Archive for June, 2009

It has just been reported that Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih (also known as Mohammed al-Hanashi), a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, has died, apparently by committing suicide.

The news comes just three days after the second anniversary of another death at Guantánamo — that of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi prisoner who died on May 30, 2007 — and just eight days before the third anniversary of the deaths of three other prisoners — Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani — who died on June 10, 2006, and it must surely hasten calls for the urgent repatriation of other prisoners before there are any more deaths at the prison.

The Associated Press, which first reported the story, stated that US military officials had reported that Salih, who was 31 years old, was found “unresponsive and not breathing in his cell Monday night,” and that he had died of an “apparent suicide.”

Like the other prisoners who died of “apparent suicides” at Guantánamo, Salih had been a long-term hunger striker, refusing food as the only method available to protest his long imprisonment without charge or trial. According to weight records issued by the Pentagon in 2007, he weighed 124 pounds on his arrival at Guantánamo, but at one point in December 2005, during the largest hunger strike in the prison’s history, his weight dropped to just 86 pounds.

Salih was one of around 50 prisoners at Guantánamo who had survived a massacre at Qala-i-Janghi, a fort in northern Afghanistan, at the end of November 2001, when, after the surrender of the city of Kunduz, several hundred foreign fighters surrendered to General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, in the mistaken belief that they would be allowed to return home. Instead, they were imprisoned in Qala-i-Janghi, a nineteenth century mud fort in Mazar-e-Sharif, and when some of the men started an uprising against their captors, which led to the death of a CIA operative, US Special Forces, working with the Northern Alliance and British Special Forces, called in bombing raids to suppress the uprising, leading to hundreds of deaths. The survivors — who, for the most part, had not taken part in the fighting — took shelter in the basement of the fort, where they endured further bombing, and they emerged only after many more had died when the basement was set on fire and then flooded.

Like many of the prisoners at Guantánamo, Salih had traveled to Afghanistan many months before the 9/11 attacks, to fight as a foot soldier for the Taliban in Afghanistan’s long-running civil war against the Muslims of the Northern Alliance. When the US military reviewed his case at Guantánamo in 2004, he refused to attend the hearing, but provided a statement via his Personal Representative (a representative of the military assigned in place of a lawyer), in which he said that he arrived in Afghanistan eight or nine months before the 9/11 attacks, and admitted being a member of the Taliban, but made a point of adding, “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I supported Osama bin Laden.”

He also admitted fighting on the front lines against the Northern Alliance, but added “that he fired at the enemy, but did not kill anyone,” and also admitted staying in four different Taliban-run guest houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although he also made a point of saying that he hadn’t heard of al-Qaeda “until from the media on the front lines.” He also explained that he did not participate in military operations against the United States or its coalition partners, saying, “The first time I saw Americans was in Kandahar” (at the US prison used for processing prisoners after their capture). He also denied an allegation that Osama bin Laden spoke to “his group” in Tora Bora (the site of a battle between US/Afghan forces and remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in late November and early December 2001), saying that he had never been in Tora Bora, which was, of course, true, as he was in Qala-i-Janghi instead, and was then moved to General Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan, where he was imprisoned when the Battle of Tora Bora took place.

It is not known yet if President Obama’s Pentagon will deal more sensitively with his death than has happened previously. I would be surprised if any comments are made that can compare with those made by Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo at the time of the deaths in 2006, who said, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us,” or Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, who described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention,” but in every previous case of a “suicide” at Guantánamo, the Pentagon has subsequently made official pronouncements about the men’s alleged involvement with terrorism, even though they — like Muhammad Salih — had never been charged or tried, and even though there was no substantial evidence to suggest that this was the case.

In Salih’s case, as in the cases of many — if not the majority — of prisoners at Guantánamo, the false allegation I identified above is not the only piece of untrustworthy material masquerading as evidence in his file. As I reported just two weeks ago, when it was announced that one of Guantánamo’s “high-value detainees,” Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was to be put forward for trial in a federal court in New York, I discovered during my research for my book The Guantánamo Files that another allegation against Muhammad Salih had been made by Ghailani, while he was held in unknown conditions in a secret prison run by the CIA.

As I explained at the time,

One of the more disturbing aspects of the gathering of evidence used against the Guantánamo prisoners is the accumulation of allegations from [their tribunals and review boards, in which] an enormous number of claims are attributed to “a senior al-Qaeda operative” or “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant.” With no names given, it has been impossible to establish the source of these claims, although they are frequently so at odds with a previously established chronology of the prisoner’s actions — placing them at training camps and in guest houses when they were not even in Afghanistan, for example — that it’s readily apparent that many, if not most of these allegations were produced under duress, probably when supposed “high-value detainees” were being shown the “family album” of prisoners that was used from the earliest days of the US-run prisons in Afghanistan, in late December 2001.

On one occasion only, I discovered that one of these “al-Qaeda” sources had been named, and was none other than Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “The Yemeni Mohammed al-Hanashi [Muhammad Salih] admitted to his tribunal in 2004 that he arrived in Afghanistan eight or nine months before 9/11, and that he fought with the Taliban. By the time of his review in 2005, however, new allegations had been added, including the claim that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani ‘identified him as having been at the al-Farouq camp [the main training camp for Arabs, associated in the years before 9/11 with Osama bin Laden] in 1998-99 prior to moving on to the front lines in Kabul.’ In other words, although al-Hanashi admitted traveling to Afghanistan to serve as a foot soldier for the Taliban, a man who was held in extremely dubious circumstances in another part of the world was shown his photo and came up with a story about seeing him two or three years before his arrival in Afghanistan, which would, henceforth, be regarded as evidence against him.”

I find it disturbing enough that, after seven and a half years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, Muhammad Salih has died at Guantánamo, but as we await further details from the prison authorities, I sincerely hope that this man — not a terrorist, but a soldier in what he thought was a holy war against other Muslims — is not slandered in death, as were Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani and Abdul Rahman al-Amri before him.

POSTSCRIPT: The following is a press release issued by the Yemeni embassy in Washington D.C.

We are saddened to learn of the death of Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih Alhanashi, a Yemeni detainee at Guantánamo Bay who apparently committed suicide late last night (Monday the 1st of June, 2009). An Embassy representative is on route to Guantánamo to be briefed on the situation and to participate in the proceedings that are required after such incident. The Embassy representative will oversee that the remains of the deceased detainee are being treated in accordance to Islamic customs. We will work closely with the US government to repatriate the remains of the deceased as soon as possible. We extend our deepest condolences to the family of the deceased. In addition, this incident demonstrates the urgency of closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. The Yemeni government is looking forward to cooperate closely with the US administration to expedite President’s Obama decision to close Guantánamo.

Mohammed Albasha
Spokesman
Embassy of the Republic of Yemen
Washington DC

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes at Guantánamo, see Shaker Aamer, A South London Man in Guantánamo: The Children Speak (July 2007), Guantánamo: al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj fears that he will die (September 2007), The long suffering of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian teenager sent home from Guantánamo (October 2007), Guantánamo suicides: so who’s telling the truth? (October 2007), Innocents and Foot Soldiers: The Stories of the 14 Saudis Just Released From Guantánamo (Yousef al-Shehri and Murtadha Makram) (November 2007), A letter from Guantánamo (by Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj) (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), The forgotten anniversary of a Guantánamo suicide (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed embarks on hunger strike to protest Guantánamo charges (June 2008), Second anniversary of triple suicide at Guantánamo (June 2008), Guantánamo Suicide Report: Truth or Travesty? (August 2008), Seven Years Of Guantánamo, And A Call For Justice At Bagram (January 2009), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), Obama’s “Humane” Guantánamo Is A Bitter Joke (February 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home (March 2009). Also see the following online chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 2 (Ahmed Kuman, Mohammed Haidel), Website Extras 3 (Abdullah al-Yafi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi), Website Extras 4 (Bakri al-Samiri, Murtadha Makram), Website Extras 5 (Ali Mohsen Salih, Ali Yahya al-Raimi, Abu Bakr Alahdal, Tarek Baada, Abdul al-Razzaq Salih).

In all the recent hysteria about the supposed dangers posed by the remaining 240 prisoners at Guantánamo, it has been easy to forget that sensible appraisals of the number of individuals with any meaningful connection to terrorism have long indicated that no more than a few dozen of those still held should be regarded as any kind of significant threat, and that therefore the prison still holds over 200 prisoners who, at best, were low-level Taliban soldiers with a strong dislike of US foreign policy, and, at worst, should never have been held at all.

To listen to Dick Cheney, or to some serving politicians who are prone to similar hyperbole, you would think that every one of the remaining 240 prisoners is just itching to return to the fictional battlefield conjured up in last week’s conveniently leaked Pentagon report about recidivism rates (PDF), which, while published uncritically by the New York Times, has been comprehensively trashed by reporters for the New American, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), Firedoglake and many other media outlets.

On Friday, the Times finally made up for its lopsided reporting, allowing Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation to write an op-ed whittling the Pentagon’s figure of 74 (14 percent of the prison’s total population) down to somewhere between 12 and 20, and all the commentators cited above have also pointed out that, in any case, the recidivism rate in US federal prisons is somewhere between 60 and 70 percent.

The prisoners in Guantánamo are human beings, and not statistics

Moreover, behind all the bluster and the reckless use of statistics are 240 human beings, who, for the most part, have now been imprisoned for over seven years with little, if any opportunity to answer back. Over the last year or so, I have done my best to profile some of these men: those “approved for transfer” from Guantánamo after multiple military review boards (many of whom are now having their cases appraised yet again, this time by the Obama administration’s inter-departmental review), the 25 prisoners cleared for release by US courts (including the Uighurs and former child prisoner Mohammed El-Gharani), after judges ruled in their habeas corpus cases that the government had failed to establish a case against them, and others whose cases are remarkably similar to those dismissed by the US courts.

Last week, however, I was reminded of another of these prisoners, one of several put forward for trial in the Military Commission trial system conceived by Dick Cheney and his legal counsel, David Addington, in November 2001, who, it seemed to me after detailed examination of their cases over the last two years, should also have been approved for release from Guantánamo, rather than being put forward for the kind of “war crimes” trials that, if valid at all, should surely have been reserved for the handful of prisoners who were accused of being involved in terrorist attacks on the United States.

These prisoners include Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was just 15 years old when he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a US soldier (although his defense team discovered, 18 months ago, that there had been a cover-up of information indicating that Khadr did not throw the grenade), and a handful of Afghans, who, like Khadr, were, at most, minor insurgents in a war zone, rather than terrorists plotting atrocities on US civilians.

However, the man I was particularly reminded of — although he, like Omar Khadr, was not a man when he was first seized — is Mohamed Jawad, a young Afghan, accused of throwing a grenade at a jeep containing two US soldiers and an Afghan interpreter in December 2002, whose long road to justice stalled in January, when the Obama administration froze all proceedings in the tribunals for four months (and is now seeking another four-month freeze).

How the case against Mohamed Jawad collapsed

This was particular harsh on Jawad because, over the previous few months, his military defense lawyer, Maj. David Frakt, had demonstrated to the judge’s satisfaction that the only material that the government was relying on as evidence of Jawad’s involvement in the attack — a confession extracted from him soon after his capture by Afghan forces, and another extracted the day after by US forces — were inadmissible because they had been obtained through death threats that constituted torture.

On October 28, the judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, found that there was “reason to believe Jawad was under the influence of drugs at the time of his capture and forced confession,” and also “accepted the accused’s account of how he was threatened, while armed senior Afghan officials allied with US forces watched his interrogation.” He stated that he believed Jawad’s account of an interrogator telling him, “You will be killed if you do not confess to the grenade attack. We will arrest your family and kill them if you do not confess.” He also made a point of stating that he was accepting Jawad’s account because the government had failed to provide “timely disclosure of evidence” for his trial, which was scheduled to begin on January 5, 2009.

In response, Maj. Frakt noted that Col. Henley was explicitly rejecting the administration’s notorious attempts to redefine torture, and congratulated the judge for “adopting a traditional legal definition of torture, rather than making one up.”

Three weeks later, Col. Henley dealt another blow to the prosecution’s case by ruling that a second confession, made in US custody the day after his Afghan confession, was also inadmissible, because “the US interrogator used techniques to maintain ‘the shock and fearful state’ associated with his arrest by Afghan police, including blindfolding him and placing a hood over his head.” As Col. Henley explained in his ruling, “The military commission concludes the effect of the death threats which produced the accused’s first confession to the Afghan police had not dissipated by the second confession to the US. In other words, the subsequent confession was itself the product of the preceding death threats.”

How Mohamed Jawad’s case prompted his prosecutor’s resignation

These were not the only blows to the credibility of Jawad’s case. In September, his prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, had become so disenchanted by systemic failures in the Prosecutors’ office that he resigned, explaining that he had gone from being a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived,” and damning the Commissions as a dysfunctional system, which, both through accident and design, prevented the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense, thereby ensuring that no fair trial was possible.

Lt. Col. Vandeveld also described how evidence proving that Jawad was a juvenile at the time of his capture, that he was tricked into joining an insurgent group and was drugged before the attack, and that two other men had confessed to the crime, had been deliberately suppressed, and also explained that his proposal to negotiate a plea arrangement for Jawad’s release, which would have involved “a short period of additional custody … devoted to rehabilitating him and preparing him to reintegrate into civilian society,” was dismissed out of hand.

In a submission accompanying Jawad’s habeas corpus claim in January this year, Lt. Col. Vandeveld laid out his criticisms in even more detail, describing at length the “chaotic” state of the Prosecutors’ Office, and explaining how he discovered evidence relating to Jawad’s abuse at Bagram and in Guantánamo, where he was subjected to a sleep deprivation program, which involved moving prisoners from cell to cell every few hours (over a two-week period, in Jawad’s case) and which was known, euphemistically, as the “frequent flier program.” He also noted that Jawad’s continued detention was “something beyond a travesty,” and stated that he “should be released to resume his life in civil society, for his sake, and for our own sense of justice and perhaps to restore a measure of our basic humanity.”

In addition, when Col. Henley excluded Jawad’s first confession because it had been extracted through torture, Lt. Col. Vandeveld explained why the government no longer had a case against him. The confession, he said, was “among the most important evidence for his upcoming war crimes trial,” and he added, “To me, the case is not only eviscerated, it is now impossible to prosecute with any credibility.”

With all this evidence eviscerating the government’s case against Jawad, you would be forgiven for thinking that, seven months later, he would have been repatriated to Afghanistan, to begin to pull together the pieces of his shattered life. Instead, however, he is still in Guantánamo, with no sign of whether his habeas corpus review will be successful, or if President Obama intends to haul him up before a Military Commission once more.

Was Mohamed Jawad just 12 years old when seized?

In an attempt to inject fresh life into Jawad’s moribund case, another member of his defense team, Marine Maj. Eric Montalvo, last week visited Afghanistan in an attempt to “create political pressure to move the case forward,” as the Associated Press explained, because President Obama’s “decision to close Guantánamo and reconsider how detainees should be tried has indefinitely stalled their case in the United States.”

Announcing, “We were in a winning posture in the trial, so to now come along and change the rules in the middle of the game, who knows what’s going to happen,” and adding that Jawad’s case was “somewhat of an embarrassment to the American judicial system,” Maj. Montalvo deposited a petition at Afghanistan’s Supreme Court last Monday, acknowledging that a ruling by the Court would “not have legal authority in the United States,” but hoping that it might raise calls for Jawad’s release by ruling that “Afghanistan’s constitution at the time did not allow for the extradition of prisoners to another country, making the transfer to Guantánamo illegal.”

However, the most shocking detail to emerge from Maj. Montalvo’s visit to Afghanistan was his announcement that recent research indicated that Jawad was not 16 or 17 when seized (in contrast to the Pentagon’s claim that he was 18), but that he was in fact just 12 years old. Like many of the dirt-poor, illiterate prisoners in Guantánamo, Jawad himself has no idea when he was born, but Maj. Montalvo said that, after representatives of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission visited his family, they were able to “estimate how old Jawad is because they recall he was born in a refugee camp in Pakistan about six months after his father was killed in the battle of Khost,” part of the bloody civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, which took place in the winter of 1990-91.

Asked to comment on this latest claim, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, maintained that a bone scan, taken at Guantánamo, indicated that Jawad was 18 at the time of his capture, but even before this latest announcement, his defense team — and Lt. Col. Vandeveld — had disputed this claim. Maj. Frakt acknowledged to the AP that Jawad’s family “might not know his age” and that “they would have an interest in making him seem younger,” but he defended the latest estimate of his age, stating that it was “supported by records showing Jawad was only 5-foot-3 and 124 pounds when he arrived at Guantánamo in February 2003, [but] is now roughly 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds.”

In an email exchange with me on Saturday, Maj. Frakt added that the US authorities were in contact with Jawad’s family for six years through the International Committee of the Red Cross, although they “apparently never bothered to ask them his age,” and defended Maj. Montalvo’s efforts to try to determine his age as “the first real concerted attempt that has been made.” He also pointed out that the government “definitely considered Jawad a minor when they transported him to Guantánamo,” because Larry C. James, the author of Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib, wrote that he “was sent to accompany minors on the flight from Afghanistan.”

As the AP noted, the estimate of Jawad’s age, if confirmed, would make him “one of the youngest detainees ever sent to Guantánamo.” This is certainly true, but as I have reported previously, at least 22 juveniles — including an Afghan boy who was probably just 11 years old when he was seized — have been held at Guantánamo throughout its long history, and in the end, whether Jawad was 12 or 17 at the time of his capture, what matters most is that he was never treated with the kind of care that is appropriate for juvenile prisoners — as stipulated by the UN Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), to which the US is a signatory — and, even more importantly, that he is still held, even though the government has no case against him.

POSTSCRIPT: Today AFP reported that the Afghan government had sent a letter to the US embassy in Kabul demanding Jawad’s repatriation. Sayed Sharif Sharif, a senior government lawyer, said, “We expect the US government to return Jawad without any delay,” and added that his detention was “totally illegal.”

Maj. Montalvo also spoke out again, telling a press conference in Kabul, “There is no dispute that Jawad was tortured in the hands of the US government over the last seven years,” and Rohullah Qarizada, the chief of Afghanistan’s Bar Association, told reporters that Jawad suffered “extremely inhuman violence, abuse and torture during interrogation in Guantánamo,” including sleep deprivation, beating and death threats. “They would make him hold a bottle in his hand, telling him that it was a grenade which would explode if he dropped it,” he added.

Also present was Jawad’s uncle, Gul Nak, who explained that the family “only learned he was in Guantánamo 10 months after he was taken to Cuba when they received a letter from him through the International Committee of the Red Cross.” Nak said, “He was a child, he had nothing to do with the Taliban or terrorists,” and stated that he was, instead, just a well digger. He added, “We want them (the US government) to compensate us financially as well as apologize.”

POSTSCRIPT 2: On June 2, District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle refused Justice Department calls “for more time to produce material relevant to the case,” as AFP described it. Giving the government a deadline of June 12 “to present supporting evidence in the case,” Judge Huvelle also set a date of June 19 for Jawad’s habeas corpus hearing, and explained — demonstrating an acute awareness of the details of Jawad’s long ordeal, which, I believe, augurs well for the success of his habeas petition — “This case has been so thoroughly examined that it may be the one and only case not to be so difficult. This case is ready to go.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

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

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

For the Guardian’s Comment is free, “Remember the Battle of the Beanfield” is an article I wrote to commemorate the 24th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, when a convoy of new age travellers, peace activists, anti-nuclear campaigners and free festival goers were ambushed en route to Stonehenge, to set up the 12th annual Stonehenge free festival, and subjected to a brutal display of State aggression.

On that dreadful day for civil liberties in the UK, when Margaret Thatcher, having crushed the miners, turned her attention to a new “enemy within,” the one-sided Battle of the Beanfield was followed up by legislation (the 1986 Public Order Act) that legitimized the government’s attempts to crush the way of life of travellers and Gypsies, curtailed the British public’s traditional right to gather freely without prior permission, and paved the way for a further assault on civil liberties (in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act), which was precipitated by the last large free festival in the UK, at Castlemorton, in May 1992.

To mark the anniversary, I’ve written a brief history of the suppression of civil liberties over the last quarter of a century, which explains how the Battle of the Beanfield led directly to the even more furious onslaught on civil liberties that has taken place in the last 12 years, under a Labour government, and drawing parallels between the Beanfield and the G20 protests in April.

Four years ago, I compiled and edited a book about The Battle of the Beanfield to mark its 20th anniversary, and, while I’m glad that the book is still available (for orders by cheque in the UK), I’m also pleased to report that, for this anniversary, I’ve finally managed to work out how to accept UK payments via PayPal, not only for The Battle of the Beanfield, but also for my other two books, The Guantánamo Files and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion. For trade orders of the Beanfield book, please contact Alan Dearling of Enabler Publications.

To further commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, the following is an introduction to the events of that day, taken from Chapter One of The Battle of the Beanfield:

An excerpt from The Battle of the Beanfield

In the summer of 1984, while the majority of the festival regulars pursued their annual cycle of events, the first signs of a new and disturbingly violent intolerance on the part of the authorities took place at Boscombe Down airfield near Stonehenge, and at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire. The first of these incidents came about after a group of militant travellers hijacked a peaceful animal rights protest at Porton Down in early July, pulling down fences before moving on to the US air force base at Boscombe Down, where a peace camp was already in existence and a free festival had been held just a few weeks before. At Boscombe Down, the fences came down once more, “undoing weeks of careful confidence-building between peace activists and the USAF base security”, as one observer, Celia Kibblewhite, described it. The authorities took their revenge shortly after, when the protestors were, according to Celia, “cut up by riot vans, boarded, attacked and trashed by a squad of Special Branch police.”

In some ways, this retaliation by the police could be regarded as the end result of a deliberately confrontational game of cat-and-mouse that had been bubbling away for years. At Nostell Priory, however, the police violence was unprovoked and far more severe. At the end of a licensed weekend festival, riot police, who had only recently been suppressing striking miners at the Orgreave coking plant, raided the site at dawn, ransacking vehicles and arresting the majority of the travellers — 360 people in total — with a savagery that had not been seen since the last Windsor Free Festival in 1974. The travellers were held without charge for up to a fortnight in police and army prisons, finally appearing before a magistrate who found them all guilty on allegedly trumped-up charges, and the events of that time are vividly described in a sometimes harrowing and sometimes hilarious account by Phil Shakesby in the following chapter.

Some of the battered survivors made it to Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, a disused World War II airbase that had been designated as the second Cruise missile base after Greenham Common, where they joined peace protestors, other travellers and members of various Green organisations to become the Rainbow Village Peace Camp. In many ways, Molesworth, which swiftly became a rooted settlement, was the epitome of the free festival-protest fusion, cutting across class and social divides and reflecting many of the developments — in feminism, activism and environmental awareness — that had been transforming alternative society since the largely middle class — and often patriarchal — revolutions of the late sixties and early seventies. One resident, Phil Hudson, recalled the extent of the experiment: “There was a village shop on a double-decker bus, a postman, a chapel, a peace garden, a small plantation of wheat for Ethiopia (planted weeks before Michael Buerk ‘broke’ the famine story in the mainstream media), and the legendary Free Food Kitchen.” The Rainbow Village was finally evicted in February 1985 by the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in the UK, and the unprecedented scale of the operation, and the effect it had in creating even stronger bonds between the various groups of travellers, are brought to life in the interview with Maureen Stone in Chapter Three, and in the recollections of Sheila Craig in Chapter Six.

A children’s parade at Molesworth peace camp, 1984.

The convoy shifted uneasily around the country for the next few months, persistently harassed by the police and regularly monitored by planes and helicopters. In April they were presented with an injunction, naming 83 individuals who supposedly made up the leadership of the convoy, which was designed to prevent them from going to Stonehenge. As Sheila Craig put it, however, “it was difficult to take it seriously, it seemed meaningless, almost comical, just a bit of paper … So the festival was banned, but we were the festival. It didn’t seem to make a lot of difference, especially as we seemed to be banned anyway, wherever we were.”

Such was the awareness that a noose was tightening around the travellers — through the well-publicised banning of the festival, as well as the constant persecution and the injunction — that even those like the Green Collective, who continued to assert the right of people to attend the 1985 festival, knew that they were effectively drawing up “battle plans.” In the face of the National Trust threatening further injunctions against organisations like Festival Welfare Services and the St John Ambulance Brigade if they showed up at Stonehenge, Bruce Garrard wrote in a Green Collective mailing newsletter, “After years of talking about it, this year it seems the authorities will be making a concerted effort to stop the next midsummer festival … but they won’t succeed; what they’ll probably do is to politicise the 50,000+ free festival goers who will arrive there anyway … Thousands of people will be on the move this summer. We’ll all look back and remember the Spirit of ’85.”

As it transpired, people would remember the Spirit of ’85 for far different reasons. On June 1st, after groups of travellers from around the country had stopped overnight in Savernake Forest near Marlborough, 140 vehicles set off for Stonehenge in the hope of setting up the 12th free festival. The atmosphere, as described by many eye-witnesses in the accounts that follow, was buoyant and optimistic. It remains apparent, however — especially in light of the persecution of the previous nine months — that behind this façade lurked generally unvoiced fears. Mo Poole, for example, recalled, in a conversation with Roisin McAuley for an edition of ‘In Living Memory’ that was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2002, that “When the convoy had left Savernake that day, there was a police helicopter that had followed us all the way. There was police everywhere, really. It was obvious to us that we were being followed by the police and that they were monitoring our journey, and therefore I knew that something was going to happen, because they’d never done that before.”

[Veteran festival organiser] Sid Rawle was so convinced that the state was planning a disproportionate response to the threat posed by the convoy that he stayed behind in Savernake, arguing that if all the travellers stayed put and waited for thousands more people to join them, the authorities would be powerless to break up the ever-growing movement that he had worked for so long to encourage. While it’s also apparent that some of those who set off for Stonehenge that day were prepared for some kind of confrontation, few could have suspected quite how well-armed and hostile their opponents would be. The violent ambush that followed has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield, but it might be better described as a one-sided rout of heart-breaking brutality, and a black day for British justice and civil liberties whose repercussions are still felt to this day.

The Rastabus, one of the last vehicles to be attacked at the Battle of the Beanfield.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For another illustrated article on Stonehenge, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present (June 2008).