I’m glad to report that I am fully recovered, that I remain healthy after my brush with mortality, and that I continue to be no longer a smoker, but it’s certainly time for another break, as, although I have tried not to work quite as relentlessly as I did before, I suspect that all that has changed is my attitude, and that I’m not quite as manic and fiery as I was before my illness.

Certainly, my involvement with WikiLeaks, who contacted me out of the blue just after I was discharged from hospital, and sought my assistance in liaising with its mainstream media partners for the release of classified military documents from Guantánamo, hurled me back into manic work when I should probably have been convalescing.

However, this was an excellent opportunity not only to help mainstream reporters understand the significance of the documents, but also to direct a whole new area of research — a detailed analysis of the documents, the Detainee Assessment Briefs, which provide the military’s analysis of almost all the prisoners — for those of us who still care about the horrendous injustice of Guantánamo, and who wish to know the details of what has taken place there over the last nine years and seven months.

I am partway through my analysis of the Detainee Assessment Briefs, which I’m adding to the existing knowledge about the prisoners to form an online reference library that will have detailed profiles of all the prisoners. By the end of the year, when this is complete, it will contain around 750,000 words, and will be pulled together under the heading, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” when I can get that together. At present, the first 200 complete profiles are available — or will soon be available — under the headings, WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo and WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004.

As a result of WikiLeaks’ intervention, designed to raise public awareness of Guantánamo when it was on the slide, I have been working pretty much non-stop all year (even through my illness) and now need to get away for two weeks. Sadly, even WikiLeaks couldn’t put the shame and injustice of Guantánamo back on the front pages for long, and when I return I’ll be liaising with various human rights organizations to raise Guantánamo (and the plight of the remaining 171 prisoners) as a topic of grave importance on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and also on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, 2012.

For now, though, I’ll be in Greece, relaxing with my family and creating some space in my head and some relaxation in my bones so that I will have energy for the long struggle ahead. We’ll be in Athens for a week, and then on a small island for another week, and I’m looking forward to the sun, to good food, and — along the way, hopefully — to meeting a few people who can fill me in thoroughly about what’s happening in Greece. We had this holiday booked before the latest manifestation of the Greek crisis, but I can’t honestly say that I can cut myself off from everything for two weeks when the ordinary people of Greece are being asked to suffer swingeing cuts, the wholesale privatization of Greece’s assets, and financial misery for a generation or more.

Have a pleasant two weeks, my friends. I’ll be publishing the occasional updates to “The Complete Guantánamo Files” when I can locate a cybercafé, but mainly I’ll be refreshingly incommunicado for the next 14 days.

If you would like to support my work, please contribute via the PayPal button at the top right.

Andy Worthington
London
August 8, 2011

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, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), 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 a result, I wrote the sleeve notes for the DVD release of the excellent film about Ronnie’s life and music, “The Passing Show,” directed by Rupert Williams and James Mackie for the BBC (with invaluable help from Darinagh O’Hagan), and originally broadcast in January 2006. I also came close to writing a biography of Ronnie, but when the offer finally came through, after many months of discussions with publishers, I was already in another world, far from the hills of Shropshire, in which manacled prisoners in orange jumpsuits, in a prison on a US naval base in Cuba, were presented as “the worst of the worst” by some of the most powerful men in the world, and I had access to publicly available documents which demonstrated that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld were lying, and the truth was that most of the men held at Guantánamo had no connection to terrorism at all.

That project — first through my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, through my dedicated journalism — has pretty much taken over my life, although when Charlie announced that he was planning the return of Slim Chance with several former members, I was delighted to become involved, putting together this review of Slim Chance’s powerful and moving gig at the 100 Club last month, which was published on the new Slim Chance website, and which, I hope, will play a small part in encouraging others to book Slim Chance and to allow others to experience Ronnie’s music brought back to life by those who knew him well, and who are doing such a great job of reviving his work.

Summoning Up the Spirit of Ronnie Lane: The Triumphant Return of Slim Chance, 100 Club, London, November 27, 2010
By Andy Worthington

Every now and then, amidst all the manipulation of reality shows and youth-based hype, something truly special happens in the world of music. On Friday November 27, 2010, at the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street, that special something was the return of Slim Chance.

In the 1970s, Ronnie Lane, founder member of psychedelic pop stars the Small Faces, left that band’s hard- rocking, hard-drinking successors, the Faces, for a farm in Shropshire and a musical vision — focused on his new group, Slim Chance — which, as well as sticking two fingers up at the celebrity trappings of rock stardom, was refreshingly original: a melting pot of rock, folk and blues influences, with some Gypsy leanings and a sprinkling of Motown grooviness.

Infused with Ronnie’s trademark wit and wistfulness, Slim Chance essentially had a pastoral heart — featuring fiddles, mandolin and accordion — but were also fully capable of rocking out when the spirit seized them. Between 1974 and 1976, they released three albums for Island — Anymore For Anymore, Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance and One For The Road — and members of Slim Chance also appeared on two more albums, Rough Mix (with Pete Townshend) in 1977 and See Me in 1979.

Although commercial success largely eluded Slim Chance, Ronnie’s many fans have long been aware that the body of work that he created in these years stood the test of time, and bore comparison with the powerful songs that Ronnie crafted as part of the Faces — songs like “Debris,” “Stone” and “Ooh La La,” which added some depth and humanity to the Faces’ general good-time hedonism.

In 2004, seven years after Ronnie’s death, following a long battle with multiple sclerosis, the seeds of the Slim Chance reunion were sown at a memorial concert for Ronnie in the Royal Albert Hall. Former Slim Chance member Charlie Hart put together a band that featured other originals Alun Davies, Henry McCullough and Chrissie Stewart, and they were joined by guests including Pete Townshend, Paul Weller, Ron Wood and Sam Brown — just some of the many musicians touched by Ronnie’s life and music.

For the latest Slim Chance reunion, five former Slim Chance members — Charlie Hart, Steve Simpson, Alun Davies, Steve Bingham and Colin Davey — got together with Geraint Watkins to immerse themselves more thoroughly in the Ronnie Lane Songbook, and the result, as the crowd at the 100 Club rapturously realized on November 27, was that special something — an evening of musical magic — that I mentioned at the start of this article.

Without attempting to replace Ronnie — which would be an impossible task — the band share vocals, with Steve and Alun singing most of the songs, but Geraint and Charlie also involved (each bringing a different perspective to the songs), and they bring Ronnie’s spirit to life through monster grooves, fiddle duels, the keening interplay of mandolin and fiddle, and the heartfelt interpretation of Ronnie’s words.

The result is quite extraordinary, a masterclass of professional musicians diving deep into a collection of simple songs with deceptively complex arrangements that makes much of what passes for live music these days seem either drab or over-rehearsed. Magic, indeed — or perhaps a form of musical alchemy, the unforeseen result of six skilled musicians bringing emotional involvement and intense musical enthusiasm to a collection of songs that not only pays tribute to Ronnie, but also invokes his spirit.

One cannot help thinking that Ronnie would have been delighted by the rough edges and the passion that runs through every single song in the two sets which revive 22 songs, from the well-known Faces numbers to the great body of work from the Slim Chance years. Untrained ears might recognize a few of these — “How Come,” for example, which was a hit in 1974, and “The Poacher” — but what is constantly amazing is how powerful every single song is, from the rousing sing-along anthems “Lad’s Got Money,” “Kuschty Rye” and “One for the Road” to the reflectiveness of songs like “Anymore for Anymore” and “Annie.”

Charlie told me afterwards that the response from the crowd was almost overwhelming, but the emotions were no less intense in the audience. We sang along, we swayed, we were energized and moved. Many of us never knew Ronnie, but he was with us all the same.

Note: Below is a video, via YouTube, of “Anymore for Anymore,” as played at the 100 Club, which I hope captures something of the spirit of the performance:

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 and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), 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.

In the first, Juan Cole, Middle East expert and author of Engaging the Muslim World, provides a much-needed response to the Islamophobia being stirred up in the US regarding the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and the Qur’an burning threats of a publicity-hungry preacher in Florida, pointing out how the Qur’an explicitly prohibits acts of terrorism — and how, by extension, Osama bin Laden “is not a proper Muslim, and his actions contravened Islamic law. He is a Jim Jones-type cultist with a fringe, violent People’s Temple.” In the second article, Robert Fisk, the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, provides his own, inimitable take on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, asking, “Did 9/11 make us all go mad?” and lamenting the two wars and the hundreds of thousands dead as a result of America’s response.

For other good articles, see Jason Linkins’ astute analysis, for the Huffington Post, of how the media created global hysteria over the Qur’an burning — instead of simply ignoring the Pastor Terry Jones — and Ted Koppel’s analysis of America’s self-defeating overreaction to the attacks in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

Top Ways 9/11 Broke Islamic Law
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment, September 11, 2010

On the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is clear that al-Qaeda was a tiny fringe terrorist movement, not a globe-straddling threat to Western societies. The organization has been decisively disrupted and now lacks command and control. Its leader, Osama Bin Laden, has not been seen in a video since 2004, and is either dead or horribly disfigured. Its number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is dangerous only in the way that any other terrorist crank is, firing off crackpot messages to his dwindling band of followers from time to time. With the startling rise of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States, fanned in large part by Republican Party fearmongering, it is worthwhile underlining the ways in which September 11 contravened Islamic values and Islamic law. (For a modernist, liberal interpretation, see “Jihad and the Islamic Law of War” (PDF)).

1. It is forbidden to attempt to impose Islam on other people. The Qur’an says, “There is no compulsion in religion. The right way has become distinct from error.” (The Cow, 2:256). Note that this verse was revealed in Medina and was never abrogated by any other verse of the Qur’an. Islam’s holy book forbids coercing people into adopting any religion. They have to willingly choose it.

2. Islamic law forbids aggressive warfare. The Qur’an says, “But if the enemies incline towards peace, do you also incline towards peace. And trust in God! For He is the one who hears and knows all things.” (8:61) The Qur’an chapter “The Cow, 2:190,” says, “Fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! God loveth not aggressors.”

3. In Islamic war, not just any civil engineer can declare or launch a war. It is the prerogative of the duly constituted leader of the Muslim community that engages in the war. Nowadays that would be the president or prime minister of the state.

4. The killing of innocent non-combatants is forbidden. According to Sunni tradition, ‘Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first Caliph, gave these instructions to his armies: “I instruct you in ten matters: Do not kill women, children, the old, or the infirm; do not cut down fruit-bearing trees; do not destroy any town …” (Malik’s Muwatta’, “Kitab al-Jihad.”)

5. Muslim commanders must give the enemy fair warning that war is imminent. The Prophet Muhammad at one point gave 4 months notice. Sneak attacks are forbidden.

The World Trade Center had a mosque in it, which Bin Laden destroyed, and he killed dozens of innocent Muslims in the attack along with thousands of others. All of this is an abomination is Islamic law.

By the laws of classical Islam and the instructions of the Qur’an, then, the September 11 act of terrorism was illegal. It is not an affirmation of Islam but a departure from its laws of war. That is why, contrary to popular belief, Muslim authorities have roundly condemned al-Qaeda’s actions in no uncertain terms. See also the Amman statement, to which large numbers of prominent Sunni and Shiite leaders subscribed.

Al-Qaeda can legitimately be seen as not a Muslim group at all. Osama Bin Laden openly said of the hijackers that “those young men had no fiqh [Islamic law]” — i.e. they were lawless secret operatives rather than proper Muslims. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when in the Philippines lived like James Bond, going to nightclubs with a pure silver cigarette lighter. Several of the hijackers frequented strip clubs. Ziad Jarrah was from a secular family and had a Turkish live-in girlfriend. Many of these operatives simply were not fundamentalists but rather an odd sort of Muslim nationalist. Bin Laden did not target the US because of its way of life, but because he said it imposed a boycott on Iraq in the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, because it encouraged the Saudi regime to pump more oil than it should so as to keep the price low, because it stationed troops in the kingdom. Even if Bin Laden hadn’t been a crackpot with conspiracy theories, these points are not civilizational or religious issues. They are just politics.

Bin Laden wanted a big fight between the Muslim world and the United States. He wanted the US mired in Afghanistan. He is a nobody, leading a tiny group of cells now mostly disrupted. But the US has sunk itself into a quagmire of wars in a vast over-reaction to a terrorist attack. Without the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, al-Qaeda might well have just disappeared even further into insignificance than it did. And now, instigated by the Republican Party, US society is moving toward an Islamophobia that could well set it at odds with 1.5 billion Muslims.

Bin Laden is not a proper Muslim, and his actions contravened Islamic law. He is a Jim Jones-type cultist with a fringe, violent People’s Temple. Americans need to stop blaming Islam, and to recognize that most Muslims in the world are their friends, and that American Muslims are patriots and contributors to our well-being.

Every time Americans tear down Islam, Bin Laden gets a little bit of what he wanted.

Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead — and nothing learnt
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, September 11, 2010

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from “ground zero” — as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W. Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic “war on terror”. And that wretched man who lived — or lives still — in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qaedas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah — not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all — utterly — on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev. Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary — and heaven spare us next year from the 10th — 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq — both the Western and the local variety — and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they — the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qaedas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters — have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville.

This is the loss, of course. But who’s made the profit? Well, the arms dealers, naturally, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and all the missile lads and the drone manufacturers and F-16 spare parts outfits and the ruthless mercenaries who stalk the Muslim lands on our behalf now that we have created 100,000 more enemies for each of the 19 murderers of 9/11. Torturers have had a good time, honing their sadism in America’s black prisons — it was appropriate that the US torture centre in Poland should be revealed on this ninth anniversary — as have the men (and women, I fear) who perfect the shackles and water-drowning techniques with which we now fight our wars. And — let us not forget — every religious raver in the world, be they of the Bin Laden variety, the bearded groupies in the Taliban, the suicide executioners, the hook-in the arm preachers, or our very own pastor of Gainesville.

And God? Where does he fit in? An archive of quotations suggests that just about every monster created in or after 9/11 is a follower of this quixotic redeemer. Bin Laden prays to God — “to turn America into a shadow of itself”, as he told me in 1997 — and Bush prayed to God and Blair prayed — and prays — to God, and all the Muslim killers and an awful lot of Western soldiers and Dr. (honorary) Pastor Terry Jones and his 30 (or it may be 50, since all statistics are hard to come by in the “war on terror”) pray to God. And poor old God, of course, has had to listen to these prayers as he always sits through them during our mad wars. Recall the words attributed to him by a poet of another generation: “God this, God that, and God the other thing. ‘Good God,’ said God, ‘I’ve got my work cut out’.” And that was just the First World War …

Just five years ago — on the fourth anniversary of the twin towers/ Pentagon/ Pennsylvania attacks — a schoolgirl asked me at a lecture in a Belfast church whether the Middle East would benefit from more religion. No — less religion! — I howled back. God is good for contemplation, not for war. But — and here we are driven on to the reefs and hidden rocks which our leaders wish us to ignore, forget and cast aside — this whole bloody mess involves the Middle East; it is about a Muslim people who have kept their faith while those Westerners who dominate them — militarily, economically, culturally, socially — have lost theirs. How can this be, Muslims ask? Indeed, it is a superb irony that the Rev. Jones is a believer while the rest of us — by and large — are not. Hence our books and our documentaries never refer to Muslims vs. Christians, but Muslims versus “The West”.

And of course, the one taboo subject of which we must not speak — Israel’s relationship with America, and America’s unconditional support for Israel’s theft of land from Muslim Arabs — also lies at the heart of this terrible crisis in our lives. In yesterday’s edition of The Independent, there was a photograph of Afghan demonstrators chanting “death to America”. But in the background, these same demonstrators were carrying a black banner with a message in Dari written upon it in white paint. What it actually said was: “The bloodsucking Zionist government regime and the Western leaders who are indifferent [to suffering] and have no conscience are again celebrating the new year by spilling the red blood of the Palestinians.”

The message is as extreme as it is vicious — but it proves, yet again, that the war in which we are engaged is also about Israel and “Palestine”. We may prefer to ignore this in “the West” — where Muslims supposedly “hate us for what we are” or “hate our democracy” (see: Bush, Blair and a host of other mendacious politicians) — but this great conflict lies at the heart of the “war on terror”. That is why the equally vicious Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to the atrocities of 9/11 by claiming that the event would be good for Israel. Israel would now be able to claim that it, too, was fighting the “war on terror”, that Arafat — this was the now-comatose Ariel Sharon’s claim — is “our Bin Laden”. And thus Israelis had the gall to claim that Sderot, under its cascade of tin-pot missiles from Hamas, was “our ground zero”.

It was not. Israel’s battle with the Palestinians is a ghastly caricature of our “war on terror”, in which we are supposed to support the last colonial project on earth — and accept its thousands of victims — because the twin towers and the Pentagon and United Flight 93 were attacked by 19 Arab murderers nine years ago. There is a supreme irony in the fact that one direct result of 9/11 has been the stream of Western policemen and spooks who have travelled to Israel to improve their “anti-terrorist expertise” with the help of Israeli officers who may — according to the United Nations — be war criminals. It was no surprise to find that the heroes who gunned down poor old Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Tube in 2005 had been receiving “anti-terrorist” advice from the Israelis.

And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives — and sacrificing theirs — on the front lines of the “war on terror”. There can be no “equivalence”. “They” kill innocents because “they” are evil. “We” kill innocents by mistake. But we know we are going to kill innocents — we willingly accept that we are going to kill innocents, that our actions are going to create mass graves of families, of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.

This is why we created the obscene definition of “collateral damage”. For if “collateral” means that these victims are innocent, then “collateral” also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill them — even if we knew it was inevitable that we would. “Collateral” is our exoneration. This one word is the difference between “them” and “us”, between our God-given right to kill and Bin Laden’s God-given right to murder. The victims, hidden away as “collateral” corpses, don’t count any more because they were slaughtered by us. Maybe it wasn’t so painful. Maybe death by drone is a more gentle departure from this earth, evisceration by an AGM-114C Boeing-Lockheed air-to-ground missile less painful, than death by shards from a roadside bomb or a cruel suicider with an explosive belt.

That’s why we know how many died on 9/11 — 2,966, although the figure may be higher — and why we don’t “do body counts” on those whom we kill. Because they – “our” victims — must have no identities, no innocence, no personality, no cause or belief or feelings; and because we have killed far, far more human beings than Bin Laden and the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Anniversaries are newspaper and television events. And they can have an eerie habit of coalescing together to create an unhappy memorial framework. Thus do we commemorate the Battle of Britain — a chivalric episode in our history — and the Blitz, a progenitor of mass murder, to be sure, but a symbol of innocent courage — as we remember the start of a war that has torn our morality apart, turned our politicians into war criminals, our soldiers into killers and our ruthless enemies into heroes of the anti-Western cause. And while on this gloomy anniversary the Rev. Jones wanted to burn a book called the Koran, Tony Blair tried to sell a book called A Journey. Jones said the Koran was “evil”; Britons have asked whether the Blair book should be classified as “crime”. Certainly, 9/11 has moved into fantasy when the Rev. Jones can command the attention of the Obamas and the Clintons and the Holy Father and the even more Holy United Nations. Whom the gods would destroy …

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 and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

However, I wanted, at the very least, to register my concern about how the Islamophobic venom that has spread from Ground Zero in a wave of intolerance, prompting an attack on a Muslim taxi driver in New York (Ahmed Sharif, who responded by stating, “This is a city of all colors, races, all religion, everyone. We live here, side by side, peacefully”), an attack on the site of an Islamic cultural center in Tennessee (following a vitriolic campaign against it), protests against the building of new mosques, and the establishment of “Burn a Quran Day” by a Pastor in Florida, appear to be indicative of a violent stupidity that is deeply troubling to those of us who hoped that this kind of hatred had been consigned to the trashcan of history with the demise of the Bush administration.

If the Constitution means anything, it is unacceptable that 61 percent of Americans think that a mosque and cultural center should not be built close to “hallowed ground” (as President Obama described the Ground Zero site) — not just because of the Constitution’s prohibition on religious favoritism, but also because such an attitude is a disgraceful affront to the memory of those who died in the 9/11 attacks who were not Christians, and who, of course, included Muslims.

As other commentators have written admirably about these problems — see, for example, editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post, an article by Glenn Greenwald, and articles by Richard Kim and Katha Pollitt in the Nation — I’ll content myself with having made the handful of observations that I wanted to make, and would like to leave you with what I regard as the most sensible appraisal of the Ground Zero Mosque controversy — a statement made by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on August 3, after New York’s Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted that there was no reason for landmark status to extend to the building on Park Place where the mosque and cultural center are planned.

I don’t always agree with Mayor Bloomberg (as, for example, when he withdrew his support for the planned 9/11 trial in New York), and I don’t agree with his assertion that the 9/11 attacks were executed by “some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives,” because the attacks were not about US freedoms, but were, instead, a brutal response to the brutality of US foreign policy. Similarly, I cannot agree with his assertion that the attack on the World Trade Center was “an act of war,” as I believe it was a terrorist attack, and therefore a criminal enterprise. However, I would be hard pressed to find a more thorough demonstration of why opposition to the creation of the mosque and cultural center is “a violation of the US Constitution,” and why it is also “as important a test … of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime.” Most importantly, unlike President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg has not flip-flopped on the mosque issue, and has also not caved in to opponents like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Mayor Bloomberg’s Speech about the Park51 Project on August 3, 2010

We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We’ve come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever — this is the freest City in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.

Our doors are open to everyone — everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants — by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life and it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.

On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.

Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue — and they were turned down.

In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies — and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion — and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780’s — St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

This morning, the City’s Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted not to extend landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.

The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right — and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the US Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question — should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.

The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves — and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans — if we said “no” to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values — and play into our enemies’ hands — if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists — and we should not stand for that.

For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime — as important a test — and it is critically important that we get it right.

On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, “What God do you pray to?” “What beliefs do you hold?”

The attack was an act of war — and our first responders defended not only our City but also our country and our Constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights — and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation — and in fact, their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. By doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our City even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our City and our country as the people of any faith and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for the better part of a year, as is their right.

The local community board in Lower Manhattan voted overwhelming to support the proposal and if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire City.

Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure — and there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God’s love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us today can attest.

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 and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

So please, my friends, hold the fort while I’m away — that will be the fort of fighting for freedom in the face of foolishness and fascism, or perhaps the castle of conquering complacency. I’ll try to keep in touch with what’s going on, but I can’t make any promises. Certainly, the timing could hardly be worse, with Omar Khadr’s trial by Military Commission due to start next week, and Ibrahim al-Qosi due to be sentenced.

And who knows what other surprises are lurking? Last year I went away and the US government released the CIA Inspector General’s Report on the torture of “high-value detainees” that had been promised for so long that the PDF had cobwebs on it.

So think of me in a few days, as all this melts away, and I’m licking a gelato by the side of a pool. I’m looking forward to having a proper opportunity to rest and recharge for the struggles ahead, and I’ll try not to sneak into too many internet cafés — although I do promise that Omar Khadr will not be far from my thoughts.

Even on holiday, it’s not possible to forget quite what a sordid and despicable thing it is for the United States to be pressing ahead with a war crimes trial for a young man who was just 15 years old when he was seized — a young man who may or may not have thrown a grenade that killed a US soldier; a young man who, through the haze of his lost youth, appears to recognize that he is the scapegoat for a worldview, cultivated by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — and, disgracefully, maintained largely intact by Barack Obama — which consists of defending the skewed belief that, in wartime, post-9/11, the US military are soldiers, but everyone who opposes them is a terrorist or a war criminal.

Buona notte a tutti! Ci vediamo in due settimane!

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 and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

There are also a few updates on torture: some evasive Congressional testimony from Jay Bybee, who signed off on the “torture memos” of August 2002, and who appears to have set up the CIA for prosecution, for exceeding his guidelines or using unapproved techniques (How Jay Bybee Has Approved the Prosecution of CIA Operatives for Torture), and the truly disturbing story of how the Obama administration, the Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit Court have all conspired to forcibly repatriate an Algerian from Guantánamo, even though he faces the risk of torture (Obama and US Courts Repatriate Algerian from Guantánamo Against His Will; May Be Complicit in Torture).

Related are two other stories: one reviewing the D.C. Circuit Court’s treatment of Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus appeals, explaining how the judges appear to be obsessed with granting the President unfettered executive power, and with undermining the District Court judges who have granted 37 out of 51 habeas petitions (Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals — it’s Part One; Part Two will follow next week). The other, focusing on one of these appeals, tells the disgraceful story of how the D.C. Circuit Court, in the case of a prisoner allegedly associated with Abu Zubaydah (the “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA torture program was invented), has drawn on long-discredited allegations about Zubaydah, ignoring the fact that, four months ago, the government conceded in a court filing that he was never a member of al-Qaeda, and has also drawn on a dubious diary by a supposed “associate” of Zubaydah, whose whereabouts are unknown (In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies).

If that’s not enough, you could explore my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, recently updated, which provides references and links for all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo, or you could come and join me in Wiltshire.

Oh, I’m sorry. Did I forget to tell you here I’m going? I’m going here:

And hopefully it will be like this (last year):

And not like this (three years ago):

If you don’t make it, then I’ll see you back here on Monday evening!

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 and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This struck a chord with me because, over the years, I too have received e-mails from Professor Chomsky, which have provided great encouragement. When I updated my definite Guantánamo prisoner list in January, for example, I received a message saying, “Glad to know you are keeping at it. Won’t be the last updating, I’m afraid.” When I sent him a link to my annotated Bagram prisoner list, he wrote back, saying, “Could be a revealing project. Wish I had something to contribute,” and just a few days ago, when I sent a link to my interactive list of the Guantánamo habeas cases, I received notification that it “[s]hould be a very valuable resource.” I’m not short of supporters, but when you’re swimming against the tide, as is the case with raising awareness of the crimes, cruelty and incompetence of the “War on Terror,” Professor Chomsky’s supportive messages are a real boost.

At the end of this article, I’ve also posted a video of a speech, “The Role of the Radical Intellectual: Some Personal Reflections,” delivered at the Orpheum Theater, Madison WI on April 8, when Professor Chomsky received the A.E. Havens Center’s Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship, which touches on some of the same themes. A transcript of this speech was posted on Truthout, as “Remembering Fascism: Learning From The Past.”

Noam Chomsky Has “Never Seen Anything Like This”
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig, April 19, 2010

Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”

Chomsky has, more than any other American intellectual, charted the downward spiral of the American political and economic system, in works such as On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture, A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent and Letters From Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda. He reminds us that genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive. It challenges cultural and political assumptions. It critiques structures. It is relentlessly self-critical. It implodes the self-indulgent myths and stereotypes we use to elevate ourselves and ignore our complicity in acts of violence and oppression. And it makes the powerful, as well as their liberal apologists, deeply uncomfortable.

Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates. When Christopher Hitchens decided to become a windup doll for the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, one of the first things he did was write a vicious article attacking Chomsky. Hitchens, unlike most of those he served, knew which intellectual in America mattered. [Editor’s note: To see some of the articles in the 2001 exchanges between Hitchens and Chomsky, click here, here, here and here.]

“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky said. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”

Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.

“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”

“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like Marriage and Morals. Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”

“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”

Chomsky’s courage to speak on behalf of those, such as the Palestinians, whose suffering is often minimized or ignored in mass culture, holds up the possibility of the moral life. And, perhaps even more than his scholarship, his example of intellectual and moral independence sustains all who defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.

“I cannot tell you how many people, myself included, and this is not hyperbole, whose lives were changed by him,” said Finkelstein, who has been driven out of several university posts for his intellectual courage and independence. “Were it not for Chomsky I would have long ago succumbed. I was beaten and battered in my professional life. It was only the knowledge that one of the greatest minds in human history has faith in me that compensates for this constant, relentless and vicious battering. There are many people who are considered nonentities, the so-called little people of this world, who suddenly get an e-mail from Noam Chomsky. It breathes new life into you. Chomsky has stirred many, many people to realize a level of their potential that would forever been lost.”

Below is the video of Professor Chomsky’s speech on April 8, “The Role of the Radical Intellectual: Some Personal Reflections”:

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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

From the Boston Globe: August 6th marks 64 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by the United States at the end of World War II. Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The US B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed “Little Boy.” At 8:15 am, “Little Boy” was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only 0.7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy — an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950. Today, Hiroshima houses a Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum near ground zero, promoting a hope to end the existence of all nuclear weapons.

A view of Hiroshima and outlying hills, seen in the autumn of 1945, from the ruins of the Red Cross building, less than one mile from the hypocenter (US National Archives).

The Hiroshima Fire Department’s main fire station, destroyed by the blast and fire of the atomic bomb, 1,200 m (4,000 ft) from ground zero (US National Archives).

A “shadow” of a hand valve wheel on the painted wall of a gas storage tank after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Radiant heat instantly burned paint where the heat rays were not obstructed, 1,920 m (6,300 ft) from ground zero (US National Archives).

Death on a horrendous scale. This photograph and others, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by US serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces.

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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.