RAF Typhoon jets are to scream back and forth over the Thames. Starstreak surface-to-air missile batteries are being set up in East End parks and on flats in Bow, with 10 soldiers manning each one. Army and navy helicopters will clatter back and forth, with snipers hanging from their doors “to shoot down pilots of terrorist planes”.

Machine-guns will for the first time be toted by guards on the London tube. Police special forces, “trained to kill”, will wear balaclavas to avoid identification. There are to be naval landing craft roaming the coast off Weymouth and submarines at the ready. The Olympics have become a festival of the global security industry, with a running and jumping contest as a sideshow. No one in government dares call a halt. Nero in his prime could not have squandered so much money on circuses.

The Olympics have become an Orwellian parody of what happens when a world agency blackmails a government aching for prestige into spending without limit. Not one defence spokesman has come up with a plausible scenario for the jets and missiles. The latter have a range of just three miles and are said to be usable “only at the express instruction of the prime minister”. What will they shoot down, and on whose head will it crash?

The figures involved are astonishing. 13,500 military personnel will be deployed for the duration of the Games, and yesterday came the doubly depressing news that the security firm G4S — “the largest employer on the London Stock Exchange with more than 650,000 staff worldwide” — has had 100,000 applications for 10,000 job vacancies, In total, G4S “will provide 23,700 personnel, including volunteers and military,” as part of a £200 million contract.

All of the above, however, is typical of everything to do with the Olympics, whose keywords are greed, waste, exaggeration, distortion, militarism, paranoia, jingoism and social cleansing, and whose abiding financial basis is the accruing of huge debts and publicly-funded corporate profiteering.

The sport itself also suffers from having become a turbo-charged manifestation of competition, which is not only co-opted for the purposes of nationalistic and corporate propaganda, but is also over-rated compared to cooperation, and almost always marketed as anti-intellectual, lest anyone actually thinks about what it all means — how the sport itself has become a sideshow to the aggressive manifestation of money and power.

While ordinary Londoners — treated with contempt, like idiotic punters to be mercilessly exploited — will be paying for this hollow spectacle for years, and are fleeced for tickets, and encouraged to “volunteer” to help out at the Olympics, while all the managers get paid, that, apparently, is not enough humiliation.

It is also clear that we will all face traffic chaos throughout the summer, which, in some cases, will inevitably lead to businesses collapsing, and some of the least fortunate Londoners are those renting a property from a landlord or landlady who cannot resist the opportunity to make a killing from the Games. Across the capital, rents are spiralling out of control, even though they are already unregulated, and already almost unaffordable, and counter-productive for the economy as a whole, because so much of workers’ wages is wasted on servicing lazy, venal landlords and their banks. As the greed increases, some tenants are being summarily evicted — at very short notice, because they have no rights — so that landlords can charge up to 20 times what they normally charge.

Below, to highlight these iniquities and more, I’m cross-posting two perceptive articles about the modern-day horror of the Games — of unaccountable corporate expansion, social cleansing and control, funded with a blank cheque paid for by taxpayers — which I believe cover most of the key topics. The first was published in the Guardian in March, and was written by Stephen Graham, Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University, whose latest book is Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. The second, by Ashok Kumar, a writer, activist and a PhD candidate of Economic Geography at Oxford University, was published last month in Ceasefire magazine.

Olympics 2012 security: welcome to lockdown London
By Stephen Graham, The Guardian, March 12, 2012

As a metaphor for the London Olympics, it could hardly be more stark. The much-derided “Wenlock” Olympic mascot is now available in London Olympic stores dressed as a Metropolitan police officer. For £10.25 you, too, can own the ultimate symbol of the Games: a member of by far the biggest and most expensive security operation in recent British history packaged as tourist commodity. Eerily, his single panoptic-style eye, peering out from beneath the police helmet, is reminiscent of the all-seeing eye of God so commonly depicted at the top of Enlightenment paintings. In these, God’s eye maintained a custodial and omniscient surveillance on His unruly subjects far below on terra firma.

The imminent Olympics will take place in a city still recovering from riots that the Guardian-LSE Reading the Riots project showed were partly fuelled by resentment at their lavish cost. Last week, the UK spending watchdog warned that the overall costs of the Games were set to be at least £11bn — £2 bn over even recently inflated budgets. When major infrastructure projects such as Crossrail, speeded up for the Games, are factored in, the figure may be as high as £24bn, according to Sky News. The estimated cost put forward only seven years ago when the Games were won was £2.37 bn.

With the required numbers of security staff more than doubling in the last year, estimates of the Games’ immediate security costs have doubled from £282m to £553m. Even these figures are likely to end up as dramatic underestimates: the final security budget of the 2004 Athens Olympics were around £1bn [and see here for an official estimate of £1.4 bn].

All this in a city convulsed by massive welfare, housing benefit and legal aid cuts, spiralling unemployment and rising social protests. It is darkly ironic, indeed, that large swaths of London and the UK are being thrown into ever deeper insecurity while being asked to pay for a massive security operation, of unprecedented scale, largely to protect wealthy and powerful people and corporations.

Critics of the Olympics have not been slow to point out the dark ironies surrounding the police Wenlock figure. “Water cannon and steel cordon sold separately,” mocks Dan Hancox on the influential Games Monitor website. “Baton rounds may be unsuitable for small children.”

In addition to the concentration of sporting talent and global media, the London Olympics will host the biggest mobilisation of military and security forces seen in the UK since the second world war. More troops – around 13,500 – will be deployed than are currently at war in Afghanistan. The growing security force is being estimated at anything between 24,000 and 49,000 in total. Such is the secrecy that no one seems to know for sure.

During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.

Beyond these security spectaculars, more stealthy changes are underway. New, punitive and potentially invasive laws such as the London Olympic Games Act 2006 are in force. These legitimise the use of force, potentially by private security companies, to proscribe Occupy-style protests. They also allow Olympic security personnel to deal forcibly with the display of any commercial material that is deemed to challenge the complete management of London as a “clean city” to be branded for the global TV audience wholly by prime corporate sponsors (including McDonald’s, Visa and Dow Chemical).

London is also being wired up with a new range of scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate and facial-recognition CCTV systems, disease tracking systems, new police control centres and checkpoints. These will intensify the sense of lockdown in a city which is already a byword across the world for remarkably intensive surveillance.

Many such systems, deliberately installed to exploit unparalleled security budgets and relatively little scrutiny or protest, have been designed to linger long after the athletes and VIPs have left. Already, the Dorset police are proudly boasting that their new number-plate recognition cameras, built for sailing events, are allowing them to catch criminals more effectively.

In Athens, the $300m “super-panopticon” CCTV and information system built for the Games following intense US pressure remained after the event, along with the disused sports facilities. In fact, the system has been used by Greek police trying in vain to control the mass uprisings responding to the crash and savage austerity measures in the country.

It is important to remember that all this is ostensibly designed to secure the spectacle of 17,000 athletes competing for 17 days. Even if London’s overall security budget remains similar to that of Athens, that works out at the startling figure of £59,000 of public money to secure each competitor or £3,500 per competitor per day. In 2004, the cost in now-bankrupt Athens was £90,000 per competitor (for a smaller number of athletes than are likely to attend London). This was a major contributor, as part of the overall £10bn costs, to Greece’s subsequent debt crisis.

In the context of post-austerity Britain, these figures are eye-watering. Even more remarkably, given that Olympics budgets have drawn down from many other public and lottery funds, and are no doubt adding hugely to UK national debt, the Daily Telegraph recently argued that the security operation for the Olympics were “key to aiding the recovery of UK plc”.

How can we make sense of this situation? Four connected points need emphasis here. The first is that, amid a global economic crash, so-called “homeland security” industries — a loose confederation of defence, IT and biotechnology industries — are in bonanza mode. As this post-9/11 paradigm is being diffused around the world, the industry — worth $142bn in 2009 — is expected to be worth a staggering $2.7tn globally between 2010 and 2020. Growth rates are between 5% and 12% a year.

The UK, long an exemplar “surveillance society”, is especially attractive to these industries, especially when hosting the Olympics. Recent security industry magazines have been full of articles excitedly extolling the Olympics as a “key driver of the industry” or as “keeping the market buoyant”.

Nation states, and the EU, are struggling to ensure that their corporations get a piece of the action in markets long dominated by US and Israeli firms. Ramping up surveillance is thus now as much a part of economic policy as a response to purported threats.

The security boom is unaffected, or perhaps even fuelled, by the global crash, as wealthy and powerful elites across the world seek ever-more fortified lifestyles. Essentially, it is about defence and security corporations building huge new income streams by systematically exploiting three linked trends: the lucrative possibilities created by post 9/11 fears; widening privatisation and out-sourcing in the context of deep austerity programmes; and the desire of big city and national governments to brand themselves as secure destinations for major global events.

Booming security markets are so lucrative that accusations of corruption are often made. Siemens, a major security contractor at Athens, allegedly paid huge bribes to get the job from its internal slush fund.

Crucially, though, as Naomi Klein points out in her book The Shock Doctrine, the security boom also involves attempts to diffuse the technologies honed in counter-insurgency and colonial war in places such as Gaza, Kabul and Baghdad — drones, helicopters, data mining, biometrics, security zones, so-called “non-lethal weapons” (devices used to disperse crowds) — to the domestic “global” cities of Asia and the west.

Particular glee that Israeli-style security arrangements are now being widely implemented is evident among the CEOs of large Israeli security and defence contractors, which are doing especially well in the security boom. Leo Gleser is president of ISDS, a company that proudly proclaims that it was established by ex-Mossad agents and which was involved in £200m worth of security contracts for the Athens Games. He talks of “growing tsunamis of violence, criminal acts, and global insecurity triggered by the 9/11 events” which made the “the western world finally understand that measures had to be taken”.

Olympics are especially important opportunities to cement the security boom still further. They are the ultimate global security shop windows through which states and corporations can advertise their latest high-tech wares to burgeoning global markets while making massive profits.

“The Olympics is a tremendous opportunity to showcase what the private sector can do in the security space,” a Whitehall official was quoted recently as saying in a Financial Times defence supplement. “Not only do you have a UK security kitemark on the product but you’ve got an Olympic kitemark to boot.”

The main security contractor for the London Olympics — G4S, more familiar under its old Group 4 moniker — is the world’s largest security company. Beyond its £130m Olympic security contracts, it operates the world’s largest private security force — 630,000 people — taking up a myriad of outsourced contracts. It secures prisons, asylum detention centres, oil and gas installations, VIPs, embassies, airports (including those in Doncaster and Baghdad) and infrastructure, and operates in 125 countries.

According to its website, G4S specialises in particular in what it terms “executive style life-support in hazardous environments”. (Presumably this refers to Baghdad and not east London.) After buying up the ArmorGroup security company in 2008, it also now runs a large number of operations in Iraq. This month it was announced that G4S will also be the first private security corporation to run UK police stations with over half of Lincolnshire’s police force actually moving over to the company.

The second point is that the homeland and Olympic security boom is being fuelled by the widening adoption of the idea of “asymmetric” war as the key security idea among nation states, militaries and corporations. Here, rather than war with other states, the main challenge for states is deemed to be mobilising more or less permanently against vague non-state or civilian threats that lurk within their own cities and the infrastructures that connect them.

In practice, such a shift has massive and troubling implications. As we have seen with the so-called war on terror, it works to dramatically blur longstanding legal, political and ethical lines demarcating war and war-like acts from peace and criminal acts. It also fuses policing, military operations and the intelligence services much more closely as all three seek to build bigger and bigger surveillance operations to try to predict threats, especially those within the vulnerable labyrinths of big cities.

Such an approach translates easily into a deep suspicion of cosmopolitan cities, multi-ethnic populations and the rights of migrant citizens, a process accelerated by the 7/7 atrocities in London the day after the Olympics were announced in 2005.

In May 2011 the Metropolitan Police announced that they were redeploying 290 cameras that had been installed as counter-terror systems in two predominantly Muslim areas of Birmingham to London for the Games. Recently, the Home Office warned Waltham Forest Council — home of part of the Olympic Park — that it is home to a large group of radicalised second- and third-generation Asian Britons who potentially pose a terrorist threat to the Games.

More visibly, this shift means that the familiar security architecture of airports and international borders — checkpoints, scanners, ID cars, cordons, security zones — start to materialise in the hearts of cities. What this amounts to, in practice, is an effort to roll out the well-established architecture and surveillance of the airport to parts of the wider, open city. The “rings of steel” around the City and Docklands in London were early examples of this.

The third explanation for the Olympic security boom is to be found by looking in more detail at how risks are considered in planning the events since the 9/11 attacks. Olympics security operations have grown beyond all recognition since 2000 because they have been shaped by new types of risk assessment.

The symbolic importance and prestige of the Games for cities, nations and corporations has meant that historical ideas of proportionality have basically been abandoned. Instead, as Canadian sociologists Phil Boyle and Kevin Haggerty have shown, security planning has tried to create the impossible illusion of total security by countering all threats, no matter how outlandish, unlikely or nightmarish.

Crucially, all such threats are now deemed equally valid. A model developed by the Rand corporation to help with planning for the London Games outlines in detail 27 possible threat scenarios and the means to counter them. Meeting them helps also to demonstrate the awesome power, and elite status, of the host city or state in the wider world.

This helps account for the ever-more baroque security and surveillance operations surrounding Olympic events. It also helps explain how, under enormous pressure from the US — whose security corporations benefited hugely in the process — the security budget for Sydney ($180m, or $16,000 an athlete) was multiplied eight times for Athens only four years later ($1.5bn and $142,000, respectively). The Beijing operations, in an authoritarian country, not surprisingly eclipsed both Athens and London and came in at a staggering $6.5bn.

The final point is how the security operations of Olympics have major long-term legacies for their host cities and nations. The security preoccupations of Olympics present unprecedented opportunities to push through highly elitist, authoritarian and speculative urban planning efforts that otherwise would be much more heavily contested — especially in democracies.

These often work to “purify” or “cleanse” diverse and messy realities of city life and portray existing places as “waste” or “derelict” spaces to be transformed by mysterious “trickle-down effects”. The scale and nature of evictions and the clearance of streets of those deemed not to befit such events can seem like systematic ethnic or social cleansing. To make way for the Beijing Games, 1.5 million were evicted; clearances of local businesses and residents in London, though more stealthy, have been marked.

Such efforts often amount in effect to expensive, privatised, elitist and gentrifying projects such as the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford (the first UK shopping centre, incidentally, to have explosives scanners at all entrances).

During the Games themselves, so-called “Olympic Divides” are especially stark. In London, a citywide system of dedicated VIP “Games lanes” are being installed. Using normally public road space, these will allow 4,000 luxury, chauffeur-driven BMWs to shuttle 40,000 Olympic officials, national bureaucrats, politicians and corporate sponsors speedily between their five-star hotels, super-yachts and cordoned-off VIP lounges within the arenas. It has recently been shown that wealthy tourists will be able to enter the VIP lanes by purchasing £20,000 package trips.

Ordinary Londoners, meanwhile — who are paying heavily for the Games through council tax hikes — will experience much worse congestion. Even their ambulances will be proscribed from the lanes if they are not running blue lights.

More broadly, a huge increase in land values tends to benefit only the wealthy property speculators and financiers that are best placed to ride the wave. Already, the Qatar royal family have bought the 1,400 homes of the Olympic village in a deal worth £557m [which is up to £275m less than it has cost UK taxpayers to build].

Looking at these various points together shows one thing: contemporary Olympics are society on steroids. They exaggerate wider trends. Far removed from their notional or founding ideals, these events dramatically embody changes in the wider world: fast-increasing inequality, growing corporate power, the rise of the homeland security complex, and the shift toward much more authoritarian styles of governance utterly obsessed by the global gaze and prestige of media spectacles.

Want to cleanse your city of its poor? Host the Olympics
By Ashok Kumar, Ceasefire, April 12, 2012

As London prepares to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, startlingly little critique has surfaced in the mainstream press. With the exception of the trivial issue of ticket prices, most of the city remains transfixed, internalising the dominant narrative. This process precedes each Olympic games, one that is written and distributed by and for the real Olympic profiteers; a nexus of powerful interests that sees both short and long term gains in each host city.

This highly profitable, publicly subsidised, sporting event always attracts the major, and wannabe major, cities of the world, using any and all methods to entice an unaccountable Olympic committee, each flexing their political muscle to ensure theirs is the next chosen location. The Olympics take billions of pounds, yen, dollars of their host countries’ tax revenue to build magnificent stadiums and housing facilities, militarise the city, trample civil liberties and construct elaborate installations with shelf lives of a few weeks.

London 2012, originally expected to cost £2.4bn, is now projected at £24bn, with contracts going to some of the world’s most egregious employers and global human rights violators. Some on the left have been critical of the massive transfer from public to private at a time of austerity. The London overspend has been portrayed by officials as a one-off, but a glance at the history of the Olympics shows that underestimating the cost is a consistent part of the Olympic experience.

The 1976 Montreal Olympics took over 30 years to pay off the debt it accumulated as a result of its overspend; the 2004 Athens Olympics went almost one thousand percent over budget from €123m (£100m)  to €11.5bn (£9.5bn) in costs significantly contributing to Greece’s deficit, and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics ended up spending six times the original projection of $1bn. In fact, barring the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics – where bottom-up pressure meant zero public dollars were expended on the games, thus securing a $233 million surplus for the city — the Olympic games always exceed their projected expense, saddling cities with years of debt — often paid back through cuts in services, regressive taxes and increased fares.

But the real gains for the rich can be witnessed in the long-term implications, once the crowds have gone home. Contrary to popular belief, the devastation inflicted on the poorest and historically marginalised communities is not simply an adverse side-effect, but goes to the very essence of why cities battle to host the Games.

In recent days attention has been given to London’s policy of ‘cleaning the streets’ of sex workers and other undesirable elements in the lead up to the games. This should come as no surprise to students of history, and if the past two decades are any indication, this is only the beginning of a comprehensive strategy to restructure the character, makeup and politics of the city. Everywhere the Games injects itself, the story remains the same; beginning with the easy targets — sex workers and the homeless — the decision-makers soon move towards driving out ethnic minority and working class residents from their city.

A common tactic is to deny any connection between the policies themselves and the Olympics. As with the sex workers of London, who have been victimised by ten times the levels of raids in the five Olympic boroughs compared to the rest of London, the authorities have repeated the claim that the beefed-up efforts are ‘not related to the Olympics’ but to growing ‘community concern’.

The Olympics have always been utilised as a means to pursue what David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ from visible policies of forced evictions to veiled ones such as gentrification. This violent process is intimately connected to reconfiguring the landscape for capital accumulation and, indeed, is a prime motivation for the very purpose of the Olympics itself.

The Games are not simply hosted to ‘clean up’ the city, but to fundamentally reconfigure it, to ‘cleanse’ it of its poor and undesirable; to not only make way for a city by and for the rich, but to expand the terrain of profitable activity.

Sanitising the City

In order to understand where London is headed it’s important to understand the history of Olympic games and the ways in which they have restructured the economic landscapes of their respective host cities.

In 2007, the UN-funded Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) released a report detailing the effects of the Olympics between 1988 and 2008. It concluded that the Olympic games, having evicted more then two million people in the past twenty years, are one of the top causes of displacement and real-estate inflation in the world.

The research details that the levels of forced displacement have increased in each successive city. The 1988 Seoul games witnessed the eviction of 720,000 people, where it was used by the military dictatorship to turn Seoul from a city maintained by and for its people into a corporate city owned by the privileged. The 2008 Beijing Olympics oversaw the eviction of 1.25 million residents to make way for the games.

Predictably, the report shows that the evictions disproportionally affect the homeless, the poor and ethnic minorities. Beyond forced displacement, the Olympics succeed in longer-term economic displacement of working class areas of host cities. The COHRE report shows that the Olympics significantly accelerate the process of inflating real-estate prices. For instance, in Sydney, host to the 2000 games, rents increased by an astounding 40%, between 1993, the year it was selected, and 1998. Whereas in the same period, neighboring city Melbourne saw only a 10% rise.

The 1996 Atlanta Olympics resulted in the demolishing of 2,000 public housing units – evicting 6,000 residents, in addition to the 30,000 residents who were displaced as a direct result of gentrification brought on by the Olympic ‘development’. Indeed, as if to say that the poor and black of Atlanta had not suffered enough, the city issued over 9,000 arrest citations for the city’s homeless population as part of a concerted ‘clean up’ effort, a kind of ‘two-week face lift’.

At the time, the New York Times reported that the Atlanta urban renewal projects saw ‘virtually every aspect of Atlanta’s civic life transformed’. In the Summerhill neighborhood adjacent to the Olympic stadium, for example, 200 slum houses had been levelled, while “clean, colorful subdivisions have risen in their place”. As one business owner candidly explained, speaking of the poor and homeless “even if it means busing these poor guys to Augusta for three weeks and feeding them, we ought to do it.  It sounds very brutal for me to say it, but they can’t stay here for the Olympics.”

A similar trend is found in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in which the COHRE study found that, in addition to the 2,500 evictions, housing prices rose 139% for sale and 145% for rentals in the period from 1986, the year it was selected to 1993. The same period saw a 76% decrease in public housing availability. In addition, the areas surrounding the Olympic Village site witnessed the displacement of over 90% of its Roma population.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics saw the forced displacement of 1.5 million residents, impacting the poorest rural migrants  living in the city’s outskirts, with watchdog groups claiming that the relocation saw declines in living conditions by as much as 20%.  The 2010 Vancouver Games targeted the homeless, indigenous, and women with eviction notices, criminalising  begging and sleeping outdoors, and introducing a law banning placards, banners or posters that do not ‘celebrate’ the Olympics or ‘create or enhance a festive environment and atmosphere’.

Policies of ‘cleansing’ have already begun in the favelas that encircle the city of Rio de Janeiro. Already 6,000 poor residents have been forcibly evicted at gun-point, as part of the government policy of ‘pacification’ involving over 3,000 military personal invading to ‘take control’ of the slum areas. This has resulted in street battles and the death of more than 30 residents. The Associated Press has shown that in 2010 alone,  170,000 people were facing housing loss due to the double threat of the 2016 Olympics and 2014 World Cup.

The Right To the City

Harvey (2008) sees the right to the city as more than the liberty of individuals to access the resources of the city. It is the collective right to exercise power to shape, transform and remake the process of urbanisation. To Harvey “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”

Some tepid liberals have spoken in hushed tones about the billions bilked from the public purse, and Citizens UK, the country’s largest community organisation, has astonishingly traded the plunder of areas where many of its members reside for a few crumbs to entrench its trademark ‘living wage Olympics’. Few in the mainstream have taken issue with the crises of housing prices and evictions.

Harvey (2008) argues that the development of capitalism is intimately connected to the emergence of cities, which require a concentration and endless search of profitable terrains for capital-surplus product with a cycle of compounded extraction, reinvestment, and expansion, hence “the history of capital accumulation paralleled by the growth path of urbanization under capitalism.”

The border of the London Olympic Park crosses some of the most working class areas in the country, and it is by no coincidence that every Olympic city chooses to situate its site in its poorest neighbourhoods. The targeted areas, such as London’s East End, LA’s South Central or Chicago’s South Side are not only the poorest but also have the highest concentrations of non-white people in each city.

In London’s case the borough of Newham, home of the Olympic Village, is the most ethnically diverse district in the country. In London’s East End, the process of forced evictions began immediately after the bid was announced with the demolishing of Clays Lane Housing Co-op and the eviction of 450 residents. Red Pepper magazine quotes one of the residents at the time, Julian Cheyne, who spoke of how ‘Compulsory purchase is a brutal process and from day one the Clays Lane community was lied to while promises were made and broken without a second thought.’

Short-term evictions and long-term gentrification go hand-in-hand. In some parts of the city, closer to the Olympic site, poor residents are being forced from their homes while beautification ‘development’ and ‘regeneration’ projects in areas as far out as Dalston Junction or Hackney’s Broadway Market have demolished a squatted social centre and theatre, whilst Council-appointed agents sell-off public land to be converted into luxury flats by developer cartels.

As with previous host cities, the displacement of residents is not limited to direct government policy. In some East London boroughs landlords have begun evicting tenants in places where rents are fetching fifteen times their standard rates, flats are now being advertised as “Olympic lets” and imposing hefty “penalty” clauses for tenants who refuse to leave.

Recently campaigners camped out in the Leyton Marshes refused attempts by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) to convert the public space into an Olympic training facility. Indeed, in the past some campaigns against the Games have succeeded in their resistance. A notable example is the broad-based coalition of housing and labor activists of No Games Chicago, largely credited for foiling the city’s attempt to host the 2016 Olympics, even after pleas from Barack and Michelle Obama.

Anti-Olympics organisers in Chicago had been so successful, despite a multi-million dollar barrage of pro-Olympic propaganda to ‘cleanse’ the working-class South Side, that days before the Olympic Committee vote the Chicago Tribune found that a majority of the city opposed the bid and 84% opposed using public money to support the games.

In Rio de Janeiro, the thousands of slum dwellers who have been given eviction notices are refusing to go quietly; instead the poor have long prepared to fight and are now putting up a historic resistance in the courts and the streets. With unions holding strikes in at least eight host cities of the 2014 World Cup, and a nation-wide movement of 25,000 World Cup workers have threatened prolonged strike action. In a New York Times report, a resident, Cenira dos Santos, said of the Games, “the authorities think progress is demolishing our community just as they can host the Olympics for a few weeks, but we’ve shocked them by resisting.”

The story in each city remains almost identical. Once selected, a city expends vast amounts of public resource to begin a program of forced displacement, rental speculation, urban renewal projects, demolition of public housing and gentrification. In fact, if there is one thread that runs through almost every Olympic event it is that the poor of each Games subsidise their own violent dispossession.

As money is pumped in to develop, regenerate and ‘clean’ the city, the ‘community’ is forced to flee, transforming an urban collective identity into an individualised consumer one, defined by a narrow homogenised racial, economic and ethnic suburban ego ideal. This process of gentrification and suburbanisation results in deep political and cultural insulation, alienation and detachment; detachment of families from one another and detachment from the commons.

Detachment shapes the way individuals are exposed to and think about themselves in relation to the world, living a life of separation protected from ‘difference’. Passive acceptance of inequality is now actively espoused. The gentrification of the Olympic host city, the withering away of an urban working class, social atomisation and the subsequent erosion of political consciousness is a planned outgrowth of a city seemingly waiting to be cleansed.

Any reading of Olympic history reveals the true motives of each host city. It is the necessity to shock, to fast track the dispossession of the poor and marginalised as part of the larger machinations of capital accumulation. The architects of this plan need a spectacular show; a hegemonic device to reconfigure the rights, spatial relations and self-determination of the city’s working class, to reconstitute for whom and for what purpose the city exists. Unlike any other event, the Olympics provide just that kind of opportunity.

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The tribunal “ruled that Bush and Blair’s name should be entered in a register of war criminals, urged that they be recognized as such under the Rome Statute, and also petitioned the International Criminal Court “to proceed with binding charges.” Though symbolic, the purpose was hugely important, as a Malaysian lawyer explained at the time, saying, “For these people who have been immune from prosecution, we want to put them on trial in this forum to prove that they committed war crimes.” In other words, as Greenwald stated, “because their own nations refuse to hold them accountable and can use their power to prevent international bodies from doing so, the tribunal wanted at least formal legal recognition of these war crimes to be recorded and the evidence of their guilt assembled.”

Greenwald also noted, “That’s the same reason a separate panel of this tribunal will hold hearings later this year on charges of torture” against senior US officials, and last week this second tribunal convened, hearing from three witnesses — former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, and Abbas Abid and Jameela Abbas, both victims of US torture in Iraq, as well as receiving written submissions from other victims.

On Friday the tribunal duly found George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William J. Haynes II, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo guilty of the crime of torture, noting, as the Malaysian Insider described it, that “they had wilfully participated in the formulation of executive orders and directives to exclude the applicability of international conventions and laws” — namely the UN Convention against Torture (1984), the Geneva Conventions (1949), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Charter — “in relation to the war launched by the US and others in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in March 2003,” and also that, “Additionally, and/or on the basis and in furtherance thereof, the accused authorised, connived in, the commission of acts of torture and cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment against victims in violation of international law, treaties and aforesaid conventions.”

The ruling, like that in November, is not enforceable legally, but, as Yvonne Ridley explained in an article after it was announced, “Transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will be sent to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as to the United Nations and the UN Security Council,” and it will, of course, add to the tarnished legacy that these men wish to avoid.

Ridley also explained that Mahathir bin Mohamad said, after the verdict was announced, “Powerful countries are getting away with murder,” and Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in America, who was part of the prosecution team, said he “was hopeful that Bush and co. could soon find themselves facing similar trials elsewhere in the world,” as Ridley put it. “We tried three times to get Bush in Canada but were thwarted by the Canadian Government, then we scared Bush out of going to Switzerland,” he said. “The Spanish attempt failed because of the government there and the same happened in Germany.” In fact, two cases are still ongoing in Spain, although it is certainly true that the Bush administration pressurised Germany to shut down an investigation, and President Obama did the same with Spain.

Responding to a question about the credibility of the Commission in Malaysia, Boyle “referenced the Nuremberg Charter which was used as the format for the tribunal,” and explained, “Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.” He added that the US “is subject to customary international law and to the Principles of the Nuremberg Charter,” and also stated that the trial “was ‘almost certainly’ being monitored closely by both Pentagon and White House officials.”

In addition, Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, who headed the prosecution, said, “The tribunal was very careful to adhere scrupulously to the regulations drawn up by the Nuremberg courts and the International Criminal Court,” and added that he “was optimistic the tribunal would be followed up elsewhere in the world where ‘countries have a duty to try war criminals,’” citing “the case of the former Chilean dictator Augustine Pinochet who was arrested in Britain to be extradited to Spain on charges of war crimes.”

In order to make sure that people have access to further important information that was revealed in the trial, I’m cross-posting below edited versions of two articles from the deLiberation website about the witnesses’ testimony on the first two days, as written by the journalist Lauren Booth, and originally published here and here.

Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal Day 1
By Lauren Booth, deLiberation, May 8, 2012

I take coffee with three Iraqi university students. They want to know why Palestine “whose dead number in the thousands” is the cause of such global outrage as opposed to Iraq, “where millions are dead and millions displaced.” Their genocide is being ignored, there is no doubt. A man with a beard shakes with emotion as he talks of the murder of thousands of scholars nationwide in Iraq. Another tells me that children for decades have struggled to even have pencils in schools because of the blockade and the subsequent occupation.

Testimony of Abbas Abid, former prisoner in Iraq

The tribunal’s first witness is Abbas Abid. The defence council seeks permission for the witness to appear covered in court and for his image not to appear. We are told this is because he fears the risk of further reprisals and danger back in Iraq. He appears with a Palestinian kaffiyeh wrapped about his face revealing only his eyes.

The witness is a 48-year old man, married from Fallujah with five children born before his arrest. He was the former chief engineer at the Science and Technology Ministry in Baghdad.

First detained on August 28, 2005, he was removed violently from his house and afterwards transferred to a nearby base where he was detained for four weeks in the then-secret prison known as Al-Jadriya. In Baghdad there were five shelters against nuclear attack. One of these was changed into the secret prison named above.

The Iraqi National Guard and US troops launched a raid on his uncle’s home with four American Humvees and 12 trucks of Iraqi soldiers. More than 15 Iraqi soldiers stormed the house in a “terrifying manner,” smashing down doors and using sound bombs. They screamed and terrorised those inside the home — his brother’s family. His nephews came to his family’s home crying for help. His brother was absent at the time so he was called to help them. He said he was ready to answer any questions and was entirely cooperative. They said, “Why so many Holy books — there are too many holy books! I told them, everyone in the family has their own Quran.” The soldiers examined some articles from the internet on the situation in Iraq. He was told to follow them for questioning. He was taken to the Al-Muthanna Brigade headquarters for questioning. They beat him up demanding to know the names of “terrorists” in his neighborhood.

“They even electrocuted me,” he said. He was cuffed with his hands behind him. A cord with a positive and negative charge was attached to his hands and then attached to a power supply. He stood up to show us his hands behind him. The wire cable had a current in it immediately and he felt the shocks straight away. The place he was in was “new” and not a “professional place for torturing” so they had amateur tools which they used at this time.

“What was the effect of the electrocution?” he was asked. “I would turn into a dancer,” he said to nervous laughter around the court. “You cannot react and your senses stop and you just shake, dancing.” This was done more than three times and he was then threatened with being shot. The US soldiers would use an AK-47 and reload it with his eyes covered, then shoot near his ears saying the next shot would be to his head if he didn’t cooperate. He knew it was an AK-47 as it is a popular gun in Iraq.

He saw Americans in uniform. The eye cover had a small space at the bottom and he could tell from the lower attire of the US military uniform. Plus their voices and accents were American. After the torture was finished he would see that the soldiers involved were indeed American. They tortured some of his cousins to get testimony against him. With seven other detainees he was moved to Al-Jadriya. He was again tortured using a wide range of methods:

• Electric shocks to his body especially the penis:
• Hitting with tools, pipes;
• Forced to drink water mixed with diuretics then having his penis tied to prevent urination;
• Hung to the wall with weights hanging from his penis;
• Threats of sexual assault and abuse to his sexual organs;
• Shooting live rounds around his body.

During the investigation period he was not given food and only drink with diuretics as above. They also pulled out his finger nails -– the audience gasped at this point — using pliers. More gasps. He was hung with his hands behind his back until his shoulders dislocated. Detainees were forced to have sex with each other. Solid objects were forced into the rectum of detainees. There was forced standing for hours. He was beaten on every part of his body — his genitals were assaulted. Detainees were used as “ash trays” by the torturers.

In a 6×6′ room he was with 30 detainees for three days. This room was a temporary room after torture, where detainees were brought in unconscious. Piles of bodies would lay there. He was wakened from time to time and would then faint again.

A bag was put over his head for two months and only removed when food was given. Some detainees would have a bag on their head for more than five months. All the time in the prison detainees had bags on their heads from the minute they arrived to the moment they left.

The room he was kept in was so overcrowded no one could sleep lying down and all had injuries. He said, “Everyone had to urinate in plastic bottles by the door. Visits to the toilet were permitted only once every four days. This was timed at one minute per person. At all other times we had to discharge our waste into plastic bags by the door. These would be trodden on or tip over and spill waste all over the floor. The bags were only emptied every four days.”

No medical care was available at all and men died from their injuries. He listed the names of almost a dozen men who died from their injuries in the eight weeks he was there.

Water was withheld. A liter per detainee every three days was the ration. Sometimes the detainees’ thirst would become so bad that they would drink from the urine bottles. He confirms that US troops not only knew about the torture facilities but that they visited them all the time.

On release he was charged ten thousand US dollars by the authorities. He was released with three other detainees. On release two cars followed him — one a BMW with darkened windows. He evaded them. He later found out that the other two released at the same time were killed and their families forced to pay huge amounts of money in order to reclaim the bodies.

He stayed just one hour in his house with his family before moving to another house and then leaving his country. He is now back in Fallujah.

He said, “My suffering was a test from Allah which I endured with patience. I am now unable to have children. I have nightmares all the time … Terrible dreams of someone coming to catch me, torture me or hurt my family. My family have similar nightmares of soldiers coming to torture me.”

When he married he wished to have 15 children. And according to the plan, his wife would conceive every two years — that is, until the time he was detained. He was happy to be released and he was overwhelmed by the joy of his loved ones but the worst thing, that happened — the thing that took all his joy since — is the fact that he left his wife pregnant at the time of his capture, but, as a result of the trauma of his capture, she miscarried twins. After going back to his life he realized his dream of a large family was shattered. He cannot have further children due to his injuries. He gave this testimony to the world so that those who act cruelly must be brought to justice. [...]

Testimony of Moazzam Begg, former Guantánamo Bay detainee

Moazzam Begg, the director of the human rights organisation Cageprisoners, and a 41-year old British citizen, said that he “wants to put on record his torture in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.”

In 2001, he went to build a school for girls in Afghanistan. When the region became dangerous due to the American invasion, he was evacuated, with his family, to Islamabad, Pakistan. On January 31, 2002, he was arrested in this house. He was questioned about his presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was held for three weeks then handed over to the Americans. The minute he was handed over he was shackled and thrown to the ground. He was reverse shackled and carried into a plane. He was punched and kicked throughout the journey, and a knife was put to his throat. Photos were taken of him in his hood.

On arrival he was punched and kicked. Cold steel ripped off his clothes. Photos were taken of him without clothes. Dogs were brought in and he was racially and religiously mocked and abused.

He was flown to Kandahar in Afghanistan where he was asked when was the last time he saw Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden. He was taken to a tent. On the way to interrogations barking dogs were brought to “bark in my face.” Once, he said, “I was asked to write my entire life story and then the entire thing was torn up.”

He was moved to Bagram. No one held there was allowed to walk, talk or move. He used to see the taxi driver Dilawar from his cell. The man was shackled to the sides of his cell. He saw him slumped at one time and instead of the soldiers administering medical aid they came in and kicked and punched him. He later found out that the man had died. The award-winning documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side” focuses on this murder of an Afghani civilian detainee held by the US troops.

Moazzam was threatened with being sent to Egypt on several occasions. In Egypt, he learnt later, a man named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, captured in Afghanistan, was waterboarded and then gave false testimony that al-Qaeda had worked with Saddam Hussein on securing chemical and biological weapons. This testimony was then used to make the case for war by Colin Powell and others.

An American soldier told him he could be sent to Egypt or Syria. This, Begg said, proves “an intelligence link between the US and Syrian leaderships.”

“Did British intelligence play a part?” he was asked. “Yes,” he said, “an immense role. I was intensely interrogated for a month in solitary confinement by the CIA, FBI, US military intelligence and also by British intelligence. For the first time the British police are examining the British government for complicity in torture … inquiries have been ordered by the British Prime Minister into cases of torture.” [although the latter inquiry -- into British complicity in torture abroad after 9/11 -- has essentially been called off after NGOs boycotted it].

During his incarceration Moazzam Begg wrote letters via the Red Cross to his wife and never got replies. At one point photos were brought in of his wife and children. A woman was heard screaming terribly nearby and profanities were being yelled at her. He believed his wife was being tortured as a result of this.  It was a ruse.

Speaking about conditions in Bagram, he said there was no tea, no fruit and no fresh food. Each cell was communal with ten prisoners with a bucket for a toilet. The stench was disgusting. Showers were communal and humiliating. Women prisoners were present during the showers and “trophy” photos were taken. He was shackled in a “three-piece suit” — shackles connecting the arms and legs to the neck and waist.

On the flight to Guantánamo Bay, with ear muffs over his ears and goggles on his eyes, which were so tight as to be agony, he begged for a sedative and was given one. He arrived in Guantánamo Bay groggy as a result.

He spent 20 months in Guantánamo Bay. He was designated a “high-risk detainee.” A document — a confession — was produced for him to sign. He was warned that failure to sign could lead to execution, or he would spend decades in Gitmo. He was in a state of constant anxiety. He continued, “The  female psychiatrist I was sent to told me a way to commit suicide using my trousers.” Drugs were given to aid sleep after which he would suffer hallucinations.

“I never knew what my crime was to this day,” he said, adding, “The absence of due process became worse than the actual detention. I never imagined the United States to be a country that would behave in this manner.” When he heard US accents after being held by the Pakistanis at first he felt relief — “at last the good guys are here. That quickly changed.”

His testimony continued, “Nine people have died in Guantánamo,” he said [actually eight]. “Children are in Guantánamo who have grown into adults there. The US — Bush and his cohorts — have not accepted responsibility for anything … it was said of us that we were the ‘worst of the worst’ if so, then why have some 600 of us been released? There is no rule of law in the US. We still carry the stigma of being Guantánamo Bay inmates to this day … until someone is charged and prosecuted for this it is very hard to remove this from over our heads.”

The court was told that “Guantánamo is the tip of the iceberg. You can go through secret prisons that make Guantánamo look relatively tame.”

Under examination Moazzam Begg described having some conversations and relationships with US soldiers at Gitmo, and was asked, would he visit the US now?

He was invited recently, he said. He was asked to visit the family of a 14-year old boy who is now 24 and remains in Gitmo [Omar Khadr, actually 15 years old when seized, and now 25 -- a Canadian citizen]. When the boy arrived at Gitmo he had a bullet wound. Moazzam knew him. However, when he arrived in Canada to meet the boy’s family, he was taken off the plane by police for being a “former Guantánamo Bay inmate.”

The defence asked, “Are you a member of al-Qaeda?” Moazzam answered that he has never been a member nor ever will be and that the fact the British government has made an out of court settlement with him should be enough proof of this.

What of the school that Moazzam had gone to Afghanistan to help build? It was “hit by a cruise missile — it was lucky no child was killed.”

The defence asked about Moazzam’s book stall in the UK in the years before his detention. Was it a religious book stall? In 2001 there was a raid on this shop and items were taken away under the UK terrorism act, he said. The items were returned. He believes this was the process that was begun by UK intelligence and allowed the US to keep him imprisoned.

Moazzam said, “I have never been to America but America has been to me … I have never hurt an American but America has hurt me.”

He didn’t meet his son until he was three years old. There are, he said, “ways of asking, processes. What you can’t or shouldn’t do is take people to a place where the law doesn’t apply like Guantánamo Bay. Even iguanas are protected on the base but no one in orange jumpsuits has any rights there.”

He was asked if he was raped in Guantánamo Bay. Uncomfortably, he said, “things were placed where they shouldn’t be.” Asked if he thought the conditions had improved over time, he quoted Malcolm X: “You don’t take a knife and put it in a man’s back nine inches deep — withdraw it two inches and say things are better.”

The US propaganda — outlined so well in [former Guantánamo chaplain] James Yee’s book [For God and Country] — that “some prisoners put on weight” in Gitmo was brought up, as was the laughable sop that religious freedoms were respected. In Gitmo Moazzam did not know when Ramadan was, when Eid was, when the prayer times were at first.

Asked about books and TV, he said, “No TV. There were some books, usually English classics — Charles Dickens.” Under examination, he admitted to reading Harry Potter in Guantánamo Bay. Which ones? The first five. To laughter, and with a slight smile, he said, “These are some of the worst admissions I have had to make.”

He also said, “Am I angry? If anyone wasn’t angry there would be something wrong with them.” Recently he met with part of the Task Force for Detainee Rights. He used his time to talk to them. He has invited Americans who served at Gitmo to his home.

‘These Americans — some of whom kept me from my children — are now in my home playing with them. My thoughts are that I am ready to forgive any American who asks for forgiveness. I am not at liberty to forgive for anyone else who is still suffering at their hands.”

He was asked if he can “understand” the thought process that could have brought someone to close an eye to torture. The fear?

“I have met many people I would consider torturers in my life,” he said. “One was called the King of Torture and the Monster. He was responsible for the interrogation of many prisoners, one of whom said he tried to rape him. In Abu Ghraib he was present at the abuse of females. In 2007 or 2008, I received a call from my lawyers asking whether I would be a character witness to him in the case regarding female prisoners.” He said that Damien Corsetti, the US soldier called the Monster, said to him, “Please forgive me. What I had become in Bagram was as a result of the propaganda I had been fed by my country and my leaders.” Corsetti realized what he had done and suffered a series of nervous breakdowns as a result.

Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal Day 2
By Lauren Booth, deLiberation, May 8, 2012

The tribunal took evidence from Jameela Abbas from Iraq, who is 57 years old. The former chief of the corporation of unions in Kirkuk, she is now based in Damascus, Syria. She was held at airport detention centre and then Abu Ghraib, and this is a partial transcript of her testimony to the tribunal.

Testimony of Jameela Abbas, former prisoner in Iraq

January 13, 2004: In the early hours, the US military broke into her house with force in Kirkuk. The Americans rounded up the whole family including her 22-year old daughter, her son, 17, her nephew, 25, a female guest aged 23, and herself. She was accused of providing monetary assistance to the resistance and they wanted the money. They searched the house and found only 150 dinars for family expenses. They tied her hands behind her with wires very tightly. They dragged her by her hair into the garden in the rain. She was in her nightclothes. It was winter. They destroyed everything in the house — all the belongings including all electrical appliances. They searched the family car, found a car battery charger and accused her of using it to make bombs, then sprayed the car with bullets rendering it useless. Her head was covered with a hood. She felt she could not breathe, that she would suffocate.

She was pushed into a Hummer vehicle where she was “kicked like an animal” by the US soldiers. After twenty minutes in the vehicle she was shoved onto the road,  then dragged along the paved road onto a cement floor. She was shoeless and in her nightclothes. She was in a hood all this time. When the hood was removed she was in a cement room with a window in the roof. She was asked her name and date of birth by a US soldier and she requested to have her hands untied as she was in pain. This was refused and she was kept with her hands tied standing in a corner of the room. She realised she was in Kirkuk military airport at that time. The hood was returned to her head and she was dragged to another room. The hood was removed and an American in civilian clothes was there along with an Arab man, a translator. She was sat in a chair. She requested her hands again be untied. Then she was told that if she continued to ask for this she would be slapped and thrown on the floor. The American then asked personal questions and asked about her relationship to the Ba’ath party. She was accused again of being a part of the resistance and of funding the resistance.

She told them that she was not, and that nothing was found in her home. The Arab man then slapped her hard across the face. He said, “This is just the beginning if you do not cooperate. You will face worse things than anyone has ever heard about.” She was very concerned for her daughter and her young female guest. She was refused water and the use of the toilet. Three days later, on January 16, the hood was again put on her head and she was dragged into the open air from her cell. It was very windy and the hood flew off and she saw the rest of her family. She became emotional because she felt that all that they were enduring was because of her. Her family tried to comfort her. The Iraqi interpreter was there. She said, “Look on me as if I am your mother. Care about this young female here and please contact her family.”

Then two helicopters came with American soldiers. Her son and nephew went with her in one, and the girls in another. The helicopter’s windows were open, despite the winter cold. She asked for the doors to be closed. The soldiers refused, citing the potential for an attack by the resistance even though, if shots were fired, it would have been her who would have been killed and not them. She said that “they were afraid of the resistance.” They were taken far away. She saw US soldiers who expressed surprise to see her shoeless and in only her nightclothes. She met her daughter and the female guest at the same place. The three were placed in a cell together and their hands untied. She had not been fed for two days nor had she been allowed to use the toilet at all. Her hands were tied again and she was asked more questions. She was taken to a wooden cell 2x2m with no facilities. She was tied again and taken for a full body search by a female soldier. This was at Baghdad airport facility. She had not been fed. She was not allowed to sit. She was dizzy and was asked again and again who were her comrades in the resistance and was accused of being in the resistance. Then one of the interrogators took her to see something she had never seen before. Details were spared for the witness here so she did not have to relive them.

She was taken to a room hung with two pictures of Saddam Hussein. They grabbed her hair, dragged her by the hair and threw her from one wall to the other continuously, many times. She lost consciousness many times. When she regained consciousness she was aware of blaring music. Inside the room was a radio. She was dragged to another cell and dropped. She was exhausted. An American soldier came but she could not stand for long so she leaned or tried to sit. Each time she did so she was hit with a stick. A bag containing food she did not recognize and water was thrown at her. In the night she heard music, dancing and shouting. Then her cell was opened and a large dog was brought in which barked at her and frightened her. After a while the cell door was closed but while it was open she realized the same thing was being done to all the other inmates too.

The second day in that prison, a hood was put on her head, and she was subjected to questioning. She was told again “confess!” If not, they said they would throw her son in prison and rape her daughter. She begged them, saying she did nothing with the resistance and that she would swear on the Quran or the Bible.

Icy water was poured on her and she was forced to crawl from one side of the wall to the other again and again. Then they hit her with a plastic tube with wood inside. When she fell to the floor they kicked her. She began bleeding, from the shoulders, arms and legs. This continued for many hours. She was taken to the cell, told to stand straight and beaten if she leaned. Her bleeding wounds were not tended. The translator came and asked for her to be allowed to rest but was told by the Americans that this was her punishment.

Back in the cell her hands were tied, she was dragged by an Afro-American female soldier and sobbed, “Allah take me.” Somehow her hands became free and she lashed out at the soldier and she was smashed against the wall in anger by her. She was then left without interrogation for two days.

On the third day she was taken again and hooded. When it was removed she saw her daughter. Her hair had been cut short. She was told to confess. Her daughter was a university student — she felt she should not go through this. She became ready to confess to anything just to end the suffering of her daughter.

She added, “I was feeling guilty that I was the reason my daughter was there.” But her daughter said strongly, “Iraq is for us all not just for you.” So she decided not to sign anything the Americans asked her to. She was hooded and then a shot was fired and she was told, “We have killed your daughter.” They told the daughter that she had been killed. At this point she “lost her mind” and began to shout. In this condition she was taken back to her cell. Later in the day she was taken to a hamam and she saw her daughter to her great relief.

Next she was taken to a black room and there was her nephew before her completely naked. She was in only her underwear. They said, “We will beat you until you confess.” Then they beat and kicked them both. Loud sounds were being played. They were beaten with plastic chairs to the degree that part of the plastic chairs they used became imbedded in her feet. This went on for hours. Then they brought a machine and said this would be used to harm her, and that she would have her head chopped by this machine. Her nephew, who was naked, was beaten in his privates. The interpreter later told her her daughter had been released. This was a lie. They had released the female guest, but not her daughter.

She was taken in a helicopter and she asked for medical assistance for the part of the chair embedded in her foot, but this was refused. She was taken back to Kirkuk and taken to a house where she was chained hand and feet.

Next day, after the first real food she took a piece of bread, but the interrogator took it back and asked again about the resistance fighters. She was slapped and her hands re-tied and she was put into a pick-up truck and taken to a large house converted into a prison. There were friends and colleagues inside who recognized her and threw her some food by hurling it into her cell.

After three days she was taken back to Baghdad airport prison. She was told her son and nephew had been released but again this was a lie. She was getting a fever from an infection due to the piece of chair embedded in her feet. The next day surgery was performed — without anaesthetic. The plastic was surgically removed from her foot, which was very painful.

Two days later she was taken to Abu Ghraib by truck. She was given a wristband and a number which was to be her name — 157574. She no longer had a name. A hood was again placed on her head. She was examined by a doctor who said she had serious injuries. The interrogator dismissed this and refused treatment. Back in the cell medicine was given just once and no follow-up medicine. The cell was 2x2m. In front of the cell was a bath where men were tortured with cold showers and threatened with dogs. She was barefoot from the day she was taken and without proper clothing. She was told to cooperate and then she would be released. It was winter and at around 10 pm every night cold water was poured into her cell which made it very cold and damp. This cold irritated her injuries.

Jameela Abbas was in Abu Ghraib for six months and approximately 20 days in Kirkuk and Baghdad airport.

One day, after the conditions in Abu Ghraib were revealed to the world, the press were allowed in. The prisoners shouted and the press were surprised to hear women’s voices, as the US military had said no women were held there. There were around 120 members of the press on that visit. Before that time they had visited the head of the prison and told there were no women or children in the prison. At the same time the women were being beaten elsewhere. “We called it ‘the scream of Abu Ghraib.’ We were about five women there in fact,” Jameela Abbas said.

For alerting the press to their existence in Abu Ghraib the women were denied proper sustenance. Abu Ghraib had a department for complaints called the CID. She lodged a complaint there about ill-treatment and her situation. Unknown to her, her sister had also complained about her detention. Afterwards a US committee visited and she made her statement to them. They acknowledged her as a war victim.

About one month later she was released on June 22, 2004. She produced an exhibit of her release letter from Abu Ghraib and from the ICRC confirming her detention. She was released without charge. She made it clear that her statement was just a small part of the suffering she endured and witnessed.

Her daughter stayed about 35 days, as well as the female guests. The nephew stayed about six months despite having no relation with any resistance at all. What hurt her most was to see the children in Abu Ghraib, some twenty-five of them aged from 5 to 12. “What could they have done?” she asked Some of the children stayed for a year and half. She heard some of them killed themselves. “What you hear and see from the media is just a drop in the ocean to what went on in Abu Ghraib. My cell was in front of the interrogation cell. I never imagined anything like this in my life — not in horror movies,” she said. “They actually have no conscience. They are not human, they have no humanity inside them.” She became emotional and raised her voice.

“All the time in Abu Ghraib I wore the same clothes with no shoes. They were trying to negotiate — get me to confess for food and shoes. I refused because I knew nothing. There was no real interrogation about me as such, just questions generally about Iraq and the people. The accusations were made to everyone the same things — you are against the soldiers, you are resistance.” She implied that there was no intelligence about her, that it was a general round-up of civilians — innocent or not — who cared? “I asked why my name came up to one soldier. She said, ‘We are using you to scare the women of Kirkuk and beyond.’” She added that women of influence were rounded up and tortured to terrorize others.

She also said, “I asked the same soldier if she felt what she was doing was wrong — destroying my house, my family. As a single mother whose husband had died I had responsibility for the home and children.”

Even on her release she was told by a US general, “If you stay in Iraq we will arrest you again.” Later on she heard there was a second letter of arrest issued for her. So she left for Syria. Her friend who was with her in the prison was rearrested and spent another two months there.

To this day Jameela Abbas cannot return to her country, and to this day she endures physical suffering as a result of the beatings she received and the conditions she was kept under by the US army. She cannot move her left leg freely, and it cannot support her. Her left arm is affected and does not work properly. She suffers continual aches in her limbs. She still cannot wear shoes that cover her feet due to the injuries. She must wear only surgical/open shoes. She cannot endure cold or air conditioning. The injuries to her lower back need further treatment which she cannot afford.

Jameela Abbas is just one of thousands, tens of thousands, who have suffered as war victims. She has, she says, seen so much suffering at the hands of the American forces. Women have suffered in Iraq terribly. Many have been raped. The female soldiers that tortured her beat her especially in the neck and the back continuously. They used some tools to do this. It was the same for all prisoners.

The prosecutor Francis Boyle drew attention to the use of Jameela and her family as “human shields” in the Apache helicopter incident. This is illegal under the Geneva Convention. He added that it was “a cowardly despicable act.”

He raised the point too that for two months Mrs. Abbas was not registered with the ICRC. He stated that it was common practise in Iraq not to register civilians with the ICRC, “the better to allow them to be tortured, murdered or disappeared,” also known as “keeping them off the books.”

“This woman was a victim of torture and her treatment was a crime against humanity,” Francis Boyle said, and asked the judges to take this into account.

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Writing about this in the Guardian last August, John Harris noted that workfare’s origins were in Labour’s “Flexible New Deal,” and that “one of the central ideas of Iain Duncan Smith’s Work Programme is ‘mandatory work activity‘: up to 30 weekly hours of faux-employment spread over 28 days, during which people have to do work ‘of benefit to the community’ in return for their jobseeker’s allowance of £67.50 a week [and just £53.45 a week for those aged between 18 and 24]. If they decline the offer of “experience” … or fail to make a go of it, their benefit can be stopped — for a minimum of three months, and six months if the transgression is repeated.”

However, although a campaigning website, Boycott Workfare, was established in 2010 to publicise the Workfare scandal, and the story resurfaced in January this year, when an enterprising young woman named Cait Reilly “launched judicial review proceedings in the high court,” as “a challenge to regulations that require up to 50,000 jobseekers to carry out unpaid work at major corporations,” it was not until February this year that the story unexpectedly broke into the mainstream, when a Tesco job advert in East Anglia — for night shift workers to be paid “JSA plus expenses” — was publicised and went viral, that public opinion swung in favour of those being exploited.

A huge number of well-known companies — and even charities — were involved in the workfare scam. When the Tesco scandal broke, the Guardian noted that they included the Arcadia group (including Topshop and Burton), Argos, Asda, Boots, Poundland and TK Maxx, and that Sainsbury’s and Waterstones had apparently ended their involvement beforehand.

As a result of the widespread public indignation — the only way that dreadful political decisions can be rolled back, it seems — the government climbed down. On February 29, the Guardian reported:

Companies and charities — now sensitised to the power of Facebook and Twitter — were not slow to pick up the enormous groundswell of anger and incredulity that such famous brands could be involved in something popularly regarded as blatantly unfair and exploitative … Employers had decided the punitive aspects of the work experience scheme were a reputational hazard. Few were averse to the principle or spirit of work experience; but none, especially the charities, could in the end live with the idea that a young person is compelled to carry through with an unpaid “voluntary” placement of up to eight weeks or face a sanction – the removal of two weeks’ unemployment benefit. That scale of loss, the children’s charity Barnardo’s said, would tip youngsters on the edge of poverty into destitution.

When ministers and representatives of the high street stores and charities met, the employers apparently had to make it clear that “dropping sanctions was the price of employers’ continued support for the entire scheme.” The Guardian noted suggestions that “the government may have been taken aback by their implacability,” and that Chris Grayling, the employment minister, “realised he had no choice but to acquiesce to their demands.”

Ministers tried to argue that sanctions were “relatively rare,” but, as the Guardian noted, it was “a presentational disaster for the government, which has struggled pitifully to convince the public that its work experience scheme for youngsters is either voluntary or reasonable.”

Unfortunately, the battle against workfare has not been won, even though, as Boycott Workfare explained, the following companies and organisations have now said they “will no longer take part in workfare”: TK Maxx, Sainsbury’s, Waterstones, Shelter, Marie Curie, 99p stores, Maplin, Oxfam, Mind, BHS, Burger King (“although they have only mentioned one of the five workfare schemes”), HMV and Boots. Four others — Scope, Matalan, Argos and Superdrug — “have suspended their involvement,” although Boycott Workfare noted that they “look forward to them confirming that they will stop involvement in any of the government’s workfare schemes.”

Boycott Workfare added crucially that Poundland said they would “pull out of the Work Programme but remain in the Work Experience Scheme,” and Tesco “are “still involved in the scheme.” In addition, Pizza Hut said they “have the scheme under review,” and Age UK are “investigating.” Boycott Workfare’s page on Workfare providers also includes dozens more companies who are, or have been involved.

However, as the Guardian also explained, the government’s climbdown was “a relatively minor concession” in the context of the government’s welfare-to-work strategy,” with ministers still believing that “sanctions are an essential tool to persuade claimants to take work experience and job placements seriously,” and punishments continuing to operate in “the other two government-run work experience schemes, and through the work programme, most notoriously for disabled and chronically sick people on employment support allowance.” See here for details of the five different workfare schemes.

Workfare and the NHS

Last week, on his website The Green Benches, Dr. Éoin Clarke broke some disturbing news that tied in the workfare debacle with the effects of the NHS privatisation that was passed by Parliament seven weeks ago. In the article, “Workfare comes to the NHS as unpaid workers take the place of NHS staff,” Dr. Clarke explained that “Jobcentre Plus & Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Hospitals Trust have teamed up to place unpaid unemployed workers in their hospitals,” and added, “After a day’s assessment and induction at Sandwell College, the untrained and inexperienced personnel are placed in the hospital for period of up to 8 weeks unpaid. During this time they provide refreshments to patients and transport medicines.”

He added:

The participants for the most part enjoyed the experience and in fact 33% of those placed actually secured jobs as a result. This however is besides the point. Freezing the recruitment of staff & replacing them with untrained staff is a deliberate downgrading & de-skilling of the workforce. This is so they can ultimately pay staff less as the jobs the staffs are being eventually placed in are simply “healthcare assistants”.

No one for one moment thinks that there will not be a gradual encroachment into the duties currently performed by nurses & auxiliaries, and that through time these unpaid staff members, or even those eventually gaining employment as health care assistants will become quasi-nurses. That the head of nurse recruitment was placed in charge of the work programme placements epitomises the future intentions of these workers to take on the role of nurses. In addition, nurses are trained professionals and their roles cannot simply be replicated by a few hours training at Sandwell College.

The most worrying aspect of this trial was that a) it was a “pilot” which means it will most likely be rolled out nationwide and that b) As far as media exercises go it was exceptionally choreographed & packaged in a way to paint the initiative in the best possible light. Details were only released after the pilot was completed. Plans are now afoot to step up the programme.

This is a fair assessment. I rang the Trust, and was directed to the press release, which was on the front page of the Trust’s website, under the heading, “Hospital trust helps jobseekers get back to work.” In the press release, it was noted that the pilot scheme involved six jobseekers, and that their tasks “included making hot and cold drinks for patients and helping to feed them if necessary, as well as collecting medication from the hospital pharmacy to give nurses more time on the wards.” They were identified as “ward service assistants,” recognisable by “the red T-shirts they wore,” and they “spent eight weeks helping out on the wards.”

As Dr. Clarke noted, those who had taken part were very enthusiastic indeed, and one said, “I know that after doing this I never want to do anything else ever.” Nevertheless, the doubts expressed by Dr. Clarke are valid, because the NHS is having to cope with the pressures of huge budget cuts, as well as additional cost of implementing the “top-down reorganisation” in the Health and Social Care Act, all of which will stretch resources to their limit. This is in spite of the fact that those involved in establishing the scheme  — the Medical Division at the Trust, including the Assistant Director of Nursing and the Head of Nursing — see it in nothing but a positive light, with Linda Pascall, the Assistant Director of Nursing, saying, “We have really appreciated the support the ward service assistants have given to the wards. Their positive attitude has made this venture a success and we hope to be able to continue to work with our Jobcentre Plus partners to offer this scheme which has proven to have genuine benefits for our local community.”

In response to Dr, Clarke’s article, one of his readers, Jennie Kermode, made some important points about those being taken on in a scheme that, as Clarke noted, is clearly intended to continue. “There are all sorts of safety issues here,” she wrote. “Medical matters aside, were all these people CRB-checked? Did they have adequate diversity training, especially in relation to disability? Did they have the health and safety training necessary to enable them to do things like lifting without injuring themselves? Were they given a proper understanding of patient confidentiality issues?”

I picked up on this story because of its importance, and, as Dr. Clarke also noted, because “not a single newspaper in this so-called representative democracy has bothered to report this even though the NHS issued a press release after the scheme had concluded.” I join a number of independent journalists in trying to correct this silence on the part of the mainstream media, and welcome any further news from anyone who knows more.

Note: Also see this new post about workfare on The Green Benches, and check out the campaigning website False Economy. Also, please note that the image at the top of this article was originally published on The Void, where a recent article about workfare described how charities are continuing to dissociate themselves from the government’s cruelty and arrogance, as personified — in this case — in the form of the increasingly unpleasant employment minister Chris Grayling.

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

With a mobile sound system pumping out pounding militant dub music, there was, for a while, an energy surge that reminded me of the spirit of creative dissent that was such a feature of Britain when I was younger — in the free festivals of the 1970s, the class war of the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher took on the miners, the travellers and the printers, and the late 80s and early 90s, when the free party movement and the road protest movement emerged, and when, most resonantly in an urban context, the theatrical activists of “Reclaim the Streets” started a global movement of occupying high streets in cities around the world.

In the late 90s, until the universal distraction of the “war on terror” conveniently took over, allowing Western governments to clamp down more heavily on the civil liberties of their citizens than ever before, the anti-globalisation movement brought together all the elements of the dissenters from the 60s onwards — anti-capitalism, environmental activism, social liberalism, all driven by utopian, revolutionary and anarchist impulses — which are largely reconfigured in the current movement for global change.

Noticeably, however, a crucial new addition is the wreckage of the global economy in the wake of the economic crash of 2008, a disaster created by the banks and their lackeys in government, and a crime so monstrous and so huge that many people — additionally distracted by the wholesale greed and materialism and self-absorption of the last 15 years in particular — are unable to grasp its scale and significance. This is in spite of the fact that the rich continue to accrue monstrous wealth, and that governments, with a straight face, dare to punish ordinary citizens from almost all walks of life — but especially the poor, the young, the unemployed and the disabled — with crushing, grinding austerity that could be avoided if the rich were made to pay their share, the real criminals were punished, and the vast, dubious debts and losses which have begun to cripple countries in Europe — particularly Greece and Spain, at present — were all written off and the financial sector was actually regulated.

The solidarity that I glimpsed yesterday in London, and that unites protestors worldwide, is something that the Occupy movement has had since its beginnings in Zuccotti Park in New York, where Occupy Wall Street started last September, and it is clearly not something that has been crushed by the sometimes violent eviction of the Occupy camps in numerous US cities at the end of last year, and the eviction of Occupy London outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, in February this year.

The Occupy movement was profoundly influenced by the revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East last year, and particularly the huge crowds that gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last January and February — and which have regularly returned, despite the ongoing brutality of the military council (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces), which held onto power after Hosni Mubarak was deposed, and whose instincts are at odds with the pressure for real democratic change.

In turn, the protestors in the Middle East inspired the indignados of Spain, another profound influence on the Occupy movement, and the protest in London yesterday — and another planned for Tuesday outside the British Bankers’ Association in the City of London — was part of a global day of action, or, more accurately, four days of action from May 12 to 15, to mark the first anniversary of the indignados‘ occupation of public spaces throughout Spain, including a massive encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square, where tens of thousands of Spanish citizens camped out last May, and where, yesterday, similar numbers turned out again, to occupy the square, while protests also took place in dozens of other cities across Spain.

In Spain, in particular, the protestors are demanding practical solutions to their version of the economic crisis, which has only become worse in the last few months, through a savage austerity program imposed by the new government, even though austerity can only make worse an already catastrophic economic situation, in which 1 in 4 are unemployed and youth unemployment stands at 50 percent. This is a disaster that only economic stimulation — probably, as in Greece, through leaving the Euro and allowing Spain to have power over its own currency, letting it devalue and become competitive again — will achieve, along with a wiping out of illegal debts accrued during the global and pan-European orgy of predatory or reckless lending over the last decade.

This “Global Spring” — which involved other protests throughout Europe, and in Russia, South America and the US, including Chicago, where a People’s Summit has been taking place this weekend, to prepare for a NATO Summit attended by the G8 leaders on May 20 and 21 — was planned and coordinated by the indignados and by activists worldwide involved with the Occupy movement and Take the Square, and other groups in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and I recommend anyone interested in how the movement is developing to read the “Global May Manifesto” that was issued last week, after four months of input from activists all round the world.

Yesterday, I posted photos from outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, and below (and above) are photos that I took at Holborn Circus and outside the Bank of England. I’m happy for readers to use them, although if you do, please credit me, and provide a link to this website.

Campaigners at Holborn Circus during the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Police reinforcements arrive at Holborn Circus during the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Campaigners arrive at the Royal Exchange, opposite the Bank of England, during the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Campaigners, watched by police, at the Royal Exchange, opposite the Bank of England, during the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

The police watch campaigners at the Royal Exchange, opposite the Bank of England, during the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Campaigners at the Royal Exchange, opposite the Bank of England, during the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral shortly after the advertised 1 o’clock start, to find St. Paul’s Churchyard, which was occupied from October 15 until its eviction on February 28, thronged with Socialists, utopians, dreamers, idealists, visionaries and anarchists — from the UK and from across Europe and around the world — filling the square, as speakers addressed the world’s ills, and the need for fundamental systemic change.

Some have argued that the Occupy movement has posed questions but has proposed few answers about how to effect change, but I think that rather misses the point. An unwillingness to be co-opted by the political mainstream, and an effort to make communal decisions, rather than trusting to charismatic leaders, was a bold and sensible way to begin, and, as has been revealed in the last few days, the “Global May Manifesto,” a work-in-progress produced over the last four months by activists from all round the world  looks, as I noted yesterday, like a first attempt to create a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the times we find ourselves in — not the post-World War II community of idealists concerned to make sure that genocide and torture were outlawed (although that, sadly, still remains horribly relevant), but the 99 percent and the indignados faced with governments that serve only the interests of the very rich, whose criminal plunder is essentially unchecked.

Below are photos that I took yesterday outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, and I also took the photo above. I’m happy for readers to use them, although if you do, please credit me, and provide a link to this website. Later I’ll post photos from outside the Bank of England, where the protest moved afterwards, via Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, RBS, Santander and Deloitte, on a tour of the headquarters of corporate conspirators in the global crash, who continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent. I left there shortly after 4 pm, when the Met’s thugs, the Territorial Suport Group, with their incongruous sky-blue caps, had just turned up. Several hours later, dedicated protestors, who had put up tents, were removed from the steps of the Royal Exchange, and at least 12 activists were arrested after being kettled.

As the Guardian explained, Occupy activists claimed that some of the police officers “had used ‘aggressive’ force as they attempted to move protesters from the area outside the banking institution.” One of the protesters, Matt Varnham, said, ‘Police have been diving in to where people were standing en masse. They were pushing people and being very aggressive. It’s been very violent.” By the end of Saturday’s event, the majority of police officers had apparently left the area, although some of the protesters were still present.

In Spain, meanwhile, tens of thousands of people gathered in more than 80 cities and towns, a year after huge crowds of indignados camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square. Since then, as Reuters explained, “Unemployment has soared to over 24 percent, over half the country’s youth is out of work, the economy has dipped back into recession and one of its largest banks has been nationalised. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government has passed painful austerity measures that have hit once-sacred public health and education spending in an effort to appease international markets and avoid a Greek-style bailout.” Gloria Bravo, a 48-year old civil servant, explained why she was demonstrating.”We have to stand up and say enough is enough!” she said. “They pull our hair telling us we’re lazy so they can dismantle social welfare and take away health and education and now they’re bailing out the bankers.”

Worldwide, protests took place in at least 60 cities, in Europe, Russia, the US and South America.

Campaigners at the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

A floating tent, with helium balloons, at the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

A campaigner at the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Campaigners at the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

A campaigner at the Occupy protest in London on May 12, 2012, as part of a global day of action against the governments, bankers and corporations that continue to profit at the expense of the 99 percent, despite having caused the global economic crash of 2008 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Ever since it became apparent, during the Bush administration, that there were wrongly detained prisoners at Guantánamo who could not be safely repatriated, certain principled groups and individuals have pushed for those men to be given new homes in the United States, the country responsible for their lost years of arbitrary detention and abuse.

From the beginning, however, voices have also been raised in opposition to these calls, even though US officials realized early on that  too many “Mickey Mouse detainees” were being sent to Guantánamo from Afghanistan, as Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo until October 2002, explained to the Los Angeles Times later that year. Officials also realized that some of these men — and boys — couldn’t be safely repatriated, but no one in a position of authority thought about granting political asylum to any of them.

The situation came to a head with the case of the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, who had escaped persecution in their homeland, and had only one enemy — the Chinese Communist government. Twenty-two Uighurs had been seized and sent to Guantánamo, but when the situation became tense for the administration, a third country was found for them instead.

That country was Albania, and on May 5, 2006, just three days before five of the Uighurs were due to have their habeas corpus petitions considered by the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., they were flown to Tirana, and given new homes in a UN refugee center.

In Bush’s dying days in the White House, the remaining Uighurs were the first Guantánamo prisoners to win their habeas corpus petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C., in October 2008, and Judge Ricardo Urbina went so far as to call their continued detention unconstitutional, and to demand their release in the US. The government appealed, however, and obtained a stay from the Court of Appeals.

When President Obama took over, and promised to close Guantánamo within a year, there were high hopes that he would realize that releasing cleared prisoners who couldn’t be repatriated into the United States would not only be appropriate, but would also send a positive signal to other countries, who were also being asked to offer new homes to those who couldn’t return home safely from Guantánamo.

Unfortunately, the President disagreed. In February 2009, the Justice Department pushed for the Appeals Court to rule that it was not up to the courts to order Guantánamo prisoners to be released into the United States, which they were happy to do, ruling that decisions about immigration were for the executive branch to make, and not for the courts — even when those seeking immigration were innocent men kidnapped and taken to Guantánamo to be held and abused for seven years.

Three months later, when White House Counsel Greg Craig had tried to make amends for this appalling decision, and was close to finalizing a plan to bring some of the Uighurs to live in the US, President Obama ditched the plan when Republicans got wind of it, and threatened to use it against him.

Around the same time, Congress stepped in, turning down a request by the administration for $80 million to close Guantánamo, and in November 2009, as part of a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, lawmakers approved a measure stating that Guantánamo prisoners could only be sent to the US mainland for prosecution, and not for resettlement.

The Amherst, Leverett and Berkeley resolutions

Just after Congress passed this legislation, the town of Amherst, in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, fought back, passing a resolution, at a Special Town meeting on November 4, 2009, in which representatives of the town “urge[d] Congress to repeal the ban on releasing cleared detainees into the United States,” and promised to “welcome such cleared detainees into our community as soon as the ban is lifted.”

The community in Amherst gave the following reasons:

• because President Obama “vowed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base by January 2010″;
• because “many detainees at Guantánamo have been cleared by our government of wrongdoing and have been determined to pose no threat to the United States”; because “many of these detainees cannot be repatriated because they are either stateless or fear the harm awaiting them if returned to their home country”;
• because “our government has asked other countries to accept cleared detainees but has banned their settlement in the United States”; because “these detainees have suffered unjust imprisonment for many years”;
• because “the Pioneer Valley has many resources to help such detainees with trauma from their imprisonment”; and
• because “the Pioneer Valley has welcomed in the past many refugees from a variety of traumatic experiences in other countries.”

Amherst established an important precedent with this resolution, which was also adopted in nearby Leverett on April 24, 2010, and on October 25, 2011, the City of Berkeley, in California, also passed a similar resolution (PDF), stating that Berkeley “supports the closure of Guantánamo as called for by President Obama in January 2009,” and is “unwilling to turn its back on cleared detainees still being held at Guantánamo,” and also that it “urges Congress to remove bans on movement of cleared detainees to the US,” and, “upon the lifting of Congressional bans, would welcome one or more cleared detainees into the Berkeley community thanks to private support.”

The community in Berkeley gave a number of reasons, including the following:

• because “[t]he residents of Berkeley have welcomed to our City those who have been forced into exile, and who have come fleeing torture and death,” as affirmed by the Berkeley City Council in 1971, when Berkeley was declared a City of Refuge;
• because “President Barack Obama stated in January 2009 that the prison at Guantánamo would be closed by January 2010″;
• because “despite US Supreme Court rulings on the right to due process” — in Rasul v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush — “Guantánamo remains open,” and those held include “those who could not be sent to their home countries because of post-transfer treatment concerns”;
• because “Guantánamo has become emblematic of the gross human rights abuses perpetrated by the US Government in the name of fighting terrorism”;
• because “Guantánamo detainees have undergone a wide range of interrogation procedures that constitute torture or maltreatment, including but not limited to sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation”;
• because “Amnesty International USA states: ‘… the indefinite and arbitrary nature of the circumstances of their detention has led to a steep decline in the mental health of many incarcerated at Guantánamo …’ (email May 12, 2011 from AI USA Chair Carole Nagengast to Peace & Justice Commissioner Rita Maran)”; and
• because “Congresswoman Barbara Lee writes: ‘Guantánamo … has led the world to question America’s commitment to the rule of law, due process, and the rejection of torture as an acceptable interrogation practice …’ (Letter of May 26, 2011 to Rita Maran).”

The Resolution came about thanks to strong support from Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), the Amnesty International USA Board of Directors Chair Carole Nagengast, and Sister Marianne Farina of the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology in Berkeley.

The ongoing need for US communities to resolve to resettle prisoners from Guantánamo

Over ten years since Guantánamo opened, the need for other communities to follow the example of Amherst, Leverett and Berkeley remains as strong as ever. Despite the failure of the Obama administration, Congress and the US courts to allow any endangered prisoner to be rehoused in the United States, 17 countries in total have, during Obama’s Presidency, taken in 39 prisoners — from Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, as well as 14 of the 17 remaining Uighurs who could not be safely repatriated.

The most recent releases were two Uighurs, who were flown to a new home in El Salvador last month, 15 months after the last prisoner was released. That huge delay was largely due to Congress, where lawmakers imposed further restrictions on the administration’s ability to release prisoners, banning the transfer of any prisoner to the US mainland for any reason, and also imposing onerous restrictions on releases to any country for any reason.

Those restrictions were defused in the National Defense Authorization Act, which contains a waiver that can be used by the President to bypass Congress, but as the Washington Post explained in an editorial on April 27 — and as we reported here last week — a home has still not been found for the last three Uighurs, whose release was ordered three years and seven months ago, and therefore they should be given new homes in the United States, to prevent them from — possibly — spending the rest of their lives in Guantánamo.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are concerned that, in total, 87 of the 169 prisoners still held at Guantánamo have been cleared for release but are still held, and we believe it is appropriate that, if these men cannot be safely rehoused elsewhere, then they should be offered homes in the US.

When Berkeley passed its resolution, those who proposed it also stated that they would be happy to accept two prisoners in particular — Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian recently profiled here, and Ravil Mingazov, the last Russian in Guantánamo, who I have written about here. In 2009, Amherst also called for Ravil Mingazov to be welcomed to live in their town, along with another Algerian, Ahmed Belbacha, profiled here, who was cleared for release in 2007, but has spent the last five years resisting his forced repatriation, because he fears that he will be imprisoned on false charges after a show trial.

For further information, please feel free to contact Rita Maran at UC Berkeley, who is a commissioner with the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission, and led the effort to draft Berkeley’s resolution, and Nancy Talanian, the executive director of “No More Guantánamos,” the organization coordinating the groups within the US calling for prisoners to be resettled in their communities. When the Berkeley resolution was passed, Nancy commended the City Council and the resolution’s supporters, and said, “Dozens of innocent men remain in Guantánamo simply because they cannot safely return to their home countries, and US allies rightly question why they must welcome all of them when the US refuses to take any. Berkeley’s resolution is a necessary step toward closing the prison with justice and restoring our country’s commitment to human rights.”

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

In London, where protestors occupied the land outside St. Paul’s Cathedral for over four months until their eviction on February 28, the day’s events will begin at 1 pm outside St. Paul’s, although no attempt will be made to reoccupy the site. Instead, there will be speeches followed by something of a magical mystery tour, as protestors will be led — or directed — to various banks, other financial institutions and lobbying forms, identified on a “Meet the 1%” map, published above. Speaking to the Guardian, Ronan McNern of Occupy London said, “It’s time to hit the financial targets. If we’re evicted, fine, but we’ll come back. There will be comparison with what happened before, but we’re in a different time and a different place.” Please click on the map above to enlarge it, and also on the key to the map, posted below.

As I explained in an article yesterday, since January, Occupy activists, representatives from the Take the Square movement and other groups in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, have been working together on a “Global May Manifesto,” a self-identified “work in progress,” which, yesterday, I described as “hinting at a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for here and now, when we face an existential threat from the unreformed elites who bankrupted us in 2008 and since then have been making us pay.”

McNern described the manifesto as listing “social justice demands ranging from everyone having ‘access to an adequate income for their livelihood,’ to a financial transaction tax and the enforced separation of banks’ retail and investment arms.”

Protests are also planned for May 15, and, in London, will focus on the headquarters of the British Bankers’ Association in the City of London.

Below is an article from the Guardian, written by Naomi Colvin of Occupy London, and for full details of all the planned activities see the “Occupy May” website, where there are also some very informative pages, explaining in greater detail aspects of the ongoing financial crisis and the corruption of the institutions that created it — Bad Apples, Banks, Central Banks, Crisis Profiteers, Financial Services Firms, Government, Hedge Funds, Lobbyists, Rating Agencies, Stock Exchanges and Tax Dodgers.

Occupy London invites you to meet the 1% this Saturday
By Naomi Colvin, The Guardian, May 11, 2012

On Saturday’s international day of action, Occupy presents a geographical exploration of a London you may not see every day.

Spring is finally here and the streets are filling with those demanding change. Last Tuesday, thousands were involved in actions across the US, with Occupy Wall Street standing in solidarity with trades unions, students, community and immigrant workers’ groups, forging a new coalition of collective action.

In London, Occupy crossed an item off the “to do” list by spending an afternoon outside the London Stock Exchange, making good on the original call-out for the 15 October. With that out of the way, the serious fun and games can now begin. The 12 and 15 May mark the two international days of action called to mark the one-year anniversary of the indignados taking to the squares of southern Europe, with actions planned as far afield as Rio and Wellington.

In Europe, Spain’s squares will be occupied once more and Occupy Frankfurt plan to “blockupy” the European Central Bank. Two big events are planned in London: the second will be a day of direct action against the lobbying power of finance on 15 May, with events at the British Bankers’ Association and a Dinner for Democracy that, unlike those cosy private suppers at Downing Street, you won’t have to find a five-figure donation to secure a place at.

On 12 May, this Saturday, Occupy London strikes back as we invite you to the centre of the city to Meet the 1%. You have a pressing interest in doing so, however well you think you know them already. Of all the OECD countries, in the UK inequality has increased fastest over the past 30 years. We’ve seen an increasing concentration of wealth while the burden of taxation has shifted down the income scale. Our economy is disproportionately reliant on a financial services industry. We hear over and over again how finance represents 7% of the UK economy, but manufacturing actually provided twice the oft-mentioned 6.8% of total government tax receipts between 2002 and 2008 — without, of course, requiring the kind of bailout we are all obliged to make good on for the foreseeable future.

The problems Occupy draws attention to are systemic and complex. That’s why Meet the 1% will be a day of education, discussion and creative action that explores the links between different actors and shows where each reside: this is a London you may not see every day, but it’s the one you’re paying for. Getting on first-name terms with the 1% is an essential step towards deciding what to do about them — and finding a solution requires that as many people as possible are involved in the discussion.

Meet the 1% starts at 1pm at St Paul’s churchyard — former site of Occupy LSX and our spiritual home — where Tent City University will be holding a special teach-out to explain just why the 1% are so deserving of our attention. Speakers will be talking about the operations of global finance, the international dimensions of the crisis – including what is happening elsewhere in Europe and beyond to mark this international day of action. Needless to say, we’ll also be taking a good look at the impacts of austerity here in the UK.

With the agenda set, we’ll be distributing our map. This identifies 49 separate targets, located all over central London — all implicated, in some way, with the financial crisis. Our targets range from the notorious to the undeservedly obscure; they include lobbyists, hedge funds and organisations profiteering from the creeping privatisation of the NHS. No longer will they be able to hide in the shadows.

Once the teach-out at St Paul’s is concluded, we’ll be heading off to one of those targets where another event is planned — the next of several to take place over the course of the day. We’re not going to reveal in advance the route we’re going to take, but you will be able to check our latest movements via Twitter: by texting “follow @occupymay” to 86444 you will be able to receive all the latest via text message. We can promise some surprises along the way — and you’re very welcome to bring a tent with you, if you feel like it.

Our map for Meet the 1% is an essential tool for finding your way around on Saturday, but we also see it as a resource to move beyond our own programme of events. We’re deliberately leaving plenty of opportunity for those who attend to determine their own course of action on a more autonomous basis. It doesn’t take much to make a statement. When “urban exploration” is classed as “extremist activity” — as the City of London police did last year — walking the streets you live in can itself become a political act.

*****

Below are Occupy London’s explanations of the motivations for the events on May 12 and May 15:

May 12 begins with a teach-out organised by the Tent City University before we visit those who:

• Gambled with our pensions and savings;
• Created financial nonsense to make money out of thin air;
• Brought the global economy to the brink of ruin and forced ordinary people to pay for their mess;
• Paid hundreds of thousands to wine and dine with our ‘elected’ representatives;
• Have taken more than £1tn in bailouts from the taxpayer and continue to pay themselves exorbitant bonuses;
• Evaded billions in taxes;
• Determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce; and
• Are benefiting by the crisis by grabbing fat privatisation contracts of our public services.

Below is the May 15 statement:

On 15 May it will be one year since the start of the indignados movement, and the fight against bailouts, corruption, repeating economic crises, and financial crimes continues. People are still occupying and protesting to bring about a better world.

This 15 May we will target an institution that has directly contributed to the strengthening of the 1 per cent. We will target an institution that has bought our democracy. One that stands in the way of structural change. The British Bankers’ Association is that target. The BBA symbolises a wider problem in our society: money and private corporations have more influence over our politicians than we do.

The BBA is the lobbying group for finance, the “voice of banking and financial services”. It represents over 200 financial institutions and lobbies your Parliament, buys your politicians, and helps bend national policy in its favour. It tries to make sure things will stay the same.

The BBA, the banks it represents, and the government they stole from us should be considered as targets that day. They are all responsible for this drought of democracy.

As part of Occupy May, 15M will be a day of direct action. We call on all autonomous groups, coalitions, progressive organisations, students, unions, workers, and pensioners to join us on this day. We encourage people to form their own affinity groups, plan their own actions, and converge upon the BBA to end the prioritisation of profit over people.

Be creative! Form your own guerilla theatre group, come in fancy dress, and turn the BBA into something beautiful. Bring glitter, stickers, banners, posters, balloons, and noise makers of all kinds! Guerilla garden — bring seeds and garden in any space available! Foreclose on the BBA! Be ridiculous! Dress as a radical clown and put on a show! Deny them any peace and quiet! Bring drums, instruments, pots, pans, sound systems of all sorts — make your presence known!

No more business as usual. You don’t ask for democracy. You make it!

We will first meet in Russell Square at 11am and then go to the BBA. Join our Facebook event page and spread the word. Make sure you follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get important updates!

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As both the introduction and the manifesto are self-explanatory, I’ll refrain from further comments, except to note that it sounds like a first attempt to create a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the times we find ourselves in — not the post-World War II community of idealists concerned to make sure that genocide and torture were outlawed (although that, sadly, still remains horribly relevant), but the 99 percent and the indignados faced with governments that serve only the interests of the very rich, whose criminal plunder is essentially unchecked. This is in spite of the fact that those directing this plunder bankrupted the world in 2008, and had to be bailed out by the rest of us, but it is, I believe, appropriate to consider, here and now, that bankers, corporations, the wealthiest individuals and their servants are now committed to using the rest of us — the 99 percent — as scapegoats and pawns in a new game, one of allegedly necessary “austerity” (although that is largely an ideological construct) in which all but the very rich will, within a decade or less, be driven into savage poverty.

I’ll also just add that I’ll be in London tomorrow, and will be posting information about the events planned for London in an article to follow. See you there, literally or metaphorically, and, as we used to say in the 1990s, it’s time to “Reclaim the Streets.”

International Assembly: Global May Manifesto
By Occupy Wall Street, May 11, 2012

As hundreds of thousands of people around the world prepare to take to the streets this weekend as part of a global call for change, the International ‘Global Spring’ Assembly — an international and inter-movement assembly formed of supporters of Occupy, Take the Square and Latin American, African, Asian and Middle Eastern social movements — has released its first statement describing concrete suggestions for a ‘global change’.

The statement — the Global May Manifesto – calls for systemic change in the global economy: the radical democratisation of international institutions like the IMF, BIS and UN; the replacement of the G8/20 with a democratic UN assembly; a system of global taxation on financial transactions; and for the abolition of tax havens. It does not represent the position of any local or city assembly; rather it is offered for their consideration.

Endorsed by consensus on 4 May 2012 by the International Assembly, this statement has been in development since January 2012. It was a process that has seen thousands of people from six continents and hundreds of cities participating in the discussion and planning for the international days of protests this month — particularly focusing on the 1, 12, 15 and 18 May. These International Assembly meetings have been convened in bi-weekly assemblies, over an online VoIP platform (called Mumble, which enables mass conference calls and give the assembly its formal name — the International General Assembly on Mumble).

The process for developing this global manifesto — which is a work in progress — started by collecting statements from the different local and city assemblies, then merging these into a common statement. Individuals were then invited to make new proposals through a public website and a number of mailing lists that are used for international inter-movement communication.

Alvaro Rodriguez, 31, of the Indignados movement in Spain, who participated in the process of writing the statement, said: “This is the beginning of a new global process of bringing the opinions of many people around the world together. It represents the beginnings of a form of global democracy in its infancy which is direct and participatory — of the people, by the people and for the people. While the statement does not represent the position of local and city assemblies, the next step is to present it to assemblies around the world for consideration, discussion and revisions, as part of a dialogue of the ‘Global Spring’ movements taking place across six continents.”

Next steps for international coordination

Individuals around the world are invited to participate in this process of further developing this global manifesto through their local and city assemblies, through the Facebook group and through the website.

Global May Manifesto

The statement below does not speak, or claim to speak, on behalf of everyone in the global spring/Occupy/Take the Square movements. This is an attempt by some inside the movements to reconcile statements written and endorsed in the different assemblies around the world. The process of writing the statement was consensus based, open to all, and regularly announced on our international communications platforms, that are also open to all (e.g. the ‘squares’ mailing list, the weekly global roundtables and the ‘international’ facebook group). It was a long and difficult process, full of compromises. This statement is offered to peoples’ assemblies around the world for discussions, revisions and endorsements.

There will be a process of a global dialogue, and this statement is part of it, a work-in-progress. We do not make demands from governments, corporations or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt. We speak to the people of the world, both inside and outside our movements. We want another world, and such a world is possible:

[1.] The economy must be put to the service of people’s welfare, and to support and serve the environment, not private profit. We want a system where labour is appreciated by its social utility, not its financial or commercial profit. Therefore, we demand:

• Free and universal access to health, education from primary school through higher education and housing for all human beings, through appropriate policies to get this. We reject outright the privatization of public services management, and the use of these essential services for private profit.
• Full respect for children’s rights, including free child care for everyone.
• Retirement pensions so we may have dignity at all ages. Mandatory universal sick leave and holiday pay.
• Every human being should have access to an adequate income for their livelihood, so we ask for work or, alternatively, universal basic income guarantee.
• Corporations should be held accountable for their actions. For example, corporate subsidies and tax cuts should be done away with if a company outsources jobs to decrease salaries, harms the environment or the rights of workers.
• Apart from bread, we want roses. Everyone has the right to enjoy culture, participate in a creative and enriching leisure in service of the progress of humankind. Therefore, we demand the progressive reduction of working hours, without reducing income.
• Food sovereignty through sustainable farming should be promoted as an instrument of food security for the benefit of all. This should include an indefinite moratorium on the production and marketing of GMOs and immediate reduction of agrochemical use.
• We demand policies that function under the understanding that our changing patterns of life should either be organic/ecological or else not occur. These policies should be based on a simple rule: one should not spoil the balance of ecosystems for profit. Violations of this policy should be prosecuted around the world as an environmental crime, with severe sanctions for convicted.
• Policies to promote the change from fossil fuels to renewable energy, through massive investment which should help to change the production model.
• We demand the creation of international environmental standards, mandatory for countries, companies, corporations, and individuals. Ecocide (willful damage to the environment, ecosystems, biodiversity) should be internationally recognised as a crime of the greatest magnitude.

[2.] To achieve these objectives, we believe that the economy should be run democratically at all levels, from local to global. People must get democratic control over financial institutions, transnational corporations and their lobbies. To this end, we demand:

• Control and regulation of financial speculation by abolishing tax havens, and establishing a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT). As long as they exist, the IMF, World Bank and the Basel Committee on Banking Regulation must be radically democratised. Their duty from now on should be fostering economic development based on democratic decision making. Rich governments cannot have more votes because they are rich. International institutions must be controlled on the principle that each human is equal to all other humans — African, Argentinean or American; Greek or German.
• As long as they exist, radical reform and democratisation of the global trading system and the World Trade Organization must take place. Commercialization of life and resources, as well as wage and trade dumping between countries must stop.
• We want democratic control of the global commons, defined as the natural resources and economic institutions essential for proper economic management. These commons are: water, energy, air, telecommunications and a fair and stable economic system. In all these cases, decisions must be accountable to citizens and ensure their interests, not the interests of a small minority or financial elite.
• As long as social inequalities exist, taxation at all levels should maintain the principle of solidarity. Those who have more should contribute to maintain services for collective welfare. Maximum income should be limited, and minimum income set to reduce the outrageous social divisions in our societies and their social political and economic effects.
• No more money to rescue banks. As long as debt exists, following the examples of Ecuador and Iceland, we demand a social audit of the debts owed by countries. Illegitimate debt owed to financial institutions should not be paid.
• An absolute end to fiscal austerity policies that benefit only a minority, and cause great suffering to the majority.
• As long as banks exist, separation of commercial and financial banks, avoiding banks “too big to fail”.
• End of the legal personhood of corporations. Companies cannot be elevated to the same level of rights as people. The public’s right to protect workers, citizens and the environment should prevail over protection of private property or investment.

[3.] We believe that political systems must be fully democratic. We therefore demand full democratization of international institutions, and the elimination of the veto power of a few governments. We want a political system which really represents the variety and diversity of our societies:

• All decisions affecting all mankind should be taken in democratic forums like a participatory and direct UN Parliamentary Assembly or a UN people’s assembly, not rich clubs such as G20 or G8.
• At all levels we ask for the development of a democracy that is as participatory as possible, including non representative direct democracy.
• As long as they are practiced, electoral systems should be as fair and representative as possible, avoiding biases that distort the principle of proportionality.
• We call for the democratization of access to and management of media (MSM). These should serve to educate the public, as opposed to the creation of an artificial consensus about unjust policies.
• We ask for democracy in companies and corporations. Workers, regardless of wage level or gender, should have real decision-making power in the companies and corporations they work in. We want to promote cooperative companies and corporations, as real democratic economic institutions.
• Zero tolerance of corruption in economic policy. We must stop the excessive influence of big business in politics, which is today a major threat to true democracy.
• We demand complete freedom of expression, assembly and demonstration, as well as the cessation of attempts to censor the Internet.
• We demand respect for privacy rights on and off the internet. Companies and the government should not engage in data mining.
• We believe that military spending is politically counterproductive to a society’s advance, so we demand its reduction to a minimum.
• Ethnic, cultural and sexual minorities should have their civil, cultural, political and economic rights fully recognized.
• Some of us believe a new Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fit for the 21st century, written in a participatory, direct and democratic way, needs to be written. As long as the current Declaration of Human Rights defines our rights, it must be enforced in relation to all — in both rich and poor countries. Implementing institutions that force compliance and penalize violators need to be established, such as a Global Court to prosecute social, economic and environmental crimes perpetrated by governments, corporations and individuals. At all levels — local, national, regional and global — new constitutions for political institutions need to be considered, like in Iceland or in some Latin American countries. Justice and law must work for all, otherwise justice is not justice, and law is not law.

This is a worldwide Global Spring. We will be there in May 2012; we will fight until we win. We will not stop being people. We are not numbers. We are free women and men.

For a Global Spring!
For global democracy and social justice!
Take to the streets on May 2012!

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

That is ridiculous, of course, as the Tory-led government’s mania for austerity has pushed Britain into a double-dip recession, and rewards are the last thing being visited on “people who work hard and do the right thing.” Instead, the ordinary hard-working people of Britain are being squeezed financially and besieged by ministers whose only message seems to be to tell people to be permanently insecure, while the only people who really matter to those in power — those rich enough not to feel the squeeze — continue to get richer through their dubious investments in property, their exploitative ventures around the world, and their shareholding in private companies profiting or preparing to profit from the destruction of the state (as with the NHS, for example).

In the Guardian, Simon Jenkins did a good job of kicking the government, as they deserve to be kicked, in an article entitled, “George Osborne’s growth policy is turning British cities into Detroit UK.” Jenkins began by noting, with reference to the pan-European obsession with austerity over the last two years, that “Europe’s collective response to the 2008 credit crunch ranks with the treaty of Versailles and German reparations among the great follies of history.”

However, while Greece, France, Spain and Italy are challenging the damaging effects of austerity, here in the UK the chancellor, George Osborne, backed by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, “have no more idea of what to do next,” as Jenkins put it. Explaining that those who warned that the government “risked double-dip recession by over-suppressing demand have been proved right,” he added that Osborne “raised VAT to 20%, tightened benefits and allowed banks to restrict credit (while saying the opposite),”  and “declared that private sector growth would more than compensate for public sector contraction.” That notion was always ridiculous, as the liberalisation of the financial sector (which led to the 2008 crash that caused our current woes) and the outsourcing mania of the last 25 years have made sure that there are no more prospects for growth in the West unless there is some genuine vision and economic stimulus from government.

Nevertheless, Osborne, echoing Cameron’s inflexibility, has insisted that there is no alternative to his kamikaze austerity mission. As Jenkins noted, he arrogantly refused to listen, in December 2010, when the most senior civil servant in the land, Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, called for a Plan B. As the Guardian described it at the time, he “urged the Treasury to prepare contingency economic stimulus plans, including fresh capital spending on infrastructure, in case economic growth falters,” at the same time that Vince Cable, the business secretary, expressed his concern about the direction of Treasury policy, describing officials as “thirties fiscal fundamentalists.”

Simon Jenkins also explained that “it was clear 18 months ago that demand was collapsing,” but that the government’s “obsession with rescuing banks” dominated  their concerns until it was too late and “the gangrene of double-dip set in.” He added, “Britain is now having one of the worst recessions in the OECD [the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development].”

Even in London, the effects can be seen, as shops and businesses close in all but the most aspirational neighbourhoods, where those with money cluster, and professional couples still shackle themselves to huge mortgages to avoid the out-of-control rents that are the only other alternative, leeching disposable income from workers everywhere — and out of the general economy — to feed property owners’ sense of entitlement.

Elsewhere, however, the effects are ruinous. As Jenkins explained, “From Cumbria to Corinth it has been left to ordinary voters, to the great Babel of democracy, to bring reality to bear on those who manage economies. Enough austerity, they have cried, try something that works.” Jenkins noted that Andrés Velasco, the former Chilean finance minister, has written that “it is ‘insane’ to envisage countries locked in a common currency slashing their deficits while trying to promote growth: it is a contradiction in terms.”

He added, perceptively:

In Britain the only growth the Treasury has recognised so far has been to turn to the banks. It is like asking the mafia to promote honesty in local government. Ministers pleaded with bankers to lend more to real people, and even printed the money for them to lend. The banks simply carted the loot from the mint and used it to pay off their gambling debts. There is no evidence that one penny of the hundreds of billions of pounds made available “leaked” into the productive economy.

In addition, in order to appreciate first-hand how ruinous two years of this government’s austerity obsession has been elsewhere in the UK, Jenkins was recently in the north of England, travelling “on the road north out of Manchester towards Rochdale,” where, he noted, “The scene is one of utter devastation. Not just individual shops but entire parades have gone out of business and are boarded up. Mile upon mile of factories, garages, supermarkets and warehouses lie empty and for sale. Recession has delivered the coup de grace to a quarter century of manufacturing decline. Manchester is by no means the worst hit of English cities, but its northern suburbs are Detroit UK.”

The answer? Short of the mass occupations of empty buildings and land that I envisage — much like the squatters after the Second World War — Jenkins focuses on the need for the government to do a U-turn, create a Plan B and stimulate demand:

The British economy needs three things: demand, demand, demand. It needs cash in pockets and cash in tills. It does not need richer banks or easier credit lines or looser regulation. It needs that old Keynesian salve, money in circulation. If money can be showered short term on banks, it can be showered short term on consumers, whether through benefit handouts, vouchers, tax holidays or scrappage schemes. Osborne declares quantitative easing to be off his debit sheet. He can do the same for temporary boosts to the money supply.

Moreover, if Osborne claims that “boosting demand is inflationary,” Jenkins has an answer: “this is the least serious threat to Britain at present. Look at youth unemployment, shop prices or interest rates. Visit the outskirts of any British city. Britain is bursting with unused capacity. Inflation is for another day, not now.”

Instead, of course, the Tories and Lib Dems, as obsessed as all governments are with corporate interests and grand schemes, remains fixated on throwing money away on vanity projects that will do nothing to stimulate demand. As Jenkins noted:

Osborne is already spending or planning billions of pounds for new railways, tunnels under London, wind turbines and aircraft carriers. There are murmurs of power stations, toll roads and ecotowns. The portfolio of ideas flowing through Whitehall reflects the interests of those whom Whitehall meets — government contractors, land-owners, estate developers and the bankers who finance them. It comes from government departments lobbying for airports, colleges, roads and hospitals.

The reason why the Treasury likes such projects is that they make headlines for ministers and can be controlled from the centre. Also, few involve big spending now. They are slow growth, lobbyists’ growth, dumb growth. They can be farmed out to private finance and are more likely to fuel the next boom than ease the present slump.

Instead, as Jenkins points out, it “would be better by far to import the US concept of “smart growth”, described on its website as “a better way to build and maintain our towns and cities. Smart growth means building urban, suburban and rural communities with housing and transportation choices near jobs, shops and schools. This approach supports local economies and protects the environment.”

Or, as Jenkins puts it, “smart growth” channels hugely important spending “to the renewal of existing communities and infrastructure, to where there are already roads, transport, schools and hospitals. It restores, infills and stimulates activity where the social and physical framework is in place. It is productive and ‘sustainable.’”

While Simon Jenkins was in Manchester, Owen Hatherley, the author of Militant Modernism: A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, was reflecting on Bradford, and the Hole, a giant crater in the city centre where a shopping centre was supposed to have been built, which I took note of during my visit to Bradford two years ago. As he explained, it “sat unused for about four years before becoming a ‘temporary urban garden’” and a site that offers new perspectives on the buildings all around — something that I also noticed, and always do in London, whenever I encounter a vast building site, in the City of London in particular.

As Hatherley noted, the Bradford Hole “is a sign of failure and a source of anger,” because of the corruption and ineptitude of elected representatives and corporate interests, but it is “also a place of possibility and potential.”

This leads him to ask, “After the bankruptcy of cities based on retail and speculation, what now could fill the empty spaces of British towns?” and to explain:

One of the greater disappointments since the bubble burst in 2008 has been in the way these holes haven’t been filled with new ideas — at least not yet. Councils, usually — and now especially — Labour-controlled, have faced derelict spaces, developers pulling out and regeneration schemes caving in, and have generally responded by desperately hoping that it’ll be 2007 again sometime soon.

In Southampton, for instance, a “master plan for renaissance” advocates demolishing the city’s post-war retail street, Above Bar, and building bigger shops in its place, then building another shopping mall in a disused post-crash site. Other proposals entail building apartment blocks on what is now light industrial space near the port. Somehow, in a prolonged economic crisis, planners and councillors have looked at the wastes and thought: “What we need here is a better retail offer and some buy-to-let flats.”

Describing the “failure of imagination” revealed in these plans as “mind-boggling,” Hatherley added:

Everywhere you look in the UK’s built environment there’s a collective refusal to admit that the game is up. Aside from commissioning instantly dated Blairite master plans, an easier way is to attempt to paper over the cracks. In Redcar, North Tyneside, and much of north Kent, virtual shop fronts hide the dereliction with photographs of shoe shops, sports shops and record shops where they might once have been.

Photos of what will eventually be there can still be seen on buildings left derelict in Sheffield, where Sevenstone, a Liverpool One-style “outdoor” mall, is still being desperately awaited by councillors, despite the lack of desire for it from either residents or retailers. Meanwhile, Castle Market, the city’s down-at-heel but unique multilevel indoor palace of small retailers, exactly the sort of place that people always say they want in their city, non-corporate, small-scale, individual, is to be replaced with a flat box next to the someday-to-arrive Sevenstone, with rents that will price out many of the old market traders. The site is to be replaced with a “mixed-use office development”, this being the home of inept outsourcing vulture A4e. Nearby, the old National Union of Mineworkers building is scheduled to be replaced by a casino. In British cities today, derelict sites are being given the most depressing uses by councils — or they’re being occupied.

In contrast to these failures of imagination, Hatherley explained that new ideas, from those living in cities, need to be allowed, pointing out that it was in cities where “the ‘civic gospel’ was preached, where publicly owned transport and publicly owned utilities were first created, and where civic planning led to public libraries and public housing.” He also noted, crucially:

During the last crisis of this size, in the 1930s, architects and planners put out proposals for what cities could look like if they weren’t dominated by rentiers. Today, architects and thinktanks give us “pop-ups”, boutique shopping, happenings and art “follies” to hide the holes. The contrast with the instant universities, health centres and libraries of the Occupy movements is telling.

After wondering whether we will ever “see the architecture foundations and civic trusts commission an architectural competition for, say, a new generation of council houses,” Hatherley concludes by expressing support for “the spaces vacated by a bankrupt neoliberalism” that “are sometimes forcibly taken anyway, like the occupied Bank of Ireland building in central Belfast, which squatters plan to turn into a homeless shelter,” and adds, “Hundreds of new councillors can now look afresh at these empty spaces. They should be looking to the occupiers, rather than the developers.”

It is not clear if most new councillors — like their more ambitious counterparts in Parliament — are up to the job of looking beyond the illusion that more shops and more flats are the way forward, when, to be blunt, the money is drying up, jobs are being lost and credit has been permanently frozen, but it is certainly the time for it, and perhaps those with vision can start persuading politicians that the crisis needs a new way of thinking. Certainly, as it stands now, at every level of government, those who who got themselves elected because they claim to want to lead are demonstrating, for the most part, a counter-productive myopia that is thoroughly uninspiring.

So if you’re interested, read up on “smart growth”, think about implementing local initiatives like the communalism initiated in Hebden Bridge and Todmorden, and consider that a huge focus on loosening the restraints on small-scale entrepreneurship — via tax breaks, rent restraints and applying the brakes to exorbitant taxation at the local level — would also benefit the UK, where we have a great amount of creativity, but not enough support for it. And as we gear up for a summer of grand, pointless gestures that will benefit no one — hello, the Olympics! — I’d also like to voice my support for a large-scale occupation of empty properties and empty land, to create homes and small businesses that can start up from nothing.

Note: For further information about James Chadderton, the artist whose image was used above, visit his website or see this BBC page. Please also note that the use of this image is not meant to be critical in any way of Manchester, the city of my birth. If I could have found a good apocalyptic picture of London I would have used it instead. Perhaps James Chadderton could be persuaded to create an apocalyptic image of the City of London?

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For the Obama administration and the Pentagon, the five men’s appearance — for their arraignment prior to their planned trial by military commission — was supposed to show that the commissions are a competent and legitimate alternative to the federal court trial that the Obama administration announced for the men in November 2009, but then abandoned after caving in to pressure from Republicans. The five defendants face 2,976 counts of murder — one for each of the victims of the 9/11 attacks — as well as charges of terrorism, hijacking, conspiracy and destruction of property, and the prosecution is seeking the death penalty.

Unfortunately for the administration, the omens were not good. The military commissions have been condemned as an inadequate trial system ever since the Bush administration first resurrected them in November 2001, intending, in the heat of post-9/11 vengeance, to use them to swiftly try and execute those it regarded as terrorists. However, after long delays and chaotic hearings, this first reincarnation of the commissions was struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006. The commissions were then revived by Congress a few months later, and were then tweaked and revived by President Obama in the summer of 2009, despite criticism from legal experts.

However, in all these years, just seven cases have been decided. Under Bush, there was a plea deal for the Australian David Hicks; a short sentence for Salim Hamdan, who drove a car for Osama bin Laden; and a life sentence for Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who made a video for al-Qaeda, and refused to participate in his trial. Since Obama revived the commissions another four cases have been decided by plea deal — those of Ibrahim al-Qosi, a cook; Omar Khadr, a child at the time of his capture; Noor Uthman Muhammed, a training camp instructor; and Majid Khan, an alleged accomplice of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Another case — that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged bomber of the USS Cole — is also proceeding to trial, but it is fair to say that the 9/11 trial is the barometer of whether or not the commissions are credible, or whether they are a second-tier judicial system, and the proceedings are little better than show trials.

On that basis, Saturday’s arraignment rather spectacularly failed to fulfil the administration’s hopes. As the Guardian noted, the hearing “descended into chaos,” as the defendants “refused to acknowledge the judge and their lawyers repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the court.”

At the last appearance of the five men in 2008, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had tried to plead guilty, and to become a martyr by being executed, but on Saturday he was more in the mood for quiet resistance, undermining the proceedings by refusing to acknowledge the judge. As the Washington Post described it, “The normally loquacious Mohammed refused to speak publicly throughout Saturday’s hearing, a stance that was largely adopted by all the other defendants, who tend to follow his lead.”

Also noteworthy was the behavior of Walid bin Attash, an amputee, who was brought to the courtroom strapped into a restraining chair, after some kind of altercation outside, and only had his restraints removed when he promised to behave, and the behavior of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, whose mental health has long been called into question by his lawyers.

At one point bin al-Shibh and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali interrupted the proceedings by praying, at at another point bin al-Shibh shouted out, comparing Guantánamo to the prisons of Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Syria. “Era of Gaddafi is over but you have Gaddafi in [Guantánamo] camp,” he said, adding, “Maybe they are going to kill us and say that we are committing suicide.” This was a sign, perhaps, that he had heard of the dubious circumstances in which five prisoners died at Guantánamo: three in June 2006, and two others in 2007 and 2009, and had even, perhaps, heard about the dubious death, in a Libyan prison in May 2009, of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan who had also been held in CIA “black sites,” and had been rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he had falsely confessed that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which, nevertheless, were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The arraignment took 13 hours to complete, although that was largely because of the men’s defense lawyers, who persistently attempted to question the credibility of the commissions, and made the most of their opportunity to question the judge’s impartiality, through the process known as voir dire. While this was happening, the defendants were mostly silent, and passed around the latest copy of the Economist, which may or may not have provided a boost to the London-based weekly magazine’s appeal. According to the Washington Post, throughout the hearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “whispered messages to his comrades, and they chatted and joked with one another during a short recess.”

By the end of the arraignment, none of the defendants had entered a plea, and the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, adjourned proceedings until June 12, and tentatively set a trial date of May 2013, although, as the Guardian explained, he “acknowledged that there are likely to be more delays.” Throughout the day, he had tried to maintain his composure, but occasionally appeared rattled. When it became clear that the accused were going to refuse to participate in the proceedings, he stated that a plea of not guilty would eventually be entered on their behalf, adding, “One cannot choose not to participate and frustrate the normal course of business,” and at another point he asked in exasperation, “Why is this so hard?”

Leading the defense’s complaints on Saturday, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyer, David Nevin, told the court that “the world is watching” the proceedings, and when the accused removed their headphones, through which they were receiving a translation of what Judge Pohl was saying, he explained that, in Mohammed’s case, “The reason he’s not putting the headphones in his ears is because of the torture imposed on him.” Nevin then “asked to be allowed to elaborate,” as the Guardian described it, but Judge Pohl refused.

Nevin’s attempts to raise the question of the men’s torture in secret CIA prisons for up to three and a half years before their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006 was the most explicit attempt to allow discussion of how the men have been treated, although as was noted in the Daily Beast by Terry McDermott (the author, with Josh Meyer, of The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), Judge Pohl deflected almost all the defense’s arguments, telling the lawyers that there would be time for them to raise whatever they thought was important at the next hearing in June. As McDermott explained, “He indicated he would eventually allow defense lawyers to argue every issue they wanted.”

In his perceptive article, McDermott noted that, after Walid bin Attash’s attorney, Cheryl Borman, had told Judge Pohl that her client had been “repeatedly beaten by guards at Guantánamo,” he was obliged to point out that the treatment of the prisoners was something over which he “had little or no control,” although he stated that he “would investigate with the relevant authorities.” For McDermott, his “relative powerlessness over events beyond the courtroom” provided a vivid demonstration of the “central contradiction” of the commissions, which he described as “the attempt to conduct trials granting nearly all rights enjoyed in US courts when the defendants are prisoners in one of the most heavily controlled prisons in the world — held, usually in solitary confinement, under extreme security with almost all access to the outside world eliminated.”

As McDermott added:

Their lawyers are thousands of miles away and require special flights just to get to Guantánamo. Even when there, the lawyers are unable to talk with their clients about anything the American military decides is classified. This includes all issues having to do with the prisoners’ treatment. Thus, defense lawyers can’t talk in court about the specifics of their clients’ complaints.

Just before the hearing began, the ACLU submitted a motion (PDF) calling for the judge “to reject the government’s attempts to censor any statements by defendants in the 9/11 military commission proceedings about their detention and treatment in US custody.”

As the ACLU explained:

[T]he government has asked or will ask this Commission to issue a protective order accepting the government’s claim that any statements made by the defendants concerning their “exposure” to the Central Intelligence Agency’s (“CIA”) detention and interrogation program are presumptively classified and must be kept from the public. The government has also asked or will ask the Commission to accept its assertion that defendants’ statements concerning their personal knowledge and experience of their imprisonment and treatment in Department of Defense (“DOD”) custody are classified and must be suppressed.

The ACLU also asked the judge not to accept the government’s insistence that there must be “a 40-second delay in the audio feed the government makes available to the public, media, and representatives of non-governmental organizations who observe the tribunal,” in order to “permit a courtroom security official to cut off the audio feed whenever the defendants describe their detention and interrogation in US custody.”

The 40-second delay was only used briefly on one occasion on Saturday, apparently when Walid bin Attash said something that prosecutors wanted suppressed, but how secrets are dealt with is central to the 9/11 trial and its claim to credibility, and it remains to be seen whether Judge Pohl will genuinely acknowledge the tensions between the absolute secrecy surrounding the Bush administration’s torture program and the need for something that resembles a fair hearing in the men’s trial by military commission.

What is clear, at present, is that, in the five years and eight months since Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his co-defendants and nine other “high-value detainees” arrived at Guantánamo from the CIA’s secret prisons, the only words that any of them have uttered that have been made available to the public are the words they said at their pre-trial hearings — in the cases of KSM and his co-accused, what they said in June, September and December 2008, and on Saturday. Everything else — every single word that has been exchanged between these 14 men and their lawyers — is presumptively classified.

This not unusual in the sense that every word exchanged between the other prisoners in Guantánamo and their lawyers is also presumptively classified, but in the cases of the other prisoners, at least parts of these exchanges have been unclassified after being reviewed by a team of Pentagon censors known as the privilege review team. In the cases of the “high-value detainees,” however, every single word remains classified.

The only possible reason for this is to prevent any discussion of of the torture to which these men were subjected in CIA “black sites” from leaking out of Guantánamo.

This is something that was noted last week in an article for Salon by the commissions’ former chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October 2007, when he was placed in a chain of command under William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, who insisted that information derived through the use of torture would be used in the commissions.

Dismissing the administration’s spurious claims that military commissions are necessary because soldiers on a battlefield cannot spend their time worrying about reading rights to prisoners in wartime, Col. Davis stated:

[T]he reason the apologists want a second-rate military commission option is because of what we did to the detainees, not because of what the detainees did to us. This is not about the exigencies of the battlefield and the problems our soldiers face trying to fight a war; this is about torture, coercion, rendition and a decade or more in confinement without an opportunity to confront the evidence — abuses that would have us up in arms if done to an American citizen by some other country — that make the tarnished military commissions uniquely suited to try and accommodate the small category of cases where we crossed over to the dark side.

And that, in short, is the key problem with the commissions that dare not speak its name, and that Judge Pohl will have to decide whether or not to tackle — whether the search for justice is even possible when those who are supposed to be subjected to it were also the victims of America’s journey to “the dark side.”

Note: The courtroom sketch above is by Janet Hamlin, and is reproduced courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

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 April 2012, “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 please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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