Archive for February, 2023
‘Frankham Walk’: Peabody’s Cynical Rebranding of the Destroyed Old Tidemill Garden Site in Deptford
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So finally, Peabody, the charitable housing association turned private developer, has rebranded the destroyed Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden site in Deptford, and the ‘regenerated’ old Tidemill primary school next door, as ‘Frankham Walk’, featuring, as its advertising hoardings show, “Your dream home” — if your dream home consists of a 1, 2, 3 or 4-bedroom apartment, a duplex or a townhouse for private sale or shared ownership, with private sales for 1 to 3-bedroom flats ranging in price from £337,500 to £690,000, and with shared ownership deals ranging from £84,375 to £172,500 for a 25% share, plus monthly rent and service charges.
There are, or will be 144 properties in total in ’Frankham Walk’ — 51 for private sale, 14 for shared ownership, and 79 that, we are told, will be “affordable rent homes for local people on Lewisham Council’s waiting list.” A further 65 properties — 27 for shared ownership, and 38 “affordable rent homes for local people on Lewisham Council’s waiting list” — will, we are also told, follow when 2-30a Reginald Road, an existing block of 16 structurally sound council flats, is demolished and replaced with new housing.
The name ‘Frankham Walk’ was probably arrived at after the longest deliberations in the history of 21st century ‘regeneration’ projects, because of the contentious nature of the development, which involved the two-month occupation of the garden by campaigners, to try to prevent its destruction, its violent eviction by bailiffs hired by Lewisham Council, and millions of pounds spent by the council guarding the empty school and the destroyed garden.
Great News As The Rabbani Brothers Are Freed From Guantánamo and Sent Home to Pakistan; 18 Others Approved for Release Must Now Also Be Freed
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On Thursday, the US authorities confirmed that two Pakistani brothers in Guantánamo — Ahmed Rabbani, 53, and his elder brother Abdul Rahim, 55 — had been freed from Guantánamo and sent home to Pakistan.
Both men had been held by the US for over 20 years. Seized in their home city of Karachi in September 2002, they had been held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for 545 days before being sent to Guantánamo in September 2004, where they had been held ever since without charge or trial.
As Carol Rosenberg noted for the New York Times, which has just published the story of their release, a day after it was broken on social media by former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, the US authorities claimed that it was holding the brothers “for helping to operate safe houses where suspected operatives of Al Qaeda holed up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”
From Ignorance to Denial to Disaster: 60 Years of Living With Climate Change — Part One: The 1960s and 1970s
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This is the first of what will be four articles looking at how awareness of the climate crisis has developed, and been supported, ignored or resisted, over the last 60 years. I’m writing these articles to reflect on my 60th birthday, at the end of February. The second part, covering the 1980s, is here.
60 years ago, as my poor mum grew ever larger, carrying what would be her only child — me — the UK experienced its coldest winter since records began. The Big Freeze began on December 12-13, 1962, and by December 29-30, when my mum was seven months pregnant, the snow lay nine inches deep in Wythenshawe, south of Manchester, and just a few miles south east of where my parents lived, in Sale.
In January, the upper reaches of the River Thames froze, and at Herne Bay, in Kent, the sea froze for a mile from the shoreline. By February, when I was born, storms reached Gale Force 8 on the Beaufort scale, and a 36-hour blizzard “caused heavy drifting snow in most parts of the country”, reaching 20 feet in some areas, as “gale-force winds reached up to 81 miles per hour.” Many parts of the country were swathed in snow for two months continuously, and it was not until March 6, when I was six days old, that the Great Freeze came to an end.
The discovery of “global warming”, from the 1820s to the 1960s
It was difficult to think, back in 1963, that human activity was already contributing to an alarming increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but it was indeed the case. Scientists had been investigating how the earth’s atmosphere functioned since the 1820s, when the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier suggested that the earth’s atmosphere might act as some kind of insulation system, making the planet warmer than it would otherwise have been if it was dependent solely on solar radiation.
Photos and Report: Coordinated Protests for the Release of “The Guantánamo 20”, and the Closure of the Prison, in London and Washington, D.C.
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On Wednesday, February 15, campaigners in London and Washington, D.C. held their first coordinated monthly protest calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, specifically, for the release of 20 men (out of the 34 men still held), who have long been approved for release, but who are still held because of a lack of urgency on the part of the US government when it comes to securing their freedom.
I wrote about the plight of the 20 men here, when Majid Khan was released from Guantánamo and resettled in Belize, eleven months after his military commission sentence came to an end, when I noted that, while it was, of course, just and appropriate that Khan had been freed and resettled, because the US government was legally required to freedom at the end of his sentence, it was unforgivable that the Biden administration is dragging its heels when it comes to releasing the 20 other men still held who have been approved for release, because the decisions to release them were taken by administrative review processes that carry no legal weight.
As I stated at the time, “Until they are freed, the message the US government is sending to these 20 men, and to the world, is that it is easier to resettle from Guantánamo someone convicted of terrorism but demonstrably remorseful than it is to resettle someone never charged with a crime at all.”
Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking £1,000 For ‘The State of London’, My Unique Reader-Funded Photo-Journalism Project
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Dear friends and supporters of ’The State of London’,
Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my unique, reader-funded photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which over 6,000 of you follow on Facebook — and nearly 1,500 on Twitter.
Long ago, in the mists of time, when David Cameron’s Tories had only been in power for two years, Brexit hadn’t even been conceived, and London was gearing up for the jingoistic orgy of nationalism that was the 2012 Olympics, I set out on my bike, with a little point-and-shoot Canon camera, to record the changing face of London.
That was in May 2012, and five years later I began posting a photo a day from my archive, and from the photos I was still taking on a daily basis, on ‘The State of London’ Facebook page, along with accompanying essays — about cynical council estate demolitions, the proliferation of new high-rise office blocks in the City and Canary Wharf, as well as photos taken on the sometimes long distance journeys that I undertook through London’s 120 geographical postcodes.
UN Finally Gets to Visit Guantánamo; Also Secures End to Trump-Era Ban on Prisoners Leaving With Their Artwork
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Finally, over 21 years after the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, a UN Rapporteur has visited the prison, to meet with prisoners as part of what a UN press release described as “a technical visit to the United States” by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.
“Between 6 and 14 February,” as the UN explained, Ní Aoláin “will visit Washington D.C. and subsequently the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” and, over the next three months, “will also carry out a series of interviews with individuals in the United States and abroad … including victims and families of victims of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and former detainees in countries of resettlement/repatriation.”
Ever since Guantánamo opened, successive UN Rapporteurs for Torture tried to visit the prison, but were rebuffed, either by the hostility of the US government, or through a failure on the part of officials to guarantee that any meetings that took place with prisoners would not be monitored.
Shocking Statistics From Guantánamo: How Long Prisoners Approved for Release Have Been Waiting to Be Freed
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Last week, when Majid Khan was freed from Guantánamo, it had taken 337 days for the US government to secure his release after his terrorism-related military commission sentence ended, on March 1, 2022.
The US government worked hard to secure Majid Khan’s resettlement in Belize because it was legally required to do so, and also because officials in various branches of the government wanted to ensure the continuing viability of plea deals for Guantánamo prisoners accused of acts of terrorism.
In contrast, however, as the infographic above shows, 20 other men approved for release through high-level government review processes have, for the most part, been waiting far longer than the 337 days that Majid Khan had to wait for his freedom.
Video: On Al Jazeera, I Discuss Majid Khan’s Release from Guantánamo, and the Urgent Need for 20 Other Men Approved for Release to Be Freed
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Last week, I was delighted to be invited to discuss Guantánamo on Al Jazeera News, in response to the release, in Belize, of Majid Khan, whose sentence for terrorism-related activities came to an end nearly a year ago. A Pakistani national, Khan is the first “high-value detainee” to be freed from Guantánamo, and the first of the six prisoners freed by President Biden to be resettled in a third country.
It was my first visit to Al Jazeera’s London studios for many years — since before they moved to The Shard, in fact — and it was a real pleasure to be interviewed in person, rather than by Zoom, as so many interviews are these days. Being live on air in a studio has much more of a buzz, and a sense of urgency about it than a Zoom call, and I was initially quite shocked to be told how rare studio interviews are these days, since the Covid lockdowns, until I recalled quite how many interviews I’ve seen, across so many news channels, of people in their spare rooms or located in front of strategically arranged bookcases.
My interview — with Lauren Taylor — is posted below, on my YouTube channel, and I hope that you have time to watch it (it’s just three and a half minutes), and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.
Majid Khan Released From Guantánamo to New Life in Belize; 20 Others Approved for Release But Still Held Must Now Be Prioritized by Biden
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Congratulations to Majid Khan, the former Guantánamo prisoner who is beginning a new life in the central American coastal country of Belize, formerly known as British Honduras when, for over a century, it was under British rule.
Now 42 years old, Khan spent almost half his life in US custody, and was, for most of that time, one of the most profoundly isolated prisoners in the whole of the “war on terror.” He is the first of 16 “high-value detainees” held at Guantánamo to be released, the sixth prisoner released under President Biden, and the first of these six to be resettled in a third country.
Seized in Karachi in March 2003, Majid Khan disappeared into the CIA’s global network of “black sites” for three and a half years — when his family had no idea of his whereabouts — until President Bush announced in September 2006 that he was one of 14 ”high-value detainees” transferred from the CIA’s secret torture prisons to Guantánamo.
Guantánamo In Its 22nd Year: “The US Created a Category of Prisoners With No Rights Whatsoever”
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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.
For more years than we care to remember, campaigners for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay have met in Washington, D.C., on and around January 11, the anniversary of its opening (in 2002), to call for its closure.
Although a coalition of groups have been involved in these annual protests — including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture — the protests’ beating heart has always been Witness Against Torture, founded in 2005 by 25 Catholic Workers. The Catholic Worker Movement was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, whose Christian anarchism, as it has been described, is focused on “liv[ing] in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ,” with “no place for economic exploitation or war,” and no “racial, gender or religious discrimination.”
The 25 founding members of Witness Against Torture, including Frida Berrigan, Matt Daloisio and Art Laffin, who are still involved today, visited Cuba in December 2005, raising publicity as they bravely attempted to visit Guantánamo, and on their return they began organizing with other groups, including CCR, protesting at the White House, and other key locations — the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Justice Department — and sometimes getting arrested.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
