Andy Worthington's Blog, page 9

Celebrating 1,300 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

Recent photos from The State of London photo-journalism project by Andy Worthington.


Please support my work on ‘The State of London’, a labour of love that has no funding except from you. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Sunday marked 1,300 days — over three and a half years — since I first began posting a photo a day (plus an accompanying essay) on my Facebook page ‘The State of London.’

The Facebook project began on May 11, 2017, the fifth anniversary of the day I first consciously began cycling around the 120 postcodes of the London Postal District (the postcodes beginning  E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC), intending to capture, in photos, the changing face of the city, and its different manifestations based on the weather and the seasons.

My thanks to everyone taking an interest in the project, which has just reached 3,800 followers — plus many more who follow the photos on my own Facebook page, and also those who follow ‘The State of London’ on Twitter.

A lot has changed in eight and a half years. Back in May 2012, the Tory government of David Cameron, having cynically introduced an “age of austerity” when they took power in 2010, in response to the banker-led global economic crash of 2008, nevertheless established that money was no object when it came to hosting the Olympic Games, which began in July. Billions of pounds were spent on the erasure of old, industrial Stratford by the River Lea, and money was also found for beautifying projects across the capital that provided a distraction from the capital’s other face — one of deranged house price inflation and exorbitant rents, often in relation to properties whose main characteristic was that were actually quite old and tatty.

The Olympics allegedly provided London — and the country as a whole — with a “feel good” factor, although, to my mind, it primarily helped to create a form of jingoism and perceived exceptionalism that fed directly into the Brexit vote of 2016, whilst also fulfilling the Olympics’ other economic and political by-products: an opportunity for social cleansing, increased authoritarianism and continuing opportunities for inward investment in “mixed-use” developments of overpriced housing, offices and retail spaces.

As I cycled around the capital in the years following the Olympics, I watched as the legacy of the Olympics — aided by the business-accommodating Boris Johnson as London’s Mayor — saw new developments counter-intuitively rising up across the capital in vast numbers; I say counter-intuitively because it was all taking place against a backdrop of increasing poverty, and an ever-growing gulf between the rich and the poor.

One particularly dispiriting aspect of London’s takeover by property-based capital was the destruction of council estates — or, as everyone involved described it, their “regeneration.” What had once been genuinely affordable housing for all was destroyed — with no concern for the environmental costs of doing so — and replaced with new properties that were mostly for private sale, but that also included a considerably less affordable element of allegedly social housing, delivered by housing associations, which, in response to Tory cuts, had enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to become public/private property developers with only a sideline in providing rented housing at less than market rents.

It was also dispiriting to realise that, across the capital, Labour councils had also responded to Tory cuts by enthusiastically embracing the stealthy removal of poorer residents from their boroughs, to be replaced by the illusion of attracting “aspirational” incomers with money to spare; the reality being that most of these incomers, if they could be located, also ended up being fleeced, having little left to put into their local economies after paying their over-inflated mortgages or rents.

And so to 2020, when the pressure cooker of 21st century London life suddenly hit a wall — and not even the environmental one that activists like Extinction Rebellion had been warning of, and which I had covered in my photographic journeys, along with all the destruction and hubristic high-rise developments described above.

Covid-19 — when Boris Johnson’s government belatedly woke up to the threat it posed, implementing a lockdown on March 23 — has, of course, completely transformed London in the last eight months, as I recorded in my photos — and accompanying essays — throughout the whole of the first lockdown, when I was repeatedly drawn to the unprecedented emptiness of the West End and the City in particular.

Gone were the tourists who, in environmentally unsustainable numbers, largely maintained the capital’s hectic, crowded worlds of hospitality, entertainment and retail. Gone too were the office workers who also did so much to sustain it, as they began working from home instead, and, in a majority of cases, found it preferable to the hideously overcrowded and often ridiculously expensive commuter journeys that they had previously been enduring.

Quite what the future holds is difficult to see right now, as the city emerges from another, more difficult month of lockdown, in which there was nothing to do and it was, for so much of the time, also cold and dark. With so many jobs lost, and so many businesses on the edge of collapse, a vaccine now seems to be our saviour, but it will not suddenly make life “safe” again, and, in any case, the desire to return to “business as usual”, as it was before Covid hit, is to ignore the environmental unsustainability of our previous lives, in which, to a large extent, we all — or those of us in the West, at least — behaved with the appetites of spoiled toddlers or medieval kings.

I’m delighted that so many of you have chosen to accompany me on this journey, which, of course, has many other aspects that are less politically charged, and if you’d like to make a donation to support ‘The State of London’, please feel free to do so, as I have no funding for it.

I hope, in the coming year, to finally set up a website, featuring, for a change, entire photo sets with accompanying essays, and I’m also still hoping that someone might be interested in putting on an exhibition. Do get in touch if you can help in any way.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

A Guantánamo Insider’s Detailed Proposal for How Joe Biden Can Finally Close the Prison

A composite image of President Elect Joe Biden and Camp 6 at Guantánamo.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

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.

With Joe Biden’s victory in the Presidential Election, it’s reassuring that Guantánamo is back on the radar, after four long years under Donald Trump in which time may as well have stood still.

The Just Security website has just published a powerful article, “A Path for Renewing Guantánamo Closure,” which we’re cross-posting below. It was written by Benjamin R. Farley, who served as Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure at the U.S. Department of State from 2013-17, and is currently a Trial Attorney and Law-of-War Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization, assigned to the team representing Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five co-defendants in the 9/11 trial.

Farley explains how, of the 40 men still held, 30 can be released “simply by restoring, with slight modification, the successful GTMO closure policy process developed during the Obama administration,” although he concedes that, “[t]o finish the remaining 25 percent of the project, [he] will likely need the historically elusive support of Congress.”

In analyzing the cases of the men still held, Farley notes that, in addition to the relatively well-known example of the five men still held who were approved for release by high-level review processes under President Obama, four or five other men were likely to have been approved for release by the second of Obama’s two review processes, the parole-style Periodic Review Boards, had it not been for what he calls the “political interference” of Donald Trump.

To ensure further releases or transfers, Farley provides details of how the PRB process can be revived and modified, as well as establishing a coherent narrative for how the necessary steps can then be taken to ensure that the prison is closed once and for all.

I won’t summarize these suggestions, because I hope you have time to read the article, and I also hope that you’ll share if with others who might find it helpful.

A Path for Renewing Guantánamo Closure

By Benjamin R. Farley, Just Security, November 17, 2020

With the ballots cast and counted, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is president-elect of the United States. He must look forward to assembling his team, to inauguration, and to beginning the work of “building back better.” Although closing the 20-year-old detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO) may not be a marquee issue among the many significant challenges Biden will face as president of the United States, it is a prerequisite for both restoring America’s global leadership by “salvag[ing] our reputation, rebuild[ing] confidence in our leadership” and for ending the so-called Forever Wars.

Closing GTMO is long overdue. As President George W. Bush recognized nearly 15 years ago, GTMO is “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.” Indeed, GTMO’s continued operation has been a drag on U.S. efforts to promote human rights and law-of-war compliance abroad. It also has proven to be a significant and continuing impediment to American counterterrorism efforts, most recently and prominently in negotiations with the United Kingdom over the disposition of the two surviving ISIS “Beatles.”

President Barack Obama understood the imperative of closing GTMO, repeatedly championed it, and made substantial progress toward that goal. His administration established a rigorous policy process to scrutinize each detainee and each proposed detainee transfer. But those efforts were stymied in part by the sudden and inexplicable transformation of GTMO closure into a partisan political issue after his inauguration. And they were dogged by specious claims of risk that reflected, without proper attribution, mistakes made during the Bush administration’s transfer of some 530 GTMO detainees. In fact, by the end of his administration, Obama had transferred 196 men from GTMO while improving the security of those transfers by a factor of five over the Bush administration’s efforts.

Today, closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay requires the United States to transfer just 40 men. Biden’s administration can safely complete that task with only moderate political, policy, and fiscal investment. Several of the steps the Biden administration should take to close GTMO are familiar — in fact, many of them were communicated to both the Trump and Biden campaigns before the election. Indeed, the reality is that Biden’s administration can accomplish 75 percent of the closure job simply by restoring, with slight modification, the successful GTMO closure policy process developed during the Obama administration. To finish the remaining 25 percent of the project, however, Biden will likely need the historically elusive support of Congress.

And Congress should aid the president-elect in closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay because doing so is both the right and fiscally responsible thing to do. Congress should support the responsible closure of GTMO because it will improve American security while restoring American leadership. And Congress should support the responsible closure of GTMO because it will help achieve finality and a long-sought measure of justice for the 9/11 attacks and the U.S.S. Cole bombing, among other terrorist acts.

Current Status

The 40 men left in U.S. custody at GTMO, at a cost of $13 million per detainee per year, fall into three rough categories:

Approved (or likely to be approved) for transfer: Nine (possibly 10).

Five GTMO detainees are currently approved for transfer. Two of those detainees — Abdul Latif Nasser and Sufyian Barhoumi — could easily have been repatriated to Morocco and Algeria, respectively, in February 2017 had the Trump administration not abandoned diplomatic arrangements already made.



Three (possibly four) GTMO detainees would likely have been approved for transfer by the Periodic Review Board (PRB) but for political interference during the Trump administration. Although PRB decisions are normally published approximately 30 days after the board meets — and although the Review Committee “shall conduct a review” if the PRB is unable to reach a consensus decision — Omar Muhammad Ali al-Rammah’s has been waiting more than three-and-a-half years for his last PRB decision; Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi has been waiting two-and-a-half years; and Said Salih Said Nashir has been waiting nearly a year. Additionally, Haroon al Afghani’s decision is nearly two months overdue, potentially indicating that the PRB may have approved his transfer but for political interference.



One additional detainee, Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, is likely to be approved for transfer in the near future. The PRB’s file-review process recently recommended that he receive an additional full review hearing. Historically, when the PRB’s file-review mechanism recommends an additional hearing, the ensuring review results in transfer approval (or likely approval) 56 percent of the time.

Military commissions proceedings: 12.

Seven detainees are currently undergoing pre-trial proceedings before three separate GTMO military commissions: the 9/11 trial, the U.S.S. Cole trial, and the Hadi al-Iraqi (or Nashwan al-Tamir) trial. Six of those men face capital charges; all seven are victims of U.S.-government-sponsored torture. And, although each was arraigned between six and nine years ago, none have yet heard opening arguments, or seen members selected and empaneled. Indeed, the government has yet to produce fundamental discovery like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation.



The Office of the Chief Prosecutor has repeatedly tried and failed to charge three additional detainees for the 2002 Bali bombings.



Majid Khan pled guilty and began cooperating with the government more than eight-and-a-half years ago. He is finally scheduled to undergo sentencing in May 2021.



Ali Hamza al Bahlul, whose sole remaining conviction — for standalone conspiracy — is before the D.C. Circuit on another petition for en banc review, is serving a sentence of uncertain duration.

Continuing law-of-war detention: 19 (or 18).

Nineteen (or 18, depending on the outcome of al Afghani’s PRB) men who have been detained for between 12 and nearly 19 years are neither approved for transfer nor face a suggestion of prosecution before a military commission.



Several of them are victims of the U.S. government’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program, including at least: Abu Zubaydah, Abu Faraj al Libbi, Muhammad Rahim, and Guleed Dourad.



Approximately 15 of them are already described as “low value” by the U.S. government, suggesting that detention at cost of $13 million per year some 15 or more years since capture is impractical at best.



Among these low-value detainees is Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani, one of the alleged “twentieth hijackers,” whose torture while in Department of Defense custody led then Convening Authority to reject military commission prosecutors’ attempt to try him as a 9/11 co-conspirator; a federal court recently ordered the United States’ first ever Mixed Medical Commission to review whether he is too mentally ill to be detained as a law-of-war detainee.

Although historically unusual and possibly unconstitutional, existing federal law imposes certain constraints on the transfer of the GTMO detainees described above. It limits the transfer of GTMO detainees subject to (1) court order or (2) advance Congressional notification that, inter alia, certifies the receiving government “has taken or agreed to take action that substantially mitigates any risk the individual could attempt to reengage in terrorist activity or otherwise threaten the United States or its allies or interests.” Existing federal law also prohibits the transfer of any of these men to the United States for any purpose, including trial or medical care—a prohibition that may well violate the United States’ international obligations. And it prohibits the transfer of any GTMO detainees to Libya, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen.

Reviving the Closure Process

By reviving, with slight modifications, the Obama administration’s GTMO detainee transfer policy process, Biden could make relatively rapid progress toward closing the detention facility. Eventually, revival and slight modification of the Obama-era GTMO detainee transfer process could allow Biden to transfer as many as 75 percent of the 40 detainees who remain in U.S. custody there even with the current transfer limitations in federal law.

Biden has the authority to direct the disposition of all the detainees at GTMO irrespective of the three categories described above. Nevertheless, building on the Obama administration’s efforts and adhering to those categories will help the Biden administration triage the GTMO closure problem set. It will allow the Biden administration to build on the successes and lessons learned from the Obama administration’s GTMO closure efforts. And it will ensure that Biden administration transfers demonstrate a similar marked improvement in the rate of former GTMO detainees who are confirmed or suspected of “reengagement,” as compared to Bush-era transfers, as those of the Obama administration.

Biden should also improve upon the Obama administration’s GTMO closure policy process to facilitate the safe and effective closure of the detention facility. By issuing guidance interpreting the PRB’s standard of review, Biden can gradually reduce the population of detainees in the continuing law-of-war detention category while ensuring that detainees who pose a bona fide significant, continuing threat to U.S. security are transferred last, following the necessarily intensive diplomatic engagement required to yield the most appropriate post-transfer security and humane-treatment guarantees.

This approach of reviving and slightly modifying the Obama-era GTMO detainee transfer process will best promote U.S. security interests while making substantial progress toward closing the detention facility. It will also avoid the time, policy, and political costs associated with creating a new process from scratch.

To reinvigorate the GTMO closure policy process, Biden should first lay the policy groundwork for GTMO closure by:

rescinding Executive Order 13823 [Trump’s executive order of January 30, 2018, keeping Guantánamo open] to reestablish GTMO closure as the official policy of the United States, which is necessary to direct the bureaucracy and arm U.S. diplomats to that end;



assigning responsibility for overseeing the closure policy to a senior member of his administration, preferably within the White House or on the National Security Council staff to ensure the sustained White House engagement on GTMO closure necessary to the policy’s success;



immediately either (a) directing principals at the agencies that participate in the PRB to reconsider their positions on the three long overdue PRB decisions; or (b) convening an equally long outstanding Review Committee to resolve the cases in limbo; and



promulgating guidance interpreting Executive Order 13567 [Obama’s executive order of March 7, 2011, establishing the PRBs] that, inter alia, clarifies the meaning of “necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States” and the factors to be considered. In particular, the guidance should establish that “necessary” means “unable to be accomplished without continued detention,” “protect” does not mean “prevent absolutely,” and “significant threat” means not just “some” or “any threat” but “a threat substantially greater than the ordinary threats posed by hostile individuals every day.” Additionally, this interpretive guidance should direct the PRB to favorably consider age, duration of detention, its deleterious impact on physical capacity, its mitigating effects on pre-detention connections to hostile actors, and the current status or existence of the entities to which the detainee was previously associated. It should also direct the PRB to favorably consider credible allegations that the detainee under review was tortured by any agent of the U.S. government or a partner government with American complicity. And it should direct the PRB to discount disciplinary infractions while in detention and the credibility of jailhouse chatter that, while potentially facially threatening, is actually unrealistic upon even cursory examination;



thereafter, ordering the PRB to hold new hearings for the 19 or so detainees who are neither yet approved for transfer nor engaged in military commissions proceedings; and



making senior administration officials available for foreign government engagement in order to open or during the course of transfer negotiations.

Then, Biden should assign to the State Department responsibility for expeditiously negotiating GTMO detainee transfer frameworks that reflect the lessons learned through the Department’s experience leading detainee transfer negotiations during the Obama administration. To that end, the State Department should:

immediately resuscitate the detainee repatriation deals with Morocco and Algeria left to gather dust by the Trump administration;



begin discussions with appropriate foreign governments concerning the potential repatriation or resettlement of the 19 detainees who are not presently approved for transfer but who may become so;



potentially reestablish the GTMO closure infrastructure at the State Department as a matter of expediency. Although reestablishment of the GTMO Closure office should not be necessary to achieve GTMO closure, a State Department office responsible for detainee affairs may prove beneficial in correcting the Trump administration’s apparent failure to monitor earlier detainee transfer agreements and to address issues arising from law-of-war detention in other contexts in which the United States is interested; and



ensure senior State Department officials, including American ambassadors abroad, prioritize and support GTMO closure by appropriately incorporating GTMO closure points into their communications with foreign government officials.

Finally, timely Department of Defense cooperation and support for GTMO detainee transfer negotiations and transfers is vital to the success of GTMO closure efforts. The Department of Defense controls access to Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, as well as the detainees themselves. The Defense Department also has access to substantial funds that are relatively unrestricted. Biden should direct DOD to facilitate the expeditious transfer of detainees in its custody by:

ensuring that the defense secretary is actively engaged with GTMO closure and their office is receptive to requests for action from the detainee affairs office within the Office of the undersecretary of defense for policy;



providing non-reimbursable air assets to facilitate State Department access to GTMO detainees, as well as foreign government interviews of GTMO detainees in furtherance of detainee transfer negotiations;



making Emergency & Expeditionary Expense funds available to support U.S. efforts to transfer GTMO detainees by defraying the security and reintegration costs such transfers impose on receiving states. These costs may include host-government expenses related to security measures, housing, physical and mental healthcare, education or job training, an allowance or stipend, and family reunification. Experience demonstrates that the availability of such funding both encourages foreign partner assistance in resettling former GTMO detainees and promotes the successful, peaceful (re)integration of former GTMO detainees; and



establishing the priority / urgency / justification / category of GTMO detainee transfer flights at a level that is sufficiently high to ensure that flights are not delayed unless absolutely necessary.

Resolving the Military Commissions

The 12 men engaged or potentially engaged in GTMO military commission proceedings pose likely the most politically fraught challenge of GTMO closure. These men represent the United States’ remaining efforts to bring to justice alleged terrorists captured in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — including five men accused of playing some role in the conspiracy to launch those attacks.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the three generations of GTMO military commissions since Sept. 11, 2001, have been an abject policy failure. One need look no further than the long delayed 9/11 military commission trial or the fragility of the vanishingly few military commission convictions for evidence of that proposition.

Federal courts, which are more than capable of trying terrorism-related cases, remain a theoretical option for prosecuting, convicting, and sentencing 10 of the 12 men at GTMO actually or potentially subject to prosecution before military commissions. But each of those 10 men is a victim of U.S. government-sponsored torture, which casts serious doubt on the fairness of any trial sponsored by their torturers. To make matters worse, in some cases the long-term effects of the U.S. government’s torture include cognitive decline and damage to memory resulting from trauma, which prevents or inhibits certain defendants from meaningfully assisting in their own defense. Worse yet, it increasingly appears that their torture is inextricably entwined with the government’s case — at least for the 9/11 defendants. The centrality of torture to these cases shadows them in doubt in a manner that was simply not publicly known when last the government considered their prosecution in federal court.

In light of the failure of GTMO military commissions prosecutions as a matter of policy, and in light of the evidentiary and fair-trial challenges posed by prosecuting these torture victims in federal court, plea bargains (whether before military commissions or federal courts) are likely the U.S. government’s best route to resolving these interminable cases while achieving some measure of justice.

To that end, Biden, through his secretary of defense, should appoint a GTMO military commissions Convening Authority who will open plea negotiations with the seven men who are already charged and in the midst of pretrial proceedings before military commissions. At least a few of these plea agreements will likely result in sentences less than life imprisonment. Given the duration of the defendants’ time in American custody already, the Convening Authority should follow the plea agreement modeled by Ahmed al Darbi and others in which a substantial portion of any sentence is served overseas.

Finally, there are three men whom the Office of the Chief Prosecutor has repeatedly tried and failed to charge in connection with the 2002 Bali bombings. The best path forward may be entering a pretrial agreement in which the Convening Authority agrees to refer certain charges and those men agree to plead guilty, while admitting such facts as would amount to a modicum of justice in the Bali bombing case.

The Remainder

Taken together, renewed diplomatic emphasis, new guidance for the PRB, a reinvigorated GTMO closure process, and plea-based resolution of the military commissions are likely to result in substantial progress towards closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But there may well be some small number of detainees who are never approved for transfer by the PRB. Closing GTMO means transferring these men, as well. The Biden administration should focus its diplomatic efforts concerning the repatriation or resettlement of these detainees — the remainder, sometimes described by the Obama administration as the “irreducible minimum” — on establishing transfer frameworks that incorporate and respond to the concerns identified by the PRB in determining these men pose a significant, continuing threat to the United States.

As Bush acknowledged long ago, closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay is a worthy goal in its own right. Operation of GTMO has cost American taxpayers at least $7 billion since 2002. According to national security experts and practitioners, the diplomatic, security, and reputational costs of the continued operation of GTMO are substantial if unquantifiable. Unfortunately, the benefits of GTMO have proved even more illusory: the limited intelligence benefits of GTMO are long since exhausted; and the security benefits of detaining primarily low-level fighters (at best) are minimal.

Additionally, ending the Forever Wars requires releasing the men who make up the irreducible minimum. When wars end, a State’s authority to detain enemy fighters ends as well. That principle applies here, as well. Once its war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces ends, as matter of international law, the United States will no longer enjoy the expansive authority it claimed to justify the detention of their fighters. Likewise, once the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force is repealed, the United States will no longer have the domestic legal authority to detain the men in U.S. custody at GTMO. Continued detention of the remainder at GTMO necessarily means the continuation of the Forever Wars.

Moreover, the continued detention of these men represents an impossible pursuit of perfect security. The release of prisoners of war, or similar, always entails some measure of risk. Indeed, as of 2016, fewer than 15 detainees out of the then-nearly 700 detainees transferred from GTMO were reportedly implicated in hostile activities involving Americans. Tragically, these hostile activities resulted in the deaths of six Americans, primarily in the course of firefights involving U.S. forces in active war zones. The death of any American abroad is one too many. But, with the post-transfer track record of former GTMO detainees, it would be difficult — even unreasonable — to conclude that negotiated transfers, designed to substantially mitigate the threat posed by a handful of aging, often sick, men some 15 years removed from their networks, measurably increase the risk exposure of the United States. Indeed, it is possible that the negotiated transfer of many of the remaining GTMO detainees is less risky than the transfer or release of dozens of men in the waning days of U.S. control of the Parwan Detention Facility in Afghanistan that proceeded with little public comment or Congressional involvement. And, the negotiated transfer of GTMO detainees certainly exposes the United States to less risk than that posed by the thousands of, often combat hardened, former ISIS fighters wandering Syria and elsewhere whom the United States has never and likely will never detain. If anything, continuing to detain these men as years stretch into decades increases the risk of compounding the reputational harm incurred when the United States opened GTMO, hampering counterterrorism cooperation, suffering disadvantageous decisions from reengaged federal courts, mythologizing foot soldiers and ordinary criminals into Rambos or Bond villains, and inspiring nonparticipants to take up the fight against the United States.

Transferring the remainder in light of the PRB’s up-to-date assessments will ensure that the location and parameters of their ultimate disposition are appropriately selected and negotiated. These negotiated transfer frameworks will be subjected to the same intensive, interagency vetting process that resulted in substantially safer detainee transfers during the Obama administration. Premising transfers on the PRB, the interagency vetting process, and serious negotiations with foreign partners will, in turn, help ensure that when the small number of difficult cases are resettled or repatriated, GTMO is closed — and it is closed safely and responsibly.

A Role for Congress in GTMO Closure?

Notwithstanding its famed GTMO-related recalcitrance during the Obama administration, Congress should assist President-elect Biden’s efforts to close GTMO by, at least, lifting the blanket prohibition on detainee transfers to the United States. Under current law, Biden has sufficient flexibility to negotiate and implement the foreign transfers necessary to reduce the GTMO detainee population by as much as 75 percent. But, assuming the United States seeks incarceration of those guilty of terrorism in its prisons — and assuming that Biden does not challenge the constitutionality of the law restricting detainee transfers — Congress must lift the blanket prohibition on U.S. transfers so certain of the military commission defendants or prospects may serve sentences arising from plea agreements.

Congress should also lift the blanket prohibition on transfers to the United States to allow GTMO detainees to be transferred, temporarily, for serious or emergent medical care. The medical facilities available to the detainees at GTMO are simply inadequate. If application of the Geneva Conventions by analogy means anything, it should mean that in situations where service members are medevacked for basic surgery, law-of-war detainees in their custody should be as well. Detainees’ lack of access to adequate medical care at GTMO, especially in emergent circumstances, may well place the United States out of compliance with its international obligations. Authorizing temporary transfer to the United States for necessary medical procedures is the appropriate course of action while the Biden administration works to finally close the facility.

Finally, Congress could improve the efficiency of the detainee transfer process by lifting the transfer restrictions and certification requirements most recently imposed by the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act. Congressional imposition of transfer restrictions for law-of-war detainees is at least inconsistent with historical practice. It may also unconstitutionally impinge on the president’s inherent authority as commander-in-chief. And the restrictions are unnecessary because they are largely redundant with the policy-based efforts of the rigorous transfer-review process adopted by the Obama administration. The real effect of the transfer restrictions is to inject delay into the transfer process by requiring congressional notification 30 days in advance of any transfer. The transfer restrictions also create unnecessary opportunities for bureaucratic fiction that contribute to delay.

As much as President-elect Biden, members of Congress should seek a swift and safe conclusion to the fiasco of detention at Guantánamo Bay. Certainly, Congress can find a better use for the more than $540 million spent annually on the detention facility’s operation. And certainly the approximately 1,500 Reserve and National Guard troops charged with guarding the 40 detainees could be deployed to greater effect elsewhere or, possibly, not at all — to give them and their families a respite from the last 20 years. Moreover, Congress should seek to positively contribute to restoring America’s place in the world by, at the very least, rescinding the nonsensical legislative policy that forces the executive branch to treat GTMO detainees, regardless of relative threat, differently than the United States treated (treasonous) Confederate fighters, Nazis, the Vietcong, or even other alleged members of al Qaeda who happened to be detained anywhere but Guantánamo.

Conclusion

Despite Trump’s threats to load GTMO up with “bad dudes,” it looks like Biden will find the population of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay much as he left it on Jan. 20, 2017. Although the infrastructure the Obama administration built to responsibly close GTMO has been dismantled in part and otherwise left to gather dust, enough of it remains that the GTMO closure process can be restarted quickly. The Biden administration is thus well positioned to take concrete, tangible steps toward finally cleaning up Guantánamo’s stain on America’s reputation and restoring America’s values-based global leadership in the near term. It should do so — and it can start by reviving, with slight modification, the GTMO detainee transfer policy process abandoned by Biden’s predecessor.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Radio: I Discuss The Future of Guantánamo Under Joe Biden with Andy Bungay and Colin Crilly in South London

A screenshot from Mixcloud of Andy Bungay’s show ‘The Chiminea’ on Riverside Radio in Battersea on November 22, 2020, also featuring Colin Crilly.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Saturday, I was delighted to take part in a remotely recorded radio show for Riverside Radio, a community station in Battersea, with Andy Bungay, who hosts ‘The Chiminea’, the 11pm to 2am slot on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and his colleague Colin Crilly.

Our interview starts about 27 minutes into the two-hour show, which is available on Mixcloud here, and Andy began by playing ‘This Time We Win’, a recently released eco-anthem by my band The Four Fathers, recorded with and featuring the great Charlie Hart on keyboards.

I then introduced myself, particularly mentioning my Guantánamo work, which I’ve been undertaking for the last 15 years, and my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’ We talked about the successful campaign to secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who was held for 14 years without charge or trial, but was eventually released five years ago, on October 30, 2015, as I noted on Facebook, following up with a photo from a Parliamentary reception for Shaker, hosted by Jeremy Corbyn, which took place on November 17, 2015.

I had been involved for many years with the Save Shaker Aamer campaign, who held regular vigils outside Parliament, and worked with the Labour MP John McDonnell MP to set up the Shaker Aamer All-Party Parliamentary Group, and, in the last year of Shaker’s imprisonment, with the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I set up with the activist Joanne MacInnes, which involved persuading a considerable number of celebrities and MPs to have their photo taken with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer, demanding his return.

Andy and Colin then played some audio footage of Shaker Aamer campaigners being interviewed outside Parliament before his release, and then Andy played another song by The Four Fathers, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, the title track of our second album, as recorded live during lockdown.

Returning to the interview, we continued to discuss Guantánamo, and specifically what we might expect from Joe Biden, after four dreadful years of very deliberate inaction by Donald Trump, and I expressed my hope that we’ll pick up where President Obama left off; in other words, that there will be people in the administration who recognize that the fundamental existence of Guantánamo is wrong, but it will remain to be seen how much political capital Biden will be wiling to spend closing it, or, at least, making progress towards its closure, starting with the release of five men still held who were unanimously approved for release by high-level review processes under Obama, but didn’t get out before Trump took over.

Andy also asked me about the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who, of course, is, shamefully, facing extradition to the US for his role as the publisher of leaked documents that it was — and is — in the public interest for people to know about. I recently gave evidence in the extradition case, but was unable to answer Andy’s question about what will happen next. Logically, Joe Biden should drop Donald Trump’s extradition request, because, as Obama concluded, prosecuting Assange would have a chilling effect on the US’s cherished First Amendment rights, but whether he will or not is as yet unknown.

There was even more in the show, after Andy played Leonard Cohen’s ‘Democracy Is Coming To The USA’, involving the story of Babar Ahmed and Talha Ehsan, south Londoners extradited to the US under Theresa May, all of which, somehow, segued into a discussion of the ongoing suicidal folly of Brexit, Our discussion came to and at 1:23:30, and I hope you have time to listen to the show, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Covid, Ghost Cities and the Collapse of Property Prices in the West End and the City of London

An almost entirely deserted Oxford Circus on November 10, 2020, during the latest Covid lockdown in England. A previously unpublished photo from Andy Worthington’s photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and photographer. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

Is this how the world as we know it ends, then — not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with the slow, silent death of shops, pubs, restaurants and live culture?

England’s second Covid lockdown, introduced on November 5 in response to rising infection rates, has, in a crucial pre-Christmas month for business, shut down all shops regarded as “non-essential” — in other words, to name just a few examples, all clothes shops, gift shops and bookshops — as well as pubs and restaurants, with a sense of timing that could lead one to conclude that it was dictated by Amazon and other online retailers for whom Covid has seen their businesses reap unprecedented profits.

The cost of this, in terms of businesses shutting down, and employees laid off, is not yet known, but it seems likely that, as 2021 unfolds, the centres of our cities and towns will be wastelands, reminiscent of the early ‘80s under Margaret Thatcher.

What is more, we don’t even know if the lockdown will end as intended on December 2, at least allowing these shops, pubs and restaurants to take advantage of what, traditionally, has been their busiest time of the year, or if it will continue with, perhaps, just a short window of socialising allowed for Christmas, followed by the resumption of lockdown in the new year.

If this scenario comes to pass, those wastelands look increasingly likely to materialise, with shops, pubs, restaurants, hotels, all shutting down in unprecedented numbers, their lifeless facades joining those of other unfortunate businesses that never even managed to reopen at all, however briefly, over the summer and into autumn — theatres and music venues, for example.

So is there any hope? Well, yes, I think there still is, although I’m not as optimistic as I was during the first lockdown, which lasted from March 23 until “non-essential” shops were allowed to re-open on June 15, and which provided us with our first opportunity to glimpse how we might be able to change society for the better — curtailing our environmentally suicidal culture of over-exploiting finite resources to feed our gluttony (for fossil fuels, for too much meat, for “cheap” clothes produced in toxic global toxic sweat shops, for example), cutting the emissions associated with our hectic over-activity (too many planes, too many lorries, too many cars, the entire cruise ship industry).

As the global tourist industry collapsed overnight, it became apparent that we had all become overly reliant on it — even major cities like London were, in fact, economically lost without millions of tourists over-consuming on a daily basis. And while this looked healthy economically, it was not only environmentally unsustainable; it was also driven by greed — the greed of the property market, with astronomical business rents and astronomical private residential rents, exploiting a hospitality industry of the underpaid and overworked. Obsessed with growth and profit, few people saw how precarious so many people’s lives were until the whole thing ground to a halt.

And while the government, predictably, handed out eye-wateringly huge amounts of money to corporate entities, to prevent their collapse, and introduced a generous furlough scheme for millions of workers who would otherwise have lost their jobs, defaulted on their mortgages or rents and ended up homeless, no one could have foreseen how another major change — the shift to home working, and the end of the insanely overcrowded daily commute — would suddenly puncture the viability of the extortionately expensive property rental market.

A collapsing property market

With the City and the West End still largely empty — of tourists, of foreign students, and of office workers — the overpriced rental market for offices and shops is facing a slow collapse, one that is, frankly, long overdue. A month ago, the Guardian reported that Shaftesbury, “the central London landlord that owns Chinatown and swathes of Soho and Covent Garden” — 16 acres in total — was seeking to “raise £297m from shareholders to boost its finances, pay some debts and make investments once” — if, surely — “the outlook for commercial property improves.”

The company announced in September that it “had received less than half (44%) of rent for the six months to 30 September, and had offered new lease terms to struggling tenants, including rent waivers, shorter leases and monthly, instead of quarterly, rental payments.” This good to hear — especially about rent waivers — but it remains to be seen if this will be enough to keep West End businesses afloat. Even before this second lockdown the West End was a ghost of its former self, with just a fraction of the shoppers and consumers it used to depend on to survive.

The same week, the Guardian also reported that LandSec, “one of Britain’s biggest property companies”, which owns hotels, retail parks and shopping centres, including Bluewater in Kent, said it “intended to sell assets worth around £4bn over four to five years and reinvest the money in new developments” — although whether there will be any buyers remains to be seen.

LandSec “revealed earlier in October that it had managed to collect only a third of rent from its retail tenants five working days after it was due”, and that it expected rents at its regional shopping centres across the country “to drop by between 20% and 25% from their March levels in order for them to become ‘sustainable’ for tenants.”

In contrast, the company was buoyant about having “collected 82% of rental payment from its office tenants”, and said that it “was not forecasting a fall in office rental values”, a position that, to my mind, ignores the fact that many office-based businesses are tied to leases, and may well downsize in droves when the opportunity arises, as their employees continue to work successfully from home.

Residential rents down 14.9% in inner London

In relation to residential rents, companies and individual landlords are also suffering, Shaftesbury explained that, in September, it was “struggling to re-let flats, with a fifth of its 622 residential properties lying empty, after many of their previous occupants, such as international students and young professionals, returned to their home countries at the start of the pandemic.”

And just last week, the Guardian reported that, according to the estate agents Hampton International, “rents in inner London were down by 14.9% year on year as landlords slashed costs to attract tenants – lopping almost £400 off the average monthly rent, which fell from £2,564 in October 2019 to £2,182 last month.” That is a significant cut, but £2,182 a month is still extortionate for a monthly rent. That’s over £26,000 a year just in rent — before council tax and bills — and even if the costs are, for example, shared by a couple, it works out at over £13,000 a year, helping to explain why so many workers are paying over half their wages just on their rent.

Hamptons also explained that rents in the countryside were rising, as some London residents seek to move out of the capital altogether, but while some commentators have referred to this as an “exodus’, the property website Zoopla stated that “the idea of a large-scale move from London is probably an overstatement”, as its data “showed that most Londoners were looking for a rental property within the city.”

These are just glimpses of a collapsing property market in the West End and the City, and I can’t, of course, predict how it’s all going to pan out in 2021 — especially with the Tories seeking to overhaul planning laws to enable unscrupulous developers to transform offices and shops into whatever kind of tiny shoe-box prisons they think they can get away with — but it does seem to me that “peak property greed” has hit a wall, and that genuinely creative solutions are going to need to be found to address the aftermath of a collapsing economic system that had very clearly run its course even before Covid arrived.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

As You Read This, Guantánamo Prisoner Ahmed Rabbani Has Been On A Hunger Strike for 2,846 Days

An image from the website, “Gitmo Hunger Strikes,” set up by Reprieve to highlight the plight of their client, Ahmed Rabbani.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

With the media spotlight hopefully being shone anew on the prison at Guantánamo Bay, now that Joe Biden has been elected as the US president, it is to be hoped that, as I explained in my recent article, President Elect Biden, It’s Time to Close Guantánamo, arrangements will be made to release the five men still held who were unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, and that there will be an acceptance within the Biden administration that holding 26 other men indefinitely without charge or trial is unacceptable.

These 26 men — accurately described as “forever prisoners” by the media — were recommended either or for prosecution, or for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the basis that they were “too dangerous to release,” even though it was acknowledged that insufficient evidence — or insufficient untainted evidence — existed for them to be charged, by the first of Obama’s two review processes, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, in 2009.

Four years later, the 26 — along with 38 others — were deemed eligible for a second review process, the Periodic Review Boards. Unlike the first process, which involved officials assessing whether prisoners should be freed, charged or held on an ongoing basis without charge or trial, the PRBs were a parole-type process, in which the men were encouraged to express contrition for the activities in which they were alleged to have been involved (whether those allegations were accurate or not), and to present credible proposals for a peaceful and constructive life if released.

In 38 cases, conducted between November 2013 and the end of Obama’s presidency, the PRBs led to recommendations that the prisoners in question be released, and all but two of them were freed before Obama left office. The 26 others, however, remain in a disturbing limbo. Under Trump, when the PRBs continued, but failed to deliver a single recommendation for release, they concluded that the process had become a sham, and, understandably, boycotted it.

Now, however, Joe Biden has the opportunity to look at their cases again, and in the months to come (both here and on the Close Guantánamo website), I will be making the case that, seven years after the PRBs started, and nearly 19 years since Guantánamo opened, it is unacceptable that these men continue to be consigned to indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial — with the PRBs concluding, in their still-ongoing reviews, that “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States” — when the basis for those decisions is often either faulty, or demonstrably over-cautious.

The case of Ahmed Rabbani

In President Elect Biden, It’s Time to Close Guantánamo, I looked at a few of these cases, and I’ll be following up on them, and also looking at others, in the months to come, but for now I’d like to focus on the case of Ahmed Rabbani, a Pakistani of Rohingya origin, seized with his elder brother, Abdul Rahim, in Karachi in September 2002, and held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for two years until their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2004.

Ahmed is a long-term hunger striker, and his lawyers, at the NGO Reprieve, recently launched a website, Gitmo Hunger Strikes, focusing on his case, and showing, in real time (as the image at the top of this article shows), how long he has been on a hunger strike, and force-fed by the authorities, how much he weighs — just 39 kilos (or 6 stone 2 pounds) — and how much of his body weight he has lost. Please do share it if you find it unconscionable that Ahmed Rabbani has been hunger striking for nearly eight years, and that the US government can get away with holding someone who must look like he is in a concentration camp.

Below I’m cross-posting an article by Ahmed Rabbani that was published by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn a few months ago, in which he discusses his hunger strike, and also mentions his son Jawed, who, as he says, is 17, and who he has “never had the chance to touch.”

Jawad Rabbani, Guantánamo prisoner Ahmed Rabbani’s 17-year old son, who has never met his father. The photo is a screenshot from a video on the Independent Urdu website.

Just two weeks ago, the Independent Urdu spoke to Jawad, who told reporter Zafar Syed, in an article translated into English by the UK-based Independent website, “I have never met my father, nor has he ever met me. I found out about my father’s case from Google when I was 12 or 13 years old. I read about his story on Wikipedia.”

He added, ”I was born five or six months after my father went to prison. When I was younger, I would never tell my friends who my father was or where he was. I used to say he was dead. When we first spoke to him [on Skype], he said he was in prison. I asked him, ‘Why are you in prison? Only bad people go to prison’ at which he laughed.”

In a letter to the Independent Urdu, Rabbani wrote that, since “release from this prison is not possible in this life; I wish to be released from this prison through death,” adding, “The Americans are afraid that I shall starve to death, so they force-feed me every day, and this is no less than torture.”

As he also stated, “I am nothing but skin and bones and I move around with the help of a cane. I’m only 51 but I look like a 95 year-old. I saw my shadow through the window and thought I might be in the movie ‘Unbroken,’ which showed American pilots who died of starvation as prisoners of war in World War II.”

On the Gitmo Hunger Strikes page, his lawyers at Reprieve describe how he “was born and grew up in Saudi Arabia, before moving to Karachi, where he ran a small taxi service,” and note that the Pakistan authorities “sold [him] for a $5,000 bounty with the story that he was actually Hassan Ghul, a notorious terrorist, to the American authorities.” It is certainly true that Ahmed Rabbani was mistaken for Hassan Ghul, but it may not be strictly true that he was just a taxi driver.

The brothers are accused by the US of being significant al-Qaeda operatives, but the truth seems to be that, needing a steady income, they worked for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, but did not have any organizational or leadership role in al-Qaeda whatsoever. In fact, as I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, in 2006 a Pakistani intelligence official specifically stated, with reference to the brothers, that, “Although they have served for Khalid Sheikh as his employees, they were not linked with al-Qaeda.”

12 years ago, Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, was subjected to a military commission trial, which found him guilty of providing material support for terrorism. The judge, however, only gave him a five-month sentence, and he was home before the end of the year. Later, his conviction was overturned, as an appeals court recognized that providing material support for terrorism was not a war crime.

12 years after Salim Hamdan went home, it is deeply shocking to me that two other men who also worked as paid employees for individuals connected to al-Qaeda, but had no decision-making role whatsoever, and were not regarded by Pakistant intelligence as al-Qaeda members, continue to be held, have not been put on trial, and are repeatedly prevented from being released — because the panel members in their parole-type process, which has no legal standing, keeps determining that “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

Below is Ahmed Rabbani’s article for Dawn, which I hope you find useful.

Wasting away

By Ahmed Rabbani, Dawn, September 22, 2020

On 21 August, 2006, records show that I weighed 73 kilos [11 stone 7 pounds]. When I was weighed a week ago, the scale registered just 39 kilos [6 stone 2 pounds]. In the last 14 years at Guantánamo Bay, nearly half of me has disappeared.

In total, it has now been 18 years since I was kidnapped and handed over to US forces, to be tortured in Afghanistan and flown halfway across the world to this island gulag. Of the original 780 prisoners, 740 have been released, but here I am, thousands of miles from my wife and children — including Jawad, who is 17, and who I have never had the chance to touch.

Can you imagine one of your children being almost adult, yet you have never touched him? My hunger strike is a peaceful protest against this indefinite detention without trial. Nobody suggests I have ever committed a crime.

The US military are paranoid about people escaping, though it is hard to think where I might go: there are 100 soldiers for each detainee, along with the second largest landmine field in the world after Korea, plus the shark infested Caribbean sea.

Yet I have an escape plan: I am going to gradually vanish. I like to think that almost half of me has found freedom already, though I am so thin I can now feel my thumb and finger when I pinch where my stomach ought to be.

This is despite them force feeding me with tins of Ensure, deliberately hurting me in the process. Twice a day they take me to the ‘torture chair.’

They say I go voluntarily, but if I do not walk there in my shackles, they send a team of guards to throw me to the floor and violently drag me out of my cell — and then punish me afterwards for refusing to comply. I may as well get there on my own two feet.

They strap me in and a military nurse uses a 110-centimetre tube on me. It is painful and I get a splitting headache each time they do it, but I am used to that. What I can never accept is being used as a sub-human guinea pig for the nurses to learn the job. Soldiers come and go every few months, but I remain. I try to teach them how to do it, as I am an expert by now: after seven years of hunger striking, on and off, I have probably had a tube stuck up my nose more times than anyone else on the planet.

In each new six-month deployment there are one or two who can’t get it round the top of my nose, or send the tube into my lungs instead of my stomach. (They have to blow air in first to show where it went — or else I would drown in protein shake). One soldier I have at the moment is just untrainable, I don’t think she’ll ever get it right, no matter how many times she tries.

Mine is a fairly desperate strategy, particularly for someone like me. Back in another world, before I was kidnapped, when I was not driving a taxi around Karachi I would be cooking for my friends and family. Preparing and eating food is one of life’s great pleasures, and I do not give it up lightly.

To distract myself from my misery, I have been working on a cookbook. My family is originally from the Rohingya minority that has suffered from Burmese genocide, so we are used to being mistreated. One of my dishes is Rohingya ‘Strappado Chicken,’ so named as you must hang the chicken rather like they dangled me in the ‘Dark Prison.’

A ‘Guantánamo Diet Book’ would be rather shorter — you just stop eating. What else am I supposed to do? What would you do if you had lost 18 years of your life, with no end in sight? The freedom to refuse food — to starve myself in protest against this terrible injustice — is the only freedom I have left.They tell me that I am not ‘cooperating’ with them. They told my lawyers if I testified against some of the high-value detainees, I could go home.

But they wanted me to repeat what I said during 540 days in their ‘Dark Prison’ in Kabul, where they hung me from an iron bar in a pitch dark pit. (That is a form of torture that was called ‘Strappado’ 500 years ago in the Middle Ages, yet is sadly something the US used on me in the 21st century — the pain as your shoulders gradually dislocate is excruciating).

But I have lines I will never cross, and I said I could not ‘cooperate’ in repeating lies that I made up to get them to stop torturing me.

I know nothing about terrorism, and it is ironic that unless I swear to these lies, I am labelled a terrorist myself. I’ve done a lot of ‘cooperating’ — following their stupid rules or taking part in their “Periodic Review Board” even though President Donald Trump tweeted he would not let anyone go — but no matter how much I do this, I am still here.

So I will maintain my peaceful protest, aiming to lose another 17 pounds, down to about 70. I suppose in the end, if I keep going, I will not survive. But I was recently 51 years old, and have had the prime of my life taken from me. If they won’t let me return to my wife and children soon, the rest of me may as well go home in a box.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

President Elect Biden, It’s Time to Close Guantánamo

Eight of the 40 remaining Guantánamo prisoners, who, along with other men still held, should be released by Joe Biden as soon as possible after he becomes president in January 2021. Top row, from L to R: Abdul Latif Nasser, Sufyian Barhoumi and Tawfiq al-Bihani, all approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, and Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner. Bottom row, from L to R: Khaled Qassim, Asadullah Haroon Gul, Ahmed Rabbani and Omar al-Rammah. Paracha and the four others in the bottom row haven’t been approved for release, but they should be, as none of them pose a threat to the US.


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

Congratulations to President Elect Joe Biden and Vice President Elect Kamala Harris for persuading enough people to vote Democrat to end the dangerous presidency of Donald Trump.

Trump was a nightmare on so many fronts, and had been particularly dangerous on race, with his vile Muslim travel ban at the start of his presidency, nearly four long years ago, his prisons for children on the Mexican border, and, this last year, in his efforts to inflame a race war, after the murder of George Floyd by a policeman sparked huge protests across the country.

At Guantánamo, Trump’s racism manifested itself via indifference to the fate of the 40 Muslim men, mostly imprisoned without charge or trial and held for up to 15 years when he took office. To him they were terrorists, and he had no interest in knowing that very few of the men held at Guantánamo have ever been accused of involvement with terrorism, and that, of the 40 men still held, only nine of them have been charged with crimes, and five of them were unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama.

Trump also wasn’t interested in the rest of the men — 26 in total — who were without status, “forever prisoners” still held because Obama’s reviews found that they still constituted some sort of a threat to the United States.

Instead, he tweeted that “there must be no more releases from Gitmo” even before he took office, and remained true to his word with the one exception of Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi sent back to Saudi Arabia in 2018, to ongoing imprisonment, as part of a plea deal in his military commission trial, conducted in 2014 when Obama was still president.

Entombed by Donald Trump

After the last four years, in which the remaining prisoners have, essentially, been entombed by Donald Trump in a limbo without end, it is time that as many as possible of these 40 men are released — not just the five men approved for release under Obama, but many, if not most of the other 26.

For some of these men, the rationale for holding them has always been inadequate. Foot soldiers for the Taliban in the inter-Muslim civil war that preceded the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion, they are only regarded as constituting a threat because of their attitude while imprisoned. In some cases this is because they have been hunger strikers, resisting the injustice of their long imprisonment without charge or trial in the only way left to those rendered powerless by their captors, while others have, ironically, been singled out as threats because of their charisma or their compassion — men who have become cell block leaders, or spiritual leaders, having shown an ability to care for their fellow prisoners. In some cases, the men still held appear to be cases of mistaken identity.

We have focused on the stories of many of the men over the years: the men approved for release, like Abdul Latif Nasser, who missed being released by just eight days, and Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian. Both men were approved for release in 2016, Obama’s last year in office, by Periodic Review Boards, but were the only two men out of 38 in total not to be released before Obama left office. The other three were approved for release ten years ago, after the deliberations of Obama’s first review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, and are the only three out of 156 men recommended for release by the task force who were not released. One, Tawfiq al-Bihani (spelled “Toffiq” by the US authorities) once thought he was getting on a plane to leave Guantánamo, but it never happened. Little is known of the two others.

As well as releasing these men, the Biden administration should look closely at who it is holding amongst the “forever prisoners” — like Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, a Pakistani businessman and model prisoner, who is widely respected by his fellow prisoners and by the prison’s military personnel, as his friend Mansoor Adayfi, now living in Serbia, explained in an article for us in October 2018, entitled, Saifullah Paracha: The Kind Father, Brother, and Friend for All at Guantánamo.

Another prisoner well-respected by his fellow prisoners and by prison staff is Khaled Qassim, a Yemeni — one of several “forever prisoners” to have had his artwork seen by the outside world. I wrote about Khalid’s artwork in February this year, in an article entitled, Humanizing the Silenced and Maligned: Guantánamo Prisoner Art at CUNY Law School in New York, after visiting an exhibition of artwork by prisoners past and present, and Mansoor Adayfi has also written poignantly about him in an article entitled My Best Friend and Brother, noting his relentless concern for others.

Qassim is not the only artist among the “forever prisoners,” for whom ongoing imprisonment seems absurd. Muaz al-Alwi (spelled “Moath” by the US authorities) makes astonishing ships out of recycled materials — or did. I have no clear way of knowing if he is still allowed to make them, after the first exhibition of prisoners’ art was held in New York in 2017, and the Pentagon responded by clamping down on the prisoners’ freedom of expression.

Then there are the cases of mistaken identity, or exaggerated significance: for example, Asadullah Haroon Gul, an insignificant Afghan, Muhammad Rahim, the other remaining Afghan, who is vouched for by high-ranking Afghans, Ahmed Rabbani, a taxi driver from Pakistan mistakenly identified as another prisoner who US forces picked up independently, and Omar al-Rammah, a Yemeni seized in Georgia in 2002, who has had no contact at all with his family.

Another prisoner whose case has been in the news this year is Mohammed al-Qahtani, tortured at Guantánamo in 2002, but who had profound mental health problems even before his torture. Al-Qahtani recently had a court grant his lawyers’ request for an objective analysis of the state of his mental health, in the hope of it leading to a recommendation that he should be repatriated because the authorities at Guantánamo are incapable of addressing his needs. It is not known how many other prisoners have serious mental health issues, but hints that other prisoners also have long-standing mental health issues have surfaced over the years.

For others — those held and tortured in CIA “black sites” — their torture is incompatible with justice. This is known but largely unacknowledged within the US government, because, over 14 years since the military commission trial system began, it still staggers on, but with trial dates endlessly deferred. Over these 14 long years, the commissions have only ever secured a handful of convictions, mostly via plea deals, and many of those have been overturned on appeal.

Eventually, the US is going to have to acknowledge that it must either charge prisoners and put them on trial in a functional system (i.e. federal courts, not the military commissions), or release them, and we believe that the fourth president to take control of Guantánamo needs to be the one to bring to an end the enduring shame of a prison that makes a mockery of the US’s claimed respect for the rule of law every day that it remains open. Only dictatorships hold people indefinitely without charge or trial.

The way forward

Detailed proposals for how the Baden-Harris transition team should deal with Guantánamo have already been put forward by a number of NGOs and human rights groups, as posted on the Just Security website, and cross-posted here as A Roadmap for the Closure of Guantánamo.

On Day One — along with executive orders already mentioned by the transition team, including dropping the Muslim ban, re-committing the US to the Paris climate accords, and reinstating its commitment to the World Health Organization, both of which were dropped by Trump — it would be heartening to see Joe Biden also issuing an executive order that repudiates Trump’s executive order keeping Guantánamo open, which he issued in his first few weeks in office.

Biden should also immediately kick-start arrangements for the release of the men already approved for release, by reinstating the Office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, a role that not only involved arranging for the resettlement of former prisoners, but also monitored them, both to ensure that were not subjected to ill-treatment, and also from the point of view of national security.

Under Trump, the US abdicated all responsibility for former prisoners, with no one at all in a position of responsibility when two Libyans resettled in Senegal were recklessly repatriated in 2018, promptly disappearing into lawless, militia-run prisons, and no one to liaise with the United Arab Emirates regarding the fate of nearly two dozen men resettled there in Obama’s last 14 months in office, who were promised the opportunity to rebuild their lives, but who, for the most part, have continued to be imprisoned, often, it seems, in abusive conditions.

As you read this, the UAE is threatening to repatriate 18 Yemeni citizens who made up the bulk of the ex-prisoners, which is not only perilous for them, given the ongoing Western- and Saudi-backed civil war in Yemen, but also flies in the face of the US’s long-established position regarding Yemeni prisoners held at Guantánamo, which, for the most part, under Bush and Obama, involved a refusal, across the whole of the US political establishment, to even contemplate the repatriation of Yemeni prisoners.

Biden also needs to do more than just reinstate the envoy role: as the NGOs and human rights groups explained, he also needs to appoint “a senior director of a reconstituted multilateral affairs and human rights directorate, or its equivalent, at the National Security Council,” to oversee the process of working towards the closure of Guantánamo.

We hope Joe Biden is listening. We know Guantánamo is almost invisible now, and far too few people care about it, but we remain sure that a Biden administration will recognize that something that is fundamentally wrong cannot be ignored just because it has largely been forgotten — and especially with the 20th anniversary of its opening just over a year away.

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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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Radio: I Discuss “Will Joe Biden Close Guantánamo?” on South Africa’s Radio Islam International

A screenshot from the podcast of Andy Worthington discussing “Will Joe Biden Close Guantánamo?” with Ebrahim Moosa on South Africa’s Radio Islam International on Nov. 8, 2020.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Yesterday evening, I was delighted to speak for half an hour to Ebraham Moosa on South Africa’s Radio Islam International about US President Elect Joe Biden — and, specifically, what to expect from the new president regarding a long-standing travesty of justice: the continued existence of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

In a thorough and wide-ranging discussion of the issues, I talked about what a disgrace Donald Trump has been when it comes to Guantánamo, entombing the 40 men still held, and how we can be hopeful that there will be change under Joe Biden, even if it also reasonable to expect that it will have to be fought for.

Unlike eleven years ago, when Barack Obama first took office promising to close Guantánamo within a year (but left eight years later having failed to do so), Guantánamo is, nowadays, America’s largely forgotten shame, and raising it as an issue — as Obama found — only tends to play into the hands of Republicans and the right-wing media.

Nevertheless, while there was no way for NGOs, human rights groups and concerned lawyers to even communicate with Trump and his administration regarding Guantánamo, Joe Biden and his transition team will be aware that Guantánamo is a disgrace that won’t go away until it is closed, and that it has been particularly outrageous how it has been sealed shut under Donald Trump for the last four years, with only one prisoner reluctantly released.

Joe Biden must also be aware that, when he is inaugurated on January 20, the prison will have just begun its 20th year of operations. Guantánamo opened on January 11, 2002, and he will have just a year to make progress on releasing insignificant prisoners (of whom there are still many) and working towards closing the prison before the 20th anniversary of the prison’s opening rolls around on January 11, 2022, when organizations and media around the world will be shining a light on the US, and asking how a prison that most closely resembles what we expect from a dictatorship can still be operating.

I’ve embedded the show below, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful. Amongst the many topics discussed were the importance of reinstating the Office of the Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, releasing the five men still held who were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, addressing the unjust basis of holding 26 other men as “forever prisoners,” even though none of them have been put forward for trials, and examining the broken military commission system, which has repeatedly demonstrated that it is incapable of delivering justice in the cases of the seven men — including those allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks — who are currently charged.

Radio Islam International · Will Biden close Guantanamo – Andy Worthington

 

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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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Keeping Live Music and Performance Alive in a Covid Lockdown Culture

The Four Fathers’ gig on October 31, 2020, successfully completed before the second Covid lockdown starts on November 5.


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I was preparing to play a gig — yes, an actual gig! — on Saturday evening, with my band The Four Fathers, when news of a second lockdown in England was finally confirmed by the government. It wasn’t surprising, because infection rates had been steadily rising, but the government — as indecisive as ever — had missed the opportunity to impose a two-week “circuit breaker” lockdown to coincide with half-term, as recommended by medical experts, and was now, belatedly, announcing a four-week lockdown instead, starting on Thursday, November 5, and lasting until December 2.

Unlike the first time around, though, the government announced that schools and universities were to stay open, even though what are regarded as “non-essential” shops and businesses will be required to shut, imperilling the future of countless small businesses, who had just begun to find their feet, and who must now be facing, in numerous cases, a fatal loss of business in the run-up to Christmas. Even if they are allowed to reopen on December 3, it seems pretty certain that Amazon and a host of other online retailers — many in the “fast fashion” business, and many with dodgy employment practices — will be making a fortune while nailing shut the coffins of high streets across the land.

To impose this kind of sweeping lockdown for an entire month while leaving schools and universities open is exactly the kind of muddled thinking on the government’s part that — even putting aside for a moment their cronyism, corruption, and obsession with incompetent, overpaid corporate service providers to do jobs that should be provided by health professionals — will enrage and alienate people, whilst also failing to actually tackle the problems of rising infection rates.

If we’re not meant to be mingling, to try and avoid spreading Covid, keeping places open where children, teenagers and young adults are permanently thrown into close proximity is idiotic. And to do so while obliging shops and businesses to close, even though most of them have been rigorously practicing social distancing, seems particularly cruel and unnecessary.

What would surely have made the most sense would have been to have a two-week total lockdown, in which schools and universities also close, as well as pubs and restaurants, and shops and other businesses, to stem the virus’s spread much more effectively than this stupidly compromised half-measure, but that evidently isn’t going to happen, as MPs today voted for the four-week plan by 516 votes to 38, with 34 of those voting against being Tory MPs.

The announcement of the second lockdown added a poignancy to our gig on Saturday — the first amplified gig The Four Fathers had played since before Covid-19 first arrived at the start of the year — and a jangle of emotions ranging from anger to frustrated indignation.

We were playing at a community-run theatre and performance space in south London that has been open for the last few months, putting on distanced events for people starved of live culture, as most music venues and theatres have not reopened, despite the opportunity to do so.

This is a situation that is, on one level, understandable, because distancing requirements would mean that, as soon as they opened their doors, they’d immediately start losing money, but there has also, I fear, been a paralysis throughout much of the arts sector, as venues have fought to secure government funding to prevent their extinction, but don’t seem to have understood the urgency with which performers need to perform and audiences need to see live performance — however much streaming has allowed some sort of distanced form of live culture to continue.

Despite the pressure exerted for a bailout for the arts sector, which finally led to the government promising, in July, a £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund, including, as confirmed in October, “£257 million to save 1,385 theatres, arts venues, museums and cultural organisations across England”, we have ended up in a situation where many permanent staff have been furloughed, while the creators themselves — musicians, performers, and all those who enable gigs and plays to take place — have been consigned to the relative penury of Universal Credit; if, that is, they aren’t amongst the unluckiest people of all, who have slipped through every net going and have no means of support other than what they have managed, over the years, to scrimp and save.

From lockdown to Black Lives Matter

In reviewing the situation on the ground, on the eve of this second lockdown, I can only really speak about my social and cultural experiences over the last seven months in the London Borough of Lewisham, where I live — a borough of nearly 300,000 people, equivalent to the population of Hull, Newcastle or Leicester — but I hope it is in some ways instructive.

At first, after the lockdown was introduced on March 23, and everything shut except essential services — involving food, drink, post offices, chemists and a few other businesses — most of us, except those required to travel to work, largely stayed home, although I went out every day on my bike to photograph the deserted capital  — and particularly the unprecedented emptiness of the West End and the City — for my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, where I encountered virtually no one. Most of my social encounters, in these first weeks, were accidental — when I encountered someone I knew out in the street, and we chatted at a distance, or brief but resonant chats with shop assistants.

In time, the lockdown eased, in particular because we had a seemingly never-ending heatwave, and people took their interpretation of lockdown into their own hands, most noticeably by gathering in significant numbers in parks — although generally with at least a moderate awareness of social distancing. That said, I still recall the nervousness with which I visited Hyde Park for a Black Lives Matter protest on June 3, following the murder of George Floyd by US police, when, for the first time in over two months, I was in a crowd of people, which was — after two months of conditioning — unnerving, even though almost everyone was wearing masks.

The Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park, June 3, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

By the time an even bigger protest took place, outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms, on June 7, I’d overcome my fear of crowds, as, yet again, almost everyone was wearing masks, and it seemed clear that this was the most sensible way to avoid the virus’s spread, and I vividly recall being impressed that, when large gatherings of young people had erupted into life, it had been because of politics, and not simply as a hedonistic response to over two months of the kind of isolation that almost no one had ever previously experienced.

It was around this time — June 15 — that “non-essential” shops were allowed to reopen, with pubs following on July 4, and while these changes resolutely brought the lockdown to an end, live culture was still in extremely short supply, largely for the reasons of economic viability outlined above.

Developing a DIY culture — primarily via young jazz musicians

Instead, those of us fortunate enough to live in an area full of young, creative jazz musicians were entertained in our local parks by jam sessions that fulfilled our need to gather and to play and appreciate music. Although some jams began in early June in Telegraph Hill Park, my first encounter with them was at Chant Down Babylon, a Black Lives Matter-inspired event, featuring a cross-section of some of the same players, all part of south east London’s young jazz community, in my local park.

In an effort to keep disruption to a minimum, and to keep the crowds small, the organisers of the jazz jams proceeded, over the course of the next six weeks, to turn Monday afternoon into the new Saturday night, performing in free-flowing collectives that attracted dozens of players, and grateful audiences, in which they also spoke in advance to members of the local community, liaised with the police, and tidied up afterwards. These were mostly young people, and so rigorous social distancing wasn’t foremost in everyone’s minds, but the organisers scrupulously kept an eye on infection rates in the borough, which were low, and remained low, and concluded, understandably, I think, that we were now in a post-lockdown phase where we could begin to socialise, to entertain and to be entertained, without compromising anyone’s safety.

The last of the weekly jazz jams in my local park, August 3, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

This situation came to an end in early August, when, first of all, the police shut down the weekly jams, after persistent complaints from one individual, and then the government — taking aim primarily at illegal raves — threatened to impose £10,000 fines on the organisers of unlicensed events, which rather put a dampener on the whole notion of playing in parks, although by this point my own experience of life under Covid was that we were largely doing what was necessary to keep infection rates down, while moderately mingling socially, and also safely enjoying whatever opportunities for live culture were presented.

At the end of August, as the government moved to reduce socialising to groups of six, The Four Fathers and other musicians played acoustically at a small party in our local park, as infection rates in Lewisham remained low, and although my evidence is only personal and anecdotal, I can honestly say that it feels like other factors have caused a rise in infections (in parts of London, but especially elsewhere in the country). The reopening of schools and universities must surely have played a part, along with, I have to say, some of the hedonistic aspects of British drinking culture, as well as the dangers of people travelling abroad and bringing back exotic new strains of the virus when, this summer, we really should all have stayed in the UK.

Despite the closure of the jazz jams in the park, music venues in general were allowed to re-open from mid-August, and a handful of venues — those that were up for putting on socially distanced events, with table seating and restrictions on numbers — started featuring live music, with that particular community theatre I mentioned above offering the jazz jam a new weekly home on Saturday afternoons in September.

Planning for the future

With this second lockdown, however, these shoots of renewed cultural life will again be put on ice, and, with winter arriving, reclaiming the parks isn’t even an option, sadly.

Instead, it seems, we’re going to have to sit out the next month, wondering if it will have the desired effect on infection rates while the schools and universities stay open, and continuing to think outside the box for when venues are allowed to reopen.

Given the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic, with no effective track, trace and isolate programme in place, this may become a pattern in our lives for some time to come, as government minister Penny Mordaunt explained yesterday, telling Parliament that, as the Guardian described it, “The UK should be braced for at least a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic and further lockdowns.” Mordaunt said the government was “hopeful of being able to unlock in December but they are being driven by the data”, and warned that “cases would inevitably rise after restrictions are lifted”, with, as she put it, “some scientists expect[ing] a third or more waves of the virus to be managed [with] repeat lockdowns.”

Seeking to quell dissent — particularly from the Tory back-benches, where the government faces persistent unrest form those who only want to prioritise the economy — she stated that, while some critics “argue that the need for future lockdowns is evidence they don’t work but that’s to misunderstand what they are there to do”, the government’s approach “buys us time and is the optimum use of the healthcare we have in the meantime while capacity is built and vaccines are sought.”

Mordaunt’s claims only helped to highlight the fact that the government has now had eight months to build capacity in the NHS, but has not done so, and to wave the prospect of a vaccine (which may or may not happen, but, in any case, will need rigorous testing before being rolled out widely) as a diversion from the government’s failures to develop a function track, trace and isolate system to enable society to function without the shock interventions of lockdowns.

But without private jets to whisk us away to second homes abroad, this is the reality for most of us, and while we need to keep pointing out how shockingly corrupt and inept the government is, and also need reassurances that funding will be provided to tide over all the businesses pushed to the brink of collapse by this next lockdown — we also need to work out where the opportunities will be, when this next lockdown ends, as it will have to, to gather and to express ourselves creatively, and to organise what may, increasingly, be some kind of ongoing DIY culture of creative expression.

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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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.

Two Years Since the Violent Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, Lewisham Council’s Housing Policy Still Puts Profits Before People

A photo taken after the violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford on October 29, 2018 (Photo: Hat Vickers).


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Two years ago yesterday, a bold experiment in people power — the two-month occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a community garden in Deptford, in south east London, to prevent its destruction and inappropriate development as part of a profit-led housing project — came to a violent end when union-busting bailiffs from County Enforcement, hired by Lewisham Council, stormed the garden at dawn, terrorising the handful of campaigners camping overnight.

Throughout the day, as locals gathered to show their disgust at the heavy-handed tactics, a line of bailiffs, protected by a line of police, prevented anyone returning to the garden as the hired thugs began tearing down the garden’s structures and trees.

Like an invading army, they tore down the garden’s beautiful Indian bean trees, the brightly-painted tree house that stood next to it, and a beautiful shed made by campaigners from found materials, which had been used just weeks before as an exhibition space when the garden featured in the annual Deptford X arts festival. (For my article about the eviction, see The Violent Eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden: Lewisham Councillors Make Sure They Will Never Be Welcome in Deptford Again, and also check out my archive of articles about Tidemill here, and this Corporate Watch report).

The trees — which mitigated the worst effects of pollution on nearby Deptford Church Street, where particulate levels have been measured that are six times the recommended WHO safety limits — had been planted when the garden was first created at the end of the ’90s by pupils at the old Tidemill primary school, their parents and their teachers, for whom it was a haven of green, before the school moved out in 2012. 

As the local community was allowed “meanwhile use” access to the garden, the focus shifted onto the long-intended development plans for the site — in which the old school would be turned into private housing for sale, while flats for rent would be built on the garden and on the site of Reginald House, an unlucky block of council flats next door that the council and the developers also intend to destroy, even though it is structurally sound. 

In total, 209 properties are planned for the site — 51 for private sale, 38 for shared ownership, 104 for rent, and 16 to replace the maisonettes lost in Reginald House. The properties for rent are at ‘London Affordable Rent’, an innovation of London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, which, in Lewisham, is 63% higher than social rents for a two-bedroom flat — although that hasn’t stopped the council from deviously proclaiming on their website that the 104 flats are “new social homes.”

For months after the eviction, the council paid Country Enforcement to protect the now-violated garden from the local community for 24 hours a day, with spotlights and dogs in the garden itself, and an attitude to the locals that made them feel that they were living in a war zone. The cost was astronomical, both financially and in terms of the council’s credibility. Four months after the eviction, Cllr. Paul Bell, the Cabinet Member for Housing, admitted that £1,372,890 had been spent on evicting and guarding the Tidemill site, a cost that has obviously increased since, and which also doesn’t take into account the £1m-plus spent on guarding the old Tidemill school over several years.

Another blow came on February 27, 2019, when the remaining trees in the garden were destroyed by an unprincipled tree services company hired by the council (in the same week that the council hypocritically declared a climate emergency), but despite all this major building works have not yet begun at Tidemill, although yesterday, of all days, a visit to the site alerted me to the fact that ground clearance works have begun in the old school’s former playground, with a digger hard at work next to a giant skip. I can only wonder whether the timing was coincidental.

A photo of a digger and a skip in the playground of the former Tidemill primary school, where ground clearance works have begun in preparation for full-scale building work, October 29, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Amersham Vale, Tidemill’s secret twin

The reason why no work has taken place at Tidemill until now became clear last September, when building work started on Tidemill’s sister site, at Amersham Vale in New Cross, the former site of another former school, Deptford Green, a secondary school. This site had been stealthily twinned with Tidemill in the planning phase, although the council had worked strenuously to keep that fact hidden, because it rather ruined their claims that the Tidemill development would deliver over 50% ‘social homes.’ 

With two-thirds of the properties at Amersham Vale for private sale (80 out of 120, with 24 being for rent and 16 for shared ownership), the percentage of rental properties over both sites fell to less than 40%, and, in any case, none of the new properties will be at social rents (what social housing tenants pay if their tenancies pre-date Tory reforms in 2011), but will, instead, also be at ‘London Affordable Rent’ (63% higher than social rent for a two-bedroom flat). 

More inappropriate development: Achilles Street, Besson Street and 1 Creekside

And while work at Amersham Vale — shamefully named ‘The Muse’ — has been underway, Lewisham Council has also been busy pursuing other dubious plans involving housing elsewhere in Deptford and New Cross. Last autumn, residents in a number of housing blocks in Achilles Street in New Cross were, as a result of an initiative introduced by Jeremy Corbyn, when he was Labour leader, required to be balloted about the future of their homes after proposals were put forward to demolish them to create a much denser new development in which, crucially, half the properties will be for private sale.

This was a monstrously one-sided process in which the council, which intends to be its own developer to trouser more of the perceived profits, pursued a massive and lavishly-funded charm offensive, while those opposing it had no budget whatsoever. Given the imbalance — imagine an election in which only the government was allowed to spend money — and the fact that there was nothing to stop councillors from promising whatever it took to get the desired result, it was no surprise that the council won, but it remains to be seen how they will fund it when it depends so heavily on half the homes being for private sale, and the Covid situation has introduced massive uncertainty into the new build marketplace. (For more about Achilles Street, see my article for Novara Media, Refurbishment Is the Dirty Word We Should Be Using, Just Look at the Achilles Street Estate).

In addition, Lewisham Council has been pumping out misinformation about the status of the rented properties planned for the new Achilles Street development, which it is calling social rent, even though it is actually ‘London Affordable Rent.’ The council has been misquoting the housing charity Shelter in its publicity, claiming that Shelter regards ‘London Affordable Rent’ as social rent, when that is patently untrue. As Shelter explained in a recent tweet, “we don’t consider London Affordable Rent to be social rent.”   

Undeterred, however, this summer the council also forged ahead with another long-fermenting plan, this one plumbing new depths of wrong-headedness for a Labour council. These proposals involve Besson Street, a long-empty site in New Cross where a council estate stood until the council knocked it down over a decade ago.

In July, the council confirmed its intention to enter into a joint partnership on the site with Grainger plc, a builder of rented properties for market rent. Yes, you read that correctly: Lewisham Council, a Labour council, intends to put its name to a project in which it will co-own homes that it will rent at the full rate that the market can bear. 

Other properties in the development — for rent — will be slightly cheaper, but not much: they will be at ‘London Living Rent’, a new rental model set up under Sadiq Khan, along with ‘London Affordable Rent.’ ‘London Living Rent’ is aimed at people on higher incomes, but who are unable to afford a mortgage, and in Lewisham, ’London Living Rent’ is 136% higher than social rent for a two-bedroom flat. (For more on Besson Street, see my article, A Radical Proposal to Save the Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald House in Deptford: Use Besson Street, an Empty Site in New Cross, and this article by Corporate Watch).

The latest news involves another site in Deptford, just across the road from Tidemill.

1 Creekside was going to involve a private developer, but has been taken over by the council, perhaps because the proposal — for two towers right by pollution hot spot Deptford Church Street — received such bad press when it was revealed that planning documents had included advice that these living in the development shouldn’t open their windows at rush hour. 

Once you’ve heard that, there isn’t really anything that can be said to make the development acceptable, and yet the council, undeterred, is forging ahead, and is currently engaged in clearing the site, which consisted of an MOT garage and a whole bunch of scraggly trees that, nevertheless, helped to soak up some of the traffic pollution, albeit in a much less significant manner than the lost and lamented trees of Tidemill. 

Noticeably, Lewisham Homes, the council’s housing body, continues the council’s inappropriate descriptions of properties for rent, claiming, in an article trumpeting the purchase of the site in August, that the development “will now be 100% affordable, offering 22 homes at social rent (an increase of 50% from the planning target) and 34 on a shared ownership basis (an increase of 74%).” 

As well as describing ‘London Affordable Rent’ as social rent yet again, Lewisham Homes also fails o recognise that shared ownership is not a form of affordable housing, but is, instead, a hybrid of rent and ownership that is fraught with its own problems — primarily, that, until residents own 100% of the property, they are merely assured tenants, and lose everything they think they have bought if they fall into arrears. In addition, they are also subject to often astronomical and unjustifiable service charges.

The urgent need for a massive programme of genuinely affordable social housing

I don’t want excuse Lewisham Council’s lack of vision in any way, but it is also worth bearing in mind that councils elsewhere in the capital — enthusiastically led, I would say, by Labour councils — also continue to press on with developments that were inadequate even before Covid hit, because they are not, for the most part, providing the kind of homes that hard-working Londoners need at the kind of rents that they can actually afford, and are, instead, simply devices for creating profits for developers and everyone else involved in the borderline criminal enterprise that is the housing development industry.

Since Covid hit, however, these councils have shown no interest whatsoever in examining what the future holds in terms of the absolutely unavoidable increase in poverty, accompanying increased unemployment, which makes the existing model of overcharging tenants to feed developer profits even more untenable.

But with the government almost certainly intent on squeezing councils even more than they have done over a decade of austerity, to satisfy their obsessive need to “pay” for the losses incurred through Covid by, as usual, punishing those at the poorer end of society, the future looks bleaker than ever unless councils wake up to the realities of a Covid-ravaged economy.

In short, there is an absolute need for as much new social housing as can be provided; not “subsidised”, as its detractors call it, but not-for-profit, providing genuinely affordable homes for those who need it — or want it — and removing the profiteering greed that has blighted housing, which, of course, ought to be a right, rather than the artificially stimulated and sustained basis of economic growth that it has been for over 20 years, endlessly siphoning money from the poor to the rich.

Post-Covid, the creeping reality of ten years of Tory rule — that you can only squeeze people until they have no more money to give — is going to become more and more apparent, in housing and across the economy as a whole. It is time for broken systems — like Labour councils’ housing policy — to be brought to an end, and for this country’s genuinely massive housing need to be properly addressed for the first time since before the days of Margaret Thatcher, the first great destroyer of a drive to create social housing that had been a dominant thread of British political life for over 60 years (since the Addison Act of 1918) until she became Prime Minister in 1979.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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

Video: I Discuss the Guantánamo Files Released by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange’s Extradition Hearing with Action4Assange and Juan Passarelli

A screenshot of the Action4Assange show on October 17, 2020, featuring guests Andy Worthington and Juan Passarelli.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Saturday, I was delighted to take part in a wide-ranging discussion about my role as a witness in the hearings regarding WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to the US, and the classified military files from Guantánamo that were released in 2011, on which I worked as a media partner.

The show — for the campaigning organization Action4Assange — was hosted by Steve Poikonen and Kendra Christian, and my fellow guest was Juan Passarelli, the filmmaker whose recent, 38-minute film about Assange, The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange, I promoted in an article last week.

The show was streamed live, and recorded for YouTube. It starts around 12 and a half minutes in, and runs for nearly two hours, and you can check it out below.

There was a lot going on in the show, with both myself and Juan discussing the inadequacies of the extradition process, the appalling treatment of Julian Assange, and the significance of my statements, and why I wasn’t allowed to present them in court in person. 

I also had time to discuss in detail why the Guantánamo files released by WikiLeaks in 2011 are so important, and this is primarily because the files name names, providing confirmation about the extent to which statements made by unreliable witnesses — previously exposed through lawyers’ investigations, and some admirable investigative journalism — all too often constitute the only significant so-called evidence in the files.

I was very pleased to have had the opportunity to tell this story in depth, explaining how prisoners were tortured, abused or bribed (with “comfort items”) to tell lies about their fellow prisoners, and how a key development in exposing this came about in an article published in, if I recall correctly, 2006, describing how a military representative, assigned to a prisoner during the Combatant Status Review Tribunals in 2004, was so surprised at how angry the prisoner got when an allegation was aired that claimed that he was in Afghanistan when he said he wasn’t, pulled out the files of all the men accused by this man, and discovered that all of them faced similar, stunningly groundless allegations about being seen in various contexts in Afghanistan when they ween’t even in the country.

There was much more in the show, and I do hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful.

* * * * *

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 music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.