Archive for November, 2019
Over 70 Doctors Write to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel Expressing Fears That Julian Assange May Die in Belmarsh Prison
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It’s three days now since over sixty medical professionals from around the world (now over seventy) published an open letter to the British home secretary Priti Patel (and shadow home secretary Diane Abbott) warning of their fears that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — who is being held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison as he fights plans to extradite him to the US to face espionage charges that carry a 175-year prison sentence — may die in British custody, and urging her to allow him to have “urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health”, and that, if any medical treatment is required, for it to be “administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital.”
I’m pleased to note that the letter was picked up on by a number of significant mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian.
However, because I think that, in particular, the detailed list of assessments of Assange’s condition, included in the letter, which have been made by numerous organizations and individuals between July 2015 and this month are worth reading in full, I’m cross-posting the letter below, as published on Medium, and credited to “Doctors for Assange,” and I’m hoping that, as a result, it will reach some new readers, and also that it will provide another reference point online for this comprehensive catalog of how, since he first sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012, Julian Assange has been deprived of proper medical and psychological treatment, leading to the terrible situation whereby now over seventy medical professionals fear for his life.
As “The Report,” About the CIA Torture Program, Is Released Online, Guantánamo Prisoner Ahmed Rabbani Urges People to Watch It
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Two weeks ago I published an article about the new movie “The Report” — which looks at the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program — entitled, CIA Torture Report Author Says More Than 119 Prisoners Were Held in “Black Sites” and More Than Three Were Waterboarded, in which I drew on a Vice News interview with former Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, the lead author of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the torture program, on which the film is based.
Jones — and his team — are true American heroes, having, despite considerable opposition, trawled through six million CIA documents to produce a 6,700-page report that, via its 500-page executive summary, which is all that has been publicly released, is unstinting in its denunciation of the brutality and pointlessness of the torture program. I made his comments available — and focused in particular on the troubling statistics in the article’s title — because I thought it was extremely significant that Jones concluded that there were clearly more than the 119 prisoners included in the report, because the CIA “had no idea how many people they detained,” and that more than three prisoners were subjected to waterboarding, because, as he says, “We found a picture of a waterboard at a detention site where there were no records of any waterboarding taking place, but it had clearly been used.”
“The Report” had its theatrical release on November 15, to generally enthusiastic reviews — an 83% approval rating on the movie aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 178 reviews, with 83% approval from audiences too. Last week, I spoke about it on a US radio show, and in just three days’ time, on November 29, it will be released on Amazon Prime.
Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo and Julian Assange on the Peace and Justice Report on Sarasota Community Radio
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On Wednesday, I was delighted to talk for 30 minutes to Bob Connors and Tom Walker of the Peace and Justice Report on Sarasota Community Radio on WSLR 96.5 FM, which describes itself as “cover[ing] local, state, national and international social justice issues.” featuring “a wide variety of guests whose views are underrepresented in the mainstream media.”
We spoke about Guantánamo, past, present and future, and also about the US torture program and the plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, imprisoned in the UK and fighting his proposed extradition to the US to face espionage charges.
The show is embedded below:
My interview started six minutes in and ended at 34:40, and in it I ran through Guantánamo’s history, and my involvement with it, and expressed my sorrow about how most people nowadays have completely forgotten about the prison, even though it continues to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial, which ought to be a source of profound shame to US citizens who respect the rule of law.
Trump’s Personal Prisoners at Guantánamo: The Five Men Cleared for Release But Still Held
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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
The nearly three-year long presidency of Donald Trump is so strewn with scandals and cruel policies that some lingering injustices are being forgotten. A case in point is the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which is rarely reported in the mainstream media, with the valiant exception of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who continues to visit the prison regularly, often being the only reporter in the whole of the US to subject the working of the facility to outside scrutiny.
And yet the longer Guantánamo remains open, the more cruel and unacceptable is its fundamentally unjust premise: that men seized nearly two decades ago can be held indefinitely without charge or trial. This was grotesque under George W. Bush, who responded by releasing nearly two-thirds of the 779 men held since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, and it remained so under Barack Obama, who, shamefully, promised to close it but never did, although he did release nearly 200 more men, via two review processes that he established.
However, a new low point has been reached under Donald Trump, who has no interest in releasing any prisoners under any circumstances, and, with one exception, has been true to his word. For the 40 men still held, the prison has become a tomb.
“First They Came for the Travellers”: Priti Patel’s Chilling Attack on Britain’s Travelling Communities
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I’ve chosen my headline with care, in response to the news that the home secretary, Priti Patel, has launched a horrible attack on Britain’s travelling community, suggesting that the police should be able to immediately confiscate the vehicle of “anyone whom they suspect to be trespassing on land with the purpose of residing on it”, and announcing her intention to “test the appetite to go further” than any previous proposals for dealing with Gypsies and travellers.
As George Monbiot explained in an article for the Guardian on Wednesday, “Until successive Conservative governments began working on it, trespass was a civil and trivial matter. Now it is treated as a crime so serious that on mere suspicion you can lose your home.” Monbiot added, “The government’s proposal, criminalising the use of any place without planning permission for Roma and Travellers to stop, would extinguish the travelling life.”
“First they came for the travellers” alludes to the famous poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller with reference to the Nazis, which begins, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist”, and continues with reference to trade unionists and Jews, and ending, “Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
The Significance of the High Court Ruling That the Police’s London-Wide Ban on Extinction Rebellion Was “Unlawful”
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The news cycle seems so frenetic right now that stories barely get noticed before the media spotlight promiscuously turns to some other topic. A case in point, to my mind, is an important High Court ruling last week — that a decision taken by the Metropolitan Police last month, to impose a blanket ban across the whole of London prohibiting any assembly of more than two people linked to Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Autumn Uprising’, under section 14 of the Public Order Act of 1986, was “unlawful.”
The two High Court judges who issued the ruling — Mr. Justice Dingemans and Mr. Justice Chamberlain — said, as the Guardian described it, that “the Met had been wrong to define Extinction Rebellion’s two-week long ‘autumn uprising’ as a single public assembly on which it could impose the order.”
As Mr. Justice Dingemans stated in the ruling, “Separate gatherings, separated both in time and by many miles, even if coordinated under the umbrella of one body, are not a public assembly under the meaning of section 14(1) of the 1986 act.” He added, “The XR autumn uprising intended to be held from 14 to 19 October was not therefore a public assembly … therefore the decision to impose the condition was unlawful because there was no power to impose it.”
CIA Torture Report Author Says More Than 119 Prisoners Were Held in “Black Sites” and More Than Three Were Waterboarded
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This week sees the release of “The Report,” an important new feature-length film about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.
The “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program — more generally known as ‘The Torture Report” — involved a team of five people reading and analyzing over six million CIA documents over the course of five years, and Committee members voted, by nine votes to six, to approve it as an official committee report on December 13, 2012, although the full report has never been publicly released.
Instead, a 500-page executive summary was released in December 2014, in which, as I wrote at the time for Al-Jazeera, the Committee “conclude[d] that torture was ‘not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees,’ that the CIA made ‘inaccurate claims’ about the ‘effectiveness’ of the program in an attempt to justify it and that it led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases.”
Closing Guantánamo, the Democrats and the NDAA
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
In the long and dispiriting story of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, in defiance of its purported values, the US is holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, the role of Congress is not always well understood.
Under George W. Bush, lawmakers were largely compliant with the shameful innovations introduced after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the week after the attacks, which allowed the president to pursue anyone that he felt was associated with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces, and to imprison them at the Guantánamo prison, which was deliberately established on the US naval base in Cuba to be beyond the reach of the US courts.
From the beginning, the men — and boys — held there were held without rights, and although long legal struggles led to them eventually securing habeas corpus rights, Congress fought back. However, when their habeas rights were eventually gutted of all meaning, the responsibility lay with ideologically malignant appeals court judges rather than Congress.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
