’re not thankfully in the middle of a national emergency like we were in the wake of 9/11.

There is no clear and present danger to the nation that would justify people saying, I know what the rules are that normally reply, but the thing that’s happening to us is so awful that we must throw away all those ways of behaving and do this terrible thing. There isn’t actually any pressure for doing that that is justifiable. I think that it would be difficult for them to justify it, and there would be a lot of resistance institutionally. But you know, who am I to know? If people take over with an aggression and craziness, it’s possible they can steamroll everything before them.

Kevin Gosztola: You also are a singer, and you have a band. I wanted to have you share the work you’ve been doing. It’s called The Four Fathers. You recorded a song particularly for the campaign to close Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington: I’ve kind of revisited something I’ve done before, which is to sing about something of importance to me. You actually made a “Protest Song of The Week” awhile back, the song I wrote for Shaker Aamer, who was the last British resident in Guantánamo, and who I was campaigning to release. I came up with another song fairly recently about Guantánamo.

So here’s this sunny, bouncy tune, which I think is probably appropriate for what this corner of the Caribbean should be, and then I basically just sang about what’s happened at Guantánamo since the prison was set up. I kind of distilled into verse what I’ve always understood about it — how the Bush administration chose it to be beyond the law, said they could torture and abuse people, and, when they tortured and abused people and they told lies, they had the nerve to then present these lies that people told under torture and abuse as though they were the truth.

And then the last verse of the song, which I’ve used in the campaign video for the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, is about President Obama’s struggles to close Guantánamo and what seems to be his failure to be able to do so. I hope people will like the song. I think it tells the story well and in a good manner. It would be lovely if you could play it to your listeners.

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.

Leaked Memo Reveals Tories Have No Clue How to Implement Brexit

Please support my work as a freelance investigative journalist.

 

Is anyone really surprised that, in a leaked memo, a consultant from the global financial services company Deloitte, working for the Cabinet Office, has concluded that the Tory government is in disarray when it comes to implementing Brexit?

The consultant highlighted that “no common strategy has emerged” between government departments regarding how to implement Brexit, despite what the Guardian, reporting on the memo, which was leaked to the Times, described as “extended debate among the permanent secretaries who head Whitehall departments.” The Guardian and also explained that the various government departments are working on “well over 500 projects, which are beyond the capacity and capability of Government to execute quickly,” adding that the government may need to hire an extra 30,000 civil servants to deal with the additional work.

The consultant added:

One Department estimates that it needs a 40% increase in staff to cope with its Brexit projects. In other words, every Department has developed a “bottom up” plan of what the impact of Brexit could be — and its plan to cope with the “worst case”. Although necessary, this falls considerably short of having a “Government plan for Brexit” because it has no prioritisation and no link to the overall negotiation strategy.

The consultant also noted that there is a fundamental split between, on one side, the three Brexit ministers — David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, putting their enthusiasm for Brexit above the economy — and on the other the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and business secretary Greg Clark, who appear to be demonstrating an unfashionable desire to protect the economy, and that Theresa May is developing a reputation as a control freak; as the consultant described it, she “is rapidly acquiring the reputation of drawing in decisions and details to settle matters herself — which is unlikely to be sustainable.”

The consultant also mentioned Nissan, noting that, as a result of the deal that the Japanese carmaker has secured, in which, last month, as the Guardian described it, the company “announced that two new car models would be built in Sunderland, safeguarding 7,000 jobs, after receiving “support and assurances” from the government about the UK’s future outside the EU, “[o]ther major players can be expected to, similar to Nissan, point a gun at the Government’s head.”

As well as concluding that “there will be no clear economic-Brexit strategy any time soon because it is being developed on a case-by-case basis as specific decisions are forced on Government,” the consultant also explained that “the Government’s priority remains its political survival, not the economy” — something I think many of us knew, but will be alarmed to see spelled out so clearly.

No wonder the government responded with what the Daily Telegraph described as an “excoriating attack on Deloitte” in which Theresa May’s spokeswoman described it as “a firm touting for business aided by the media” — a rather desperate claim, it seems to me, considering that it actually appears to be rather difficult to argue with the consultant’s conclusions.

Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that the leaked memo showed a “shambles at the heart of government” over the direction of Brexit. He added, “It’s time for the Prime Minister to stop being led astray by her warring cabinet. Otherwise her government is heading for the worst possible outcome: a reckless, destructive Brexit that will do untold damage to British jobs and the economy.”

Brexit criticism by the Institute for Government

In related news, the Belfast Telegraph reported how the Institute for Government, which is publishing a report on Brexit next month, has also just revealed some of its fears and criticisms:

The Institute for Government, which has been talking to key figures inside and outside Whitehall ahead of a report next month, said it had been told that Brexit represented an “existential threat” to the operation of departments whose budgets and staffing have been sharply reduced in recent years.

A “secretive approach” at the top of Theresa May’s administration was causing “significant uncertainty” for Whitehall departments and preventing civil servants from planning far enough ahead. To some outsiders, the process appears “chaotic and dysfunctional”, said the thinktank, which warned the Prime Minister: “Silence is not a strategy”.

Although a Deloitte spokesman conceded that the consultant’s memo “was a note intended primarily for internal audiences,” Joe Owen of the Institute for Government said that, “while he may not recognise all of the accountancy firm’s figures, some of its claims did chime with the thinktank’s findings,” as the Belfast Telegraph described it.

In an article on the IFG’s website, he stated:

Whitehall has most of the technical skills required to deliver Brexit … What Whitehall does not have is the capacity to deliver Brexit on top of everything else to which it is already committed. The work required to deliver Brexit has been described to us as an existential threat to how some departments operate. Managing this whilst continuing to deliver existing priorities with the smallest Civil Service in decades is unsustainable.

He added:

Departments like Defra are in the middle of a transformation programme that was ambitious before Brexit came along – achieving a 25% cut to resource budgets over the next five years must now be considered undeliverable.

There are departments upon which Brexit will have a huge impact. We hope the Autumn Statement will show the commitments the Government intends to keep, and what it will drop, so resources can be focused on the Brexit task.

Owen added, “There is a huge amount of work already underway, in both DExEU and the rest of Whitehall, but the lack of publicly visible direction and secretive approach at the top means much of it is too reactive.” He also stated, “Those leading Brexit in departments know little more than the general public — an Article 50 trigger some time by March 2017 and a two-year negotiating window. There is no understanding of what the process of reaching a negotiating position looks like or even the criteria required to get there, even on specific issues, which make departmental planning of activity and analysis very difficult.”

On business, Owen noted that “Brexit has caused significant uncertainty for businesses and departments, and in the absence of certainty there is a need for confidence and clarity about the process. The current political approach and the absence of a clear overarching plan for exiting the EU means there is neither.”

In conclusion, Owen echoed the Deloitte consultant’s conclusion that “the Government’s priority remains its political survival, not the economy,” noting that, for Theresa May, “with a slim majority and a need to satisfy ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’ in her own party (as well as across the country), the more [she] reveals the more difficult her job of party political management becomes.”

However, he added, “silence is not a strategy. Failure to reveal the Government’s plan to reach a negotiating position is eroding confidence among business and investors, and encouraging unhelpful speculation about what the final destination might be.”

Below, via Sky News, is the full text of the Deloitte consultant’s memo.

Brexit memo, written on November 7 by a consultant from Deloitte working for the Cabinet Office

The Political Domain

The Prime Minister’s over-riding objective has been to keep her party from repeating its history of splitting four times in the past 200 years over global trade – each time being out of power for 15-30 years. The public stance of Government is orientated primarily to its own supporters, with industry in particular being on the radarscreen — yet.

The Government’s appeal to the Supreme Court has to be seen in this light — it is about avoiding any more public debate than necessary because it will expose splits within the predominantly “remain” Conservative MPs and intensify the pressure from predominantly “leave” constituency parties. A General Election is only a last resort for three reasons — boundary changes (that favour the Conservatives) will not be effective until 2019; the Fixed Term Parliaments Act obstructs Prime Ministerial freedom to call an election at will; and it may suit major decision makers to slowly shift away from more difficult aspects of Brexit on the grounds that Parliament has forced them to do so.

The divisions within the Cabinet are between the three Brexiteers on one side and Philip Hammond/Greg Clark on the other side. The Prime Minister is rapidly acquiring the reputation of drawing in decisions and details to settle matters herself — which is unlikely to be sustainable. Overall, it appears best to judge who is winning the debate by assuming that the noisiest individuals have lost the intra-Government debate and are stirring up external supporters.

The Supreme Court appears likely to delay its ruling until early January and, assuming it sustains the High Court, a short enabling bill will then be submitted to Parliament, permitting the Government to invoke Article 50 in March as planned. The Government will probably be able to face down wrecking amendments, but the debate in Parliament will certainly shift expectations of what will be achieved/sellable in Brexit negotiations. Remain supporters can be expected to reserve their fire until winners and losers emerge from negotiation and the political atmosphere allows more sophisticated assessment of choices.

The Government Domain

Individual Departments have been busily developing their projects to implement Brexit, resulting in well over 500 projects, which are beyond the capacity and capability of Government to execute quickly. One Department estimates that it needs a 40% increase in staff to cope with its Brexit projects. In other words, every Department has developed a “bottom up” plan of what the impact of Brexit could be — and its plan to cope with the “worst case”. Although necessary, this falls considerably short of having a “Government plan for Brexit” because it has no prioritisation and no link to the overall negotiation strategy.

However, it may be six months before there is a view on priorities/negotiation strategy as the political situation in the UK and the EU evolves. Despite extended debate among Permanent Secretaries, no common strategy has emerged, in part because the potential scope and negotiating positions have to be curtailed before realistic planning can happen, in part because of the divisions within the Cabinet. It is likely that the senior ranks in the Civil Service will feel compelled to present potential high level plan(s) to avoid further drift.

Departments are struggling to come up to speed on the potential Brexit effects on industry. This is due to starting from a relatively low base of insight and also due to fragmentation – Treasury “owning” financial services, DH-BEIS both covering life sciences, DCMS for telecoms, BEIS most other industries, DIT building parallel capability focused on trade etc.

Capability-building is making slow progress, partly through deliberate control by the Cabinet Office and partly from Treasury’s opening negotiating position that Departments will meet Brexit costs from existing settlements — although no one is treating that position as sustainable. Expectations of increased headcount are in the 10-30,000 range. Initiatives to build capability are getting off the ground — the Diplomatic Academy is providing trade training programmes, Cabinet Office is discussing system-wide capability programmes.

The Autumn Statement on 23rd November is expected to provide some headlines in terms of infrastructure investment, making the UK fit for growth and the inclusive economy. It will not provide resources for the Civil Service to grow its Brexit capacity and capability. In fact, we are more likely to see a further squeeze on Departmental operating costs to compensate for new spending.

The Industry Domain

Government expects lobbying on three levels to continue:

1. Company-specific decisions — the Nissan investment decision is a prime example. These are viewed as major opportunities/threats for Government. Other major players can be expected to, similar to Nissan, point a gun at the Government’s head.

2. Industry insights — the major challenge for industry and Government are “the unknown unknowns” where industry has to educate Government fast on the most important negotiating issues — e.g., they think they know about talent, but know they know little about data.

3. Overall business concerns — the province of CBI and largely dealt with as a PR issue.

Industry has two unpleasant realisations — first, that the Government’s priority remains its political survival, not the economy[;] second, that there will be no clear economic-Brexit strategy any time soon because it is being developed on a case-by-case basis as specific decisions are forced on Government.

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

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

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

Andy Worthington Joins Panel at Homeless Film Festival’s 50th Anniversary Screening of Ken Loach’s ‘Cathy Come Home’, LCC, Fri. Nov. 18

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I’m delighted to have been added, as a commentator on Britain’s housing crisis, to a panel discussion taking place after a screening this Friday, November 18, of ‘Cathy Come Home’ at London College of Communication, at the Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB. The screening marks the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of this hugely important drama about homelessness, written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Ken Loach, and first broadcast on November 16, 1966, in the BBC’s series, ‘The Wednesday Play,’ which aired between 1964 and 1970, tackling contemporary social issues that might not otherwise have reached a wide audience. Also screening is a short film about London’s homelessness crisis by photographer Don McCullin. Thanks to Polly Nash for adding me to the panel.

The event is part of the Homeless Film Festival, and it runs from 6.30-9pm in Lecture Theatre B at the LCC. Also on the panel is a very good friend of mine, Val Stevenson, Chair of The Pavement, the magazine for homeless people, and Michael Chandler, Programme Director of Cardboard Citizens who make life changing theatre with and for homeless people. The page for the event is here. Please note that it is free, but booking is required.

Writing about the importance of ‘Cathy Come Home’ this summer, and the impact of homelessness and housing stress on people’s mental health, journalist and author Clare Allan, in an article for the Guardian, wrote how “this drama about a young mother caught in an impossible, inhuman system, which leaves her homeless, destroys her marriage and ultimately robs her of her children, led to public outrage, a surge in donations to the charity Shelter and the founding of the charity Crisis the following year.”

She added, “I wasn’t born when the film was first shown, yet the sense of hopelessness it conveys, the spectre of the individual smashed repeatedly against the rocks of a rigid, impersonal system is shockingly familiar. Familiar, too, is the misattribution of blame to the individual, rather than acknowledging the wider causes of their situation. Unscrupulous landlords, family breakdown, a negligent employer, and, above all, a dearth of affordable housing are the true cause of Cathy’s predicament and yet she is told again and again to ‘sort herself out’, as though all that is lacking is an adequate exertion of will.”

Since the Tories got back into power in 2010, the demonisation of the most vulnerable members of society — those that a decent, caring society would recognise the need to look after — has been profoundly shameful and seemingly unstoppable. The unemployed, who are without jobs mostly through no fault of their own, have been portrayed as lazy, as shirkers and scroungers, to facilitate a clampdown on the meagre benefits paid out to the unemployed (see my articles here), and people with mental and/or physical disabilities that make it impossible for them to work, or that would pretty much guarantee that they would never be chosen over someone without disabilities, have been portrayed as lying about their disabilities, and forced to go through assessments cynically designed to find them fit for work, which have led to numerous suicides.

As a result of both of these cannibalistic government assaults on the people they are supposed to represent, homelessness is increasing, although the major contributor is the deeply shocking and seemingly endless housing bubble that has become the main driver of the British economy over the last 18 years. The bubble is partly explained as the result of an under-investment in new housing since the days of Margaret Thatcher, who started the rot with the sell-off of council housing, but banned councils from building any new social housing. However, the main driver is greed: the greed of individuals, of banks, of the government, and of the numerous levels of leeches — lawyers, estate agents and various go-betweens — that sustain the housing market.

In a bubble artificially sustained (despite the crash of the economy in 2008 as a result of the unfettered greed of bankers), even well-paid professionals cannot get on the housing ladder in London and the south east, and young people are having to leave the capital because they cannot afford rents that are unregulated, and that are raised at a whim by unscrupulous landlords. It can now cost a couple £15,000 or £20,000 a year to rent somewhere to live, but while those with guaranteed work and decent pay can perhaps rebuild their lives elsewhere, others are, understandably, falling off the ladder completely.

As I wrote after attending a protest against homelessness in April 2015, just before the last General Election:

Homelessness has increased by 55% since the Tory-led coalition government came to power, and, of course, has increased specifically because of the introduction of certain disgraceful policies — the benefit cap, which attempted to portray those receiving benefits as the problem, when the real problem is greedy landlords; and the bedroom tax, whereby a cabinet of millionaires, with more rooms than they can count, passed legislation forcing people on benefits living in social housing who are deemed to have a “spare room” to downsize, even though there are few smaller properties to move to, and many people, treated as worthless “units” by the government and kicked out of their homes, have had to be rehoused in the private sector, thereby increasing the overall housing benefit bill.

An article in the Guardian last June stated that, in 2013, “112,070 people declared themselves homeless in England — a 26% increase in four years. At the same time, the number of people sleeping rough in London grew by 75% to a staggering 6,437.” In addition, as the Streets of London website notes, there are also “around 400,000 ‘hidden homeless’ in the UK, living out of sight in hostels, B&Bs, ‘sofa-surfing’ or squatting.”

At that protest, I also met John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlingdon (and not, at the time, the Shadow Chancellor), who I described, accurately, as “one of Parliament’s great fighters against all forms of injustice.” I added, “John and I know each other through working to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, but at the March for the Homeless we spoke mainly about London’s housing woes. He showed me a depressing photo of a one-room, damp-infested shed rented to a family for £400 a month in his constituency that he had recently visited, and lamented that Gordon Brown never understood the importance of social housing, apparently trusting the private sector to provide for people’s needs — something that, of course, was a fundamentally groundless hope.”

Since the Tories got back into power in May 2015 — without even the pitiful levels of restraint provided by the Lib Dems — the situation has continued to get worse. Housing continues to be a bubble tended assiduously by the Tories that is unrelated to ordinary people’s lives, with the government, housing developers, builders and the banks functioning as pimps for speculators and criminals from all around the world, maintaining a high-end, “luxury” housing bubble that guarantees eye-wateringly huge profits to the few, while fundamentally being a betrayal of the majority of the British people.

The latest horror from the government is an increase to the overall benefit cap first introduced by George Osborne, which, experts are warning, could lead to at least 250,000 children being made homeless. As I explained in an analysis of this latest wretched development (which was initiated by Osborne before he lost his job after the EU referendum debacle, but has not been stopped by the dismal Theresa May):

The benefit cap was introduced in April 2013, capping at £26,000 the total amount that any family can receive in benefits, which might have sounded fair to anyone who wasn’t really paying attention. A little thought, however, would reveal that the majority of that money went not to the claimant, but to their landlord.

In July 2015, Osborne’s wheeze, which had played well with tabloid-reading British citizens, encouraged by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Sun to regard welfare claimants as vermin, was further reinforced, with a reduction in the welfare cap from £26,000 to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere, beginning yesterday, November 7.

In the Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty explained how, from last Monday, “88,000 families across Britain will have their housing benefit slashed. They will no longer have the cash to pay their rent. Among all those whose lives will be turned upside down will be a quarter of a million children. That’s enough kids to fill 350 primary schools, all facing homelessness.”

50 years on from ‘Cathy Come Home’, it is shameful that we should need to watch it not as a historical document, but as a reminder of how, fundamentally, the progress made after its broadcast has been rolled back from the time of Margaret Thatcher onwards, and it is also worth reflecting on how the sense of outrage prompted by its broadcast is almost impossible to imagine nowadays.

Encouraged by a cynical media, by flint-hearted politicians and by the atomising effects of technology (encouraging people to be self-obsessed, and, often, to have a bloated and groundless sense of entitlement and a simultaneous sense of being hard done by), increasing numbers of our fellow citizens are showing no concern whatsoever for those less fortunate than themselves, whether their fellow citizens for whom the safety net of the welfare state has unravelled, or refugees fleeing death and destruction, who, like everyone whose lives fall apart through no fault of their own, are portrayed as scroungers, and as worthless.

In conclusion, I’d like to reflect on the failures of the broadcast media to recognise the importance of dramas like ‘Cathy Come Home.’ As Ken Loach has stated recently, in discussions prompted by the success (in cinemas) of his latest film, ‘I, Daniel Blake,’ which confronts the heartbreaking realities of the Tories’ austerity programme, in today’s environment ‘Cathy Come Home’ would not have been made. As he put it, “Those ideas would be killed before they got anywhere near the screen.”

If you’re in London this Friday, I hope to see you at the screening. If you can’t make it, please be aware that all Ken Loach’s films, including ‘Cathy Come Home,’ are available to rent on his YouTube channel, where some of his TV dramas are also available for free.

Note: For further information about Ken Loach, please check out this recent Guardian interview, ‘If you’re not angry, what kind of person are you?’

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

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

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

Andy Worthington Speaks About “Demonising ‘the Other’” at the Festival of Ideas for Change in Brockley, London SE4, Sun. Nov. 20

This coming Sunday, November 20, I’ll be talking about “Demonising the ‘Other’: Tackling the rise of racism and xenophobia” at a fascinating one-day festival, the Festival of Ideas for Change, organised by the Brockley Society and the St. John’s Society. The festival is taking place in the Mural Hall at Prendergast Hilly Fields College in Brockley, London SE4 (the address is Adelaide Avenue, SE4 1LE, but the Mural Hall is actually in the main building at the top of Hilly Fields). Entrance is free, but you do need to book here, via TicketSource.

I’m one of 17 speakers during the day, and we’ll each be speaking for ten minutes in four different sessions — ‘Participation and democracy’ at 10.30am, ‘A fairer world’ at 12 noon, ‘An inclusive society’ at 2pm (at which I’ll be speaking), and ‘Building a new economy’ at 3.30pm, and there will be questions and discussion after each session.

This is something of a first for me, and I’m looking forward to it. Regular readers will know, of course, that for over ten years I have focused most of my work on Guantánamo and related issues, although I have always made room for involvement in and commentary about other issues, particularly involving the takeover of politics by largely interchangeable parties devoted only to the enrichment of the rich, and to putting the greed of banks and corporations above the needs of the people. Over the last six years, a major focus of my non-Guantánamo work has related to the cynical age of austerity implemented since 2010 by the Tories, targeting the unemployed, the disabled and immigrants.

When I was discussing my proposal for a talk with Anthony Russell and Clare Cowan of the Brockley Society, who had approached me as a potential speaker, I explained how I wanted to discuss the recent disturbing rise of racism and xenophobia in the UK, which, in large part, had led to the Leave campaign’s small but disturbing majority in the EU referendum in June, and which, alarmingly, has since led to our new Prime Minister, Theresa May, seeking to single-handedly force our departure from the EU, without consulting Parliament, as though the referendum had installed her as a tyrant.

I wanted to tie it into my work, in which, of course, I have been attempting, for over ten years, to humanise Muslim prisoners, held in a lawless manner at Guantánamo and in other US “war on terror” prisons that would be completely unacceptable if, for example, they were Christians or Jews, and I also wanted to mention how the rise in racism is a fundamental betrayal of the Christian values that are supposed to underpin the beliefs of so many British people.

I won’t indulge in further description of what I intend on talk about, except to mention that I will also be discussing the current refugee crisis, on a scale that is unprecedented in most of our lifetimes, and the inadequacy, to put it mildly, of our response, and I will also touch on the recent election of Donald Trump in the US, which is, of course, another worrying symptom of the shift to the far right in the countries of the west that is a cause for serious alarm.

Below is a list of all the sessions and speakers (or click on the image above, which will enlarge it), and if you’re in London on Sunday it would be great to see you at the festival, which promises to be very thought-provoking, and, I hope, will also contain inspiration for how decent people can get involved in actively resisting the fundamental challenges to civil society and the common good that are, with Brexit, Trump’s election, and the separatist cluelessness of Theresa May and her government, now at a very dangerous stage.

Session 1: ‘Participation and democracy’, 10.30am

Sean Coughlan, broadcaster: ‘The future of education’

Ivo Mosley, author: ‘A constitution for a genuine democracy’

Swetam Gungah, mathematical physicist: ‘Sensible about science’

Camilla Berens, South East London Community Energy: ‘Creating local energy’

Michael o’Keefe, Positive Money: ‘Debt-free money’

Session 2: ‘A fairer world’, 12 noon

Natasha Wort, Uniting for Peace: ‘How to save the world – A Buddhist’s guide’

Cassia Kobylinska, filmmaker, Goldsmiths College: ‘Film as social action’

Lui Smyth, anthropologist: ‘Unconditional basic income for all’

Lunch, 1pm

Session 3: ‘An inclusive society’, 2pm

Gabriel Gbadamosi, writer: ‘The creative community as a condition of multicultural society’

Andy Worthington, journalist and activist: ‘Demonising “the other”: Tackling the rise of racism and xenophobia’

Rosario Guimba-Stewart, Lewisham Refugee and Migrant Network: ‘refugees and their challenges’

Jacqueline Walker, author: ‘From life to action’

Session 4: ‘Building a new economy’, 3.30pm

Bruce Mauleverer QC, the International Law Association: ‘International Law’, to be read on his behalf by Bob Barrett

Aeron Davis, Professor of Political Communication, Goldsmiths College: ‘What has the financial system ever done for us?’

Helen Mercer, lecturer in economics: ‘The Private Finance Initiative: how to end the rip-off’

Oliver Lewis, campaigner: ‘Bring back British Rail’

Anthony Russell, cultural historian: ‘An ethos for a social renaissance’

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.