Andy Worthington's Blog, page 65

Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Closing Guantánamo, Trump, Brexit and the Failure of Mainstream Politics on Portland’s KBOO FM

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.

 

Yesterday, I was delighted to speak to Linda Olson-Osterlund on KBOO FM, a great community radio station in Portland, Oregon. The show, “Positively Revolting,” aired for an hour from 8am (4pm London time), and is available here on the website or here as an MP3. I hope you have time to listen to it and to share it if you find useful.

On the website, it was noted how Linda and I “talk[ed] about the seventy days left of the Obama presidency and the movement to close Guantánamo and release all prisoners not convicted of a crime,” as well as “the 2016 Presidential election and the parallels to the UK vote to leave the EU and the rise of the extreme right wing in both countries.”

Linda had picked up on the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that has been running all year, and that I was promoting on Thursday, just two days after the election, because moping or ignoring Guantánamo will not get that wretched place closed, and Barack Obama is still president for another ten weeks.

On Thursday, I launched a campaign video for the Close Guantánamo campaign I launched in 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner (who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008), featuring photos of some of the 500+ celebrities and concerned citizens across the US and around the world who, at 50-day intervals this year, have taken photos of themselves with posters counting down how many days remained for Obama to fulfill his promise.

The video encourages people to get involved with the next stage of the countdown, on November 30, when President Obama will have just 50 days left to fulfill his promise. Please print off a poster, take a photo with it and send it to us. Please also feel free to include a message to President Obama, and, if you wish, to let us know where you are.

The video also includes a new song of mine, played with my band The Four Fathers, which, aptly, is called “Close Guantánamo.” In it, I run through the history of Guantánamo’s sordid history as a “war on terror” prison, and explain how and why Obama has failed to close it, and you can hear the whole song and buy it as a download on our Bandcamp page.

See below for the video:

In the show, I explained who is still held at Guantánamo (60 men), and how I hope that the men approved for release (20 of these 60) will be freed before Obama leaves office, because, of course, we have no idea what Donald Trump will do when he becomes president. I also expressed my hope that the Periodic Review Boards, a recent review parole-like process that has approved half the remaining prisoners for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, will continue, because the PRBs have approved 34 men for release who were previously, and ill-advisedly, regarded as “too dangerous to release.” However, the PRBs were established via an executive order issued by Obama, and may be exactly the sort of thing that Trump, and the disturbingly right-wing Republicans jockeying for power around him, will want to get rid of when he takes office.

I also spoke about how I think it will be difficult for Trump to send anyone new to Guantánamo — something that Obama always refused to even contemplate — because Guantánamo is a broken, useless place, and federal courts are the correct venue for terrorist trials.

However, as noted above, I have no idea what Donald Trump really believes in, and what he will do, now that the hateful, far right rhetoric of his campaign is no longer needed. At his meeting with Obama in the White House, Trump looked old, mentally ill and confused, and in his acceptance speech he noticeably dropped all his fighting talk. However, he remains stunningly unpredictable — and, let me add, very evidently unsuited to the demands of high office — and another great fear centers on which of the objectionable, white and mainly old and male lawmakers vying for his attention will get nominated to key positions in his administration.

So the future, unfortunately, does not look bright, as Linda and I also discussed in a reflection on the similarities between the US election (and Linda was kind enough to promote my article, Trump’s Victory Confirms 2016 as the Year WASPs Began, Alarmingly, to Embrace the Far Right in Significant Numbers) and the UK’s EU referendum in June, and how, in both places, racism is on the rise and the understandably disenfranchised, in huge numbers, are seeking an alternative to the two mainstream parties, who have spent decades catering only to the rich, the banks and the corporations, facilitating the outsourcing of as much work as possible to other countries, and absolutely failing to protect workers in their own countries.

The sad irony, of course, is that the billionaire Trump is no “man of the people” outsider, as the new Republican government will, presumably, show in all its old-fashioned greed and disdain for the common man and woman as soon as Trump is inaugurated, and, in the UK, Nigel Farage of UKIP, a former commodities broker, is, similarly, only given credibility by those desperately projecting their hopes onto him. What is genuinely needed is either for the Democratic Party and the Labour Party to become agents of profound economic change, putting the people before the profits of their exploiters, or for us, the people, to organize a new world from the ground up — a huge task given how so many people are permanently ground down just trying to get by, but one that appears ever more necessary if we are not simply to be crushed.

This was a call-in show, so there were numerous calls from listeners, many of which were very interesting, and some of which drifted off-topic, but this was, I think, inevitable given fears about Donald Trump’s election victory, and also reflected other facets of the urgent need for decent people to organize at the grass-roots level, and, fundamentally, not to accept the regressive step that was taken by a minority of voters but a majority of the electoral colleges on Tuesday, when a bitter old white America, gazing endlessly backwards at a non-existent golden age, unconvincingly seized the reins of power, despite having no notion whatsoever of how to create a functioning government that will do anything useful for the majority of the American people.

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.

With Trump En Route to the White House, New Close Guantánamo Video Urges President Obama to Get the Prison Closed

I wrote the following article (as “New Close Guantánamo Video Reminds President Obama He Has Just 70 Days Left to Close the Prison Before He Leaves Office”)  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.

Video features photos of some of the 500+ celebrities and concerned citizens who have sent in photos this year for the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, and a new song, “Close Guantánamo,” by The Four Fathers.

Following the news that Donald Trump has won the Presidential Election, the Close Guantánamo campaign has launched a new promotional video, urging President Obama to do all he can to fulfill the promise to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay that he made on his second day in office back in January 2009.

We believe that the need to close the prison is more urgent than ever, given that, on the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to keep Guantánamo open, to send new prisoners there, and to reintroduce torture.

See the video below via YouTube — and please note it is also featured on our Facebook page, and is also on the homepage of Close Guantánamo website.

 

The Close Guantánamo campaign was established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, by journalist Andy Worthington and attorney Tom Wilner, who was Counsel of Record to the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008.

Tom Wilner says: “Obama has the authority to close Guantánamo. He has 70 days to do it. This lawless prison should not be his legacy.”

Andy Worthington says: “No more delays. Anything could happen after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Obama needs to close Guantánamo in his last ten weeks in office.”

The Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative was launched in January by Andy and music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd), and over 500 celebrities and concerned citizens across the U.S. and around the world have sent in photos of themselves reminding President Obama, at 50-day intervals, of how many days remained for him to close Guantánamo. See the Celebrity Photos here, and Public Photos here, and here and also here. The newest photos are here.

The video features, amongst others, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, David Morrissey, former prisoners Shaker Aamer, Moazzam Begg and Djamel Ameziane, Reprieve’s founder Clive Stafford Smith, Andy Slaughter MP, Fowzia Siddiqui, the sister of “war on terror” victim Aafia Siddiqui, attorney Nancy Hollander, Yahdid Ould Slahi, the brother of recently released Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Yemi Hailemariam, the partner of UK citizen and Ethiopian political activist Andy Tsege, kidnapped by the Ethiopian government and abandoned by the British government, journalist Yvonne Ridley, Joy Hurcombe, the chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, journalist and doctor Saleyha Ahsan, Joanne MacInnes, the co-founder of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, Mexican playwright Humberto Robles, and Muslim campaigner Suliman Gani.

The song featured in the video is by Andy Worthington’s band The Four Fathers, who also performed the campaign song for the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and is available as a download here.

For further information, and to discuss any aspects of the campaign to close Guantánamo relating to President Obama’s last ten weeks in office, and the significance of Donald Trump’s election victory, please contact Close Guantánamo.

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

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

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

Trump’s Victory Confirms 2016 as the Year WASPs Began, Alarmingly, to Embrace the Far Right in Significant Numbers

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Please listen to “Neo-Liberal Bullshit Blues” by my band The Four Fathers, with its verse about how “Donald Trump is no answer / He’s just a selfish and dangerous fool / He’s just another version / Of the Neo-Liberal Bullshit Blues.”

Like June 23, 2016, November 8, 2016 will go down in the history books as a day when dreams of progress and tolerance and hope were brutally dashed. On June 23, in the UK, a slim majority of voters who could be bothered to turn out to vote in the EU referendum gave a kicking to the British establishment and endorsed racism and xenophobia, damaging the economy for no discernibly important reason whatsoever, making us a laughing stock around the world, and resetting the UK’s default position on tolerance to one in which foreigners can be openly abused, and anyone foreign-born, or appearing to be foreign-born, can be treated as “the other.”

In the US, as Jonathan Freedland wrote for the Guardian today, “We thought the United States would step back from the abyss. We believed … that Americans would not, in the end, hand the most powerful office on earth to an unstable bigot, sexual predator and compulsive liar.”

And yet, that is exactly what happened, and the parallels with the UK are, unfortunately, illuminating. Voters gave a kicking to the establishment, represented by Hillary Clinton, and white voters turned to Trump, the showman who, like Nigel Farage, pretended to be a “man of the people,” even though that was patently untrue.

Trump’s appeal, like Farage’s in the UK, was primarily to WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), for two particular reasons: firstly, because their lives have been eroded by the relentless crushing greed of neoliberalism, although they are spectacularly poor at working out who it is who has been exploiting them, and always seem to end up in the arms of their exploiters rather than working out that someone with a socialist message offers the only hope of salvation; and, secondly, because they have been kept in an endless state of alarm about the threat posed by the “other” — Muslims and Mexicans, for example, in the US, and Muslims, east Europeans and refugees in the UK — which has been played upon by cynical politicians (or, in Trump’s case, self-seeking showmen disguised as politicians) and the ever-present cynical and manipulative media.

To be fair, Hillary Clinton was an unconvincing candidate, lacking an ability to connect with people that Barack Obama clearly had (and how apparent it was whenever he popped up to support Clinton), and that, sadly, Trump was also widely perceived to have had. However, Trump’s victory owes much more to the two profound sources of disaffection I outlined above — the threat posed by the “other” and the perceived erosion of people’s living standards by an “enemy within,” the establishment.

The racism, I admit, scares me, as Britain has become a place of open racism since June 23, reminding me of the country of my youth, in the days of Enoch Powell, before Rock Against Racism did so much to move my generation beyond racism and to celebrate multi-culturalism and diversity. In Trump’s America, too, the intolerance must be deeply alarming.

As my friend Larisa Alexandrovna Horton wrote on Facebook earlier today, explaining why she was banning anyone who voted for Trump:

This man ran on a platform that said refugees are evil and parasitic. I am a refugee. This man ran on a platform that said journalists are dangerous and that laws need to be passed to silence them. I am a journalist. This man ran on a platform that emboldened and legitimized Antisemitism. I am a Jew. This man has consistently bragged about assaulting and dehumanizing women. I am a woman.

On these fronts, however, we can at least fight back. On the economy — on the betrayal of the people by a corrupt establishment in which politicians only look out for their interests of corporations and the banks — we face, it seems, a much more uphill struggle to convince people that the answer to their problems is some form of socialism, some political framework that puts the needs of the people — all the people — before the greed of the corporations and the banks.

As I read recently (and I’m sorry I can’t remember who made the statement), neoliberalism, the prevailing capitalist model that is grinding us all down, works by making as many people as possible feel as insecure as possible as much of the time as possible.

How is that meant to be the basis for a happy, functioning society?

It isn’t.

Neoliberalism is killing our planet, our jobs, our hopes and our happiness, and we must find a way not only to resist it, but to work out how to persuade our fellow citizens, on both sides of the Atlantic, that they are being misdirected, that they are being lied to by representatives of the establishment masquerading as outsiders — the billionaire Donald Trump, and the former commodities broker Nigel Farage.

As for fears of fascism, it is true that neither Trump nor Farage has militias like the Nazis, but it would be unwise to underestimate how both men could mobilize supporters in the street if that was their wish. Farage, for example, is already threatening to raise a mob to intimidate the Supreme Court judges in the UK who are legitimately ruling on whether Parliament must have a say in deciding the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU, or if the EU referendum was actually about empowering the replacement for David Cameron — Theresa May, chosen as the UK’s leader by just 199 Tory MPs — as a tyrant.

And Donald Trump, of course, has repeatedly incited his supporters to violence, as this New York Times video shows – and also see this Huffington Post article, and this exhaustive list.

And so, here’s an apposite poem about fascism by the British poet and academic Michael Rosen:

Fascism: I sometimes fear …

By Michael Rosen, 2014

I sometimes fear that

people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress

worn by grotesques and monsters

as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

Fascism arrives as your friend.

It will restore your honour,

make you feel proud,

protect your house,

give you a job,

clean up the neighbourhood,

remind you of how great you once were,

clear out the venal and the corrupt,

remove anything you feel is unlike you …

It doesn’t walk in saying,

“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”

*****

As we try to come to terms with how a man described, at the foot of every Huffington Post article about him (until his victory), as someone who “regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the US,” I leave you with these thoughts from a US citizen on Facebook, which I found to break new ground in dealing with the discrediting of the position of President of the United States of America:

I will have no president. I respect the office far too much to ever call Donald Trump “president.” I’ve lived thru Democrat presidents, Republican presidents and have found something to respect in all of them. I have only disgust and loathing for Donald Trump and I’ll not call this washed-up, white-trash, racist ignoramus “president.” Ever. Will it make any difference? Of course not. It’s my own personal stand. I’ll do it for myself and my own self respect. America chose a very, very dark path today.

That’s just about it for me for now. I have no desire to hear Trump speak, ever again, or to read or hear almost anything being written or spoken about him. The prospect of four years of this seems like something from a medieval description of hell, as I could never stomach Trump for more than a few seconds. If nothing else, his inability to show any confidence that he could formulate even a single coherent sentence always shocked me, and I was unsurprised when I read that, as a speaker, he talks like a child; a third-grader, in fact.

And so, yet again, I wonder how this has come to pass, even though I understand what led to it. How is this possible? Perhaps, as we begin to work out what this might mean for so many issues of great importance that affect not just the US but the rest of the world, we all need to consider whether it is possible that, when it comes down to it, a clown who isn’t a politician can’t really do the job of president, and the Republicans may end up as a mess rather than as a functional government. I certainly hope so, but I also freely admit that I’m in uncharted waters, that we’re all in uncharted waters, and that the future looks rather disturbingly uncertain.

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.

Theresa May Oversees Cruel Benefit Cap That Could Make 250,000 Children Homeless

Please support my work as a freelance investigative journalist.

 

As we feverishly await the result of the US Presidential Election (with, to my mind, the clear recognition that there is such a thing as the lesser of two evils), I wanted to take the opportunity to shine a light on another story of government cruelty in my home country, the UK, to add to the colossal and unprecedented incompetence of the current government, under the stunningly inept leadership of Theresa May.

Unlike the Brexit debacle, which is being spectacularly mismanaged by May and her post-referendum Cabinet, the story I want to shine light on predates May, but is part of a continuum of cruelty for which the current Conservative Party is notorious; specifically, the benefit cap, introduced by George Osborne, when he was Chancellor and David Cameron was Prime Minister, and relaunched on Monday with an even more savage bite.

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 an editorial in July 2015, the Guardian pointed out Osborne’s cruelty and mendacity, but as with so much of Tory cruelty over the last six years — even when, as with almost everything Osborne touched, it ended up costing more than before — the majority of British people failed to notice or to care. The editors wrote of the benefit cap:

It did not start out with the hunt for a solution to any policy problem, but with the hunt for a slogan for Mr Osborne’s 2010 conference speech. “Nobody on benefits should be allowed to earn more than the average wage” sounds like a winning line. The difficulty is that the comparison is dishonest, as even Iain Duncan Smith was reported as objecting at the time. Median pay might have been £26,000 a year, but this was gross pre-tax earnings for an individual, as opposed to the disposable income of a whole family, which for working and workless alike has always also depended on child benefits and help with the rent. The result of this deliberate confusion is to arbitrarily punish children born into big families paying high rents. Experts calculated that, even in unfashionable parts of London, some youngsters would end up being raised on as little as 62p a day.

Tough choices are often required, but what marks this move out as nasty is the lack of any defensible principle. If the aim is, say, saving on housing benefit, that should be capped directly; likewise targeted cuts can always be made to any other benefit. Instead, in order to swell an inflammatory headline figure about maximal sponging, all the payments to a household are lumped together before this cap is applied. The effect is to sever the connection, which has existed since the workhouse, between the number of mouths to feed and the support provided. No wonder the supreme court ruled that the cap breached the UN convention on the rights of the child.

Osborne’s second round of cuts to the welfare cap came into force this Monday, November 7, and in the Guardian last week Aditya Chakrabortty wrote a powerful article about it which I’m taking the liberty of cross-posting below in its entirety. Further commentary follows it.

Creating child poverty for a whole new generation. Take a bow, Theresa May

By Aditya Chakrabortty, the Guardian, October 31, 2016

I have seen how the new household benefit cuts will tear poor families apart. Even Margaret Thatcher would have balked at this.

In a little council house in Birkenhead, Steve is panicking over how he’ll find an extra £304 rent money a month. He has just days to magic up an answer. If he can’t, he can guess what will happen. “Eviction. Come the end of November, I won’t have a roof.” As a single parent, Steve won’t be the only one slung out. His four boys, aged from three to eight, would also lose their home and probably be taken from their dad. “I’d be fed to the dogs.” Everything I’ve tried so hard for …” – a snap of his fingers – “Nothing.”

It’s not a landlord doing this to Steve; it’s our government. It’s not his rent that’s going up; it’s his housing benefit that’s getting cut. And he’s not the only one; on official figures, almost 500 households in the borough of Wirral face a shortfall of up to £500 a month.

From [7 November] 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.

Those figures come directly from the Department for Work and Pensions. Plenty dispute them, which is unsurprising since DWP officials keep changing their minds. Some experts believe the number of children at risk could total 500,000.

This is the biggest benefit cut that you’ve never heard of. The newspapers will waste gallons of ink on Candice Bake-Off’s lipstick and Cheryl’s apparent baby bump. But about a government policy that could disrupt hundreds of thousands of lives, there is near silence.

So allow me to explain. From next week Theresa May’s government will extend the cap on household benefits. Poor families in London will not be allowed more than £442 a week. Those outside the capital will be cut to £385 a week. In some areas the cuts will be brought in straightaway; in others with a slight delay. But in the end, families above the limit will be hit twice over. First, they will be pushed further into poverty. And, like Steve, their housing benefit will be docked, so they will be left scrabbling just to make the rent and keep a roof above their heads.

How those families will manage is anyone’s guess. When Steve opened the letter at the end of July he had a “panic attack”. All that went round his mind was one question: “How the hell am I going to pay this?” Then came what he calls “a depressive state” that lasted nearly two months. Now he bottles it up, for the sake of his boys. “When they’re not around, that’s when I cry. When they’re out at school, when they’re asleep: that’s when I break down.”

It’s the fear of losing the boys he fought so hard for custody of that haunts him most. So worried is he about a social worker taking them away that he requests a false name.

Like many of the families that will be hit, Steve’s options are very limited. He can borrow from his mum, although she’s hard up. He can try to land 16 hours’ work a week – and has already been giving out his CV – but not too many employers will be able to fit around his school runs and meal preps. Or he can ask Wirral council to top up his rent, by filling out a complicated form that asks for proof of his weekly spend on everything from cigarettes to toiletries. And that would only cover him for a few months.

Even before next week’s cuts, Steve is already bumping along the bottom. He has one jumper and one coat to last him the entire winter. He sometimes gets by on a single bowl of cornflakes a day. Anything spare goes towards the boys. But they don’t get fresh fruit or veg, subsisting on frozen meals from Iceland.

The three-year-old comes into the kitchen for a drink, and as Steve opens the fridge, I can see it contains nothing apart from a half-full bottle of milk. The house is empty to the point of desolation: no shades for any of the lightbulbs, none of the usual family photos or decorations.

George Osborne’s benefits cap was always a rotten policy that played well in focus groups. But when introduced in 2013, it hit a relatively small number of poor families in high-rent London. And, some on the right would whisper in the ears of biddable journalists, the poor really had no place in the world’s biggest property bubble. The cuts that start next week will be a step change. They will hit low-rent areas such as Wirral and Darlington. They will render family homes rented out by housing associations “financially toxic”, according to the housing expert Joe Halewood: tenants will no longer be able to afford them, and housing associations can’t afford to leave them empty. And they will rip through the budgets of already cash-starved local councils, who will now have to find emergency accommodation and cash funds for displaced families.

To see how deep it will cut, have a look at these figures. I grew up on the outskirts of London, in a place called Edmonton. It has pockets of deprivation as bad as anything in Wirral and, on DWP estimates, around 1,200 households here will be hit by the new benefits cap. By my reckoning, this government now expects children growing up in my former home to be raised on £1.02 a day.

The basic expenses for a family with four children in Edmonton come to £399.14 per week.

My sums go as follows:

£315.12 for rent (the allowable local rent for a three-bed home).
£33.36 for council tax (Enfield council, band E property).
£32 for gas and electric (the average weekly bill, according to government figures, with an extra 20% added for a large family).
£8.54 for water (Thames Water’s average bill for 2015, with 20% added for a large family).
£10.12 phone and broadband (BT Anytime standard package).

Taking all that from the £442.31 allowed to any London family leaves £43.17 each week left over for the family. That is £1.02 per person per day.

Of course, these figures are arguable. The family could cut down on energy use by choosing to be cold this winter. Or they could go without showers and washing up. That said, I’ve left off mobile phone calls and TV. I’ve not factored in school trips or family breaks or Christmas.

These cuts will do something Thatcher never managed: they break once and for all the link between the needs of benefits claimants and their entitlements. Children will be punished for the “sins” of their parents: the sins of being poor and of having too large a family in the eyes of Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith. David Cameron’s Tories once legislated to “eliminate child poverty”: Theresa May’s Tories are re-creating it for a new generation.

*****

In a second article in the Guardian, Patrick Butler looked into analysis of the impact of the welfare cap by housing experts, who found that “[m]ore than 116,000 of the poorest households in the UK will be hit by the extended benefit cap, putting many at risk of homelessness,” and spoke to Terrie Alafat, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, who said, “We are seriously concerned that this could have a severe impact on these families, make housing in large sections of the country unaffordable, and risk worsening what is already a growing homelessness problem.”

Butler confirmed Chakrabortty’s assessment that, unlike the the cap away first introduced, its expansion would pretty indiscriminately hit people across the country. He stated:

Unlike the benefit cap introduced in 2013, which mainly hit households in high-rent areas such as London and the handful of families with five or more children, the extended cap will have an impact on families in all areas of the country.

The cap will see “average” sized families affected in even those parts of the country with the cheapest housing, such as Wales and north-east England. For example, a couple with three children outside London will have £50.80 a week left for housing costs after out-of-work benefits are taken into account. In Leeds, where a three-bedroom property at local allowance rates costs £151.50, this would leave them with a shortfall of £100.70. In Northampton a similar family would face a shortfall of £89.04 a week, and £75.78 in Leicester.

In Butler’s words, Terrie Alafat “said the new cap could put many families at serious risk of losing their homes and would make housing in significant parts of the country unaffordable for those affected.”

Alafat said, “The results of our research are extremely worrying. It shows that the reduction in total benefits is going to hit some of the most vulnerable families of all sizes across England, Scotland and Wales. These families will lose out when the cap comes into effect from 7 November and in many cases will straight away face a substantial gap between their rent and the help they receive to pay for their housing. Worryingly, our analysis shows many families could be one redundancy or a period of ill health away from being in this situation. We are seriously concerned that this could have a severe impact on these families, make housing in large sections of the country unaffordable and risk worsening what is already a growing homelessness problem. This is a measure which seriously risks undermining the government’s commitment to making society fairer for families in Great Britain and we suggest that they look at this urgently.”

Unfortunately, the government is not listening. The latest sociopath to wear the work and pension secretary’s dunce’s cap is Damian Green, who, on Monday, blathered on about how “making sure that those people who are out of work are faced with the same choices as those who are in work,” and stated, “By lowering the cap today, we are ensuring the values of this government continue to chime with those of ordinary working people and delivering on our commitment to make sure work pays more than welfare.” On Radio 4, he even had the effrontery to state, “By the far the best long-term route out of poverty is to have a job,” as if those unfortunate enough not to be working are not aware the fact.

As usual, the minister’s words play to the darkness in British people’s hearts that is regularly stoked by the right-wing tabloid media, but do nothing to address the problem that, up and down the country, the reason people are not working is because there are no jobs. The government, with its accomplices in the media, persistently seem to be getting away with lying obsessively about the lack of meaningful work prospects in most of the UK today, but I feel sure that the government is running out of time.

Many of those who voted to leave the EU in June intended to dish out a bloody nose to the Westminster elite. I happen to think their aim was astonishingly wrong, and punching the EU’s lights out does absolutely nothing to land a blow on those who really deserve it — the self-seeking clowns of the Tory government, and their persistent lies about the ordinary people of this country.

My great fear, however, is that, when they realise how savagely they are being shafted by their own government, the put-upon people of the UK will not turn to socialism, as they should, but to fascism, and the menace of UKIP that is only currently dormant because Nigel Farage is too lazy to want to remain leader.

Over the last few years, and especially since June 23, the Tories have been trying to appear more and more like UKIP, but it is a conjuring trick that cannot last, because they cannot adequately pretend in the long run that they care about the poor and the hardworking — and, in particular, those who work hard but cannot make ends meet, and need state support — because the system itself, which the Tories are absolutely at the heart of, is committed to screwing the ordinary people  of this country relentlessly to make life comfortable for those who leech off them — and those people are not the EU, but British Tories, feeding off the people as they have for centuries.

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.

Parliament and the People: Two Days of London Events About Guantánamo, Torture and the Military Commissions

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.

 

So last week was an interesting week for events focused on Guantánamo, torture and the military commissions in London, as Alka Pradhan, a lawyer with the defense team for Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali), a “high-value detainee,” and one of five men facing a trial for his alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, was in town, and as a result MPs who, for the most part, had been involved in the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, had arranged a Parliamentary meeting.

The meeting was also called to coincide with a visit from Andrew Tyrie MP (Conservative, Chichester), the chair of the long-standing All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, and the election of officers for a new APPG on Guantánamo. It was chaired by Tom Brake MP (Liberal Democrat, Carshalton and Wallington), who held a Parliamentary meeting earlier this year for Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the torture victim and best-selling author who was recently released from Guantánamo, and attended by MPs including Chris Law (SNP, Dundee West), who will be the chair of the new APPG, and Andy Slaughter (Labour, Hammersmith), who, in 2014, visited Washington, D.C. to call for Shaker Aamer’s release with the Conservative MPs David Davis and Andrew Mitchell, and Jeremy Corbyn, before he became the leader of the Labour Party. Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion) and Mark Durkan (SDLP) were unable to make it to the meeting, but will also be involved in the APPG.

At the meeting, Alka briefed MPs on the story of her client, which I recently wrote about for Al-Jazeera, as he sought to persuade the US government to allow the UN Rapporteur for Torture to make an independent visit to Guantánamo to assess the conditions in which they are held, and to talk freely with them about their torture in CIA “black sites.” Unsurprisingly, no independent visit has been allowed, because the US government is determined to continue hiding evidence of the CIA’s torture program, despite the publication, nearly two years ago, of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, with its damning verdict on the brutality and futility of the program, and the CIA’s repeated lies about it.

Alka was particularly hoping that MPs would maintain an interest in what the British government may have known about the “imprisonment of the “high-value detainees” in “black sites,” as allegations have been made of a plot that involved Heathrow, and the presumption, therefore, is that British agents would have been involved in interrogations, something that, unsurprisingly, has not been admitted by the British government, whose secrecy, unlike the US — where the system of checks and balances eventually led to the publication of the executive summary of the Senate torture report — can realistically be described as obsessive.

Alka also spoke about how the defense teams at Guantánamo have, essentially, been unable to obtain any information from the US government about the torture and abuse of their clients, explaining how the makers of the dreadful torture propaganda movie, Zero Dark Thirty, were given more information by the CIA than they have received, and she reminded MPs of the importance of the UK “not aiding and abetting an illegal trial.”

In further reflection on Britain’s role in the “war on terror,” Andrew Tyrie ran though the story of the APPG on Extraordinary Rendition, which he set up in December 2005, shortly after revelations first surfaced about the CIA’s “black sites,” and he spoke about discovering how rendition flights had stopped at Prestwick Airport in Glasgow, which he described as “refuelling the getaway car.”

He said that the Labour government had not been supportive of his efforts, but that, in 2009, he had had meetings with David Cameron and William Hague, who had promised to hold an inquiry. That inquiry — the Gibson Inquiry into UK involvement in rendition — was announced in July 2010, after the coalition government was formed, although lawyers and NGOs soon boycotted it, as it was intending to take evidence in secret, and had no interest tin hearing from the prisoners themselves.

The Gibson Inquiry fizzled out with a report, of sorts, at the end of 2013, but there were already calls for a renewed inquiry because of evidence, found in the ruins of Col. Gaddafi’s Libya, of British involvement in the rendition to Libya of political opponents of Col. Gaddafi, who were subsequently abused and imprisoned (see the latest on this long-running saga here). However, because the police were investigating the Libya claims, a new inquiry, or a resumption of the Gibson Inquiry, never took place.

The Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, joined calls for a renewed, judge-led inquiry, but in the meantime the years passed and this “stain on democracy,” in Tyrie’s words, continued to fester. For further information, see Ian Cobain’s Guardian article, Why did the Gibson inquiry into rendition disappear?

Asking how involved the British government was in the US rendition programme, Tyrie said that we didn’t know, but that it was clear that they were, from the evidence in the case of Binyam Mohamed, which I wrote about extensively from 2008 to 2010. See, for example, High Court rules against UK and US in case of Guantánamo torture victim Binyam Mohamed.

Returning to the present, Andrew Tyrie also pointed out that it is now nearly three years since the Gibson Inquiry concluded, and although investigatory powers were subsequently handed over to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), there has “not been much progress.” The ISC is chaired by Dominic Grieve, who has made it clear that he wants to throughly investigate claims of British wrongdoing, but observers fear that, because the ISC reports to the Prime Minister, any critical findings will be suppressed. In November 2014, I reported how lawyers and NGOs continue to be dissatisfied with the government’s behaviour, in my article,  UK Human Rights Groups Dismiss Rendition and Torture Inquiry as a Whitewash.

As a result of the concerns about the ISC’s impartiality, calls for a proper, independent, judge-led inquiry are not going to go away, and it remains to be seen if there is a deadline by which the ISC’s work will be complete, and if it will prove to have been robust enough. As Andrew Tyrie stated, however, “I’d rather have a judge-led inquiry.”

On Wednesday, I joined Alka and Carla Ferstman, the director of the anti-torture organisation Redress, for a packed-out event I had initiated, ‘Enshrined Injustice: Guantánamo, Torture and the Military Commissions’ — at the University of Westminster. The event was put together by Sam Raphael, senior lecturer at the university and the co-director (with Ruth Blakeley of the University of Kent) of The Rendition Project, which for several years now, has been providing detailed research into the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) programme, and Sam did a great job promoting it.

Alka spoke first (after an introduction from Sam), largely reprising her presentation to the MPs. One new piece of information I gathered was that, over five years since al-Baluchi and the other four men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks were charged (for the first time since their abortive first charges in February 2008), only 15% of the material that should have been provided to the defence teams by the prosecution has actually been provided, a single, shocking fact that serves to demonstrate how broken the system is.

I spoke next, running through a history of Guantánamo past and present, and how I came to understand the stories of the prisoners, and to appreciate the extent to which the prison has been an unmitigated disaster — including the failure to screen men on capture to ascertain whether they were combatants or civilians seized by mistake; the confusion of criminals (terrorists) with soldiers, in which soldiers also came to be regarded as terrorists, and both categories of men were regarded as human beings wth no rights whatsoever; the bounty payments made to the US’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, who were responsible for the capture of the overwhelming majority of the prisoners; and the use of torture and abuse to extract the false confessions that fill the prisoners military’ files, released by WikiLeaks in 2011. I also ran though Barack Obama’s history regarding Guantánamo, and the reasons for his failure to close the prison as he promised on his second day in office, and I also looked at whether he might get to close it before he leaves office (unlikely, but not impossible), and what to expect from his successor, whether it is Hillary Clinton or — alarmingly — Donald Trump.

I also played, as a world exclusive, a two-minute promotional video for the Close Guantánamo campaign I founded with the US attorney Tom Wilner in 2012, which was made by Brendan Horstead, the drummer in my band The Four Fathers, featuring ‘Close Guantánamo,’ a new song I wrote for the band, images of people holding up posters reminding President Obama how many days he has left to close Guantánamo (taken throughout the year as part of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative I launched in January), and messages about how people can get involved (see here). The video will be released on November 10, when President Obama will have just 70 days left to close Guantánamo before he leaves office.

Finally, Carla discussed Redress’s involvement in the case of another “high-value detainee” charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — Mustafa al-Hawsawi — who, disturbingly, was subjected to anal rape — “rectal rehydration,’ in the US authorities’ words — in a “black site” in 2003. Carla explained that Redress had become involved in cases relating the European Court of Human Rights, regarding prisoners held in “black sites” in Poland, Romania and Lithuania, with al-Hawsawi having probably been held in Lithuania, and also in “black sites” in Afghanistan and Morocco.

She spoke about how the Senate report revealed that al-Hawsawi had become so ill during his torture — in Lithuania — the he had needed urgent medical treatment, but that, although the CIA had tried to access a local hospital, the Lithuanian authorities had refused, and so a third country had had to be found that would help.

The ECHR has already ruled in the cases of other “high-value detainees” — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — who were held in Poland, and as Carla pointed out, although the US refuses to cooperate with the European cases, the ECHR rulings mean that host countries must demand of the US that individuals held in “black sites” must not be subjected to the death penalty, and must receive a fair trial — something that cannot be said of Mustafa al-Hawsawi’s case at present.

This was a great event, and I look forward to further events soon, as, of course, Guantánamo is still not closed, and, even if it were, the military commissions will almost certainly continue, though they are not fit for purpose, and, moreover, there must one day be accountability for those who authorized torture, rendition and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial.

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.

Humanizing a Torture Victim: Abu Zubaydah’s Letters from Guantánamo

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo for the next three months.

 

On Tuesday, I wrote about the recent decision, by a Periodic Review Board, to approve the ongoing imprisonment of Abu Zubaydah, one of 14 men described as “high-value detainees,” who were brought to Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” just over ten years ago, in September 2006.

Zubaydah — whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — was actually the first victim of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 torture program, but although the US government initially touted him as a significant figure in al-Qaeda, by 2010 they had backed down from their claims, accepting that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, and was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. In legal documents, the government claimed that they had “not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and had “not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Nevertheless, in approving Zubaydah’s ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, the members of the review board — consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — sought to still identify him with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and drew on a videotaped interview, made by militants after the 9/11 attacks, in which he spoke of how closely he and bin Laden had been working together for ten years, a claim that sounds suspiciously like Zubaydah making false claims about his own significance. In contrast, at a tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, Zubaydah stated that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.”

In the hope of keeping Abu Zubaydah’s story in the public eye — and, most crucially, of humanizing a man who, like all America’s post-9/11 torture victims, has been deliberately dehumanized by the US authorities, who have spent years trying to ensure that every word he has uttered in US custody remains classified — I’m posting below a powerful op-ed published in the Washington Post last month, and written by two of his attorneys, Amanda L. Jacobsen, a law faculty member at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law, and Joseph Margulies, a professor of law and government at Cornell University, and, most crucially, unclassified excerpts from four letters he wrote to Jacobsen, referred to as Amy. They reveal, as the lawyers point out, someone who is “caring, funny, forgiving [and] honest,” in contrast to the government’s best efforts to keep him unknown, and therefore easily portrayed as some sort of faceless existential threat.

The op-ed by Jacobsen and Margulies also responded to Zubaydah’s review board, which took place on August 23 (and which I wrote about here), when a handful of reporters at a military facility in Virginia were able to see Zubaydah via video link from Guantánamo, but were not allowed to hear him speak, maintaining the silence that has so effectively dehumanized him for the last 14 and a half years. The lawyers also discussed the US authorities’ shameful refusal to reschedule the review board hearing, even though the only one of his attorneys who was permitted to attend, Mark Denbeaux, was unable to make the trip because his wife was dying.

I hope you find the op-ed — and the excerpts from Abu Zubaydah’s letters — to be important and worthwhile, and that you will share them if you do.

The ‘guinea pig’ for U.S. torture is languishing at Guantánamo

By Amanda L. Jacobsen and Joseph Margulies, Washington Post, October 7, 2016

The poster child of the American torture program sits in a Guantánamo Bay prison cell, where many U.S. officials hope he will simply be forgotten. But blood always leaves a stain, and the mark on our conscience and law will remain until we reckon with the case of Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, known to the world as Abu Zubaydah.

Zubaydah was the “guinea pig” of the CIA torture program. He was the first prisoner sent to a secret CIA “black site,” the first to have his interrogation “enhanced” and the only prisoner subjected to all of the CIA’s approved techniques, as well as many that were not authorized. He is the man for whom the George W. Bush administration wrote the infamous torture memo in the summer of 2002.

The United States pressed Zubaydah into this indecent role because the Bush administration believed he was a senior member of al-Qaeda. Senior officials thought he had been personally involved in every major al-Qaeda operation, including 9/11. Today, the United States acknowledges that assessment was, to put it graciously, overblown. As much to the point, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, his extended torture provided no actionable intelligence about al-Qaeda’s plans.

The chasm between myth and reality explains much about what has happened since his arrest in March 2002. The United States has cast him into limbo. He has never been charged with a violation of U.S. law, military or civilian, and apparently never will be formally charged. Instead, he languishes at Guantánamo. After years in secret prisons around the world, he remains incommunicado, with no prospect of trial.

We have been representing Zubaydah for nine years and have gotten to know him through numerous face-to-face meetings. Recently, the public got a brief glimpse of Zubaydah. For the first time since his arrest, he appeared for a few minutes on a video broadcast from Guantánamo. A dozen journalists and human rights advocates huddled in the District to watch as he appeared silently on the screen; no recording devices were permitted. The ostensible purpose of the appearance was a “hearing” to consider whether Zubaydah might finally be released. But this proceeding was mere political theater.

To begin with, Zubaydah had no counsel at the hearing. Although he has a team of lawyers who have volunteered to represent him, for free, the United States authorized only one of his counsel, Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux, to appear on his behalf. Just before the hearing, Denbeaux had to cancel his flight, when he was informed that his wife of 51 years, Marcia, needed emergency surgery. No other attorney could substitute because Denbeaux alone had been authorized by the government to fly to the base.

Although Denbeaux made clear to the government that his wife was on her deathbed, the government refused to delay the proceeding, even for a few days. After imprisoning Zubaydah for years with no legal process, it was suddenly imperative that the hearing take place without delay, and therefore without counsel. Marcia Denbeaux died four days after the hearing.

Unable to appear on his behalf, his legal team asked the Periodic Review Board, composed of a cross-section of national security officials, to consider a summary of the report on the torture program prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee. That summary, based on a review of more than 6 million pages from inside the CIA, provides the most detailed account of Zubaydah’s torture and the mistakes and misrepresentations made about him. The Review Board refused to read it. They said it was too long.

At the public portion of this hearing, Zubaydah was not merely silent, but silenced. The public did not hear Zubaydah speak because the government would not allow him to respond publicly to the allegations against him. Instead, Zubaydah was permitted to speak only in the closed session, and a government representative, who had met him only briefly a few weeks before the hearing, was assigned to read a half-page statement, which was prepared for Zubaydah and pre-approved by the government for the public session.

Dismissing Zubaydah’s express repudiation of terrorism, the government insisted in its official allegations against him that Zubaydah “probably retains an extremist mindset” and “possibly” or “might” or “could” be dangerous. Even the fact that he has consistently been highly cooperative during his imprisonment was twisted to suggest he was simply honing his skills as a terrorist.

Who is Zubaydah, really? Despite the tremendous amount of information about Zubaydah that has become publicly available over the years, public understanding about Zubaydah remains remarkably controlled and superficial.

The person we have come to know over nearly a decade is caring, funny, forgiving, honest. But you do not need to agree with our assessment of his character to recognize Zubaydah’s humanity and, therefore, be horrified at his treatment — first his torture, and now the drawn-out pain of being held indefinitely.

In connection with Zubaydah’s stalled case seeking federal court review of his detention, the government has recently agreed to clear for public release a few of the letters he has written to us. These brief letters, published here for the first time, provide what we believe is a far truer glimpse of Zubaydah than the government’s “hearing” has or ever was intended to provide.

Letters from Abu Zubaydah: ‘My mother. I have not seen her in so long now.’

Washington Post, October 7, 2016

The four letters below were sent last year by Guantánamoo Bay detainee Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah, to his lawyer Amanda L. Jacobsen. They are being published with Zubaydah’s consent.

‘Who should you care for?’

Dear Amy:

You asked me why I have not called my mother and father, after all these years, finally we are allowed to Skype video call with our family, which I have wanted for so long. But here is the reason why: it is too difficult, the way they do it. They say we are allowed a 30 minute call, but after just saying hello, there is a 10 minute gap, and then hello in return, and a 10 minute gap. My mother. I have not seen her in so long now. In my culture, if you ask: Who should you care for? The answer: your mother. Okay, and THEN who? The answer again: your mother. Okay, okay, and THEN who? A third time: your mother. And then I should care next about my father. One of the prisoners here in the cell block with me, Hamabali [Hambali], after all of these years, they told him now finally he could see his mother, and when he saw her, he began to cry. He is an old man, and his mother even older. But mother is mother. And she will likely die before he

[REDACTED – Page 2 classified in its entirety]

Zayn Husayn

‘When I was a 15 year old boy’

Dear Amy:

I find myself so surprised by people who think of other people based upon the color of their skin. I feel just as I did when I was a 15 year old boy living in Saudia Arabia. My friends and I loved to get together to watch American movies. But sometimes in the movies we were shocked to hear the racist things they said. And we were ashamed. It was embarrassing. We would turn to our friends, sitting next to us, who were black, and they didn’t understand, and we didn’t understand, only that it made us feel sad.

Zayn Husayn

‘The limits of our scale’

Dear Amy:

Here is what I think about the human mind:

It is like a scale for weighing, which can measure up to 1 kilo only. It can be extremely precise, telling in fine detail to the hundredth and thousandth decimal place the weight of a beautiful diamond. But try to consider something too great, 10 kilos, 20 kilos, beyond its comprehension, and you will break the scale.

So, too, for me: there are ideas which are beyond human comprehension and if we try to consider them with our 1 kilo scale, it will break the scale, by which I mean, it can make you crazy, or it will read at most a measure of 1 kilo, which is to say, give an inaccurate reading. Of course, this does not mean that we should stop searching and trying to comprehend, but as we do so, it must be understood within the limits of our scale.

Zayn Husayn

‘Trouble with my eye’

Dear Amy:

Here is a story that I think you will appreciate. A new doctor came to check on me and I told him I was having trouble with my eye. He asked which one, so I took out my glass eye to show him. He jumped back aghast. I asked him: Didn’t you know from my medical file that I have only one eye? He said no. I asked him: what about this eye patch I wear, couldn’t you tell from that? And he said, oh, I thought you just liked to wear that for style. They think I am like a cartoon Caribbean pirate. AAARRGGH! It’s funny, but actually he was a good doctor.

Zayn Husayn

Note: The photo at the top of this article is taken from Jason Leopold’s March 2014 article for the now defunct Al-Jazeera America, “EXCLUSIVE: The notorious Gitmo prisoner as a young man.”

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.

YES! Judges Tell Lawless Tory Government That UK Cannot Leave EU Without Parliamentary Approval

Please support my work as a freelance investigative journalist.

 

Great, great, great news from the High Court, as three of the most senior judges in the UK — the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Sir Terence Etherton, the Master of the Rolls, and Lord Justice Sales — have ruled that “Parliament alone has the power to trigger Brexit by notifying Brussels of the UK’s intention to leave the European Union,” as the Guardian reported it, adding that the ruling was “likely to slow the pace of Britain’s departure from the EU and is a huge setback for Theresa May, who had insisted the government alone would decide when to trigger the process.”

Despite Theresa May’s wishful thinking, the Lord Chief Justice reminded her — and her ministers — that “the most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that Parliament is sovereign,” something that those us with better knowledge of British democracy than our most senior ministers have been pointing out for the last four months.

Lord Thomas said, specifically, “The court does not accept the argument put forward by the government. There is nothing in the 1972 European Communities Act to support it. In the judgment of the court, the argument is contrary both to the language used by parliament in the 1972 act, and to the fundamental principles of the sovereignty of parliament and the absence of any entitlement on the part of the crown to change domestic law by the exercise of its prerogative powers.”

Unless the ruling is overturned on appeal at the Supreme Court, it “threatens to plunge the government’s plans for Brexit into disarray as the process will have to be subject to full parliamentary control,” in the Guardian’s words.

And so we have it. Finally, 133 days after the EU referendum, a body of unarguable weight and authority has told the unelected Prime Minister Theresa May and her deluded ministers that they cannot behave like tyrants. Sovereignty in the UK lies not with the Prime Minister or the Cabinet, or the 72.21% of the eligible electorate who voted in a non-binding referendum, giving a slim majority to those voting to leave the EU (by 51.9% of those who voted to 48.1%), but with Parliament.

Three-quarters of MPs support the UK remaining in the EU, so the challenge now is to persuade them to vote in the interests of the UK rather than deciding that they must comply with the narrowest of majorities in an advisory referendum that should never have been called in the first place.

I very much hope to hear in the imminent future that some of the 16.1 million people who voted to remain in the EU will be setting up a massive lobbying campaign to persuade MPs that they must not endorse any effort to leave the EU that will be an economic disaster; in other words, that preserving the single market is unarguably much more significant than efforts to curb immigration — which, it should be noted, are in any case likely to be as effective as King Canute, the Danish king of England a thousand years ago, attempting to hold back the tide.

As the ramifications of the ruling sink in, it’s worth just looking back at how we got to this ridiculous place, where Britain has become an international laughing stock — except to far-right and hard-left separatists of various kinds — and racism is now so open and so openly hostile that anyone who can be regarded as “foreign” can likely expect abuse — or, at a familiarly polite English level, controlled disdain, via, for example, inquiries about where they’re from, questions that, it should be noted, people living here for decades have never been asked before.

So let’s begin with the man who should one day be held primarily accountable for this debacle, Little “Dave” Cameron, whose arrogance was such that he called a referendum he should never have called to placate those to the right of him (the far right of the Tory Party, and the slimeball UK Independence Party), and arrogantly assumed that a campaign led by himself would walk to victory.

And yet, despite this, it turns out that Cameron was not as terrible a Prime Minister as he could have been; that award actually goes to Theresa May. Don’t get me wrong. Cameron was an irritating, patronising would-be smoothie, and his regime was foul and cruel, with an unparalleled assault on the fundamental bases of decent society (essentially, recognizing that the state provisions of services is both worthwhile and necessary, that the drive to privatise almost everything is ruinous, and that everyone is society should receive basic protections).

In his six years as Prime Minister, the country became a darker, more hard-hearted place, via — to name but a few of the main culprits — his dysfunctional, tight-fisted, austerity-obsessed Chancellor, George Osborne; the vicious Iain Duncan Smith, with his Victorian Social Darwinism, blaming the poor for their poverty by calling them dysfunctional rather than recognising them as the victims of a fundamental and ever-growing economic inequality; the slimy school destroyer Michael Gove; the supremely incompetent justice secretary, Chris “No Brain” Grayling; and the money-grabbing, social mobility-wrecking universities minister, David Willetts, known as “Two Brains” for his supposed intellect, although, as I have always noted, he may have two brains, but neither of them actually work. And, of course, let’s not forget his home secretary, Theresa May, whose dangerous authoritarianism and racism I have written about previously — see As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration

I could go on, but I think I’ve established well enough how desolate the political landscape was from May 2010, when the Tories first installed themselves back in power with the help of the hapless Lib Dems, until June 23 this year, and the EU referendum.

But amazingly, since then, the new reality has been even worse. Theresa May, it turns out, the only contender left standing after a virtual shootout that wiped out Cameron, Osborne, Boris Johnson and  Michael Gove, is not a safe pair as hands, as the Thatcher-loving right are desperate to gush about, but, as those of us paying close attention already knew, a colossally small-minded, Home Counties bigot, whose lukewarm support for the Remain campaign turned to an evangelical fervour for leaving the EU as soon as she became leader.

As a leader, she has been a disaster — visionless, rudderless, still fundamentally bigoted, and capable of wiping eye-watering amounts of money off the value of the pound every time she has opened her mouth to bleat on about pursuing a “hard Brexit.” Unable to contemplate resisting any kind of exit from the EU that would be disastrous for our economy, and for our well-being as a modern tolerant, inclusive society (which we largely were before June 23), she has blundered on, pointless and clueless, flanked by her three horsemen of the Apocalypse, her Brexit ministers — David Davis, an admirable figure over the last decade or so as the Tories’ conscience on human rights, but hopelessly out of his depth as the minister for the UK’s suicide (sorry, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union); the idiot Boris Johnson, who “won” the Brexit campaign but didn’t even want to, and has been beyond satire as foreign secretary — including at the Spectator Awards this week, when he promised that the UK would “make a Titanic success” of leaving the EU, prompting George Osborne, presenting him with a comeback of the year award, to remind him that the Titanic sank; and, last but not least, the dangerously right-wing Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for International Trade, who somehow crawled back to ministerial life after the disgrace of his companion Adam Werrity being allowed to attend meetings of international government business when Fox was defence secretary in 2010-11.

In response to today’s court ruling, a government spokesman said ministers would appeal to the Supreme Court, and it has already been announced that that hearing will take place on December 7 and 8. I am pretty much 100% convinced that the Supreme Court will not disagree with the High Court’s ruling, so today I am going to carry on celebrating the fact that, when it came down to it, and as has happened sporadically during my life, judges have been there to stop the government from turning the executive branch into a tyranny; and please, let’s not forget the irony of this coming from ministers whose reason for wanting to leave the EU was that they regarded it as having been detrimental to Britain’s own sovereignty; the sovereignty that, in closing, for now, I must once more reiterate lies with Parliament and not with the Prime Minister and her cabinet.

So now, let’s please bring on the concerted campaign to persuade MPs to vote with their brains and their hearts, and to have the courage to say what Theresa May and her Cabinet have not: that the referendum result was only advisory, and that anything that fundamentally and profoundly damages our economy to the extent that the Brexit debacle is already doing cannot be accepted based on an advisory referendum that should never have been called and whose alleged victory was only secured with majority so slim that it does not represent a sufficient mandate for such devastating upheaval.

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.

First “War on Terror” Torture Victim Abu Zubaydah Denied Release from Guantánamo

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo for the next three months.

 

On October 27, it was announced that Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the US’s post-9/11 torture program was initiated, had his ongoing imprisonment recommended by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process involving representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Zubaydah’s review took place on August 23 (as I reported here), and the decision was taken on September 22, but, for some reason, it was not made public for five weeks.

The PRBs began in November 2013, and have reviewed the cases of 64 men, who were previously recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the basis that they were allegedly “too dangerous to release” (41 of the 64) or for men initially recommended for trials, until the legitimacy of the military commission trial system was seriously shaken by a court ruling on October 2012, and by subsequent rulings (the remaining 23). To date, 62 decisions have been taken, with 34 men being approved for release, while 28 others have had their ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial upheld. For further information, see my definitive Periodic Review Board list on the Close Guantánamo website.

In their Final Determination approving Abu Zubaydah’s ongoing imprisonment, the board members, having determined, by consensus, that “continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” described how they had “considered [his] past involvement in terrorist activities to include probably serving as one of Usama Bin Ladin’s [sic] most trusted facilitators and his admitted abilities as a long-term facilitator and fundraiser for extremist causes, regardless of his claim that he was not a formal member of al-Qa’ida.”

There’s a use of the word “probably” in that cumbersome sentence that ought to set alarms bells ringing about the truth of the board’s claims — and for good reason. Although Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was touted as a significant figure in al-Qaeda at the time of his capture, he was actually the facilitator for a training camp that was not aligned with al-Qaeda, and by 2010 the US government had officially walked back from its claims in a court submission that I wrote about at the time, in my article, Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing. For further background, also see my 2009 article, Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives.

The board members also “noted [Abu Zubaydah’s] responses to the Board which minimized his relationship with al-Qa’ida and contradicted statements he previously made, such as ‘We and the sheikh (Usama Bin Ladin) are one. We have been working together for almost 10 years, but we were hoping to keep this work secret … hidden. We were forced to make ourselves known because of what took place in Afghanistan and thereafter.’”

This quote comes from a video of an interview with Zubaydah, made by militants, probably after 9/11 and before his capture in March 2002, which, though conceivably true, should perhaps be more accurately regarded as an example of Zubaydah trying to make himself sound more important than he was.

The board members also “considered [Abu Zubaydah’s] susceptibility to recruitment by extremists due to his continued feeling of an obligation to defend and support oppressed Muslims,” and also noted that they “received no information regarding whether there are any potential receiving countries that could sufficiently mitigate his threat,” and that they “look[ed] forward to such information being presented to future reviews.”

I can’t help but find it disappointing that a “continued feeling of an obligation to defend and support oppressed Muslims” is regarded as sufficient reason for someone to continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial — especially as, at the time of his torture in 2002, another reason was given that strikes me as much more compelling from the US government’s point of view; namely, that CIA interrogators specifically sought “reasonable assurances” from their superiors that, if he survived his torture, he would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

More genuinely problematical is what would happen to Zubaydah if the US authorities ever decided to go against the CIA interrogators’ request and release him, because the Israeli government has never allowed Palestinians at Guantánamo to be repatriated, and Saudi Arabia, presumably, would not guarantee him fair treatment, meaning that a third country would have to be found that would be prepared to offer him a new home — something that his notoriety (as someone tainted by his torture, if nothing else) may well preclude.

That said, his lawyers have no expectations that he will ever be recommended for release. After the decision was announced, Brent Mickum, one of his attorneys, told Jason Leopold of Vice News, “We always expected that it would always come down exactly as it has. We never believed we had a chance.”

Like all the prisoners whose ongoing imprisonment has been approved by the Periodic Review Boards, Abu Zubaydah will be eligible for a file review in six months’ time. This is a purely administrative process, although his lawyers can submit new information if they think it will prove useful. After three years, he will be eligible for another full review, at which he will have another opportunity to make his case to the board members by video-conference, although a full review can take place sooner if the board members receive sufficiently persuasive information to convince them that it would be worthwhile.

Whether it is worthwhile or not, in the cases of “high-value detainees” like Abu Zubaydah, remains to be seen. It is certainly reassuring, for a sense of justice, that six men recommended for prosecution by the last review process seven years ago have ended up being recommended for release by the PRBs, but in the cases of the “high-value detainees” the door is still firmly shut, and it should be asked whether this is because of the dangers these men still pose, or because of an institutional refusal to consider releasing any of them under any circumstances.

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.

New Thank You Message from Shaker Aamer to Supporters, Exactly One Year Since His Release from Guantánamo

Exactly one year ago, on October 30, 2015, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in the US’s disgraceful “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, arrived home in the UK, a free man.

Prior to his release, Shaker had been told that the US no longer wanted to hold him in 2007, under George W. Bush, and was told again under President Obama, in 2009, that he had been approved for release. However, it took an extraordinary effort, by over 100,000 concerned British citizens, by MPs, by the mainstream British media and by campaigners, including myself, for him to finally be released — all because, it seems, an official or officials somewhere within the US administration refused to accept that he had unanimously been approved for release by a stringent US inter-agency review process, and regarded him, implausibly, as someone dangerous.

Today, he sent the following message to everyone who supported him over the long years of his imprisonment without charge or trial:

Dear good, beautiful, just people all over the world,

I just wanted to say thank you and I hope my message gets to you where you are in the best of health and happiness.

I am well by the grace of Allah (God) and I am very happy to let you know that I pray for all of you.

No words will be enough to show my gratitude to you.

Thank you for every morning I wake up out of that horrible place. Thank you for every meal I eat out of that miserable place. Thanks for every breath I take out of that dark place.

I have no doubt you can hear my thoughts, all of you good people out there.

May allah guide all of us to his paradise.

Aameen (Amen).

SHAKER AAMER (239).

While he was held by the US, Shaker came to be regarded as dangerous not because he was, but because he had stood up relentlessly to his captors’ injustice, and, as a charismatic and eloquent individual, had his actions interpreted as those of someone of significance within al-Qaeda rather than what he was — a wrongly imprisoned individual who was passionate about human rights and justice, not just for himself, but for everyone else who found themselves unjustly held as a result of America’s largely indiscriminate post-9/11 dragnet in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As a result of his charisma and his ability to mobilize his fellow prisoners, Shaker spent much of his 14-year imprisonment in isolation — he was held for nearly three years in uninterrupted isolation between 2005 and 2008 — and was frequently subjected to abuse.

See below for Shaker’s message to President Obama (via YouTube), urging him to close the prison — on October 11 this year, when the president had just 100 days left to fulfill the promise to close Guantánamo that he made on his second day in office back in January 2009. I recorded the video for the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that I initiated in January for the Close Guantánamo campaign that I launched in 2012, and tomorrow President Obama will have just 80 days left.

The path to Shaker’s release involved years of campaigning by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign and the London Guantánamo Campaign, and, from November 2014, the efforts of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which I founded with the activist Joanne MacInnes, and which, over an eleven-month period, secured 100 photos of celebrities and MPs standing with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker, which I had thought of, and Joanne had got made.

In the last year of Shaker’s imprisonment, there was also an All-Party Parliamentary Group that pushed for Shaker’s release, set up by the great campaigning MP John McDonnell (now the Shadow Chancellor), and including others who had long supported Shaker’s release, the Green MP Caroline Lucas and John’s colleague Jeremy Corbyn (now the Labour Party leader). In May, the Conservative MPs David Davis and Andrew Mitchell, plus Corbyn and his Labour colleague Andy Slaughter, visited the US to call for Shaker’s release, and this plus the support of the mainstream media (especially the Daily Mail) and other campaigning highlights — an open letter to President Obama on Independence Day, for example — eventually led to Shaker’s release.

I vividly recall October 30 last year, as I received a phone call in the morning from Joanne, letting me know that she was heading down to Biggin Hill, where Shaker was due to arrive at lunchtime. I then spent the rest of the day in a blur of activity, dealing with the media frenzy, and appearing on numerous TV and radio shows.

A few weeks after Shaker’s release, I was privileged to get to meet him finally at an event put together for him to meet his supporters, including the many MPs who had worked to get him freed, where the photo at the top of this article was taken. When I posted it on Facebook at the start of this year, I wrote, “It was amazing to finally get to meet [Shaker], and to get to appreciate his resilience, sense of fairness and justice, and great sense of humour, which were almost miraculous to behold after his long imprisonment in such abusive conditions.”

Throughout the last year, I have met Shaker on several more occasions, most recently for the video I recorded, posted above, but to mark the anniversary of his release I’d also like to refer people to a few more relevant media items: the 90-minute interview Shaker did with Victoria Derbyshire for the BBC last December, plus my “Song for Shaker Aamer (Freedom Version)” recorded with my band The Four Fathers (with the lyrics changed from the original campaign song to reflect Shaker’s release), and the video of me singing the song in Washington, D.C. in January this year.

Fighting Injustice EP (UK version) by The Four Fathers

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

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

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

In Contentious Split Decision, Appeals Court Upholds Guantánamo Prisoner Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul’s Conspiracy Conviction

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

Last week, in the latest development in a long-running court case related to Guantánamo, the court of appeals in Washington, D.C. (the D.C. Circuit) upheld Ali Hamza al-Bahlul’s November 2008 conviction for conspiracy in his trial by military commission, but in a divided decision that means the case will almost certainly now make its way to the Supreme Court.

Al-Bahlul, a Yemeni, was seized in Afghanistan in December 2001, and taken to Guantánamo, where, in June 2004, he was charged in the first version of the military commissions that were ill-advisedly dragged out of the history books by the Bush administration in November 2001, primarily on the basis that he had made a promotional video for al-Qaeda.

Two years later, the commissions were scrapped after the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal, but they were subsequently revived by Congress, and in February 2008 he was charged again, and convicted in November 2008, after a trial in which he refused to mount a defense, on “17 counts of conspiracy, eight counts of solicitation to commit murder and 10 counts of providing material support for terrorism,” as I described it at the time.

However, in October 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court threw out the material support conviction against another prisoner, Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, and in January 2013 al-Bahlul’s conviction was also dismissed. As I explained at the time, “the Court of Appeals vacated his conviction for material support, conspiracy, and another charge, solicitation, citing a supplemental brief filed by the government on January 9, 2013, advising the Court that it took the ‘position that Hamdan requires reversal of Bahlul’s convictions by military commission.’”

Nevertheless, the government appealed to the full court, rather than just the three judges who reached the ruling in January 2013. That hearing took place on September 30, 2013, leading to what I described as “the rather confusing outcome of the government’s appeal” after the ruling was delivered on July 14, 2014.

The en banc court, as I also described it, “confirmed that al-Bahlul’s material support conviction was overturned, and also confirmed that his conviction for soliciting others to commit war crimes was overturned as well.” The judges, as I put it, “agreed that providing material support for terrorism is not a war crime triable by military commission based on conduct occurring prior to 2006, even for a defendant who gave up that argument at trial” — and the same applied to the solicitation charges.

However, “on the third count on which he was initially convicted, conspiracy to commit war crimes, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected a constitutional challenge brought by al-Bahlul, but did so, as the National Law Journal explained, in ‘a fractured ruling that left unclear how future cases against terrorism suspects might proceed.’”

Revealing quite how “unclear” the ruling was, aspects of al-Bahlul’s conspiracy conviction were sent back to the original three-judge panel, and on June 12, 2015, the court “vacated Bahlul’s inchoate conspiracy conviction,” as the Harvard Law School National Security Journal explained, for reasons related to the conflict between federal courts (Article III courts), where material support and conspiracy are crimes, and military commissions, where they are not (or were not until Congress tried to claim that they were, in 2006 and again in 2009).

The court held that, as the Harvard article described it, “1) the claim that Congress encroached upon Article III judicial power by authorizing Executive Branch tribunals to try purely domestic crime of inchoate conspiracy was a structural objection that could not be forfeited and 2) conviction of Bahlul for inchoate conspiracy by law of war military commission violated separation of powers enshrined in Article III.”

The government then petitioned for another en banc hearing, arguing that Congress “did not violate Article III when it codified conspiracy as an offense triable by military commission,” because:

The Constitution confers on Congress extensive war powers that include not only the power to “define and punish . . . offenses against the Law of Nations,” but also the power to declare war, as well as the power to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” Congress’s authority to give military tribunals jurisdiction to try alien unlawful enemy combatants for conspiracies to commit war crimes derives from all of these sources.

The court granted the government’s petition, whilst also “vacat[ing] its June 2015 judgment that vacated Bahlul’s conspiracy conviction.” That hearing took place on December 1, 2015, leading to last week’s ruling, by six judges to three, reinstating al-Bahlul’s conspiracy conviction.

As the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School explained in its morning brief the day after the ruling:

Th[e] issue in the case was whether the Constitution allows Congress to make conspiracy to commit war crimes an offense triable by military commissions, despite the fact that conspiracy is not recognized as an international war crime. Four of the six judges in the majority argued that Congress had the constitutional power to authorize conspiracy charges in the military commission. One of the four judges, Brett Kavanaugh, wrote that “wherever one might ultimately draw the outer boundaries of Congress’s authority to establish offenses triable by military commission, the historically rooted offense of conspiracy to commit war crimes is well within those limits.”

However, the ruling lacked a clear majority, as the two other judges who voted to uphold the decision did so for different legal reasons. In dissent, three judges wrote that “although the government might well be entitled to detain al-Bahlul as an enemy belligerent, it does not have the power to switch the Constitution on and off at will.” They added that Bahlul’s prosecution on conspiracy charges “exceeded the scope” of what is allowed for military tribunals under the Constitution.

The Fordham briefing also noted that Michel Paradis, one of al-Bahlul’s attorneys, “said he expected the next step, after consulting with his client, was to attempt to have the case heard by the Supreme Court.”

In the New York Times, Charlie Savage explained how the ruling “salvag[ed] a rare successful outcome for the troubled tribunals system,” but added that “the divided ruling left unresolved a broader legal question that could help determine whether the tribunals system takes root as a permanent alternative to civilian court for prosecuting terrorism suspects, or fades away after the handful of current cases come to an end.”

Savage added, “That question is whether the military commissions can be used to prosecute additional terrorism defendants for conspiracy. That charge, which is useful for trying people suspected of participating in a terrorist organization, is considered a crime under domestic law, but it is not a war crime recognized by international law. Generally, tribunals are used to prosecute war crimes.”

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, told Charlie Savage, “There is still no resolution of this basic constitutional question that has been dogging the commissions since their inception. The court let this one conviction stand, but in the process, it didn’t actually settle the fight.”

Savage also explained a little more about the ruling, noting that “[f]our of the six judges in the majority — Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas B. Griffith, Brett Kavanaugh and Karen L. Henderson, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents — argued that Congress had the constitutional power to authorize bringing conspiracy charges in the war crimes court, despite international law,” while “the other two judges in the majority — Patricia Ann Millett and Robert L. Wilkins, both Democratic appointees — agreed that Mr. Bahlul’s conviction should be upheld, but cited different legal reasons specific to his case. They expressed no opinion about the broader issue of conspiracy charges.”

The three dissenting judges were Cornelia T.L. Pillard, Judith W. Rogers and David S. Tatel, all Democratic appointees, who, as Charlie Savage described it, “said conspiracy charges could never be brought in a commission.” He added, “As a result, there was no majority to resolve the bigger question about such charges.”

Note: Steve Vladeck is also the co-editor-in-chief of the very worthwhile Just Security, and also sometimes writes for the generally to be avoided Lawfare, which positions itself as a centrist forum for national security discussions but is actually, in general, rather disturbingly right-wing. Nevertheless, those who want to know more about the intricacies of this latest ruling — and can understand them — are directed to Steve’s latest post, “Al Bahlul and the Long Shadow of Illegitimacy.”

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

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