It is but no means clear that the government can be persuaded to scrap its bill, as the entire rationale for the coalition government’s existence seems to be to remove whatever remains in public ownership and to hand it over to the private sector, even though that particular approach to politics is exactly the opposite of what we need, after the unfettered greed of bankers and the private sector led to the economic crash of 2008, whose reverberations have, perhaps fatally, undermined the economic health of the West, even while, in the UK, cynical and thoroughly unqualified ideologues like David Cameron and George Osborne attempt to pin all the blame for Britain’s economic woes on the poor, the unemployed and the disabled.

This approach — and the way it is being lapped up by a majority of the British people — marks a particularly low point in my lack of respect for politicians or my fellow citizens, and I’ll be writing more about it soon, but for now, in an effort to maintain the focus on the NHS, and the need for persistent opposition to the government’s plans from anyone who understands how extraordinary it is to have a health service paid for by general taxation, which is free at the point of entry and exit, and how important it is to hold onto this service, I’m cross-posting below an article by Dr. Clare Gerada, the chair of the Royal College of GPs — whose members last week voiced their considerable opposition to the government’s planned reforms — which was published in October in the Guardian.

In it, she provided a particularly poignant explanation of why people choose to be part of a caring profession, and I hope it provides a reminder of why these motivations, rather than the lust for power and money that evidently drives David Cameron, George Osborne, Andrew Lansley and the sharks queuing up to dissect the NHS, are to be cherished and protected at all costs.

NHS doctors are under pressure to replace caring with market values
By Clare Gerada, The Guardian, October 20, 2011

I’d like to tell you a story about a GP, a radiologist, a pathologist and a psychiatrist. Sounds like the first line of a joke, but it isn’t. The GP was me.

We were having dinner with our children at an open-air opera in Germany. The place was packed. Everyone was having a good time, when the dreaded happened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an elderly man fall headfirst into his plate.

The four of us looked at each other. We knew our meal was over and we swung into action. Each working to type. The psychiatrist tending to the man’s wife. The radiologist searching for a defibrillator. The pathologist pounding on the poor man’s chest. Me giving mouth-to-mouth.

From the way he keeled over, it was obvious he was dead. But we knew there was still plenty for us to do. We had to comfort his distressed wife. And we had to keep the crowd calm for 30 minutes, till the paramedics arrived.

When it was over, my 15-year-old son turned to me and said: “I want to be able to do that.”

“Do what?” I asked him.

“Care for people,” he said.

His reply surprised me. Not just because impressing teenage children isn’t easy. But because what impressed him wasn’t the glory and the drama of our public display of medical skill. No. What impressed him was our simple act of caring.

Caring for a sick man. Caring for the man’s wife. And caring for the people in the crowd. That’s what inspired my son.

And that’s how my father inspired me a generation ago. It wouldn’t be allowed now, but he used to take me with him on home visits in the postwar slums of Peterborough. I watched him treat children with measles and care for the dying in their homes. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a doctor.

Why did I tell you that story? Because I believe each of us has a story about what inspired us to become a doctor. A story that made us what we are today. A story that lights our way to the future.

Our stories have never been more important. Especially now, when our profession is under pressure to replace the language of caring with the language of the market.

We need to remind ourselves why we entered this honourable profession in the first place.

When I come home from work and my son asks me what sort of day I’ve had, on a good day I want to be able to say “I saved a life”, not “I met a budget”.

Of course, it’s important that GPs are mindful of resources. We have a responsibility to spend the public’s money carefully and wisely. That goes without saying.

But we must never lose sight of the patient as a person, at the heart of our practice. Patients are not “commodities” to be bought and sold in the health marketplace.

In this brave new cost-driven, competitive, managed-care world, I worry about the effect the language of marketing is having on our clinical relationships.

It’s changing the precious relationship between clinician and patient into a crudely costed financial procedure. Turning our patients into aliquots of costed tariffs and us into financial managers of care.

We are already embracing the language of the market when we talk about, for example, care pathways, case management, demand management, productivity, clinical and financial alignment, risk stratification.

We’re already accused of making “inappropriate referrals” whenever we put what’s best for our patients above what’s best for saving money.

We’re being forced to comply with referral protocols and so-called rules-based medicine, in an effort to control medical care before it’s delivered.

Referral management systems — already widespread — place a hidden stranger in the consulting room. A hidden stranger who interferes with decisions that should be made by GPs in partnership with their patients.

Insulting terms, like “frequent flyers”, are being used to describe people who are sick and need our care and attention.

The Archbishop of Canterbury attacked what he described as “the quiet resurgence of the seductive language of the deserving and undeserving poor”. If we don’t watch out, the deserving and undeserving poor could soon be joined by the deserving and undeserving sick.

I worry we’re heading towards a situation where healthcare will be like a budget airline. There’ll be two queues: one queue for those who can afford to pay, and another for those who can’t. Seats will be limited to those who muscle in first. And the rest will be left stranded on the tarmac.

This can’t be right. After all, no one chooses to be sick. We must hold fast to the principle that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth.

Of course, there have always been health inequalities. But my concern is that despite all the talk of reducing these inequalities, the size looks set to increase, not decrease.

So what about GP commissioning? Will it help us reduce health inequalities? And will it enable us to deliver better care to our patients?

People often tell me that GPs make good commissioners because of the population-focus we bring to care. After all as a profession we see 300 million patients per year. If anyone can be said to have their finger on the pulse of the nation, surely it’s us.

It’s an argument I’ve supported for decades. But we must tread carefully in this brave new world and do everything in our power to make sure it’s the public’s pulse we have our fingers on — not the public’s purse.

Which is why I believe that big decisions — decisions like whether to close hospitals — should be the responsibility of governments, not GPs. It’s the government’s job to decide how much we invest in healthcare and what services the NHS should provide.

Of course we should do our bit — we already do, by sitting on Nice, Sign and other committees. But governments should have ultimate responsibility for decisions about rationing healthcare, not GPs — guided and advised by us, for sure, but finally the decision must be taken by a publicly accountable body, not an individual doctor or a group of doctors.

We don’t shirk our responsibilities. Governments shouldn’t shirk theirs either. Rhetoric about putting doctors in charge doesn’t convince me. In this brave new world it’s the market — led by CEOs, shareholders and accountants — that will be in charge, not doctors.

We mustn’t allow ourselves to be compromised. Our first responsibility must be to the patient in front of us. Our next is to the patients in the waiting room. After that comes our responsibility to those on our list. And then to our local community, and finally the wider population. In that order.

I’ve always said that good commissioning is about being a good GP. It’s about understanding how we use resources fairly and effectively. But whatever happens we must make sure that the commissioning agenda isn’t allowed to compromise our relationship with the patient in front of us. We must not risk long-term benefits being sacrificed in favour of short-term savings.

How soon will it be, for example, before we stop referring for cochlear implant? An expensive intervention, but one that, in the long term, saves enormous amounts of public money. But not a saving from our budget.

How long will it be before we find ourselves injecting a patient’s knee joint — at Injections-R-us plc — instead of referring to an orthopaedic surgeon for a knee replacement?

And, once referred for hospital treatment, patients must be able to trust their doctors to base care on need and not on making money for the hospital.

If you think this is far-fetched, the Economist calculated that in 2009 the market-driven, corporate-dominated US healthcare system generated around $300bn of charges for unnecessary care.

This represented 10% to 12% of US healthcare spending for that year. This means women having unnecessary hysterectomies. This mean men having unnecessary angiograms. This means adolescents being given antidepressants for no reason. Do we want that here?

As doctors we risk being doubly compromised. We’ll have to choose between the best interests of our patients and those of the commissioning group’s purse. And, to make matters worse, we’ll also be rewarded for staying in budget — and not spending the money on restoring that child’s hearing. It goes by the quaint title of the “quality premium”. Now that’s what I call a perverse incentive.

We are told that one of the reasons clinical commissioning is being introduced is to reduce the spiralling costs of healthcare. But if the American experience is anything to go by, the opposite will be true.

Paul Ellwood, one of the founders of the American health maintenance system in the 1970s, had this to say in 1999 about what happened there: “A series of perverse economic incentives were instituted from top to bottom so as to seriously compromise the independent clinical judgments of physicians and other health professionals.”

He describes health maintenance organisations (which have the same function as our clinical commissioning groups) as finding themselves in “a deepening swamp of commercialism over service, of profiteering over professionalism, of denial or rationing of care where such care is critically needed, of depersonalisation of intensely personal kinds of relationships”. Is this what we want here?

The NHS can always be improved, but we must do it very carefully, so as not to lose what we and previous generations of doctors like my father have achieved.

As Allyson Pollock reminds us, the NHS was not an experiment. It wasn’t a mythical utopia either. The reality is that for more than 50 years it has delivered high-quality care for most patients, most of the time.

Can the market achieve similar outcomes? There is plenty of evidence that market-driven health services lead to limited choice, escalating costs, reduced quality. And let’s remind ourselves, the biggest health market in the world, the US, has achieved the remarkable double whammy of having the most expensive system in the world and the greatest health inequalities. It comes near the bottom of the league for most health outcomes — and boasts an unnecessary death every 12 minutes.

So what can we do? It would be easy to feel discouraged. But I know we all want the best for our patients, we always have and we always will. And as long as we do what we know to be right for patients, we will keep their trust.

And we can do this by ensuring that the systems we work in continue to allow us to work ethically and always as our patients’ advocates.

We must resist the encroachments of the market wherever it threatens our freedom to serve our patients and our communities. This is what those of you leading commissioning must promise us.

We have to get the actuaries, risk-adjusters and shareholders out of the health service, and put clinicians (not just medics) back in charge of it. And then we need to bring in management staff to advise and assist us. Staff who are truly committed to the values of our NHS.

We all became doctors because we wanted to make a positive difference to people’s lives. It would be hard to devise a better and more inspiring way of achieving this than through the provision of excellent general practice care, within a universal health service.

In times of austerity, we need to come together so that we can collaborate, co-operate and innovate — not compete against each other.

You expected me to talk about the health bill in England, but this bill, like other reorganisations across the whole of the UK, will come and go. Instead I have chosen to talk to you about what matters to our patients, now and for ever — a doctor who cares.

I am convinced that there are enough of us to create a revolution in healthcare. Not a revolution that the government is talking about in the bill – in structures, payments and competition. But a revolution in values.

One that will provide excellent care to our patients. Where in every interaction we pinch ourselves at the honour we have been given to be privy to their secrets and pain — and as Don Berwick says, “being allowed to be guests in their lives”.

My message to you is simple and clear. My son wanted to do medicine because of what he saw me and my friends do: care. If we want to keep serving the best interests of our patients, we must reject the language of the market and embrace the language of caring. And keep telling our stories.

Note: To keep up pressure on the government, please sign the 38 Degrees petition (which is currently very close to 500,000 signatures), and the Keep Our NHS Public e-petition on the government’s website (which is currently close to 50,000 signatures).

Also, if you’re in London, please attend a protest outside Parliament on Wednesday February 8, the day that the Health and Social Care Bill is due to reach report stage. This event is organised by Hackney Keep Our NHS Public, and takes place in Old Palace Yard, opposite the House of Lords, from 2.30 to 8.30 pm. For further information, contact Hackney Keep Our NHS Public.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Understanding this, the professional bodies representing those who actually work in the NHS have opposed the bill. Amongst other bodies, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives have opposed the government’s plans, and last week, in an editorial published simultaneously in the British Medical Journal, the Health Service Journal and Nursing Times, the editors of those magazines described the government’s plans as a “damaging … unholy mess,” and stated that the NHS “is far too important to be left at the mercy of ideological and incompetent intervention” and that “we must make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.”

In a second British Medical Journal editorial last week, Kieran Walshe, professor of health policy at Manchester Business School, explained how abandoning the bill now would save over £1bn in 2013. As he explained, “Going ahead with the bill means setting up the NHS Commissioning Board (with an annual running cost of £492m), 260 clinical commissioning groups (with an annual running cost of £1.25bn), and the new economic regulator, Monitor (with its anticipated annual running cost of £82m). Each of these new statutory organisations will have additional set-up costs — perhaps amounting to a one-off spend of £360m. If the bill were stopped now, it would save all those set-up costs, and at least £650m in annual running costs — just over £1bn in 2013.”

On Wednesday, a group of 365 GPs, specialists and health academics urged the government to drop bill, which, they said in a letter in the Daily Telegraph, will “derail and fragment” the NHS. As the Guardian described it, the letter urged the government to “drop the bill altogether and focus instead on the ‘real issues,’ namely improving safety, efficiency and the quality of patient care.”

The letter stated that the clinical commissioning group leaders who have backed the bill “do not represent the majority of GPs who believe the bill will seriously damage patient care,” and the signatories added, “The NHS is not in peril if these reforms don’t go ahead. On the contrary, it is the bill which threatens to derail and fragment the NHS into a collection of competing private providers. The bill will result in hundreds of different organisations pulling against each other, leading to fragmentation, chaos and damage to the quality and availability of patient care.”

Also last week, the Royal College of General Practitioners, which represents 44,000 GPs in England, and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, which has over 50,000 members, called for the bill to be withdrawn.

Dr. Helena Johnson, the chair of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, said, “Together with many other health professionals, we have tried to engage constructively and make sensible suggestions throughout the bill’s passage through Parliament. But time and time again, the views of patients and health professionals have been ignored. The government seems determined to press ahead with these reforms.”

The most damaging criticism, however, came from the GPs, because, as the BBC noted, the BMA and the nurses’ and midwives’ organisations are unions, and their complaints allowed a deeply cynical government “to suggest they were motivated by the dispute over pay and pensions, whereas the RCGP is part of the professional arm of the health service which sets standards.” The GPs’ criticism is also hugely significant, of course, “because GPs are widely thought of as one of the main beneficiaries of the reforms, as they are supposed to get more control over how NHS funds are spent.” In fact, that is putting it mildly, as GPs are supposed to take over NHS commissioning with a budget of £60 bn, even though the details of how this is supposed to happen have not been explained.

As a resident of Oxfordshire, Bernard Dod, explained in a letter to the Guardian last week, although the government claims that GPs will play a key role, “Oxfordshire has 83 GP practices comprising hundreds of individual doctors. When I asked representatives of the current (soon to be abolished) primary care trust how in practice all these doctors would be able to make so many important decisions, they said that nobody knew: the new system has not been trialled. The government has embarked on a massive, destructive and expensive reorganisation without knowing how it will work, and without producing a shred of evidence that it will result in a better, fairer and cheaper service.”

Perhaps some GPs are also aware that power is only being handed over to them so that they will, in turn, hand it on to private providers. Or, as Ben Goldacre tweeted:

• In case u don’t understand NHS bill: GPs know they’re being set up to fail by being given commissioning powers. Those are specialist skills.
• After GPs fail, private commissioning expertise will be needed: large private corps, which will come to operate like health insurers.
• These large bodies, like public/private insurance co’s, will be able to pick & choose patients. Note no geographical responsibility in bill.
• Small differences will emerge in what services they offer. Top up plans will become available. And that, kids, will be that.
• It is so very obvious that GPs are being set up to fail at the specialist task of health service planning that it’s clearly not an accident.

In an attempt to fend off further criticism last week — from the GPs, in particular — the ever desperate, but ever obstinate health minister Andrew Lansley offered further concessions, including a promise that the health minister would retain the ultimate responsibility for the NHS. When this abdication of responsibility first became obvious last year, it caused understandable alarm, because it revealed explicitly how the government was seeking to make the NHS unaccountable to either voters or the government — or, in other words, how it was in fact planning to privatise the NHS.

In response to these concessions and others resulting from criticism by the Lords, including what the BBC described as “strengthening the requirement of the regulator to ensure the different providers competing for patients also work together to provide seamless services for patients,” RCGP chairman Dr. Clare Gerada said:

This decision was not taken lightly, but it is clear that the College has been left with no alternative. We have taken every opportunity to negotiate changes for the good of our patients and for the continued stability of the NHS, yet while the Government has claimed that it has made widespread concessions, our view is that the amendments have created greater confusion. We remain unconvinced that the Bill will improve the care and services we provide to our patients.

Our position has not changed, and the concerns we expressed when this Bill was at the White Paper stage 18 months ago have still not been satisfactorily addressed. Competition, and the opening up our of health service to any qualified providers will lead not only to fragmentation of care, but also potentially to a ‘two tier’ system with access to care defined by a patient’s ability to pay.

We support a greater role for GPs in the planning, design and delivery of services within their local communities, but as the organisation representing the views of over 44,000 GPs, we cannot support a Bill that will damage the care and services that GPs deliver to patients and ultimately bring about the demise of a unified, national health service.

Our view is that what is required now is to rapidly consolidate the current organisational structure, such that PCT clusters remain, with GPs placed as the majority of the Board so that we may address the serious issues facing our NHS. There should be a debate as a matter of urgency to determine what the NHS can provide, how it should be funded, and how we deal with the major health and social care problems facing our population.

In a key passage, Dr. Gerada explained:

We cannot sit back. Instead, we must once again raise our concerns in the hope that the Prime Minister will halt this damaging, unnecessary and expensive reorganisation which, in our view, risks leaving the poorest and most vulnerable in society to bear the brunt.

In conclusion, she stated:

We will continue to do everything we can, both as a College and in partnership with our colleagues in the Academy of Royal Colleges, our nursing colleagues and across the wider health and social care sectors, to bring about change for the good of our patients and preserve the principles of the NHS that has served millions of patients so well for over 60 years — a universal healthcare service, free at the point of need.

Dr. Gerada also spoke to the BBC, telling the Radio 4 Today programme that the bill would “turn the National Health Service into thousands of different health services, all competing for the same patients, the same knee, the same brain, the same heart. Patients will find their care will be fragmented, it will be on different sites, it won’t join up, it will be difficult to hand over care and it will be phenomenally expensive to keep track of all these competing parts of the NHS.”

Next week, this wretched bill will return to the Lords, where it can expect more damaging criticism, but don’t be fooled: the government still doesn’t want to give up on its dreadful plans. To keep up pressure on the government, please sign the 38 Degrees petition (which is currently very close to 500,000 signatures), and the Keep Our NHS Public e-petition on the government’s website (which is currently close to 50,000 signatures).

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The prison never conformed to the Geneva Conventions, which were, essentially, discarded when the Bush administration decided to hold prisoners in its “war on terror” as “illegal enemy combatants,” and have never been reinstated. Moreover, the prisoners remained beyond the law even when the Supreme Court granted habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners in June 2004, and again in June 2008, after Congress had tried to remove these rights in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF).

In March 2009, in Washington D.C., District Judge John D. Bates briefly brought this era of secrecy and unaccountability to an end, granting the habeas corpus petitions of three foreign prisoners — Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, Pakistan in May 2002; Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni gemstone dealer seized in Bangkok, Thailand in late 2002; and Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004.

Although Judge Bates ruled that the habeas corpus rights granted by the Supreme Court to the Guantánamo prisoners extended to the foreign prisoners in Bagram, because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same,” the Obama administration appealed, and had its appeal granted by the D.C. Circuit Court in May 2010.

This ruling failed to take into account that Judge Bates had not ruled in favor of a fourth man, Pacha Wazir (aka Haji Wazir), an Afghan, deciding that the fate of Afghan prisoners ought to involve negotiations between the US and Afghan governments. Wazir, it turned out, had been seized in the United Arab Emirates, where he ran a chain of hawala banks, in 2003, and rendered to a CIA black site prior to his arrival at Bagram, on suspicion that he was a banker for Osama bin Laden. In June 2011, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle wrote a book, The Interrogator: An Education, in which he explained that he had established that Wazir was not bin Laden’s banker, but stated that his findings were ignored, and Wazir was not released from Bagram until February 2010.

For the other prisoners, Judge Bates also found that the review process introduced under President Bush at Bagram was both “inadequate” and “more error-prone” than the review process introduced at Guantánamo, and, also found that it “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo.” In response, the Obama administration introduced a review process modeled on the review process at Guantánamo that the Supreme Court found inadequate, and this is the process that has been used ever since to decide what should happen to the 645 prisoners who were held in September 2009 (according to the first unclassified prisoner list, released in January 2010), and the thousands of prisoners held in the last two and a half years.

By January this year, the Washington Post reported that 2,600 prisoners were held in Bagram — or, more specifically, in the replacement facility, renamed the Parwan Detention Center, which opened in December 2009. In addition, as the Post described it on January 5, President Karzai “called for the United States to hand over its biggest military prison in Afghanistan within a month,” stating that “Afghan government investigators had found violations of the Afghan constitution and international human rights conventions at the prison.” He “did not provide details of the alleged violations, but he said in a statement that they constituted a ‘breach of Afghan sovereignty.’”

President Karzai was drawing on a US memorandum publicly issued two years ago, in which officials stated that they expected the Parwan facility to be transferred to Afghan control in early 2012, although US officials have pointed out that any proposed transfer is subject to “demonstrated capacity,” and the Afghan government does not have a good track record to date.

Nevertheless, in sounding out the possibilities of closing the Parwan facility, the Obama administration is finally addressing the problems presented by the foreign prisoners. A year ago, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First visited Parwan and discovered that 41 prisoners came from outside Afghanistan, and were still held, even though “more than a dozen” had been recommended for release. One story she heard concerned Hamidullah Khan, a Pakistani who was just 16 years old when he was seized in the summer of 2008. When he was allowed to communicate with his family, in 2010, he explained that his case had been reviewed, and he had been recommended for release, but he was still held.

Eviatar added that the foreign prisoners were “from Pakistan, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen and even Germany,” but could not find any explanation for why, even when cleared, they were still held. She noted that “one soldier complained about how frustrating it is to be unable to tell innocent prisoners when they’ll be going home, or what’s causing the holdup,” and that US officials in Afghanistan had only been able to state that the problem was “somewhere in Washington.”

In the Washington Post last week, Peter Finn and Julie Tate reported that Washington was finally dealing with the problem. Noting that the foreign prisoners now “number close to 50″ and “were in some cases picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan and in others detained in third countries and taken to the prison by the CIA, according to US and foreign officials,” they wrote that, with a handover of the prison now on the cards, “American officials believe that Afghan authorities are unlikely to have any interest in either continuing to hold the foreigners or in putting them on trial.”

The officials added that, by starting the process of repatriating foreign prisoners now, they were hoping not only to successfully “negotiate transfers with the detainees’ home countries,” but also to “arrange for post-transfer monitoring, and secure diplomatic assurances that detainees will not be abused when they return home.”

They added that a “small number” of those currently held “may be deemed to pose a terrorist threat, requiring their continued detention or close supervision by their home country if released,” and also explained that some of the men are Yemeni, “complicating their possible repatriation,” because, in response to the failed airline bomb plot in December 2009 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis, “because of concerns about the security situation in Yemen,” which still stands to this day.

As the Post described it, the Parwan prison holds “up to two dozen Arabs of various nationalities, according to administration and foreign officials,” although the rest are Pakistanis, and it was noted that the first to be released may well be one of these men, Yunus Rahmatullah.

Seized in Iraq by British Special Forces in 2004, he was subsequently handed over to US forces and rendered to Bagram by the CIA, where his detention went largely unnoticed until lawyers in the UK — at solicitors Leigh Day & Co. and the legal action charity Reprieve — succeeded in convincing the Court of Appeal to grant him a writ of habeas corpus and to order the British government to take custody of him. As the Post described it, his lawyers “argued in the British courts that the transfer violated a memorandum of understanding between the US and British militaries, and was a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions because it involved the removal of a civilian from the war theater.” The judges added that if foreign secretary William Hague and defense minister Philip Hammond failed to secure his release, the court would “be moved to commit you to prison for your contempt in not obeying the said writ.” A deadline of February 14 was set for Rahmatullah’s release.

The UK government has appealed the ruling, although ministers have asked for the Obama administration to arrange for Rahmatullah to be returned to Pakistan, which, as the Post put it, “would satisfy the court and his lawyers.” The British court also made a point of noting that, back in 2010, a review board at Bagram had cleared Rahmatullah for release.

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director, said, “It would make no sense for the Obama administration to ratify this Bush-era war crime. Under the Geneva Convention, Yunus Rahmatullah is Britain’s responsibility and should never have been sent to Bagram in the first place. The man is cleared, his family are waiting, and Pakistan is apparently happy to have him — it’s high time to send him home.”

The Post noted that another Pakistani, Amanatullah Ali, who was also picked up by British forces in Iraq, is seeking his release through the US courts, and that seven Pakistanis in total, including Yunus Rahmatullah and Hamidullah Khan, are suing the Pakistani government “either for its alleged role in their capture or for failing to secure their release.”

US officials, stating that they were prepared to release Rahmatullah, nevertheless played down the role of the British court, and also “said that any transfer home has been complicated by the deterioration in relations between the United States and Pakistan.” One official said, “We will do this on our timetable.”

However, it appears that this is not entirely true, and that the days of holding prisoners at Bagram whether or not they have been cleared for release — as at Guantánamo, where 89 of the remaining 171 prisoners have been cleared, but are still held — are coming to an end. For the foreign prisoners held at Bagram without rights for up to ten years, the potential end of this long-running saga of injustice is to be welcomed.

POSTSCRIPT: At the time of publication, an Internet search revealed to me that I had missed an Associated Press story from last April in which it was reported that Amin al-Bakri, Redha al-Najar and Fadi al-Maqaleh had all been cleared for release from the Parwan prison.

The AP noted that al-Bakri, who was 42 years old, had a review board hearing in August 2010, and, in October, “was handed a paper saying he was going to be released to his home country,” but in April 2011 he was still seeking his release via the US courts. Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York who filed the appeal, said, ”Amin has been there for almost a decade of his life,” adding that he “should never have been there in the first place. He has never been a threat to the United States.”

The AP also reported that Redha al-Najar, who was 45 years old, had been cleared for release to Tunisia. His lawyer, Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, “said she learned through al-Najar’s family that the military planned to release him and send him to Tunisia, his country of birth, instead of Pakistan where he was picked up,” but added that he did not want to go to Tunisia. Foster also explained that Fadi al-Maqaleh had also been cleared for release but was still being held.

In addition, the AP report noted: “Also waiting to walk free is Jan Sher Khan, who has been detained for six years. He was 15 when he disappeared from his village near Kohat, Pakistan, in the spring of 2005. He never came home from classes at his high school and ended up at Bagram. According to court papers filed seeking his release, his family believes he was seized by someone seeking thousands of dollars in reward money advertised for the capture of suspected members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. On Jan. 10 [2011], the US government confirmed that Khan had been cleared for release.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

As I have been explaining since the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo a year ago, it is now appropriate to regard most of, if not all of the remaining 171 prisoners as political prisoners, given that the Obama administration, Congress and the judiciary have all made sure that Guantánamo may never close, and that few, if any of the remaining prisoners will ever be released, even though 89 of them were cleared for release (or, technically, “approved for transfer”) by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established in January 2009.

The situation is no better for the other 82 prisoners, who are either scheduled to face trials that, in most cases, show no signs of materializing, or, in 46 cases, have been specifically designated as prisoners to be held indefinitely without charge or trial by President Obama, in an executive order last March. Although the President promised periodic reviews for these prisoners, his executive order essentially enshrines the indefensible –  indefinite detention without charge or trial — as an official policy of his administration, even though he and senior officials have been at pains to point out that it applies only to these men, and is not to be construed as lending credibility to indefinite detention in general.

That is a not an entirely convincing argument, of course, but in stepping back and looking at the situation facing all the men still held, it is, I believe, appropriate to focus not only on the injustice specifically facing these 46 men, but, as I mentioned above, to describe all the remaining detainees as political prisoners, because it makes no difference whether they have been cleared or not, as it ends up with the same result — indefinite detention, with no end in sight.

While the stories of the British ex-prisoners — eight of whom came to the Observer‘s offices to be interviewed, and to take part in a photoshoot — are fascinating, as they recall their horrendous experiences in US custody, and their struggles to rebuild their lives, it is Shaker Aamer, the charismatic, eloquent activist for the prisoners’ rights, who hovers over the proceedings, and it is Shaker, of course, who, like the 170 other men still held at Guantánamo, can now be regarded as a political prisoner, unlikely to be freed even though the Obama administration cleared him for release, and even though the British government has asked for him to be returned to the UK, where he has a British wife and four children.

Below, I’m cross-posting Tracy McVeigh’s article about the released prisoners, and an additional Observer article about Shaker, in which, sadly, it is revealed that senior White House sources have said that the Obama administration “will not risk releasing Shaker Aamer” before the Presidential election in November, because, as one said, “We’ve taken enough hits from the right; we can’t risk any more.” The article also notes that the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta — and therefore, by extension, the administration as a whole — has been “unwilling” to secure Shaker’s release by overcoming the main obstacle to the release of cleared prisoners — Congressional demands that the defense secretary certifies that any country to which prisoners are to be released is “safe,” and that released prisoners will not be able to “return to the battlefield.”

Given that this involves the UK, America’s staunchest ally in the “war on terror,” it is depressing that the administration is unwilling to tackle Congress, and it is to be hoped, therefore, that there is genuine reason to be encouraged by the Observer also noting that, with regard to the UK, “it is believed that the foreign secretary, William Hague, has called an urgent meeting early in the new year to discuss what more the British government can do to bring Aamer home.”

Securing Shaker’s return is not only a matter of justice, of course; it may also be a matter of life or death, as his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, noted after visiting him in November. In the Independent, Paul Cahalan, who has closely followed Shaker’s case, spoke to his father-in-law, Saeed Siddique, who also raised alarm bells about Shaker’s condition. “In the 10 years Shaker has been there he has become old,” he said. “His hair has turned white and he is very ill. His children are growing now and it is difficult for them. The youngest one is nine and has never met his dad. He doesn’t know why, and he tells his mum, ‘My father doesn’t love me because he never sees me.’” He added, “Since Shaker has gone, my daughter has become very ill. She has been treated for depression and hearing voices. When she is very bad, I have to look after her and the children for weeks. It is very hard for her and all the children. When he was captured, Shaker offered to let my daughter divorce him, but she said, ‘No, I will wait for you.’ She is still waiting.”

Britain’s Guantánamo survivors are suffering a toxic legacy
By Tracy McVeigh, The Observer, January 1, 2012

After years of imprisonment, victims of America’s ‘icon of lawlessness’ were released without charge, but their lives have been shattered.

They call each other “brother” and the warmth between them is tangible. Not close friends as such, they come from different walks of life, cultures and backgrounds, but have been thrown together by a shared experience. They are Britain’s survivors of Guantánamo, the detention centre that has been called the “gulag of our times”.

All were imprisoned, interrogated and held without charge or trial; some allege that they were tortured; all have suffered lasting effects to their mental and physical health.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the first detainees arriving at Guantánamo Bay detention camps, where the open-mesh and barbed-wire cells became synonymous with the abuse of human rights and the scandal of illegal rendition. The camp was called an “icon of lawlessness” by Amnesty International because inside its high-security fences all conventions of international justice, from the Geneva Convention to access to legal representation, were ignored.

Still in operation despite Barack Obama’s pre- and post-election pledges to close it, Guantánamo now houses 171 prisoners, including the last remaining British resident, Shaker Aamer. In total nine British citizens and six British residents were among the 779 adults and children imprisoned in Guantánamo camps, built on a US naval outpost on the southeastern tip of Cuba to house the “enemy combatants” of George Bush’s war on terror.

All bar Aamer were released back to the UK without charge. All were interviewed by the British authorities on their return and allowed to go back to whatever remained salvageable of their lives and were later awarded out-of-court compensation for their extrajudicial ordeal. Four have had their travel outside the UK restricted.

Any involvement the men may or may not have had with the fighting in Afghanistan or with any terror plots has never been proved. Most, says Guantánamo expert and author Andy Worthington, were “a bunch of nobodies”.

“One tries to stay very objective in taking an overview of Guantánamo, but at the end of the day it’s pretty evident that all but a handful of the people caught up in the trawling approach the Americans took post-9/11 in Afghanistan were not terrorists,” he said.

“Some were hanging out in Afghanistan because it was a cheap place to live or study, some young idealistic men might have gone to training camps to get involved in fighting against the Northern Alliance but, not to be too flippant, it was a bunch of boy scouts with AK47s. A combination of drifters and footsoldiers. The Americans were so busy cranking up the significance of what they were doing and hanging on to people they should have let go, it became a colossal waste of resources.”

On 14 February, 43-year-old Aamer will have spent 10 years in Guantánamo, without charge or trial, and two years after he was cleared for release by the US authorities. The day will be the 10th birthday of the youngest of his four children, Faris, who has never met his father. The family, who live in Battersea, south London, have had a difficult time coping. Aamer’s wife, Zin, suffers from depression and the children have been badly bullied because of who their dad is. Faris is struggling at school.

In a recent letter to the outside world from Aamer and six other prisoners, he wrote: “After these years of hardship that we have spent here, we want you to consider our cases as soon as possible and give us the right to a just and a public trial or set us free without restriction.”

Aamer, who worked for an Islamic relief organisation in Bosnia and Afghanistan, claims he was told by MI5 officers he could either spy on jihadists in the UK or stay in American custody. The US has accused Aamer of being Osama bin Laden’s personal interpreter, although he denies ever meeting him. In 2007 he was cleared for release.

His continuing detention is causing great concern among human rights campaigners, MPs and the British government, which has petitioned the US for his immediate release. His lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, who visited Aamer in November, has expressed deep concern about his declining health, made worse by several hunger strikes.

As part of the detainees’ financial agreement with the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, a sum is believed to have been set aside for Aamer, Britain’s last link to the discredited detention camp.

“We are all worried about Shaker,” said Asif Iqbal, 40, one of the “Tipton Three” who were among the first wave of British men to be released from Guantánamo in 2004 after two years in custody. All three were accused of visiting training camps for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and handling weapons. “We know what it is like to be there and there is only so long a man can survive. He was a figure of support to everyone in Guantánamo, he really looked out for people and fought for prisoners’ rights. That is probably why they won’t let him go now.”

Campaign groups such as Reprieve and Cageprisoners and charities such as the Helen Bamber Foundation are working to provide support for the traumatised men who return from Guantánamo.

“Coming back to Britain, you are branded, you live like a guilty man. You assume they are listening to every call, every conversation,” said Feroz Ali Abbasi, 31, from Croydon, who was imprisoned in Guantánamo in 2002 after being picked up in Afghanistan.

The US authorities say he fought alongside al-Qaida and the Taliban and attended training camps. His lawyers argue that Abbasi is one of a small group of idealistic young Muslim men who found themselves caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was released in 2005.

“When 7/7 happened I waited for them to kick down my door. I want to go to university and I’ve to think really carefully about what course I take. Can it be misconstrued, can it be linked to terrorism? When the authorities have behaved without logic, with such stupidness, you still believe they are after us, just waiting for an opportune moment,” he said.

“It’s hard when Britain didn’t look after you. I don’t think we [ex-detainees] are wanted in this country, we’re made not to feel wanted. But they took liberties in Guantánamo Bay, and if we do not speak out they will take liberties with someone else, Muslim or not.”

The experiences of being inside the camps have not left any of the detainees. Several who came to the Observer photoshoot still find it difficult to talk about what happened, including Tarek Dergoul, 34, from east London, who lost an arm and his toes in an US airstrike in Afghanistan where he said he was on a business trip to buy property. He has talked about his torture before, but today says he cannot and politely refused to be photographed. “Sometimes you can talk and sometimes it sticks in your throat,” he said.

Abbasi recognised how Dergoul is feeling: “For me, speaking English broke a lot of barriers, because if you speak to the guards you become a person. I had two years in isolation, so you had to talk to soldiers.

“I spent a lot of time analysing them and realised that for Americans they have to believe they are right. You have to be a terrorist. They assume you are both Taliban and al-Qaida, there is no doubt in their minds, and in their view they have a right to treat you badly, seeking their retribution.

“I remember looking through my cage at another man who had a wife and child and thought how lucky I was to be a single man so I could concentrate on myself surviving. You are on edge 24/7, your senses are tuned to what they will do to you next, a footstep, a bolt opening, the creak of a door. Once I’d left, my mind did strange things. I’d be walking down the street and see buildings on fire, cars on fire. I had this impulse to hit out at people, even my mother. It was very troubling. Over time I’m becoming myself, but I did forget who I was. You are in one consciousness all the time, one survival mode.”

The bonds created between the survivors are strong and all the men are here in order to support the campaign for the release of Shaker Aamer.

“The pain of Guantánamo is made much worse by the pain of people left there,” said Bisher al-Rawi, 44, an Iraqi living in Derby, who was released in 2007 after almost five years. “When Guantánamo started I was living in London and watching all about it on TV. Back then I truly believed that the people in Guantánamo were terrorists. It’s funny, but I did.”

Bisher said he was on a business trip to Gambia with his business partner, Jamil el-Banna, when he was arrested by the Gambian National Intelligence Agency in November 2002. They were later handed on to US authorities, who sent them to Bagram airbase and from there to Guantánamo Bay. US files show they were believed to have been in possession of bomb-making devices.

“It is like being thrown into a very dark grave. The level of fear it is possible to experience and survive is something terrible. I tried very hard to preserve my body and my mind and thought I had done a good job until I was released. The emotions involved are still very personal and overwhelming, there is a real deep pain. I try not to remember the faces of the people who hurt me, so I can concentrate on those who are left behind.”

Al-Rawi said he too was glad he did not have a family. “I’d been really hoping to get married and it didn’t work out; that was something I was very thankful for when I was in Guantánamo. The families suffered so much, I was glad that was not my family.”

The “no smoke without fire” approach has dogged all the survivors back in the UK. Omar Deghayes had to have CCTV fitted at his home by police because of months of racist attacks by local youths.

For Deghayes, 42, six years’ imprisonment in Guantánamo also destroyed his marriage. His wife in East Sussex wrote to him in prison, but her letters were never delivered and neither were his to her. Both believed they had been abandoned and she returned to her family in Afghanistan. It was, he has said, one of the cruellest things that happened to him during his detention.

The other was the loss of sight in one eye after a guard allegedly tried to gouge out his eyeballs with his fingers. Deghayes, a law graduate, fled Libya for the UK as a child after his father was executed by the Gaddafi regime. He had been living in Pakistan with his wife and child when he was picked up by the Americans.

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Deghayes now lives in Brighton and works with human rights group Reprieve and other survivors of Guantánamo on the ongoing court cases against the UK government’s alleged complicity in human rights abuses at Guantánamo and other detention centres around the world.

An inquiry into the involvement of British intelligence services in torture and rendition has opened but is not due to begin calling witnesses until all those cases have concluded. All the British detainees, and charities including Amnesty International, have announced they will boycott the Detainee Inquiry, headed by Sir Peter Gibson, because of concerns that it will not be open and transparent.

“We may never get a public inquiry and examination of what happened at Guantánamo,” said Worthington. “But we do know it has left a toxic legacy. Guantánamo was an aberration.”

Abbasi’s verdict was simple and damning: “Guantánamo was an excuse to take away the rights of ordinary people. It must not happen again.”

Last British resident held in Guantánamo Bay faces another year’s captivity
By Tracy McVeigh, The Observer, January 1, 2012

The last British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay faces at least another year in detention because of wrangling in a US presidential election year. Senior White House sources have said the Obama administration will not risk releasing Shaker Aamer before November. “We’ve taken enough hits from the right; we can’t risk any more,” one said. Another said: “There will be no rocking of boats from now on in.”

As the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp in Cuba approaches, it is believed that the foreign secretary, William Hague, has called an urgent meeting early in the new year to discuss what more the British government can do to bring Aamer home.

He will complete his 10th year in Guantánamo on 14 February, although he has never been charged or faced trial. His British wife, Zin, last saw her husband when she was pregnant with their fourth child. Aamer has never met his son, Faris.

Campaigners are stepping up efforts to draw attention to Aamer’s case, after his British lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, found the 43-year-old former charity worker in poor health during a visit to the prison in November.

“I do not think it is stretching matters to say he is dying in Guantánamo Bay,” said Stafford-Smith, director of the human rights charity Reprieve. Although Aamer was cleared for release by the US authorities in 2007 there have been no further moves to return him to the UK. He was first picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 where he said he worked for an Islamic charity. But the US suspected him of both Taliban and al-Qaida connections, accusing him of being a translator for Osama bin Laden.

New US legislation has also proved to be a stumbling block to his release with the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, now responsible for certifying that Britain is a safe place for him to return to, and that he will commit no crimes there — something Panetta has been unwilling to do.

Stafford-Smith said: “Britain has the best record of any country with former Guantánamo prisoners, with nobody released committing any offence, and Shaker Aamer has never committed a crime of any kind. Why does Britain pretend it has a special relationship if a British resident is still in this shameful position?” He said Aamer had suffered “unfathomable abuse”.

Jane Ellison, Tory MP for Battersea, where Aamer’s wife and children live, is writing to Barack Obama to urge his immediate release. “People forget that behind this is a family in deep distress and a man in poor health,” she said. This is a human tragedy as much as a political embarrassment. The family of Shaker Aamer are hurting and they need him home.”

She has tabled several questions in the Commons drawing attention to Aamer’s plight and believes the UK Government is committed to bringing him home but is up against a lack of political will in the US.

“After 10 years, the bottom line should be that if they aren’t going to charge him, they should release him. That is the way we have conducted ourselves in Britain since the Magna Carta.”

But Aamer’s own campaigning spirit may be working against him. “The irony is that Shaker may be the victim of what he has done inside Guantanámo rather than anything he might be suspected of doing previous to his captivity. He has been a thorn in the side of the prison authorities, organising hunger strikes and fighting for prisoners’ rights. By all accounts he is a charismatic and eloquent man,” said investigative journalist and author Andy Worthington.

*****

The following is also from the double-page feature in the Observer:

The men America freed

Asif Iqbal, 40, of Tipton, West Midlands

Released in March 2004 after two years. On arrival at Guantánamo, a soldier told him: “You killed my family in the towers and now it’s time to get you back.”

Jamil el-Banna, 59, a Palestinian from Jordan

Has UK refugee status. He has five children, the last one born while he was in captivity. Released in 2007.

Jamal al-Harith, 45, from Manchester

A backpacker arrested by the Taliban who ended up in US detention. The web designer was freed in 2004 after two years.

Feroz Ali Abbasi, 31, from Croydon, south London

UK citizen born in Uganda. In 2002 the British Court of Appeal found his detention “legally objectionable”. Freed in 2005.

Bisher al-Rawi, 44, Iraqi-born

British resident living in Derby with wife and two young children. Picked up in Gambia in 2002 and freed in 2007.

Shafiq Rasul, 44, of Tipton, West Midlands

Released March 2004. US supreme court case Rasul vs Bush established detainees could challenge whether their detention is constitutional.

Rhuhel Ahmed [Ruhal Ahmed], 40, of Tipton, West Midlands

Held without trial or charge for more than two years. One of the Tipton Three who released a report detailing abuse and torture.

Martin Mubanga, 38, from Wembley, north London

Victim of extraordinary rendition, held for 33 months accused of al-Qaida links after his passport was found in a Pakistan base.

Moazzam Begg, 43, from Birmingham

After three years in US custody, he is now director of the London-based prisoners’ rights charity Cageprisoners Ltd and an outspoken critic of anti-terror legislation.

Tarek Dergoul, 34, from London

Claims to have gone to Afghanistan to buy up properties from fleeing refugees. Lost an arm and toes in an allied bombing raid. Although he attended the photoshoot to support his fellow detainees, he is deeply shy and politely refused to be photographed.

Omar Deghayes, 42, from Brighton

The Libyan-born British citizen was blinded, beaten and sexually assaulted between 2002 and 2007, despite having never been charged with an offence.

Richard Dean Belmar, 32, from London

Returned to the UK in 2005 after three years imprisonment, first in Pakistan, then Bagram and finally Guantánamo. Converted from Catholicism to Islam and had enrolled in a religious school in Afghanistan.

Binyam Mohamed, 33

An Ethiopian national who moved to the UK in 1994, he spent seven years in custody, four at Guantánamo. He was released in 2009. He is taking the government to court over British alleged complicity in his torture.

Sameur Abdenour [Abdulnour Sameur], 38, from London

Fled persecution from the military dictatorship in his native Algeria and was granted asylum in this country in 2000. He was detained in Guantánamo from 2002 to 2007.

… and one they still hold

Shaker Aamer, 43, Saudi-born

Next month Aamer will mark the 10th anniversary of his detention in Guantánamo. He worked as a legal translator in the UK and married a British woman in 1994. He claims to have been in Afghanistan working for a Saudi charity when he was picked up in 2002 and handed over to the Americans. He is thought to have angered the prison authorities by going on hunger-strike protests. He was cleared for release by the US in 2007 but remains in isolation.

Note: For further information, and to sign up to a new movement to close Guantánamo, please visit the new website, “Close Guantánamo,” which you can join here, and also please sign a new White House petition on the “We the People” website calling for the closure of Guantánamo. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Mr. Belhadj, also identified as Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, has instructed solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. to take legal action, and the legal action charity Reprieve are acting as US counsel and are also providing investigative support.

In 2004, when Mr. Belhadj’s ordeal at the hands of the British, the Americans and the Gaddafi regime began, he was living in Beijing, China, having previously led the resistance to the Gaddafi regime, and having, for a while, lived in Afghanistan. In early 2004, when Ms. Bouchar began to fear they were under surveillance, they decided to try to seek asylum in the UK. At the airport, however, they were detained and deported to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, their previous destination before China.

On arrival they were seized and held for several weeks, and then told that they would be allowed to travel to the UK, via Bangkok. They were then “forced to board an aircraft” bound for Bangkok, as Reprieve explained in a press release, and then “separated, handed over to US authorities and taken to what they believe was a US secret prison,” where “they were subjected to a barrage of barbaric treatment.” If this was in Thailand, then it may contradict claims that the secret prison used to hold “high-value detainees” in 2002 closed at the end of that year, as a new facility opened in Poland.

Mr. Belhadj has explained that, when he was not being interrogated, he “was hung by his wrists from hooks in his cell for prolonged periods, while hooded, blindfolded and viciously beaten.” Fatima Bouchar has said that she was “mistreated so severely that she finds it difficult to discuss even today.”

Still isolated from each other, they were then rendered to Libya from Bangkok by the US authorities, and, as was normal for US rendition fights, Mr. Belhadj “was hooded and shackled to the floor of the plane in a stress position, unable to sit or lie during the entire 17-hour flight.” Adding to British woes, the flight stopped to re-fuel in Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean Territory leased to the US, where, for many years, there have been rumors of the existence of another secret prison.

In Libya, Mr. Belhadj was imprisoned for six years in some of the country’s most brutal jails, including Abu Salim in Tripoli, where 1200 prisoners were killed in a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in 1996. In Libya’s prisons, he “was savagely beaten, hung from walls and cut off from human contact and daylight,” and has stated that he was interrogated by “foreign” agents, including agents from the UK. In 2008, he was sentenced to death after a 15-minute trial. For two more years, his abuse continued, and then, in 2010, he was released as part of negotiations between the Gaddafi regime and former members of the LIFG.

Alarmingly, Fatima Bouchar was also imprisoned on her return to Libya, and was subjected to aggressive interrogations,. In total, she was held for four months, and was released just three weeks before her baby was born. As Reprieve noted, by this time “her health, and that of her baby, was in a precarious state.”

Speaking of the case, Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director, said, “Mr. Belhaj was totally willing to come to an agreement with the British government. He made it absolutely plain that what he cared about was an open apology and for those who tortured him and his wife to be brought to justice. It is only after those requests were ignored for a month that he has decided to make his grievance public.”

Sapna Malik of Leigh Day & Co. added, “[T]he barbaric treatment which our clients describe, both at the hands of the Americans and the Libyans is beyond comprehension and yet it appears that the UK was responsible for setting off this torturous chain of events … [O]ur clients want those responsible for the wrongs done to them, and other Libyans, in the past be held to account and the truth to come out, so that the new Libya can finally turn the page.”

Disgracefully, evidence of the UK’s role in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhadj and Fatima Bouchar was revealed in a number of fawning, and previously classified documents that came to light in Tripoli, in September, as the Gaddafi regime fell, and which were discovered by Human Rights Watch. These documents reveal that the British government told the Libyan government that the couple were in Malaysia in early March 2004, and Sir Mark Allen, who was then the director of counter-terrorism at MI6, wrote to the notorious torturer Moussa Koussa, the head of  Libyan intelligence, who, earlier this year, fled Libya as the regime began tumbling and was briefly welcomed in the UK.

In a letter dated March 18, 2004, just a week before British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Gaddafi in Libya to welcome him on board as an ally in the “war on terror,” Allen wrote an embarrassing and self-incriminating letter, in which he stated, “Most importantly, I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq [Abdel Hakim Belhadj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years. I am so glad. I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.”

He added, “Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from Abu Abd Allah through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing. The intelligence on Abu Abd Allah was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful for the help you are giving us.”

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is not the first former opponent of Gaddafi to sue the British government. In October, Sami al-Saadi (also known as Abu Munthir), another prominent figure in the LIFG, launched an action to claim damages from the British government after the documents discovered in Tripoli revealed the key role played by MI6 in his rendition as well. The Tripoli documents revealed a fax the CIA sent to Moussa Koussa, just two days before Tony Blair’s visit to Gaddafi, which, as the Guardian put it, “shows that the agency was eager to join in the Saadi rendition operation after learning that MI6 and Gaddafi’s government were about to embark upon it.”

As the Guardian was also keen to point out, after Blair’s visit, Gaddafi announced that he “had signed a £550m gas exploration deal with Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant.” Three days later, part of thew human cargo that helped to buy this deal — Sami al-Saadi — who had been seized by British agents in Hong Kong with his wife, two sons aged 12 and nine, and two daughters aged 14 and six, was forced onto a plane with his family and flown to Tripoli, where, on arrival, “he and his wife were handcuffed and hooded, and their legs were bound together with lengths of wire,” and “[t]he entire family was then thrown in jail.” Al-Saadi’s wife and children were released after two months of what he described as “psychological torture,” while he, like Belhaj, was held for six years and, as he explained, “repeatedly beaten, subjected to electric shocks and threatened with death.”

In a claim that also explains how British cynicism spread beyond Libya, he also said that “he was interrogated about Libyans living in the UK, shown photographs of a number of them, and on one occasion questioned by two British intelligence officers while one of his Libyan interrogators was present,” and what is clear from the experience of Libyan dissidents in the UK, who had claimed asylum, is that, after Gaddafi’s miraculous volte-face, his enemies were subjected to arbitrary imprisonment in the UK (in prisons, and also under house arrest) and shameful attempts to repatriate them, in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Reinforcing this assessment, the Guardian explained that al-Saadi “had lived in north London for several years in the 90s, having claimed asylum in the UK, and a number of his associates suspect he was handed over to Gaddafi as a ‘gift,’ rather than as an individual who threatened British national security,” much as those other individuals became playthings in a depressingly immoral game.

The Guardian also noted that the CIA fax made it clear that “the plan was to render not just Saadi but also his family,” even though what awaited them in Gaddafi’s Libya was obvious. Foreign Office representatives refused to comment, but solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. and lawyers at Reprieve pointed out that they had identified other documents in the Tripoli cache relating to al-Saadi, including one showing MI6 “preparing the ground for his rendition five months before it happened,” in a fax sent in November 2003, in which an MI6 officer “tells one of Koussa’s aides that the agency is talking to the Chinese intelligence services about ‘the Islamic extremist target in China.’”

Back in October, Cori Crider said of al-Saadi’s claim, “The British security services have let slip that Sami al-Saadi’s illegal kidnap was ‘ministerially authorised.’ So who signed the torture warrant? Was it [former foreign secretary] Jack Straw? The Metropolitan Police must launch an immediate criminal investigation, focusing on the highest echelons of British government. The British public, to say nothing of Sami, his wife and his family, have a right to know.”

With Abdel Hakim Belhaj joining Sami al-Saadi in suing the British government, these are difficult times for Prime Minister David Cameron, who now finds Libyans joining a queue of torture victims seeking a thorough inquiry into Britain’s use of torture, and not the whitewash envisaged by Cameron, who, in July 2009, initiated a largely secretive judge-led inquiry, which has yet to begin its deliberations, but which has been boycotted by all the major NGOs.

Sadly, the Obama administration, as is typical, is studiously avoiding having to answer any questions about the Bush administration’s involvement in the rendition and torture not only of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, but also of several other Libyans, some of whom I profiled for the United Nations, and also wrote about in an article in September 2010, entitled, “Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Freed in Libya After Three Years’ Detention – And Information About ‘Ghost Prisoners.’”

Most significant, however, is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the former emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. Seized by the US crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, he was sent to Egypt to be tortured, where he came up with a false confession that al-Qaeda operatives had met with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi recanted his claim, but it was, nevertheless, used to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq, and al-Libi himself, after a tour of US torture prisons, was also returned to Libya, where he too was imprisoned and tortured, Unlike Balhaj, al-Saadi and others, however, al-Libi never survived. In May 2009, it was reported that he had committed suicide in his cell at Abu Salim prison, a story that no one with knowledge of Gaddafi — or, for that matter, the CIA — believed, especially as ming, the US embassy in Tripoli reopened just three days after his death.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Despite being held for nearly eight years, Yunus, also known as “Saleh Huddin,” was held incommunicado, unable even to contact his family, for six years, and has only recently been allowed to establish telephone contact with his relatives. Reprieve noted its lawyers and investigators had been “told by multiple sources that, as a result of his abuse in UK and US custody, he is in catastrophic mental and physical shape, and now spends most of his time in the mental health cells at Bagram.”

As Reprieve explained, this “historic decision” also “marks the first time any civilian legal system has penetrated Bagram, a legal black hole where nearly three thousand prisoners — many rendered from all over the world — have been unlawfully held by the US military for up to a decade.” Unlike at Guantánamo, itself an opaque and unjust facility, but one where civilian lawyers have had access since the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004, no civilian lawyer has ever been allowed into Bagram, which, as Reprieve described it, “is notorious for torture and homicides and has been called ‘Guantánamo’s Evil Twin.’”

This is indeed a remarkable development, as the Bagram prisoners have been abandoned by the US courts, despite winning a remarkable — and entirely appropriate — victory in April 2009, when, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge John D. Bates granted habeas corpus rights to three foreigners rendered to Bagram from other countries, and held for many years, asserting that the circumstances in which they were held were essentially the same as those in Guantánamo. However, in May 2010, that ruling was reversed on appeal, leaving the prisoners still stranded by the Obama administration, in what Judge Bates described as “a ‘black hole’ for detainees in a ‘law-free zone.’”

The UK Court of Appeal’s ruling — by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Lord Justice Sullivan — came in response to a habeas corpus application by Reprieve, in which it was noted that the British government had “repeatedly refused to help Yunus,” even though the Abu Ghraib scandal was made public just weeks after his detention.

Reprieve noted that British officials “failed to get him back and said nothing when they learned he had been sent illegally to Bagram,” even though the British government “has always had the clear power to get Yunus back, under the Geneva Conventions and under the relevant ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ which grants control over the prisoner to the UK and explicitly requires Yunus to be returned to UK custody on request.”

Describing the history of Britain’s shameful role in Yunus’ long years of abuse, Reprieve explained:

In February 2009, after years of government denials that the UK had been involved in any rendition operations, then-Secretary of State for Defence John Hutton announced to Parliament that UK forces had captured two men in Iraq in February 2004, and handed them to US forces. In subsequent statements to Parliament, the government revealed that in March 2004, British officials had become aware of the US intention to transfer the men from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The British government admitted its complicity in crime (kidnapping, otherwise called rendition), admitted it was wrong, and appeared to apologize. Yet it did not and refused to identify the men — a crucial step if they are to be reunited with their basic human rights. Indeed, the government has apparently done nothing over the past seven years to ensure that they receive legal assistance.

Reprieve led a complicated and expensive search for the identity of these men, which covered three continents over ten months. One of the men has been identified as Amanatullah Ali and the other as Yunus Rahmatullah.

A spokesperson for Leigh Day also explained how difficult it was to actually represent Yunus Rahmatullah, because of the Obama adminstration’s refusal to allow any lawyer to visit Bgaram. Yunus, the spokesperson said, was “prevented from speaking with or instructing lawyers,” so instructions to act on his behalf “were received through his cousin, who has intermittent communication with the client through the International Committee of the Red Cross.”

In the ruling, Lord Neuberger said there was “a substantial case for saying that the UK government is under an international legal obligation to demand the return of the applicant, and the US government is bound to accede to such an request,” leading Reprieve to state that there was, therefore, “no reason” to think that the US government will not comply with the court’s request.

Reprieve also noted that the US government has already acknowledged that it no longer wishes to hold Yunus. At Bagram, his case was assessed by a Detainee Review Board on June 5, 2010, in which it was concluded that his continued imprisonment was “not necessary.” The review process at Bagram was established by President Obama — and was copied from the system introduced by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, which was described as “inadequate” by the Supreme Court — but, instead of being released, he continues to be held.

As Reprieve noted, “There is therefore no lawful basis for his imprisonment, as the UK government has admitted to the court. The UK therefore has the right — and the duty — to send Yunus home.” Reprieve also stated that, although the British government “has repeatedly declined to state on what legal basis Yunus was rendered, the Geneva Conventions define his rendition as a “grave breach” — that is, a war crime — about which the UK appears to have known in advance,” adding, “The Court of Appeal acknowledges this, and has said the UK may be required under international law to get Yunus out of Bagram — or face being in grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.”

The Court gave the British government just seven days to secure Yunus’s release, or to explain to the court why they cannot do so, and Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, said, “Yunus Rahmatullah’s mother cries herself to sleep at night because the United Kingdom wrongfully arrested her son and has refused to facilitate his release. The legal black hole of Bagram is antithetical to the rule of law, and Guantánamo’s evil twin. The Court of Appeals is right to recognize this injustice and the British government must now do the decent thing, which it has so far repeatedly refused to do — help Yunus return home.”

In addition, Yunus’ solicitor at Leigh Day, Jamie Beagent, said, “This judgment affirms that our client remains the responsibility of the UK under international law. The government must now accept its responsibilities and seek the return of Mr. Rahmatullah from US detention, under the terms of its agreements with the United States.” He added, “We hope that the writ of habeas corpus will finally bring to an end our client’s nightmare of indefinite detention without charge in appalling conditions at Bagram.”

Back in May 2010, Yunus’s mother, Fatima Rahmatullah, issued the following statement:

Yunus is the youngest and closest son to my heart. I lost my other son, his only brother, in a tragic accident. Now, Yunus is my only hope in life. I see him in my dreams; I pray daily that I will see him in my waking hours again. Our family was shocked when we learned that the British government might have been behind Yunus’ disappearance. I am told the British government has refused even to confirm that Yunus was the person they seized six years ago. As a mother, this is a position that I struggle to understand.

As well as tackling the British government’s responsibility for Yunus Rahmatullah, Reprieve is also involved, in Pakistan, with the organization Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), fighting what it describes as “a ground-breaking case filed on behalf of seven Pakistanis imprisoned in Bagram Air Base, which challenges the Pakistan government over their role in renditions.”

In addition to Yunus Rahmatullah, the case also involves Awwal Khan, Hamidullah Khan, Abdul Haleem Saifullah, Fazal Karim, Amal Khan and Iftikhar Ahmad, who were “abducted from Pakistan and taken to Bagram, where they have been kept without charge or trial since 2003.” Reprieve added, “One prisoner is merely 16 years of age and was seized two years ago at the age of 14. Another was not permitted to speak to his family for six years, and is believed to be in a grievous physical and psychological condition.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

His story features prominently in the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” that I co-directed with Polly Nash. In August, I publicised a report that he was on a hunger strike, and just last week I cross-posted, with my own commentary, an article by his lawyer, Ciive Stafford Smith, who had just paid his first visit to Guantánamo for a number of years, and a letter Stafford Smith had written to the British foreign secretary William Hague, revealing how ill Shaker Aamer is after ten years in US custody.

In their open letter, the MPs eloquently called for the return of Shaker Aamer to his wife and children in the UK, and mentioned, for the first time ever in public, that he was “cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo” as a result of the review of all the remaining prisoners’ cases that was conducted throughout 2009 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama when he came into office. The document that contained that information also informed him, “The US government intends to transfer you as soon as possible.”

Although it was well-known that Shaker Aamer had been told that he had been cleared for release from Guantánamo early in 2007, that was never officially confirmed, and, when WikiLeaks released classified military assessments for the Guantánamo prisoners in April this year, his file, dated November 2007, recommended him for “Continued Detention Under DoD Control.”

Given that it has now been confirmed that Shaker Aamer was cleared for release under President Obama no later than January 2010, when the Guantánamo Review Task Force issued its final report, it beggars belief that he is still held, because, although Congress passed legislation almost a year ago insisting that, as the MPs put it, “detainees from Guantanamo must be ‘certified’ before being transferred” — meaning that the defense secretary must guarantee to lawmakers that any prisoner the administration intends to release is not being sent to a country where they might be at liberty to take up arms against the US — there is obviously no way that lawmakers could possibly argue that what they had in mind was the UK, one of America’s closest allies, and the firmest of friends in the “war on terror,” unless they wanted to expose themselves to ridicule.

It is my contention that this announcement about Shaker Aamer’s status must lead to his release in the near future, but in the meantime, I am delighted to present, below, the letter that Britain’s only Green MP, the formidable Caroline Lucas, sent to Congress, along with her hard-working colleagues, the Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Meacher, and the Liberal Democrat MP John Leech.

An Open Letter to the US Congress From Members of the British Parliament About Guantánamo
By Jeremy Corbyn, John Leech, Caroline Lucas and Michael Meacher, Truthout, December 1, 2011

As a group of elected members of Parliament (MP) from all the main parties represented at Westminster, we are outraged by the current position of the US Congress which, apparently, means that Guantánamo Bay prison will never be closed, and, of particular concern to us, that a British resident who was cleared for release more than two years ago, cannot return here.

The US official document given to him states, “On January 22, 2009 the president of the United States ordered a new review of the status of each detainee in Guantánamo. As a result of that review you have been cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo … The US government intends to transfer you as soon as possible …”

Mr. Shaker Aamer, who has a British wife and four children, has now been held for nine and a half years, despite the fact that officials in the US governments of both President Bush and President Obama have been aware for several years that there was never a case for him to answer.

During this period Mr. Aamer has been tortured by US agents — for example, by having his head repeatedly banged against a wall — and has witnessed the torture of another UK resident.

In January of this year, with eight other prisoners, Mr. Aamer started a new hunger strike to press for his release. In a scribbled note to his lawyers on the official paper saying he could be released, he urged them to work fast and get him home to his wife and kids “before it’s too late.”

In recent days, new evidence has emerged via a legal representative who has visited Mr. Aamer about his fragile state of health, including extreme kidney pain and serious asthma problems. He is clearly in urgent need of an independent medical assessment.

The British foreign secretary has raised this appalling case with the US secretary of state, stressing its high importance to the UK government and to many people in Britain who are shocked by the painful injustice Mr. Aamer and his British family have suffered at the hands of our ally.

In Britain, we have seen nine UK citizens and five UK residents returned from Guantánamo, after prolonged negotiations and court action, and the UK government took the responsibility for those men’s conduct on their return. All have been exemplary members of our society ever since. There is no reason to believe Mr. Aamer would be any different, and the UK government is responsible for verifying that.

Mr. Aamer was not returned with the others during the Bush period, perhaps because he knew too many terrible stories from the prison. As a Saudi citizen, educated in the US, with a warm and outgoing personality, he had language and social skills that made him a chosen leader in several negotiations with the US authorities in Guantánamo Bay prison — notably over ending earlier hunger strikes. The negotiations failed when the prison authorities did not keep the bargains made, according to lawyers familiar with that period in the prison. Mr. Aamer’s prominence among the prisoners has been reported by former prisoners, by several US guards and a number of lawyers with experience in his case.

We understand that the US government at one point planned to return him, against his will, to Saudi Arabia. Once there, he would have entered a re-education program, and it is likely his British family — who do not speak Arabic — would not have had the necessary status to be able to join him. He has told his family — in two phone calls in the entire period — his wish is to return to them in London and recover from his ordeal by living a quiet family life.

For all these years, his family have kept as far as possible out of the public eye, maintaining their privacy and dignity in very difficult times, without husband and father. This unimaginable pain has gone on longer than anyone should have to bear. It is difficult for us to understand this is going on in our country because of the attitude of the elected leaders of US friends and allies.

The loss of their father came after the family was living quietly among aid workers in Kabul where Mr. Aamer was building schools and digging wells. When the US bombing of Kabul began a month after 9/11, he took his family to Pakistan for safety and returned to look after their home and effects in Kabul. We do not know how he then came to be in US custody, but we know enough about the bounties paid then by the US for foreigners to be extremely uneasy about what may have triggered his long incarceration — unprotected by the Geneva Conventions, which are the common heritage of our nations that fought together in World War II to defend a world free of fascism and injustice.

We know that the National Defense Authorization Act 2011, which came into force in January of this year, means that detainees from Guantanamo must be “certified” before being transferred, and that new draft legislation is currently being debated in the Senate for when this act lapses in September. What “certification” beyond the word of our foreign secretary do you need to send home a man your own military authorities have cleared as innocent?

We strongly urge members of Congress to take action on Mr. Aamer’s case to end this intolerable situation, which casts a dark shadow over America’s reputation here.

Jeremy Corbyn, MP
John Leech, MP
Caroline Lucas, MP
Michael Meacher, MP

House of Commons, London SW1

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The timing could hardly have been better, as the strike came the day after the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, admitted in his autumn statement that the whole point of the cuts and misery inflicted on everyone in Britain below the level of rich and super-rich — designed, we were told, to pay off Britain’s deficit in time for the next General Election in 2015 — had failed.

As Jonathan Freedland explained in the Guardian, “That goal had now receded to the distant horizon of 2016-17,” and “All the pain, the tax rises and spending cuts, that were meant to turn red ink black, would be, if not quite in vain, in pursuit of a goal now revealed as vanishingly remote.”

As Freedland also explained, Osborne was, in addition, obliged to sign up for what he always claimed was “the great Labour disease” — excessive borrowing. “And yet here he was,” Freedland continued, “admitting that the coalition would be borrowing £158bn more over the next four years than it planned a year ago.”

As Freedland also noted, “He could not even boast that this extra cash would be spent stimulating the economy. Instead he had to absorb the Labour taunts that he was paying the ‘bills of failure,’ borrowing to pay for the dole and forfeited tax receipts of the newly jobless.”

That should have been obvious to anyone who had been looking carefully at the coalition government’s assault on workers since they came to power. With no sign whatsoever of how savaging state spending (with its huge knock-on effect on private sector firms servicing the public sector) would stimulate growth, it was inexplicable that the government could fool itself into thinking that actively making people unemployed would lead to anything other than reduced tax receipts and an increased bill for the unemployed, which, in turn, would require extra borrowing.

Even more insultingly, having decided to actively seek to make people unemployed, the Tories also declared, soon after taking power in their unholy coalition with the now thoroughly discredited Liberal Democrats, that they were aiming to punish the unemployed as well, for daring to be feckless and workshy, as they and their friends in the tabloid media portrayed it, even though there was only one job for every five job applicants in the whole of the UK.

Kicking the unemployed during a recession was one of the greatest cruelties of our new masters, but it was matched, I believe, not only by the cap on benefits that has not yet kicked in, but will lead to tens of thousands of people being made homeless (even though it will, in the end, cost more to rehouse them), but also by the continued assault on the mentally and physically disabled. Following up on one of Labour’s cruel legacies — the assault on incapacity benefit — the Tory-led government has pushed ahead with allowing the French firm ATOS Healthcare to review the cases of the 2.6 million people on incapacity benefit, at a rate of 11,000 a week, with a mandate to find as many people as possible “fit to work,” even though the entire review process has been revealed as a scam, and the government is now being obliged to pay out a fortune in legal fees in an attempt to defend its indefensible actions.

For more on this story, see my article, Brutal Benefit Cuts for the Disabled Are Leading to Suicides in the UK, and also see this article by John Harris, and this sad story of a man who died of lung disease after being declared “fit to work.” Also see this report on the impact of incapacity benefit “reforms” by Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill of Sheffield University, which, as Professor John Walton explained in a letter to the Guardian last week, “shows how the government is poised to push 900,000 largely unqualified long-term sick and disabled people into ‘engagement’ with a non-existent job market, harassing and threatening them, and reducing already exiguous living standards still further.”

So today, although I was happy to stand with public sector workers fighting back against a squeeze on their pensions, I was also, to be blunt, aware that my sympathies also extend to workers prevented from being in unions, millions of self-employed workers, and, of course, the unemployed, whether they are mentally or physically disabled, or are young people being forced into a disgraceful workfare programme that involves them working for their dole (in other words, for far less than the minimum wage) for corporations that could easily afford to pay them.

In the new year, I hope that there will be a renewed coalition of those opposed to this rudderless government, which includes all of the categories of people mentioned above, and not just unionised workers, because we need to create a climate for change that mainstream politics seems unable to offer, and to find representation for all of us who are being kicked down and demeaned by the government.

Certainly, there is no way that the government can transform Britain’s economic woes into anything positive — not only by the new year, but at any point. The Chancellor has always boasted that he did not have a Plan B. Where does that leave him now that his Plan A has failed? The ongoing cuts have failed to encourage growth, there is no private sector miracle waiting to ride in on a white charger, the misery is only going to get worse and worse, and the Chancellor has singularly failed to provide for a moment any sign that the UK is a remotely happy place to be, and one in which, under his care and attention, citizens can have faith in the future.

Instead, he and Cameron and whichever two other idiots in the Cabinet that you’d like to choose, are like a grim parody of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Note: For further information about the government’s cruel notions of welfare reform, and my despair at my fellow citizens, see the following articles that I wrote last year: Butchering the Poor, the Ill, the Weak, the Dispossessed and the Marginalized: Welcome to Cameron and Osborne’s Heartless Britain, Critics Attack UK Government’s Cruel and Ill-Conceived Assault on Welfare, The Cruelty and Stupidity of the Government’s Welfare Reforms and On Housing Benefit Cuts, British Public Reveals Shocking Lack of Empathy and Compassion.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

On the N30 website, set up specifically for the event, thousands of strike actions across the country are listed, and, in London, where nearly 300 actions have so far been submitted, the central event is a march, beginning at Lincoln’s Inn Fields at 12 noon, proceeding to a rally on Victoria Embankment at 1 pm, which I will certainly be attending.

On the face of it, this strike called by the unions, and inspired in particular as part of an ongoing struggle with the government regarding pensions, is not representative of the broad cross-section of British society affected by the government’s savage programme of cuts, because, of course, the government is also targeting those who don’t have unions, and who, in addition, don’t even have pensions to worry about — the unemployed (and especially those who are disabled), students, schoolchildren, and the many workers, including many self-employed people, who don’t have union representation.

Nevertheless, although Margaret Thatcher began a concerted programme of de-unionisation in the UK in the 1980s, there are still seven and half million union members in Britain (down from a high of 13 million-plus in 1979) and I believe it is fair to say that they represent the single largest group of people who can be mobilised to fundamentally challenge the austerity programme for which the government — as a coalition of two parties without a majority, who never spoke of their plans for a hatchet job on the State in their manifestos or on the campaign trail — does not have a mandate.

As a social work student wrote, on the N30 website, “Twenty-four unions are going to be out on the 30th. That’s twenty-four groups of people who have had enough and see no alternative option to industrial action. Nurses, teachers, porters, social workers, physiotherapists, lecturers, refuse collectors, cooks, domestics, managers, podiatrists, radiographers, crossing guards, civil servants, police staff, housing staff, occupational therapists, paramedics, head teachers, accountants, HR managers, healthcare support workers, electricians, IT technicians, health visitors, psychologists, teaching assistants, clinical coders, receptionists, hygiene inspectors, parking medical secretaries, civil enforcement officers, benefit staff, speech and language therapists, estates officers, ward clerks, the list keeps growing.”

That’s a powerful list of public servants — all, collectively, finding themselves marginalised and belittled by the government, which is content to  pump out, or allow misinformation to be pumped out suggesting that public sector workers will be raking in huge pensions when that is simply not true, of course, and serves, as usual, only to distract people from the more significant questions regarding how the rich, the super-rich and those who caused this crisis are not being called to account, or required to prevent others from paying for their greed, their omissions, or their crimes.

As the TUC explained in an article about the day of strike action, describing its campaign as aiming for “pension justice”:

The government wants to make people pay more and work longer for a lot less. Despite hours of talks, ministers have yet to seriously negotiate.

Few understand all the detail of pensions, but the issue is simple. Most public sector workers are modestly paid. Their pay has been frozen while the price of basics is shooting up. Now they are expected to pay an extra £3 billion a year for much worse pensions, by a government that cancelled the banker’s bonus tax that raised almost the same.

It’s wrong to make public sector workers pay an unfair contribution to reducing a deficit they did nothing to cause. Unions want proper negotiations. We have done fair deals before. That is why the TUC has called a day of action for pensions justice on November 30. It’s a chance to stand up for decent pensions and tell ministers to start negotiating.

And, of course, if this argument fails to persuade, then perhaps some of the unconstructive rhetoric emerging from the government will swell the numbers of strikers and their supporters on Wednesday. Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, for example, a Minister under Thatcher, has done a wonderful job of enticing people out onto the streets, telling the Daily Telegraph that the strike would be “stupid and wrong.”

As the Telegraph put it, he was also concerned that some of the unions will be striking “on the basis of fewer than a third of their members’ votes, though others passed the 50 percent threshold advocated by business lobbies,” and criticised a voting system that “allows an open-ended mandate for strikes after the first walkout,” which, he said, creates a “perverse incentive” to militancy. “If very disruptive strike action is carried out on the basis of these weak ballots, weak turnouts, the case for reform gets stronger,” he said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his own party secured just 36.1 percent of votes in the 2010 General Election.

If that doesn’t swing it, perhaps ministers’ hysterical claim that, as the Guardian put it, “the economy would lose £500m and an unspecified number of jobs would be axed, because working parents would be forced into emergency childcare by school closures — an estimate dismissed by one respected think-tank [the National Institute of Economic and Social Research] as ‘economic nonsense,’” will prove persuasive, although, to be honest, 18 months of this government’s cruelty and lack of vision ought to be enough to bring the country to a halt — for more than a day, if necessary.

I also liked the words of Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, who said, “The rightwing press brand this as an old-fashioned trade union dispute, linking it to strikes in the past. But this is different. People who provide our local government services, our health services, people who care for us, are saying they can’t take it any more. And 75% of these workers are women.”

Note: For further information, I also recommend visiting the websites of UK Uncut and False Economy.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This is a time of grim anniversaries. The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in September was followed, in October, by the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and, as the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaches, on January 11, 2012, we have now reached the point where we can begin to mark the 10th anniversary of the dates on which the 171 men still held there were first seized, and to reflect on what it says about America’s notions of justice and fairness that they are, for the most part, still held without charge or trial.

On his visit to Guantánamo, Stafford Smith was visiting Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, whose case has long been of concern to British citizens and to opponents of Guantánamo in the US and elsewhere in the world. I have written about his case extensively over the years, and his story also features in the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with the filmmaker Polly Nash.

A British resident with a British wife and four British children, Shaker Aamer has never been charged or tried, and yet, as Clive Stafford Smith reports, in an article, a press release and a letter to the British foreign secretary William Hague, all cross-posted below, he remains held, exactly ten years since he was first seized, even though he was notified that he had been cleared for release in 2007, and even though successive British governments have requested his return to the UK.

Those closest to his case have been obliged to conclude, for many years, that he is still held because, as an eloquent, charismatic man, and the foremost advocate of the prisoners’ rights, he knows too much, and these fears are further confirmed with the knowledge that he stated that, on the night of June 9, 2006, when three other prisoners died in Guantánamo in disputed circumstances (the authorities claimed that it was suicide, while soldiers who were present have suggested that the men may have been killed), he was tortured to within an inch of his life.

In addition, although the Labour government under Gordon Brown and the current Tory-led coalition government have requested the release of Shaker Aamer, his continued detention appears to be inexplicable unless, like their US counterparts, the British authorities do not really want him released either. Shaker Aamer embarrassed the British government in 2009, when he won a court case to secure the release of information regarding his claims that he was tortured by US forces in Afghanistan while UK agents were in the room, and this might explain the government’s reluctance to secure his return, were it not for three additional facts: firstly, that the Metropolitan Police are investigating his torture claims, and that he is surely needed as a witness; secondly, that the British government reached a financial settlement with him a year ago, which cannot be concluded while he is still in Guantánamo; and thirdly, that David Cameron’s much-criticised torture inquiry, into British complicity in torture abroad, cannot realistically begin while Shaker Aamer is still detained.

To shed further light on the current situation at Guantánamo, on Shaker Aamer’s case, on his array of physical and mental ailments, as a result of his ill-treatment over the years, and on the inexcusable inaction by both the British and the American governments, I refer you to Clive Stafford Smith’s commentaries below, and, if you would like to add your voice to those pressing for Shaker Aamer’s return,  you can email William Hague here or you can write to him at the following address: The Foreign Secretary, William Hague MP, The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AH.

Guantánamo Bay: An Unpalatable Visit
By Clive Stafford Smith, Huffington Post UK, November 23, 2011

This week I visited Shaker Aamer, the last remaining British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay.

He was originally detained on 24 November 2001, so he is marking ten years in prison without any charge. I cannot disclose what he said to me because, as ever, complaints he might have about his mistreatment, or his chronic health problems, are deemed classified until the United States sees fit to allow me to discuss them. However, Guantánamo is more depressed than ever, as perhaps illustrated by my own experiences on the gastronomic front.

I was looking forward to dining in the best restaurant on the Leeward Side of the infamous navy based, the Clipper Club, which qualifies because it is the only place that is normally open by the time our ferry gets back from the Windward side of the bay. The Club normally boasts a microwave pizza, which is putrid, but also a gin and tonic, which I find more nutritious.

So I walked down there on my first evening, past a couple of million dollars’ worth of new, wholly unused, now abandoned and overgrown, military housing units that some civilian Pentagon contractor got paid to put up two years ago. Arriving eagerly at my destination, I was aghast to discover that military economies meant that the Club now opens only on weekends. There was only one remaining dining alternative, the vending machine at the motel.

Therefore, after an appetiser of Planters Peanuts (not quite past their expiration date yet, but tasting rather stale), the main course was a bright green bag of Kars’ All Energy Trail Mix. I could only swallow half of my dessert, as my memory deceived me, and the Reese’s Peanut Butter cups were not up to par.

The nice lady from Jamaica at the front desk (who is, if my earlier visits hold true, being paid substantially under minimum wage by another civilian contractor) confirmed that the satellite dish had been broken for a while, so there was no chance of much after-dinner diversion. I asked when it might be fixed; she laughed rather charmingly, and said she knew of no plan to do anything about it. Tomorrow night’s entertainment will, then, be rather similar to this evening’s: tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Indeed, on my second evening on the island, things had not improved. One of the silly new rules dictated that I must choose between cutting off my visit with Shaker Aamer 50 minutes early, and being refused a visit to the main shop on the Windward side.

I chose the latter, hoping against hope that the little shop on the Leeward side would still be open when my ferry got there. Alas, while the lights were still on, I was fifteen minutes late.

So I repaired to the vending machine again; even the remaining Reese’s cup seemed appetising tonight.

Guantánamo is, increasingly, torture for all those concerned. The soldiers have long since forsaken the notion that by holding prisoners without trial they are preserving the rule of law; the prisoners have lost all hope, ten years into their endless detention; and, as the Gitmo Diet takes hold, even the lawyers are finding their visits unpalatable.

Shaker Aamer, last British resident in Guantánamo Bay, ‘celebrates’ his tenth year imprisoned without charge or trial
Reprieve press release, November 24, 2011

Ten years ago today Shaker Aamer was detained in Afghanistan. He was subsequently sold for a bounty to US forces, tortured in Bagram Air Force Base and Kandahar (with British agents as witnesses), before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay for additional abuse.

He has never been charged with any offence, and published reports indicate that he is one of 88 among the 171 prisoners remaining in Guantánamo Bay who has long been cleared for release from the prison. However, the law in the US as it currently stands requires that the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta must certify that Britain is a safe place for him to return to, and that he will commit no future crimes there — something that apparently Panetta has been unwilling to do.

Immediately upon visiting Shaker last week, Reprieve’s director wrote to Foreign Secretary William Hague concerning the laundry list of physical ailments that Shaker suffers — a list that had just been cleared through the US censorship process. That disturbing letter has now been made public [and is cross-posted below].

Reprieve’s director Clive Stafford Smith said: “I saw Shaker last Thursday and he tries to put a brave face on ten years of horrible abuse, but it is enough to wear any human being down almost to the point of death. Why does Britain pretend it has a Special Relationship if someone from London can be held for a decade without any due process, leaving his British wife without a husband and his British children without a father?

“Notwithstanding the fact that Britain has the best record of any country with former Guantánamo prisoners (nobody released has committed any offence), and that Shaker Aamer has anyway never committed a crime of any kind, the US Secretary of Defense is apparently not willing to certify that it would be safe for him to return here. It’s time someone in the British government told Leon Panetta what time of day it is.”

Clive Stafford Smith’s letter to William Hague regarding Shaker Aamer, November 18, 2011

Rt. Hon. William Hague
Foreign & Commonwealth Office
King Charles Street London

Re: Shaker Aamer & Guantánamo Bay

Dear Mr Hague:

I am writing to you urgently from Miami International Airport. I have just flown in from Guantánamo Bay where I visited Shaker Aamer yesterday. While there are aspects of that visit that I may not divulge due to US classification rules, I am permitted to relay my impressions, as well as detail the materials that were unclassified yesterday.

These give great cause for concern. Mr Aamer has suffered abuse that is unfathomable in the twenty-first century. One of the many areas of concern is his physical health.

Mr Aamer has now been held in isolation for more than two years. The US authorities may quibble about the term “isolation” (they have been known to do so in the past), but nothing can change the fact that Mr Aamer has been held in a solitary cell for that time, and much more over the past ten years. He has been thus punished because he continues to insist on the most basic elements of justice: that he be given a fair trial.

He has listed for counsel the following physical ailments that currently afflict him:

• Arthritis in the knees and fingers, stemming from his abuse in custody;
• Serious asthma problems (exacerbated, almost to the point of asphyxiation, when the US military sprays him with pepper spray during their periodic forcible cell extractions, or FCEs);
• Heartburn and acid reflux exacerbated by the diet;
• Prostate pain, with serious problems with urination;
• Problems with his ears, including the loss of balance and dizziness;
• Neck, shoulder and back pain resulting from the beatings that he has suffered;
• Serious infection of his nails;
• Ring worm and itchiness between his legs;
• Constant haemorrhoids and rectal pain;
• Extreme Kidney pain.

He also complains of E-N-T problems, serious insomnia, nerve problems in his right leg, and so forth. I can directly attest to various of these problems. For example, if the US insists that his food is of good quality, I can tell you that I tasted the lunch that he was given yesterday and it was revolting. I observed the infection of his left thumb, his right thumb, and his right index and middle finger nails, and it is like nothing I have seen before, rendering the nail soft and crumbling off the digit.

I do not think it is stretching matters to say that he is gradually dying in Guantánamo Bay.

This makes it all the more urgent that we get an independent medical assessment of him. However, ultimately there is only one solution, which is to get him out of Guantánamo Bay, home to his family in London. I should note that on February 14th he will have been in Guantánamo Bay for ten years; the anniversary coincides with the tenth birthday of his youngest child, who he has never met.

I remain,
Yours sincerely,
Clive A. Stafford Smith, Director

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.