Andy Worthington's Blog, page 98

As Gitmo Clock Marks 700 Days Since Obama’s Promise to Resume Releasing Prisoners, 57th Man Is Approved For Release

[image error]I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with 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.

Remember back in May 2013, when a prison-wide hunger strike was raging at Guantánamo? Promoted into action by international criticism, President Obama delivered a major speech on national security issues in which he promised to resume releasing prisoners from Guantánamo, after a period of over two and a half years in which just five men had been freed.

That deadlock had arisen because Congress had imposed onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, and the president was unwilling to spend political capital overcoming those obstacles, even though he had the power to do so.

After President Obama’s promise in May 2013, we at “Close Guantánamo” established the Gitmo Clock to mark how many days it is since the promise, and how many men have been freed.

Today the Gitmo Clock marks 700 days since the promise, and just 44 men have been freed. That is progress, of course, after the inertia of 2010-2013, for which President Obama and his administration must be commended, as many of those men could not safely be returned home — or, in the case of 12 Yemenis, were from a country whose security situation is not trusted by the US — and new countries had to be found that would take them in.

For the last three months, however, no one has been freed, even though, of the 122 men remaining in the prison, 57 have been approved for release.

50 of those men were approved for release in by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. 43 of these 50 men are Yemenis, and so have run up against the unwillingness of the entire US establishment to contemplate their repatriation, but neither this — nor the ongoing imprisonment of seven other men approved for release by the task force, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison —  can be tolerated indefinitely.

It is, to be blunt, disgraceful to approve men for release — from a horrendous purgatory of indefinite detention without charge or trial — and then not set them free. It is, in fact, something that would shame most dictators, who don’t pretend that their lawless gulags have meaningful review processes attached.

In addition to these 50 men, seven others have been approved for release in the last 15 months by Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of the majority of the other prisoners not already approved for release by the task force. The review process is moving with a glacial slowness that, again, is unacceptable, but in the decisions taken there is, at least, some sort of progress. Although 42 men are still awaiting reviews, 13 have had their cases reviewed to date, and in nine cases the review boards have approved their release — although only two have been freed. The rest — six Yemenis and an Egyptian — have merely joined the seemingly interminable queue of all the other prisoners approved for release but still held.

While we encourage you to contact President Obama and the new defense secretary, Ashton Carter, to demand renewed action on releasing prisoners, we also hope you will visit, like, share and tweet the Gitmo Clock, and we also want to point out that the ninth man to be approved for release after a PRB is Mashur al-Sabri, a Yemeni, whose approval for release was announced last week.

I wrote about al-Sabri’s PRB when it took place, on March 3, and posted the opening statement of his civilian lawyer, Brian J. Neff, who has been meeting his client since December 2006, and who encouraged the board to recommend his release.

Below are Mashur al-Sabri’s own words, delivered to the PRB on March 3.

Mashur al-Sabri’s statement to his Periodic Review Board, March 3, 2015

[In English] Good Morning. I am Mashhoor Al-Sabri. Thank you for hearing my case. I am hoping to start a new life after Guantánamo. My wish is to get married, raise a family and live a peaceful life. I have learned some English but now I would like to speak in Arabic.

[In Arabic, translated] Thank you for your comments for, for listening to me. I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. I have seven brothers and nine sisters. I am the oldest child. My father, God bless his soul, passed away last year. My mother is still alive but has high blood pressure and other health problems. I don’t pose any danger to the United States. I am against violence. I have lost many years of my life in prison and don’t have any intention to do any acts that would lead to more loss. I have normal hopes for the future just like any other man. I want to have a job, get married and support my family. I would like to raise children and feel the happiness of having them around me. I want to be with my family and build a future for myself.

As you know, I was imprisoned when I was 24 years old and now I am 37. I want to return to life outside of Guantánamo and put this experience behind me to start a new life. I don’t have any political goals and will never get involved in political activities. I am against violence. I don’ t have the least intention to spend any more time with other detainees.

I was young before my imprisonment and I was not responsible towards any obligation at that time. But now, I have major obligations. I have many brothers and sisters and I am supposed to be responsible for every one of them since I am the oldest son. I will be responsible to find them wives and husbands. I will also be responsible for dividing the inheritance of my father. Furthermore, I hope to be with my brother to serve her — with my mother, excuse me — to serve her and keep away any worries she has about me. I don’t want her and the rest of my family to go through pains and worries because of my — of me anymore.

My first choice would be to return to my home in Saudi Arabia but I am willing to go to any country that will accept me. If I am sent to some other country, I understand and know that integrating into society will require hard work for [sic] me. I have taken classes, here at Guantánamo to prepare for my life after release. This has included classes studying agriculture, business, computers, health, and nutrition. My instructor told me that my score on the final exam in my nutrition course was the highest in the camp. My family will help to support me wherever I am able to find a job. If it was not an Arabic speaking country, I would work hard to learn the language there even before I leave Guantánamo. My hope is that my mother will come to live with me. Of course, I will accept any condition to be imposed on me for my release.

That was all I wanted to say. If the Honorable Board members have any questions, I will do my best to answer them.

* * * * *

You can read the full transcript here, and while I hope he and the other cleared prisoners will be released soon, you can help their cause by contacting the White House and the Pentagon, as detailed below.

Contact the White House and the Pentagon

Call the White House and ask President Obama to release all the men cleared for release, and to make sure that reviews for the other men are fair and objective. Call 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 or submit a comment online.

Call the Department of Defense and ask Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to issue certifications for other cleared prisoners, as required by law: 703-571-3343.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

We Stand With Shaker Aamer: 70th Celebrity Photo Published, As Campaign to Free Him from Guantánamo Continues

Today, the We Stand With Shaker campaign, launched last November by the campaigning freelance journalist Andy Worthington and the activist Joanne MacInnes to call for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, published the 70th photo of a high-profile supporter standing with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker that is at the heart of the campaign.

The 70th photo was of the journalist Yvonne Ridley, who joins a roll-call of MPs — from across the political spectrum — as well as actors, comedians, writers, directors, musicians, and activists who have stood with Shaker outside Parliament, and at a variety of locations across London, since the campaign began.

The inflatable figure has proven to be one of those campaigning tools that captures people’s imagination, and our launch — attended by Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, comedian Jeremy Hardy, activist Peter Tatchell and the MPs John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes and Harlington) and Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion) — was swiftly followed by high-level support from the Daily Mail, which ran a front-page story condemning Shaker’s ongoing imprisonment, almost eight years after he was first approved for release by the US authorities, and then followed up with support for the campaign and for our open letter to David Cameron, which MPs and our celebrity supporters signed in significant numbers.

Unfortunately, Shaker has still not been released, but the campaign — and the ongoing campaigning of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, as well as the political pressure that was consolidated when John McDonnell set up the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, led to David Cameron raising the issue of Shaker’s ongoing imprisonment with Barack Obama at a meeting in January (when the president promised to “prioritise” his case), and, in March, led to a Parliamentary debate at which the British government supported the motion, “That this House calls on the US Government to release Shaker Aamer from his imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay and to allow him to return to his family in the UK.” Read the transcript here and here.

Speaking for the British government, Tobias Ellwood, a Tory MP and a junior minister in the Foreign Office, said, “I hope I have made it clear that the UK Government are absolutely committed to securing the release of Mr Aamer. Today I would like to underline that commitment and join the House in calling for the US Government to approve the release of Shaker Aamer to the UK.”

Next month, a Parliamentary delegation will be visiting Washington D.C. to “meet with individuals, officials and organisations who may be able to influence events and keep President Obama to his promise to ‘prioritise’ Shaker Aamer’s case and to ensure his release as a matter of the utmost urgency.” The delegation has almost raised the £5,000 needed to fund the visit, but if you would like to donate please visit this Crowdfunder page established by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign.

We also hope that British supporters of Shaker’s case will ask the candidates standing in their constituencies for the General Election on May 7 to show their support for Shaker’s release to his family in the UK, and, if elected, to join the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group. You can contact all your Parliamentary candidates via YourNextMP.com, where you enter your postcode (or find your constituency on an alphabetical list), and get all the candidates’ details. It’s a great resource!

Below is the list of the 70 MP and celebrity photos published to date, with links to the images on the We Stand With Shaker website, which can be shared via Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. All the images can also be seen on our website here, and also on our Facebook and Twitter pages. In addition, photos of supporters holding up placards showing their support for Shaker can be found here.

The 70 MPs, celebrities and activists who have stood with Shaker

1 Clive Stafford Smith, founder and director, Reprieve

2 George Galloway MP (Respect, Bradford West)

3 Roger Waters, musician, ex-Pink Floyd

4 Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

5 Shaykh Suliman Ghani, teacher and broadcaster

6 Benjamin Zephaniah, dub poet and writer

7 John McDonnell MP (Labour, Hayes and Harlington, and chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group)

8 Jeremy Hardy, comedian

9 Diane Abbott MP (Labour, Hackney North and Stoke Newington)

10 Nick Davies, journalist

11 Sara Pascoe, comedian

12 Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green party

13 Janet Ellis, actress and TV presenter

14 Andy Slaughter MP (Labour, Hammersmith)

15 Mark Thomas, comedian and author

16 Jean Lambert MEP (Green Party, London)

17 Seumas Milne, journalist

18 Sarah Gillespie, singer-songwriter

19 John Pilger, journalist and documentary film-maker

20 Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General

21 Juliet Stevenson, actress

22 Frankie Boyle, comedian

23 Mark Rylance, actor and director

24 John Rees, writer, broadcaster, co-founder, Stop the War Coalition

25 Mark Durkan MP (SDLP, Foyle)

26 Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour, Islington North)

27 Vanessa Redgrave, actress

28 Helena Kennedy QC, Labour peer

29 Lisa Appignanesi, writer, former President of English PEN

30 Harriet Walter, actress

31 Norman Baker MP (Liberal Democrat, Lewes)

32 Yasmin Qureshi MP (Labour, Bolton South East)

33 Gillian Slovo, novelist and playwright, co-author, ‘Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’

34 Tom Wilner, US lawyer

35 Peter Oborne, journalist

36 Baroness Jenny Jones (Green, London Assembly member)

37 The staff of Reprieve

38 Ken Loach, film director

39 William Hoyland, Jan Chappell, Alan Parnaby, Gillian Slovo, Daniel Cerqueira, Nicolas Kent, Patrick Robinson and Sacha Wares, ‘Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ cast and creators

40 Hamja Ahsan, human rights activist

41 Rhys Ifans, actor

42 Julian Huppert MP (Liberal Democrat, Cambridge)

43 Bill Paterson, actor

44 Sir Bob Russell MP (Liberal Democrat, Colchester)

45 John Leech MP (Liberal Democrat, Manchester Withington)

46 Ann Clwyd MP (Labour, Cynon Valley)

47 Cori Crider, lawyer, Reprieve

48 Roger Godsiff MP (Labour, Birmingham Hall Green)

49 Anna Perera, author, ‘Guantánamo Boy’

50 David Ward MP (Liberal Democrat, Bradford East)

51 Mike Leigh, writer, film director and theatre director

52 Nicolas Kent, theatre director

53 Nick Harvey MP (Liberal Democrat, North Devon)

54 Clare Solomon, journalist

55 Alistair Burt MP (Conservative, North East Bedfordshire)

56 Gavin Shuker MP (Labour and Cooperative, Luton South)

57 Matt Foot, solicitor

58 George Barda, Occupy

59 Stephen Timms MP (Labour, East Ham)

60 Maxine Peake, actress

61 Shaker Aamer’s sons

62 Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

63 Mark Lazarowicz MP (Labour/Co-operative, Edinburgh North and Leith)

64 Hywel Williams MP (Plaid Cymru, Arfon)

65 Neil Carmichael MP (Conservative, Stroud)

66 Elfyn Llwyd MP (Plaid Cymru, Dwyfor Meirionnydd)

67 Kate Hoey MP (Labour, Vauxhall)

68 Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition

69 Bruce Kent, peace activist

70 Yvonne Ridley, journalist and broadcaster

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

90-Pound Guantánamo Hunger Striker Appeals in Court for Assistance from Pakistani Government

On April 14, lawyers for Ahmad Rabbani (aka Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani), one of the last few Pakistani prisoners in Guantánamo, “filed an emergency application with the Islamabad High Court, demanding that the Pakistani government intervene immediately in his case,” as the legal action charity Reprieve (which represents Mr. Rabbani) explained in a press release.

The filing notes that Mr. Rabbani “has been unlawfully captured and later on illegally detained, without a charge or notification of any pending or contemplated charges against him since 2001,” and that he “has been repeatedly tortured and subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment as a result of gross and flagrant violation of national and international law.” The lawyers added that his  “unfortunate torture … still continues.”

In addition, the lawyers stated that Mr. Rabbani’s case “involves a matter of urgency, as the fundamental rights, life, health, liberty and dignity of a man, who has been unlawfully detained, admittedly on mistaken identity, without a due process of law or fair trial guarantees, is at stake.” They added, “The ongoing torture, humiliation and deterioration of health of a Pakistani citizen, who has a right over the state institutions to protection of his life, dignity and liberty requires this case to be heard on an urgent basis.”

As Reprieve explained in their press release, Ahmad Rabbani “has been on hunger strike for more than two years in protest at his detention without charge or trial in Guantánamo” for eleven years.

As I explained last year, when Mr. Rabbani submitted a motion to the District Court in Washington D.C. asking a judge to order videotapes of his force-feeding to be preserved, the father-of-three “was held in CIA ‘black sites’ (aka torture prisons) prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, with nine other men held in secret prisons, in September 2004.”

When Mr. Rabbani began his hunger strike, during a prison-wide hunger strike in 2013, he said that he had lost 60 pounds since the hunger strike began, and weighed just 107 pounds. “I vomit and cough blood,” he said, adding, “I have often thought of smashing my head against the wall and cracking it because of [severe pain].”

Now, however, Mr. Rabbani weighs even less. An affidavit submitted to the Pakistani court by Reprieve, whose lawyers recently visited Mr. Rabbani, “describes the damaging effect on his health of his brutal treatment at the prison –including daily force-feedings and ‘forced cell extractions’ (FCEs),” as Repreive’s press release explains. Moreover, the lawyers described him as looking “emaciated” during their latest visit.

Reprieve also explained that, according to Mr. Rabbani, “his weight has dropped to approximately 40kg” (90 pounds, or six stone and six pounds), and that he “regularly vomits and experiences numbness in his limbs, dizziness and fainting.” He also “described how his thigh has wasted away to the width of his calf.”

As with all my reports on prisoners wasting away as a result of hunger strikes, I lament as ever that no photos are available to show the world how some of the long-term hunger strikers in Guantánamo look like the survivors of the Nazis’ death camps in World War II, as I’m sure that a single released photograph would precipitate global outrage and calls for the prison’s swift closure.

Importantly, Mr. Rabbani’s lawyers submitted to the court a copy of the executive summary of the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, which reveals, as Reprieve put it, that “his 2002 arrest was a case of mistaken identity.” The report also “confirms that Mr. Rabbani was initially detained for 540 days in secret CIA jails before his transfer to Guantánamo, and was subjected to a number of violent interrogation methods that have been condemned as torture.”

Despite this, Mr. Rabbani has not been approved for release from Guantánamo, where 122 men are still held, 57 of whom have been approved for release. Disturbingly, he was recommended for prosecution by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, although in April 2013 the Defense Department determined that he was eligible for a Periodic Review Board, a process established in 2013 to review the cases of 71 men — 46 who had been designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by the task force, and 25 others who had been recommended for prosecution.

However, just 13 reviews have taken place to date, and although nine men have been recommended for release, there is no sign of when the majority of the men — including Mr. Rabbani — who were deemed to be eligible for PRBs will have their cases reviewed. The appeal to the Pakistani court is, therefore, entirely appropriate given Mr. Rabbani’s serious health issues as a result of his hunger strike and the brutal treatment to which he has been subjected over the last 13 years.

Commenting on Mr. Rabbani’s case, Alka Pradhan, his lawyer at Reprieve’s US branch, said, “The US Senate report confirmed that Ahmed Rabbani was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time 13 years ago — and that he was horribly tortured in US secret prisons. But he remains in Guantánamo — and after years of abuse, he is now dangerously ill. Ahmad’s hunger strike is a last desperate cry for help from the Pakistani government. They must now intervene in his case and bring him home.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

Photos: March for the Homeless Opposite 10 Downing Street, London, April 15, 2015

[image error] See my photo set on Flickr here!

On March 15, 2015, 22 events took place in the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada to raise awareness of homelessness, under the umbrella heading, “March for the Homeless.” I attended the protest in London, opposite 10 Downing Street, where campaigners had arranged for homeless voters to register for the General Election on May 7, and there was a free food kitchen.

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

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

I was pleased to see that many hundreds of people turned up, including representatives of some of the many housing campaigns in London — campaigners fighting to save the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, in south east London, residents from the West Hendon Estate, who are fighting to save their homes, the E15 Mothers from Stratford, who are campaigning for more social housing, and the Sweets Way tenants from Barnet, recently evicted by developers.

I was also delighted to bump into John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlingdon, who is one of Parliament’s great fighters against all forms of injustice — and who had just been supporting fast food workers in their campaign for a decent living wage of £10 an hour. John and I know each other through working to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, but at the March for the Homeless we spoke mainly about London’s housing woes. He showed me a depressing photo of a one-room, damp-infested shed rented to a family for £400 a month in his constituency that he had recently visited, and lamented that Gordon Brown never understood the importance of social housing, apparently trusting the private sector to provide for people’s needs — something that, of course, was a fundamentally groundless hope.

As Johnny Void described the March for the Homeless, “This march was exactly what needs to happen in a city where an entire generation of children are growing up who will not be able to afford to live here when they are older.  A housing movement that thinks creatively, takes no shit, does not ask permission and is fun to be a part of can only grow as ever more people see their homes come under threat.” Please also check out the article for further information about what the marchers did before ending up on Whitehall.

After the success of the “March for Homes” earlier this year, my feeling is that what we need, for the maximum impact, is for campaigns that unite all the people affected by the housing crisis, perhaps under the heading “The Housing Crisis and the Homeless” — focusing not just on the homeless, but also on others suffering from what is, for far too many people, the most pressing concern of their lives: the insecurity and/or exploitation of our housing need, which ought to be considered a human right.

So the others in  precarious housing position are those in the private rented sector who are seeing their rents spiralling out of control, and who have no protection against landlords ripping them off or renting out slums; those in social housing facing the destruction of their housing estates because councils cannot afford to repair them, and are making deals with developers who then move tenants out, knock down the estates and build unaffordable new ones: and, finally, new social tenants, who have no security of tenure, and are expected to pay what, laughably, are called “affordable rents,” set by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson at 80% of market rents — which are now regularly reaching £15,000 to £20,000 a year, comparable to the median income of working Londoners.

What we need, above all, are politicians prepared to invest in a huge social homebuilding programme, so that as many people as possible can be housed adequately and securely in properties that should cost no more than £100 a week. It is possible, and it needs to happen. All that is preventing it, to put it bluntly, is greed, the vile, dead-eyed greed that is such a disgraceful emblem of modern Britain.

See below for a video made to promote the “March for the Homeless,” featuring photos of homelessness and of the various housing protests in London:

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

Former Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab and Other Guantánamo Prisoners Freed in Uruguay Discuss Their Problems

To donate to support the six men released in Uruguay, please follow this link to a Just Giving page set up by Cage for Reprieve.

A month ago, I wrote a well-received article, “Guantánamo Prisoners Released in Uruguay Struggle to Adapt to Freedom,” looking at the problems faced by the six former Guantánamo prisoners given new homes in Uruguay in December. The six men, long cleared for release, couldn’t be safely repatriated, as four are from war-torn Syria, one is from Tunisia, where, it appears, the US is now concerned about the security situation, and the sixth is Palestinian, and the Israeli government has always prevented Palestinians held in Guantánamo from being returned home.

As I pointed out in my article, and in a follow-up interview with a Uruguayan journalist, “Strangers in a Strange Land: My Interview About the Struggles of the Six Men Freed from Guantánamo in Uruguay,” the former prisoners are struggling to adapt to a new country, in which they don’t speak the language and there is no Muslim community, and in which they are still separated from their families, over 13 years since they were first seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan by or on behalf of US forces.

Most of all, however, I believe that, while there have been murmurings in Uruguay about the men’s apparent unwillingness to work, those complaining are overlooking the fact that all six men are evidently grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after their long ordeal in a experimental prison where abusive indefinite detention without charge or trial is the norm.

Since I wrote my article and undertook my interview, there have been developments. On April 8, the Associated Press reported that Uruguay’s new President Tabare Vazquez said the US should provide financial assistance to the six men, and promised to raise the issue with President Obama at the Summit of the Americas in Panama, which began shortly after he spoke to the media.

President Vazquez said, “Uruguay gave them asylum, but the US government should provide all the necessary means so that those citizens of other countries can have a dignified life in our country.” As the AP put it, he also said he had “heard Obama was worried about the men’s progress in adapting and added that he also saw them struggling.”

“I put myself in their place and it must be very hard to come from another part of the world, with other cultures, other religions, other customs, and be planted in a foreign country,” President Vazquez said, adding, “I’m also worried because their arrival, this placing of Guantánamo prisoners here, has also impacted our society.”

On April 11, President Vazquez  told reporters at the Summit of the Americas that, following discussions, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees had provided a commitment that the UNHCR would provide homes for each of the six men, who were assigned a house to share by a prominent Uruguayan trade union on their arrival in December, and are given $600 a month to live on.

After meeting with President Obama, President Vazquez confirmed the news. “UNHCR has the necessary resources to meet the needs of the prisoners and soon each will have a home,” he said.

On Monday, Fox News Latino followed up by suggesting that the six men are “considering a job offer at a meat warehouse not far from Montevideo, the capital,” adding, “A company located in the department of Canelones is giving the men the chance to work processing tons of beef,” according to local newspaper El País, which is also “offering them a place of worship at the site.” The local paper said that the offer “is being seriously considered by the former prisoners.”

While we wait to hear if this is a genuine offer, and if the men are willing and able to take it up, further insights into their state of mind were provided in a detailed article last month in the Washington Post by Joshua Partlow, who spent a week with the men in the house in Montevideo that was assigned to them.

Describing the men’s arrival in Uruguay, and the plans for their resettlement, Partlow wrote:

Uruguay arranged for a workers’ union to take care of their daily provisions. The union moved them into a two-story building in a working-class Montevideo neighborhood across from a bakery and a bicycle repair shop, a few blocks from the Atlantic. Their building abuts an overgrown vacant lot ringed in barbed wire. Graffitied across the wall is a man’s screaming face, a cluster of skyscrapers growing out of his head. On hot days, a dead-fish tang wafts up from the sea.

Their place, which used to be a home for battered women, has the feeling of a convalescent ward. The men pad around the hardwood floors in flip-flops and sweat pants. Their thoughts seem elsewhere, on the Arabic news streaming over the Internet, in the hours of long-distance calls and laptop Skype chats to relatives in the Middle East. Five times a day, they go to their rooms and face northeast, toward the bakery and beyond to Mecca, and pray.

The men were invariably gracious and welcoming — offering tea and small talk — but most did not want to discuss their situation on the record. Some want to forget about Guantánamo. One would talk only if paid.

Partlow spoke the most to Abu Wa’el Dhiab (aka Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab), the former hunger striker who was involved in a significant court case against the US government last year regarding their claimed right to be able to force-feed him as they saw fit.

The men’s new freedom in a strange land has been “hardest on Dhiab,” according to Partlow, who wrote:

The marks of a dozen years in a cell and the hunger strikes he held there show in his gaunt 43-year-old frame, his beard flecked with gray. He hobbles around on crutches, still wearing the Army green T-shirt and sweat pants given to him in Guantánamo. The infamous orange uniform — a Bob Barker brand 65-35 poly-cotton blend made in El Salvador — hangs in his closet for safekeeping.

Partlow also noted that, “While free — in theory — to leave Uruguay, the men do not yet have passports.” Dhiab, he added, “hardly ever goes outside now. He feels the promises made to him have been betrayed. He wants his own house, his family brought from Syria, enough money to live with dignity and start a business. He demands that the United States own up to its responsibility for having imprisoned him without charge for more than a decade, finally releasing him with a letter from the State Department saying there was no information he or any of the other men had any role in ‘conducting or facilitating terrorist activities.'”

At the time, Dhiab was threatening to embark on a hunger strike outside the US Embassy, but it now seem probable that the latest developments, involving the UN, will have addressed at least some of his concerns.

Nevertheless, as Partlow noted, “For Dhiab, the anger has not subsided.” During those discussions with the journalist last month, he “invariably returned to what he sees as the ultimate culprit, the United States, which he blames for an unjust war against Islam, for the theft of 12 years of his life, for the death of his son (one of four children) in Syria, who may have been killed in a chemical attack by the Damascus government. As he sees it, he is guilty of one thing: being a Muslim. He is grateful to Uruguay for accepting him but feels the United States needs to provide for his well-being. ‘Who is to blame for my wife and I living in hell?’ he asked. ‘America.'”

Partlow also noted Dhiab’s struggles to adjust to a world in which so many changes have taken place in the last 13 years. He stated that he “had a fascination with technology before his imprisonment,” but that “the developments of the past decade confound him. His last computer before his capture ran a Pentium III microprocessor. Now, he wants to understand the differences between the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Apple iPhone 6. He wants to know which Canon camera is good for video, how to install Viber on the house computer.”

However, when he sits in front of the computer provided by the union, He “is mostly frozen,” Partlow wrote, adding, “He doesn’t know how to copy and paste. He said he has opened several e-mail accounts, but keeps forgetting the passwords.”

As Dhiab told him, alluding to what I see as his PTSD, “I forgot everything in Guantánamo.”

Partlow proceeded to tell Dhiab’s story, as follows: “After growing up on the eastern outskirts of Damascus, Dhiab served three years of compulsory military service in the Syrian air force in the early 1990s. He worked for years in his father’s restaurant, which had more than 100 tables amid gardens and fountains … Before Sept. 11, he said, he sold honey in Kabul … He was captured in Lahore during a Pakistani police raid in 2002 and later taken to Guantánamo.”

Unconfirmed are claims aired by Partlow that appeared in Dhiab’s classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011: that he was “a member of the Syrian Group, a dismantled terrorist cell that fled to Afghanistan,” that he was “sentenced to death in absentia, ‘probably for terrorist activities in Syria,'” and that he “once hosted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist, and received training at an al-Qaeda camp in Kandahar.” Trusting anything in the files that is not openly corroborated elsewhere is not recommended. Most of what purports to be evidence comes from statements produced by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, in circumstances involving torture, other forms of abuse, or bribery, none of which are conducive for revealing the truth.

Partlow proceeded to explain that Dhiab “did not want to discuss in detail” his life before Guantánamo, but added that he “has begun writing a book about his life that he insists will reveal all he endured. He alluded to beatings by the prison guards over the years — boot kicks in the back, punches to his neck. During his months of hunger strikes, he was strapped in a restraining chair and force-fed through tubing inserted into his nose, a procedure that US District Judge Gladys Kessler described as causing ‘unnecessary pain’ and ‘agony.'”

Partlow added, “Whether to make the videos of that process public is now the subject of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Dhiab and several media organizations, including the Washington Post,” and as I explained in a recent article, an appeal against the government’s obstruction has been submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court, with oral argument scheduled for May 8.

Partlow also noted how all the men “recounted smaller daily indignities. How the guards allowed them to go to prison classes but escorted them there so late they routinely missed most of the instruction. How the large sizes of the orange jumpsuits would go to the short detainees and the smalls to taller men. On their flight to Montevideo, five years after they were cleared for release, they were still shackled hand and foot and forced to wear blackout goggles and ear coverings. One of them said he urinated on himself twice during the flight because they were not allowed to use the toilet.”

Providing an overview of the men’s situation, Partlow wrote, “Adapting has come easier for some. After morning doctors’ appointments, some exercise at a gym. They have walked among crowds in parades and street festivals. They’ve saved from their stipends and bought cellphones. Some want to learn the language and make a life here.”

He added, however, that “several of the men feel they are not yet equipped to do so,” and added that they “don’t all get along well and chafe at living together in bunk beds.” He confirmed, as has been noted before, that one of the men, Adel bin Muhammad El-Ouerghi, the Tunisian, who is 50 years old, “now sleeps in a nearby hotel,” and that they generally “complain the money is insufficient.” He pointed out that one of the Syrians, Ali Husain Shabaan, 33, “said in a televised interview that he would not be able to provide for his family if they came to Montevideo.”

Shabaan said, “Give or take, almost half of my age has been spent in a prison. To ask me to support myself and to be independent from the first week or the first month or two months, that’s quite unreasonable.”

As with some of Dhiab’s complaints, it is to be hoped that the intervention of the UNHCR will address some of these problems, but it seems likely that, even if the housing situation is resolved to the men’s satisfaction, money problems will probably persist. It has, as Partlow noted, “become a sore subject with their hosts. A couple of weeks ago, the union sponsors cut off the long-distance phone line to the house after they saw the bill. They stopped buying the men the kosher meat they had requested, because it was too expensive. Although they were given some laptops, the men each wanted their own headset for Skype calls, while the union wanted them to share one.”

Importantly, however, Partlow recognized that many of the men “still struggle from the effects of chronic ailments such as tuberculosis and hepatitis B.” As he pointed out, “Shabaan has impaired vision that he attributes to his time in Guantánamo. Ahmed Adnan Ahjam, a 37-year-old Syrian, has intestinal trouble and a perforated eardrum. Dhiab can’t drink coffee or tea because of kidney problems. The right side of his body frequently goes numb. He says his constant pain keeps him from sleeping more than two hours a night. His lawyer says Dhiab is plagued with post-traumatic stress and mental illness.”

Leonardo Duarte, a union official who, as Partlow put it, “regularly visits the house and ferries the men on their errands,” succinctly explained the men’s problems. “They didn’t arrive here in good health,” he said, adding, “They’re not ready to work; that’s the reality.”

Dhiab’s lawyer in London, Cori Crider of the legal action charity Reprieve, “praised Uruguay for its goodwill,” but also highlighted Dhiab’s problems as a result of his long and brutal imprisonment. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that after over a dozen years in Gitmo, years of brutal force-feedings, a son’s death and a homeland laid waste, both Dhiab’s body and his mind are going to need time to recover,” she said.

In conclusion, Partlow wrote, “Dhiab doesn’t know what he will do. He cannot go home; his village of Otaybah has been devastated by the war, his family scattered to refugee camps. He wants to be elsewhere — Qatar, Malaysia, Brunei — somewhere he can speak Arabic and be among Muslims.”

As Dhiab told him, “In 13 years, I’ve not seen my family. I miss my family. I need my family. Nobody helps me like my family.”

“We are broken,” he added. “And we need to heal.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

Sen. Dianne Feinstein Urges Pentagon to End “Unnecessary” Force-Feeding at Guantánamo

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently sent a letter to Ashton Carter, the new defense secretary, urging him to “end the unnecessary force-feedings of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”

Sen. Feinstein, who, until recently, was chair of the committee, and oversaw the creation of the hugely important report into the CIA’s use of torture whose executive summary was released in December, has long been a critic of Guantánamo. After a visit to the prison in July 2013, with Sen. Dick Durbin, she and Durbin “asked President Barack Obama to order the Pentagon to stop routinely force-feeding hunger strikers at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo and adopt a model that feeds out of medical necessity, like in the federal prison system,” as the Miami Herald described it.

As she noted in her letter to Ashton Carter, “The hunger strikes themselves stem in part to the fact that many detainees have remained in legal limbo for more than a decade and have given up hope. Therefore, it is imperative that the Administration outline a formal process to permanently close the Guantánamo facility as soon as possible. I look forward to continue working with you to achieve that end.”

As well as urging an end to the force-feeding at Guantánamo — which is what her reference to “unnecessary” force-feeding meant — Sen. Feinstein urged Carter (and the Obama administration) to “adopt the recommendation of a recent report by the Defense Health Board that leaders at the Department of Defense should ‘excuse health care professionals from performing medical procedures that violate their professional code of ethics,’ such as force-feeding.”

That report, issued on March 3, was entitled, “Ethical Guidelines and Practices for US Military Medical Professionals,” and, as Sen. Feinstein stated, the Defense Health Board, a federal advisory committee to the Secretary of Defense, noted in it that “the practice of force-feeding has created conflicts between the role of military health professionals as members of the Armed Forces and their obligations as health care providers.”

Sen. Feinstein reminded the defense secretary that, in its Declaration of Malta, in 1991, the World Medical Association stated that force-feeding is “never ethically acceptable,” and that force-feeding accompanied by coercion, force or use of physical restraints “is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Sen. Feinstein also explained how, in its report, the Defense Health Board also explained that the American Nurses Association “has been monitoring the force-feeding of detainees at Guantánamo Bay for approximately six years,” and that, “In response to the case of a Navy medical officer (a registered nurse) who refused to continue managing force-feedings of hunger strikers at Guantánamo and was reassigned to ‘alternative duties,’ the association issued a statement supporting the right of the medical officer to refuse to perform force-feedings.”

I wrote about the case of the nurse here, and am reassured by the support from the ANA (see this article) and Physicians for Human Rights, and the recognition, by the military, that “force-feeding people who are capable of making informed decisions about their own health is a violation of medical ethics and international law,” as a document obtained by Jason Leopold for Vice News in January revealed.

Sen. Feinstein also noted, “The statement and a letter to then-Secretary Hagel urged ‘military leadership to recognize the ethical code of conduct to which professional registered nurses are accountable.’ The Defense Health Board’s recommendation regarding health professionals’ objections based on ethical principles is in line with the views of the American Nurses Association.”

Sen. Feinstein also demanded that, “[i]f force-feeding continues at Guantánamo,” the Department of Defense “must at least observe the safeguards and oversight mechanisms established at US Bureau of Prisons facilities,” where, “according to the Defense Health Board report, the US Federal Bureau of Prisons usually does not use a force-feeding restraining chair; it must report to a sentencing judge as to what it did, and the final authority in prisons is the physician.”

That is very different to Guantánamo, of course, where decisions about force-feeding are made not on a medical basis, but according to the desires of the military.

Sen. Feinstein also “requested access to videotapes of force-feedings of detainees at Guantánamo,” repeating a request she had made last year, which, as she added, had been declined in a letter dated December 3, 2014, “on the grounds that public release of these videotapes is not imminent.”

The tapes are videotapes of force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions” that a Syrian prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, spent most of last year seeking the release of through the US courts, before his release in Uruguay in December. As Sen. Feinstein explained, “This response is unacceptable; the public release of the videotapes has nothing to do my request for the videotapes. I hope that under your leadership at the Department of Defense, you will re-examine this issue and provide the tapes that I have requested.”

The Pentagon’s spokesman for Guantánamo issues, Army Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, said in an email to Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald that the Defense Department will respond to Sen. Feinstein’s letter “through official correspondence channels.”

Lawyers and media organizations still seek public release of force-feeding videos

Access to the force-feeding videos is also still being pursued through the courts. In November, disappointingly, District Judge Gladys Kessler, in Washington D.C., “disappointed Mr. Dhiab, his lawyers and everyone who wants personnel at Guantánamo to be accountable for their actions by denying his request ‘to significantly change the manner in which the US military transfers, restrains and forcibly feeds detainees on hunger strike to protest their confinement,’ as the Guardian described it, and as I wrote about at the time. The month before, Judge Kessler had allowed the government a month’s delay when it came to complying with her order to release the videotapes — which a coalition of media organizations had actively been seeking — giving officials time to redact parts of the tapes to protect individuals involved, and other aspects of operations that they could legitimately claim needed to be keep secret.

The government subsequently tried to shut down all these unwelcome demands by appealing.

As Kevin Gosztola explained in an article on FireDogLake, the Obama administration claimed that “the executive branch alone may decide whether to disclose previously classified videos of the force-feeding of a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner — even though the videos are judicial records and a judge should be able to unseal and release them to the public.”

As Gosztola proceeded to explain, “According to the Obama administration, an executive order on classified information, which Obama issued during his first months in office, is binding on the judicial branch and precludes the unsealing of videos.” Judge Kessler, however, disagreed, because this “would displace the court’s power to seal its own record, putting that authority in the government’s hands alone.” She added, “Although the executive has the sole authority to determine what information is properly classified for its purposes, only the judiciary has the discretion to seal or unseal a judicial record.”

Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s lawyers — and the media outlets — agree. In a recent filing, for a hearing in the appeals court (the D.C. Circuit Court), scheduled for May 8, the lawyers stated, “Control over the classified filings in this case — including the videotapes — is a judicial branch power upon which the executive branch cannot intrude by operation of executive orders.”

As Gosztola described it, “Constitutional separation of powers grants the court authority to order public disclosure.” Or as the lawyers put it, “Neither the district court nor this court is beholden to the executive branch to keep these videotapes wholly secret from the American public.”

I hope the D.C. Circuit Court judges agree — although that is far from certain — as the court, with notable exceptions, has far too frequently opposed any effort by prisoners to challenge the conditions of their detention.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

Prisoners in Guantánamo Ask to be Freed Because of the End of the War in Afghanistan

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

On March 30, lawyers for five Afghan prisoners still held at Guantánamo wrote a letter to President Obama and other senior officials in the Obama administration asking for their clients to be released.

The five men in question are: Haji Hamdullah (aka Haji Hamidullah), ISN 1119; Mohammed Kamin, ISN 1045; Bostan Karim, ISN 975; Obaidullah, ISN 762; and Abdul Zahir, ISN 753.

The lawyers wrote, “Their continued detention is illegal because the hostilities in Afghanistan, the only possible justification for detention, have ended. Therefore, these individuals should be released and repatriated or resettled immediately.” They referred to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, on January 20 this year, at which the president said, “Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.”

Under the heading, “The War in Afghanistan Is Over and Therefore Afghan Citizens Must Be Released,” the lawyers wrote, “The government’s authority to detain our clients is based on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (‘AUMF’), passed by Congress and signed into law in the week following the attacks of September 11, 2001 … The government’s authority to detain is not indefinite. Indeed, it lasts only as long as the war in Afghanistan exists.”

The lawyers then quoted Judge Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the 2004 Supreme Court ruling establishing that the AUMF authorized the imprisonment of the men held at Guantánamo. “It is a clearly established principle of the law of war that detention may last no longer than active hostilities,” Judge O’Connor wrote.

The lawyers added, “Over the last decade, the federal judiciary has acknowledged that the government’s authority to detain individuals at Guantánamo Bay will end eventually,” and quoted from a variety of US cases, in the D.C. Circuit Court, relating to the Guantánamo prisoners — including Adham Ali Awad, a Yemeni prisoner, in 2010, when the appeals court judges stated, “[T]he United States’ authority to detain an enemy combatant is not dependent on whether an individual would pose a threat to the United States or its allies if released but rather upon the continuation of hostilities.”

As well as citing President Obama’s State of the Union Address, the lawyers also noted that, “on December 28, 2014, President Obama marked the end of Operation Enduring Freedom and combat operations in Afghanistan at a flag ceremony in Kabul, noting that ‘thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.’ At that same ceremony, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel further acknowledged the end of combat operations by American forces and the transfer of security authority to the government of Afghanistan: ‘At the end of this year, as our Afghan partners assume responsibility for the security of their country, the United States officially concludes Operation Enduring Freedom. Our combat mission in Afghanistan, which began in the aftermath of the September 11, 2011 attacks, will come to an end.'”

The lawyers also noted that the statements by President Obama and Chuck Hagel “are supported by concrete steps taken by American military forces, including the significant reduction of troops stationed in Afghanistan, the transfer of control over detention facilities housing Afghan detainees at Bagram Airfield to the Afghan government, and the transfer of security control of 95 Afghan districts to the Afghan government.”

They added, “Moreover, the Afghan government has requested on multiple occasions that its citizens detained in Guantánamo Bay be released. On December 22, 2014, the United States released four Afghan detainees from Guantánamo Bay and returned them to Afghanistan. Additionally, the United States has released hundreds of Afghan detainees being held at Bagram Airbase [and] the Afghan government has successfully overseen their return to civilian life. Accordingly, any concern that the release of our clients will result in their recruitment to an engagement in belligerent and militant actions against American forces is wholly unfounded. Our clients are not charged with any crime. Their detention is not penal in nature. Instead, they are being held captive subject to a military action that has concluded.”

They then — again — cited Justice O’Connor in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, drawing on a 1946 ruling: “Captivity is neither a punishment nor an act of vengeance … A prisoner of war is no convict … He is disarmed and from then on must be removed as completely as practicable from the front, treated humanely and in time exchanged, repatriated or otherwise released.”

In conclusion, the lawyers wrote, “In sum, we request that you take immediate action to release these five Afghan detainees. They have been detained without charge for over thirteen years. They have lived the last several years in isolation without any real hope that their detention will come to an end. The moral and legal deadline for their release passed long ago.”

The five men are amongst the 56 prisoners — out of the remaining 122 prisoners — who have not either been approved for release (56 others) or put forward for trials (the other ten). One of the five, Abdul Zahir, had been charged in the very first incarnation of the military commissions under President Bush, which the Supreme Court shut down in 2006. He has not been charged again in the years since although, as the Miami Herald noted, his name was “included in a list of war crimes trial candidates drawn up by the Department of Defense late last year that surfaced recently in legal documents.”

Two others — Mohammed Kamin and Obaidullah — were charged in subsequent versions of the military commissions, but the cases were ridiculously weak, and the cases are no longer active. In addition, Obaidullah and another of the five, Bostan Karim, had their habeas corpus petitions turned down after ideologically-motivated interference by the D.C. Circuit Court.

The other four men — none of whom are expected to face trials — are eligible for Periodic Review Boards, a process established in 2013 to review the cases of the men not cleared for release or facing trials. Unfortunately, the review process is disturbingly slow-moving. Just 13 reviews have taken place to date, and although eight men have been approved for release and two of the eight have been freed, there is no way of  knowing how many years it might take for any of the other men — including the Afghans — to have their cases reviewed.

A Yemeni prisoner asks a court to order his release

The lawyers’ letter about the Afghans followed a federal court filing submitted on behalf of a Yemeni prisoner, Mukhtar al-Warafi, at the end of February. Unlike the Afghans, al-Warafi, a medic in Afghanistan whose habeas corpus petition was turned down in March 2010, was approved for release — if security concerns could be satisfied — by President Obama’s high-level Guantánamo Review Task Force in January 2010, but, as the Miami Herald put it, he “is from violence-plagued Yemen, where the Obama administration won’t send cleared captives.”

Al-Warafi’s lawyers presented many of the same arguments the Afghans’ lawyers put forward in their letter last week. As Shane Harris described it in an article for the Daily Beast, al-Warafi is “saying that since President Obama has declared the war in Afghanistan is over, there are no longer any legal grounds to hold him.”

Harris stated that al-Warafi’s court submission was “believed to be the first time a Guantánamo detainee has argued that the government’s authority to detain him evaporated with end of military operations against the Taliban.” However, as he added, “when US attorneys respond, they could argue that, in fact, hostilities haven’t come to a conclusion, and there are still grounds to hold the man. That could put them the strange position of undercutting the president, and arguing that just because the commander-in-chief says the war is over doesn’t necessarily make it so.”

One of al-Warafi’s lawyers is Brian Foster, who, with colleagues at the law firm Covington & Burling, represents prisoners accused of being involved with the Taliban as well as others accused of having some involvement with al-Qaeda. Foster said they “chose al-Warafi’s case as a first test because he was only ever named as a member of the Taliban, offering a clearer argument for why he should be set free now,” as opposed to men accused of having al-Qaeda connections.

Arguments will no doubt be put forward that the conflict with al-Qaeda is ongoing, although as we at “Close Guantánamo” have always maintained, it should never be taken for granted that the US authorities’ supposed evidence against the prisoners — including claims of their supposed involvement with al-Qaeda — is at all reliable, and in any case, as Brian Foster explained, although the legal argument for freeing men allegedly associated with al-Qaeda “is more complicated than for al-Warafi, which is why the team started with a client that had no al-Qaeda connections,” assumptions about al-Qaeda must also be challenged.

As Foster pointed out, the al-Qaeda to which low-level prisoners belonged “is not the same organization” as it was back in 2001. “It has nothing to do with the people who’ve been in Guantánamo for 13 years,” he said.

At “Close Guantánamo” we agree, and we can see no reason for any case to be made to attempt to justify the ongoing imprisonment of anyone at Guantánamo except for those who are facing trials. We urge appropriate action from President Obama, the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and hope to see further releases from Guantánamo in the very near future.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

Guantánamo “An Endless Horror Movie”: Hunger Striker Appeals for Help to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

In the long struggle for justice at Guantánamo — a prison intended at its founding, 13 years ago, to be beyond the law — there have been few occasions when any outside body has been able to exert any meaningful pressure on the US regarding the imprisonment, mostly without charge or trial, of the men held there.

One exception is the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), whose mission is “to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere,” and whose resolutions are supposed to be binding on the US, which is a member state.

The IACHR has long taken an interest in Guantánamo (as this page on their website explains), and three years ago delivered a powerful ruling in the case of Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian who was still held despite being approved for release (a situation currently faced by 56 of the 122 men still held).

In Ameziane’s case, his lawyers, at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), stated in a press release that the ruling marked “the first time the IACHR has accepted jurisdiction over the case of a man detained at Guantánamo, and underscores the fact that there has been no effective domestic remedy available to victims of unjust detentions and other abuses at the base.”

Ameziane was finally released from Guantánamo in December 2013, although he was sent home to Algeria, against his will.

In February, lawyers for another Guantánamo prisoner, Muaz al-Alawi, identified in Guantánamo as Moath al-Alwi, submitted a petition requesting the IACHR to “issue precautionary measures to end his indefinite detention.” Regular readers may recognise al-Alawi’s story, as I have written about him before — when his habeas corpus petition was denied in 2011 (in an article aptly entitled, “Guantánamo and the Death of Habeas Corpus”), during the prison-wide hunger strike in 2013, and last year, via the New York Times.

The lawyers — interns and supervising attorneys at City University of New York School of Law — stated in the petition:

During his detainment at Guantánamo, Mr. al-Alwi has been systematically tortured and isolated. He has been denied contact with his family, slandered and stigmatized around the globe. He has been denied an opportunity to develop a trade or skill, to meet a partner or start a family. He has been physically abused, only to have medical treatment withheld. Throughout this intense suffering, Mr. al-Alwi has never had a fair trial. Rather, he was tortured by the U.S. and coerced into making statements that were later used against him in court. After a trial ridden with procedural and evidentiary flaws, U.S. federal courts denied his habeas corpus petition in 2011. Thirteen years after he was originally brought to Guantánamo, Mr. al-Alwi remains detained, awaiting a resolution to his indefinite detention without charge or fair process.

Since February 2013, Mr. al-Alwi has participated in his most recent hunger strike. Frustrated by his continued detainment, on April 2013, Mr. al-Alwi escalated his protest by even rejecting water. At the time, Mr. al-Alwi was among the sixteen detainees who were force-fed by prison authorities at Guantánamo. As this Petition and Request for Precautionary Measures is filed, Mr. al-Alwi continues this hunger strike and fully intends to keep up his protest until he is free. He has vowed to “not eat or drink until [he] die[s], if necessary, to protest the injustice of this place …” As of February 2015, Mr. al-Alwi is still held in solitary confinement and subject to regular force-feeding.

Additionally, in April 2013, a U.S. Army guard has shot Mr. al-Alwi, without reason, multiple times at close range, striking his chest, left thigh, left elbow, and shoulder.

He has yet to receive adequate medical care for these gunshot wounds.

Accordingly, Mr. al-Alwi faces irreparable harm at Guantánamo and respectfully requests this Commission to issue precautionary measures to end his indefinite detention.

Al-Alawi’s petition was, rather shamefully, barely covered by any media outlets. An exception was The Intercept, where Murtaza Hussain picked out some highlights from the petition, noting firstly that he weighs just 98 pounds and lost 70 pounds in weight between February and December 2013 — and prompting me, yet again, to think that, if a single photo of al-Alawi or a similarly emaciated prisoner were to be leaked, the resulting outrage might speed the closure of Guantánamo.

Hussain also noted that al-Alawi’s lawyers describe how his “mental and physical state is seriously deteriorating after two years on hunger strike, and subsequent force-feeding,” and point out that he ha stated that, since he embarked on the hunger strike in February 2013, he “has been subjected to escalating physical and psychological abuse from guards, as well as increasingly brutal force-feeding procedures administered by medical personnel.”

Explaining that al-Alawi has described his strike as “a form of peaceful protest against injustice,” the lawyers also note that prison officials “have responded to his hunger strike by placing him in solitary confinement, denying him access to prescribed medical items and subjecting him to extreme temperatures in his cell,” as The Intercept described it.

Although a Guantánamo spokesperson claimed that the medical care received by prisoners at Guantánamo “is on the same level as that provided to U.S. Service members serving here,” the lawyers contend that their client’s nasal passages have “swelled shut due to the extra large tubes prison authorities have repeatedly forced down his nasal cavity” during the force-feeding process,” and also state that the force-feeding sessions “have led to heavy vomiting and daily blood loss.”

In addition, because he is shackled to a chair for many hours every day, while being force-fed, al-Alawi “now suffers severe back pain and other debilitating physical injuries.”

And yet, what he — and other force-fed prisoners — are calling for is simply to be treated humanely. As he has stated, “Tube-feed us humanely. There is no need to use the restraint chair and the riot squads.” During a visit with his lawyers in January, he also said, “It is really bewildering. I weigh less than 100 pounds. I wear braces on both ankles, and both wrists, and one around my lower back. I am five foot five … and they claim that I am ‘resisting’ and that they have to unleash a full riot squad of six giants to move me. How can I possibly resist anyone, let alone these men?”

The title of this article, via Murtaza Hussain, comes from Muaz al-Alawi’s own words, describing Guantánamo as “an endless horror story.”

The petition also describes much more about how he was shot in April 2013:

On April 12, 2013, the International Committee of the Red Cross competed a three-week visit to Guantánamo, meeting with detainees and assessing conditions after nearly a month of hunger striking by a majority of the detainees. A day later, armed guards flooded Mr. al-Alwi’s communal cellblock and physically assaulted and opened fire on the detainees. Mr. al-Alwi was preparing for dawn prayers at the time when a U.S. Army guard appeared in front of him on the other side of a wire-link fence in a small recreation area near his cellblock. From a distance of two to three feet, with no provocation, and without prior warning, a guard shot Mr. al-Alwi multiple times with rubber-coated steel bullets.

The first pellets hit the left part of his chest, above and below Mr. al-Alwi’s heart. As he fled the area for safety, the guard continued to shoot at him and struck him in the front of his left thigh, left elbow, and the back of his right shoulder. Mr. al-Alwi suffered immense pain from these shots. When he was finally away from the guard, Mr. al-Alwi realized that his clothes were soaked in blood and torn from the intensity of the rounds that struck him. The wounds close to Mr. al-Alwi’s heart were also badly swollen.

Since being shot, Mr. al-Alwi has been placed in solitary confinement and has escalated his hunger strike in protest.

It is not known when the IACHR will issue its ruling, but I hope it will be soon. As a prisoner not approved for release, but not facing prosecution either, Muaz al-Alawi is one of 56 remaining prisoners whose only other route out of Guantánamo is, conceivably, via a Periodic Review Board, a process established in 2013, which, to date, has involved reviews of the cases of 13 prisoners, approving eight men for release, and recommending four others for ongoing imprisonment — with one other case yet to be decided. The process is slow, and, although two men have been freed, the majority approved for release have not. Yemenis, like Muaz al-Alawi, they join 43 of their fellow countrymen who are still held despite being approved for release in January 2010 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force.

A supportive ruling for Muaz al-Alawi might, therefore, be useful in pushing the US to follow through on its decisions regarding the Yemenis, which remains something of a disgrace, even though 12 Yemenis cleared for release were — finally — freed and rehoused in third countries at the end of last year and the start of this.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

Strangers in a Strange Land: My Interview About the Struggles of the Six Men Freed from Guantánamo in Uruguay

Recently, I was delighted to be interviewed for the Montevideo Portal website by a Uruguayan journalist, Martin Otheguy, who wanted to know my thoughts about the situation facing the six former Guantánamo prisoners who were given new homes in Uruguay in December. I wrote about the negotiations for their release here and here, and I also wrote about the men following their release, here and here. In addition, I looked at the stories of their difficulties adapting to their new lives just a few weeks ago, which was the spur for Martin approaching me for an interview.

The interview is below. I translated it from the Spanish via Google Translate, and then tried to reconstruct it so that it reflects as accurately as possible the original interview, which was in English. I hope you find it useful, and will share it if you do:

Strangers in a Strange Land

Andy Worthington interviewed by Martin Otheguy for Montevideo Portal

Andy Worthington, documentary filmmaker and author specializing in Guantánamo, told Montevideo Portal that a dedicated team of psychologists should treat the men released from Guantánamo in December. “They are in a unique and horrible position in which nobody can understand what they went through,” he said.

Andy Worthington is a British investigative journalist (also a writer, filmmaker and photographer) who has devoted much of his work to Guantánamo Bay.

He co-founded the influential “Close Guantánamo” campaign, co-directed the documentary “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” and is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (which includes references to the six refugees who are now in Uruguay).

Through his website, he has closely followed how the six Guantánamo prisoners released in our country have adapted to their new home and their new lives, while continuing to actively demand the release of other prisoners held without charge or trial in Guantánamo.

In the midst of an ongoing controversy about how the former prisoners are adapting to life in Uruguay, focused on how they are still without work, and questions about how the men’s resettlement has been handled, Worthington chatted with Montevideo Portal on the backgrounds of the former prisoners, their problems adjusting to their new lives, and a couple of things that Uruguayan society tends to forget.

Martin Otheguy: In Uruguay some people are frightened by the former prisoners, even though the US government clued them for release. What is known about these six men?

Andy Worthington: They are people who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan from their countries as refugees — economic refugees more than anything else. They had been told that in Afghanistan the Taliban had established a pure Islamic state, and they believed they could find a new life there.

There was a significant number of people from North Africa and the Gulf who traveled to Europe to try to find work and settle there, but they found it very difficult, so they ended up going to Afghanistan, where they could live very cheaply. That was the situation when they were arrested. I understand that people worry because they are former prisoners, but in their case there are no genuine allegations of their involvement in military activities or indeed any kind of terrorism.

Martin Otheguy: But can they be considered religious fundamentalists, even though they have not been involved in terrorist activities?

Andy Worthington: I don’t think so. My impression is that they are not fundamentalists, there is no evidence of that. They are four Syrians, a Tunisian and a Palestinian who don’t behave as through they are fundamentalists. They appear to be happy with their civilian lives and have not insisted on devoting themselves to any kind of religious figures, for example.

Martin Otheguy: Former President Jose Mujica said that they were people who were not used to working hard. Do you think it was unfair?

Andy Worthington: I’ve seen different interpretations of what he said. For me it’s more appropriate to understand they were very damaged by their experience in Guantánamo, and I must say that these are people who were not only tortured and abused and held for 13 years without charge or trial; the process of detaining them in that manner has a tendency to create a state of weakness and impotence — and of people who, when released, are unable to act independently.

And especially in Guantánamo, the United States undertook a process that was designed to dehumanize the prisoners, to break them and make them completely dependent on the authorities. It is very clear to me that these men have post-traumatic stress disorder (PRSD), that they have psychological problems that must be addressed so that they can re-motivate. I know one of them mentioned how difficult it is to have to now make their own decisions because, as prisoners, they were completely powerless.

Martin Otheguy: Is psychological therapy necessary to prepare them for work and to have a normal life here?

Andy Worthington: I think it would be appropriate for them to have psychological help, and I also think that, in the meantime, financial support to keep them should come from the US. I don’t know really how that has worked so far; from what I have heard, though, it has involved the assistance of a Uruguayan labor union. It is the moral obligation of the United States to keep these men until they are in a position to move on with their lives.

Another thing that is very important is that they need to rejoin their families. They spent 13 years in a horrible, horrible prison where they were badly mistreated and separated from their families; nobody was allowed to see them, even if they could afford to travel the naval base, unlike any other US prisoner who has been convicted for the most terrible crimes. This is a unique situation.

Martin Otheguy: In the interviews there have been some complaints about the Uruguayan resettlement plan. Do you think it was not well planned?

Andy Worthington: I don’t know. I think the fact that former President Mujica has been so receptive about the need to help prisoners at Guantánamo is more positive than almost all other countries. Other nations have taken in other prisoners who could not be safely repatriated, but have not been as sympathetic as President Mujica.

I think the problem we all have is that this is a completely unique situation. These are men who were tortured, abused and wrongly imprisoned by the United States, and the US has refused to do anything about it. The US hasn’t offer new homes to any of these men, but expects other countries to be willing to help, countries that receive very damaged people who are then placed in unfamiliar surroundings.

I hope if they decide to stay in Uruguay they can get used to the Latin American hospitality, even though they are Muslims from the Middle East, and are unfamiliar with the language and the culture; It is a strange place for them.

I hope everything goes well, but I must say that the most important thing for me is that people understand how unreliable are the rumors and allegations about Guantánamo prisoners. People should be careful because there are documents on Guantánamo — the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011 — which, if people see, they can say, “Such a person is such a thing or the other,” but most of that information is completely unfounded. It is not worthwhile for people to worry about those documents.

Martin Otheguy: You talked about adapting. Is it possible that eventually they will adapt to the country despite there being virtually no Muslims here, and despite the fact that there is not even a mosque for them to pray at?

Andy Worthington: I would say yes. These are people who understand that they have no other place to go. If you have to leave your country and go to another, there will always be a problem adapting. The main problem for Uruguay is knowing how damaged they are, and what their experiences were, but I would say that, as long as the men are in a supportive environment, I cannot see why they cannot adapt to it.

Martin Otheguy: Do you think that Uruguayan society and its politicians have to be more patient, that the refugees need more time before working?

Andy Worthington: Yes, clearly they need to overcome their PTSD. Some countries have organizations dedicated to dealing with victims of torture. I think that in Uruguay they should be treated by a team of psychologists who can help them to cope with what has happened. We must remember that, for the people in Guantánamo, no one else has gone through anything similar.

If you or I were to go to jail, it would be because we were accused of a crime, prosecuted and sentenced. These men were captured by the United States, who told the world that they were “the worst of the worst,” and they were held without rights and were given no opportunity to challenge the allegations against them. They are in a uniquely horrible position in which no one can really understand what happened to them except for other Guantánamo prisoners.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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

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

London’s Housing Crisis: Please Support the Sweets Way Tenants Facing Eviction in Barnet

Please sign and share the Sweets Way tenants’ petition calling for their homes to be saved from demolition on Change.org, and see below for their story.

London’s housing crisis is something that preoccupies me on a daily basis, although I don’t get to write about it anywhere near as much as I’d like. As a social housing tenant who has lived in London for 30 years, I can say that, since the Tory-led government came to power five years ago, I have never felt as vulnerable or as demeaned, and I have watched aghast as the current housing bubble has driven house prices beyond the reach of most families — and, perhaps more crucially, has also driven rents to levels never seen before.

With rents and mortgages easily reaching £15,000 or £20,000 a year, matching the median income in London, it is understandable why so many hard-working people are now paying out so much for a roof over their heads that they have little left over for their own enjoyment (and crucially, to put into the wider economy), or cannot make ends meet and are obliged to use food banks, or are having to leave London entirely.

In addition, for many social tenants, life is increasingly insecure, as cash-strapped councils claim that they are unable to afford the maintenance on aging estates, and, as a result, sell the land to developers to build new estates, from which existing tenants are priced out, replaced by foreign investors and relatively wealthy British buyers. These developments are supposed to include “affordable” social housing, but more often than not whatever social component exists is actually unaffordable for most workers, because, in September 2013, London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, set affordable rents at 80 percent of market rents.

The Heygate Estate at the Elephant and Castle, in Southwark, which has a Labour council, is a notorious example of an estate sold cheap to developers, with former tenants scattered to the wind, and leaseholders — the ones who bought into the rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher’s council house sell-off — paid well below market rates to move out. Demolished last year, after many years of wrangling over its future, it is now being transformed into a “luxury” estate with no genuinely affordable housing whatsoever for ordinary working Londoners. For the whole sorry story, see the incomparable Southwark Notes website.

Far from learning from its disdain for its own tenants, Southwark Council is now repeating its disgraceful behaviour at the Aylesbury Estate. As Londonist reported on March 6:

Like its now-demolished neighbour, the Heygate Estate, residents at the Aylesbury Estate are losing their homes in a deal between the local authority and Notting Hill Housing (NHH). Southwark call it regeneration, the residents call it social cleansing.

It’s not the first time that Aylesbury residents have fought off an attempt to effectively privatise the estate — in 2001, they voted overwhelmingly against a sale of the estate to a housing association. But in 2005, Southwark came to the decision it wasn’t prepared to stump up the estimated £350m it would cost to upgrade the estate. Instead they decided to rebuild a new estate under the control of NHH, with 50% of the new development being affordable housing. As we’ve pointed out before, the definition of ‘affordable’ varies wildly and isn’t usually that affordable. Recent government-led changes further eroded the obligation on developers to build affordable housing or even pay towards it.

It’s not just council tenants who face eviction; residents who bought their properties under the Right To Buy (RTB) scheme are also getting a raw deal. As the freeholder, Southwark issued Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) to buy back the properties. This is where owning your own council home under RTB might not be such a good idea after all.

Residents say that unlike other developments, Southwark has used an in-house surveyor rather than an independent one to determine how much they will pay for a property. They claim they are being pressured into accepting below market rate and risk being priced out of the area.

On January 31, during the March for Homes protest, an empty block on the Aylesbury Estate was occupied by housing campaigners, and when the block was finally evicted they turned their attentions to another, larger block, prompting a Colditz-style response from the council and the housing trust, who have ringed the blocks in question with a razor wire-topped fence, allowing existing tenants to come and go via one entrance only, patrolled by security guards, creating the impression that they are living in a prison.

Similar, or related problems are taking place across London. In West Hendon, for example, a campaign has been ongoing for a year. As Vice News described the situation in an article in October, “The story unfolding in West Hendon, part of the North London borough of Barnet, is in many ways the same one that’s happening all over London: a council estate being demolished, the land sold off to a property developer and the construction of expensive new, ‘luxury’ flats, with no space on the new development for many of the current, relatively poor residents.” You can sign the petition here (which has over 130,000 supporters), and join the Facebook page.

Last year, two other campaigns secured a huge amount of coverage — the E15 Mothers in Stratford, mostly single mums evicted from a hostel who occupied empty flats on the Carpenters Estate, and the residents of the New Era Estate in Hoxton, who were threatened by a predatory property development company.

The latest group of people facing predatory developers are the residents of Sweets Way Estate in Barnet, in north London — an estate consisting of 160 homes, which previously belonged to the MOD, and had been provided to some of the borough’s most vulnerable people, including formerly homeless families, through an arrangement between the council and Notting Hill Housing Trust. Now, however, the estate is the focus of redevelopment plans, approved by the council, put forward by Annington Property Ltd. As the Guardian revealed last week, Annington was bought in 2012 by Terra Firma, “a multi-billion-pound investment house” run by Guy Hands, “a tax exile and one of Britain’s top private equity investors.”

Last week, Russell Brand attended a sleepover on the estate, attracting media attention as he did previously in Stratford and Hoxton for the E15 Mothers and the New Era protesters. Of the 160 houses on the estate, just ten were still occupied when, last week, protestors decided to squat some of the empty properties to highlight the plight of the former residents.

As the Guardian explained, “The occupation of Sweets Way began last week, when four of the boarded-up properties were occupied by squatters protesting against the redevelopment. During Tuesday’s sleepover, metal grilles were removed from two more recently evacuated homes, revealing pristine conditions inside. The occupiers invited those who had lost their homes on the estate to ‘move back in.'”

Local resident Rosa de Souza said, “These housing protests are happening all over London. Developers are destroying communities. This is social cleansing. People don’t matter any more, just profit.”

A spokesman for Annington Property Ltd. claimed that the company “very much supports the argument for more homes, both in London and elsewhere, although there is a need for development to achieve this. It is regrettable when homes need to be demolished, but Annington’s decision to redevelop the estate will see an increase in the number of homes by more than 100%, from 142 to 288, and the inclusion of 20% affordable homes will see a minimum of 59 created where there were none before.”

Unfortunately, of course, the “affordable” homes will not be affordable for the former tenants — or for the majority of hard-working Londoners in the borough — rather making a mockery of Annington’s claims.

Below is the petition on Change.org by the Sweets Way Resists tenants’ group, which currently has over 60,000 signatures, and below that is Owen Jones’ Guardian article about the protest, and a video of residents talking about their situation. The Facebook page is here, and on Monday March 30, at 10am, the campaigners and residents are at Barnet County Court, resisting eviction after a one-week stay that was granted by the judge last week. As they say, “Annington have a well-paid team of lawyers who will use every trick in the book to not only evict the Sweets Way social centre, but also to criminalise protest across the whole estate (where families are still living!) This is potentially setting a very dangerous legal precedent for future housing protests and freedom of expression more widely. Come out and make it clear that we won’t stand by as our right to protest is trampled with our right to decent homes!”

Stop the evictions and demolition of the Sweets Way estate

Change.org petition by Sweets Way Resists

Sweets Way Estate used to be a tight-knit community in Barnet, London, with families and children who played and went to school together. Now Sweets Way is the site of protest, where these same families are pleading with the council not to push them from their homes.

We are Sweets Way Resists, a group of residents and ex-residents of the Sweets Way estate who are being evicted so that the estate can be redeveloped and turned into flats for the wealthy.

Before December there were 160 homes on the estate, all but 10 families have now been evicted and rehoused mostly out of the borough — some even out of London. Most of these are families with children who have had their lives uprooted and moved away from their community, their friends and their schools.

The property is being developed by the company Annington — one of the largest property developers in the UK. In December, Barnet Council approved Annington’s application to redevelop Sweets Way – meaning pushing out all current residents and replacing the existing homes with up to 288 new ones. Almost all of these new homes will be for the wealthy.

And meanwhile the families of Sweets Way have been forced into homes that are too small, too far from schools (meaning some of the children have had to miss school) and none have been told where or how they will be housed long term. But we don’t want to be rehoused — we want our homes back.

According to Annington’s plans, the ten families left on the estate will be removed by the end of this month.  We won’t let that happen — we’re standing our ground, occupying the empty flats and will stand together until Richard Cornelius, Leader of Barnet Council and Annington meet our demands.

Barnet Homes has repeatedly told us that there are no appropriate homes for us in the borough, but they are wrong — we are living in them! Our homes are well-built and perfectly habitable and the estate offers green spaces and gardens for our kids to play and the community to come together. Annington’s so-called ‘regeneration’ of our estate benefits private developers at the expense of our community.

We demand:

1. No demolition of the homes on Sweets Way estate

2. Repopulation of empty homes, with right to return for all decanted residents

3. Immediate stop to all eviction proceedings against residents

If Annington can’t provide homes at Sweets Way that we can afford, we demand that they sell the estate to Barnet Council at a cost the council can afford.

On Sweets Way the great ignored are finding ways to assert themselves

By Owen Jones, The Guardian, March 24, 2015

“They think we’re a piece of furniture,” Kauthar says, her tone one of defiance and incredulity. “We’re not a sofa or a table, we’re actually human beings.” She oozes determination. Along with the rest of her community, Kauthar faces eviction from Sweets Way estate in Barnet, north London, because a tax exile wants to bulldoze their homes to make way for luxury homes. Oh, and 59 “affordable” homes, an Orwellian attempt to rebrand rents only the comfortably off can pay as something else.

Kauthar is just 13 years old, a year-eight student who is also a resolute, charismatic protester. When her family were booted out of their home, they were relocated to a house with no hot water, leaving them to spend weeks bathing with the help of a kettle. But she isn’t broken: far from it. “We just want them to listen to us,” Kauthar says. “We want them to come and be in our shoes because if they were in our shoes they would hate it. They’re living out a posh life and they’ve got money, but our parents didn’t choose to be in this situation.”

The occupation of Sweets Way estate matters. It’s crucial, of course, for the dignity and security of its inhabitants, who were taken to court on Monday but won an adjournment until next week. It’s important, too, to confront a housing crisis that has left 5 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists, and countless families at the mercy of an unregulated, sometimes extortionate private rental market. But it is significant because it is a striking example of people deprived of any meaningful political voice in modern Britain. Lacking representation at local and national levels, benefiting from few allies in the mainstream media, they are forced to be creative when it comes to forcing the powerful to listen.

Neoliberal society obliterates organised dissent. Ideologically, it breaks down solidarity, encouraging the idea that we all rise or fall as individuals based on our personal effort, or lack thereof. The shift from an industrial to a service-sector working class breaks down other organic forms of solidarity: jobs can be more precarious and short-lived, and communities tend not to be based around supermarkets or call centres as they once were around factories or mines. Trade unions have been weakened by anti-union laws, defeats in seismic industrial disputes, and mass unemployment. Working-class people were deprived of a voice; the notion of collectively organising to improve the conditions of individuals, communities and society as a whole has been eroded.

The proliferation of home ownership was supposed to further inculcate a sense of individualism, and hinder protracted strikes because of the need to pay mortgages. Trade unions and local government gave working-class people political experience and knowhow; their decline, along with the general professionalisation of politics, has ensured the dominance of the professional middle classes in Westminster. The decline of the left, and with it a sense of a coherent alternative vision for how society could be run, saps the will to fight.

It should be so different. A broader labour movement would organise the unemployed and those living a precarious existence. There would be more local councillors hailing from the circumstances of those facing eviction from Sweets Way. Members of parliament would find themselves directly accountable to a thriving movement from below. There would be far more journalists from such communities, instead of a media transformed into a closed shop for the privileged, thanks to unpaid internships and expensive postgraduate qualifications. Democracy would be a far more effective counterweight to corporate interests.

Of course, in such a Britain it is unlikely the residents of Sweets Way estate would find themselves in their current situation in the first place. But deprived of effective representation, they are forced to resort to any means possible to be heard.

The residents cannot rely on mainstream media that are largely the plaything of a few privileged owners. And so they bypass it with social media, increasingly becoming a great hope for those seeking to democratise the means of dispersing information in modern Britain. They tweet out their situation, argue their case, appeal for solidarity and resources, ask others to build pressure on both their corporate tormentors and local and national politicians. They enlist the support of Russell Brand, who has become an important ally of this grassroots campaign because his social media following and celebrity makes him a highly effective megaphone.

Democracy no longer listens to the likes of Sweets Way residents, let alone caters for their needs. That leaves many Britons in desperate circumstances feeling resigned and hopeless, sensing the odds are too great, lacking faith in collective struggle as a solution. But the likes of Sweets Way – following struggles over housing led by working-class women in Focus E15 and the New Era last year – demonstrate that the apparently voiceless are increasingly finding ways of asserting themselves.

We won’t hear voices like Kauthar’s in the general election campaign. A coup by the privileged in politics and media ensures that they are simply not listened to or taken seriously. But I found a courage and determination in that 13-year-old girl that is infectious. From Brixton cinema workers fighting for the living wage to the New Era tenants, the great ignored are finding ways to win despite a decaying democracy that excludes them. It should give hope to others in similar circumstances.

And if not, Kauthar has a warning. “When we grow older, we might be controlling them. They never know.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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