Posts Tagged ‘London Guantanamo Campaign’

Cable Car, Victoria Dock, Olympic Site & Torture 2013

Wednesday, June 26th, 2024

Cable Car, Victoria Dock, Olympic Site & Torture: I was coming to London to photograph the ‘Say No to Torture‘ protest on the evening of Wednesday 26th June, but as it was a nice day and I came up a few hours earlier to take a ride on London’s cable car and then to take a few pictures around Victoria Dock and Silvertown before making quick visit to the Greenway to see what progress was being made in opening up the former Olympic site.


Emirates ‘Airline’ – Arab Dangleway – North Greenwich – Victoria Dock.

Cable Car, Victoria Dock, Olympic Site & Torture

Now known officially since 2022 as the IFS Cloud Cable Car, the dangleway was never a viable transport system, with longer journey time and costing more than alternative routes on almost every conceivable journey.

Cable Car, Victoria Dock, Olympic Site & Torture

It doesn’t quite connect up with the rest of Transport for London’s system, the south terminal being a short and slightly confusing walk from North Greenwich Jubilee and bus station, and another fairly short walk on the North bank to Royal Victoria DLR. Completed in June 2012 its cost of £60m made it the most expensive cable car system ever built.

Cable Car, Victoria Dock, Olympic Site & Torture

As I noted “it should be promoted as one of London’s cheaper and more interesting tourist attractions” giving great views along the River Thames, although the journey is a relatively short on at 7-10 minutes. with London in the distance, Canary Wharf and the Olympic site a little closer and Bow Creek, Silvertown and the Dome both nearly underneath.

Cable Car, Victoria Dock, Olympic Site & Torture

To my surprise, 11 years later the service is still running and TfL say that with the sponsorship deals it actually makes a profit.

Emirates ‘Airline’ – Arab Dangleway


Victoria Dock and Silvertown

I think the more interesting parts of the Thames shoreline here are not yet publicly accessible, but you can – at least most of the time – walk along by Royal Victoria Dock and across the high level bridge for some more interesting views. The area and bridge get closed off when they are flogging illegal arms at the Excel Centre fairs (if you represent a despotic government you’ll have a ticket to that anyway.)

Most of the pictures here were taken from that high level walkway across the dock, but I think I walked on to the stations on the DLR line to Woolwich (then only to North Woolwich) which are elevated and also give some interesting views.

Victoria Dock and Silvertown


Stratford Greenway Olympic Revisit – Stratford Marsh

I took the DLR to Canning Town, changed to the JUbilee to Stratford then back to the DLR for the short ride to Puddling Mill Lane, and walked up onto the Greenway, where I’d photogaphed many times in the past.

Progress in releasing the Olympic site to the public appeared to be very slow and there sre still routes closed off in 2024.

Stratford Greenway Olympic Revisit


Say No To Torture – Trafalgar Square

It was the ‘International Day in Support of Victims of Torture‘, the anniversary of the UN Convention Against Torture on 26 June 1987, and the London Guantanamo Campaign had organised a protest in Trafalgar Square.

The London Guantanamo Campaign had been active in calling for the closure of Guantanamo and other torture prisons including Bagram in Afghanistan since 2006. In particular the protest was to draw attention to Shaker Aamer, one of the 166 prisoners still held in Guantanamo. A London resident he was captured by bandits in Afghanistan where he was working for a medical charity and sold to the American forces, who tortured him – with the cooperation of the British Secret Service in Bagram, before illegally rendering him to Guantanamo where he continues to be tortured despite having been cleared for release.

In 2013 he was in very poor health having been – along with the majority of the other prisoners there – on hunger strike for 141 days. It was not until 30 October 2015 that he was finally released to the UK.

The US response to the hunger strike had been regular beatings, keeping those taking part in solitary confinement in bare cells and to use forcible feeding, strapping them into a special chair and forcing a feeding tube up a nostril and down into their stomach. The procedure is extremely painful and both this and the sensory deprivation of solitary confinement in bare cells also constitute torture under the UN definitions.

Many of those taking part wore orange Guanatanamo-style jump suits and black hoods and they held up banners an placards saying ‘No To Torture‘ in 30 languages. Some of those taking part were regular protesters with the ‘Save Shaker Aamer Campaign‘ which has been holding daily lunchtime vigils opposite the House of Commons to put pressure on the UK government to release him. Many think his continued imprisonment is because his testimony would embarrass both the UK and US security services who were clearly involved in his torture.

Others were also protesting against torture, with Balochs in Pakistan being subject to arrests and other human rights violations including torture by the Pakistan authorities for campaigning for independence. The protesters held pictures of a number of Baloch activists who have simply disappeared, believed to be held or possibly killed by Pakistani forces.

And protesters also drew attention to the US treatment of award-winning British poet and translator Talha Ahsan who suffers from Aspergers syndrome. He was extradited from the UK and was currently awaiting trial in solitary confinement in a high-security state prison in Connecticut because of alleged association with an Islamic web site and publishing house said to have links with terrorism. He was eventually released after 8 years following a plea bargain in December 2013 when time already served in the UK and US prisons was ‘time already served.’

Say No To Torture.


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Guantanamo Day – 11th January

Thursday, January 11th, 2024

Guantanamo Day – 11th January. It was on January 11, 2002 that George W Bush set up the detention camp on the disputed US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, after he had been advised by lawyers that the US courts would be unable to offer detainees held there the normal legal protection that detention in the US would have enabled.

Guantanamo Day - 11th January

Camp X-Ray, a temporary facility, began with 22 detainees on that day, and others were soon filling this and the other camps which make up Guantanamo the largest of which was Camp Delta. At first the details of those sent there were kept secret, but eventually the US Department of Defense was forced to respond to a Freedom of Information from the Associated Press and to say that 779 prisoners were being held there.

Guantanamo Day - 11th January

The world got to know considerably more about what had been going on inside the torture camp in 2011 with the publication of documents by Wikileaks including 779 secret files on the prisoners. Among other revelations was “that more than 150 innocent Afghans and Pakistanis, including farmers, chefs, and drivers, were held for years without charges.”

Guantanamo Day - 11th January

The US government asserted that those held there were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, though later they lost the case in the US courts which found that they were entitled to protection under Common Article 3 which applies to armed conflicts “not of an international character”.

Guantanamo Day - 11th January

From the start the US had claimed to be treating “all detainees consistently with the principles of the Geneva Convention.” This was of course a complete lie. Guantanamo was set up as a torture camp and detainees were routinely abused and tortured, humiliated and kept under inhumane conditions in what an Amnesty International report ‘called the “Gulag of our times.“‘ As various reports by them and others including the Red Cross state it was a human rights scandal. There is much more about this in the Wikipedia article.

When President Obama came to power he had promised to close the camp, but his efforts to do so in 2009 were opposed by the military at Guantanamo and funds to transfer or release the prisoners were blocked by the US Senate. Further opposition from the US Congress against moving prisoners to the US for detention or trial prevented Obama from clearing the camp, but by the end of his administration only 41 men remained detained there.

By the end of 2023, 30 men were still being held at Guantanamo, with over half having been cleared for release. 11 of them have been charged with war crimes and are awaiting a military trial and 1 has been convicted. Some are still there because if sent to their home country they are likely to be subject to further imprisonment or death despite their innocence.

British interest in Gunatanamo decreased sharply after the release in October 2015 of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident there. A Saudi national who had permission to stay in the UK he was able at last to return to his wife and children in Battersea after having been held and tortured since 2002. He had never been charged or faced trial.

The Guardian reported following the publication of the book ‘The Secret History of the Five Eyes‘ by Richard Kerbaj in 2022, that in 2004 “Tony Blair’s government was given special access to US intelligence files on Guantánamo Bay which revealed there was no credible evidence against the British detainees“. Yet Aamer was held for another 11 years.

Since Aamer’s release protests on the anniversary of the setting up of Guantanamo have continued, but on a rather smaller scale as you can see from Vigil marks 17 years of Guantanamo torture in 2019. The pictures on this post are from 2008 when I photographed four different events in London on January 11th.

Six years of Guantanamo: Amnesty
London Guantanamo Campaign / Cageprisoners
Guantanamo – London Catholic Worker
Guantanamo – Parliament Square Rally

Immigration Deaths and US Truth & Justice – 2012

Monday, November 6th, 2023

Immigration Deaths and US Truth & Justice After a protest at Harmondsworth Detention Centre following the death of a detainee I travelled into central London to cover a protest at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on the eve of US Elections.


Noisy Demo after 17th Immigration Death – Harmondsworth Detention Centre

Immigration Deaths and US Truth & Justice

Campaigners from the All African Women’s Group and others demonstrated noisily at the Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre as the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman paid a visit following the death a week ago of Prince Kwabena Fosu, a Ghanian who died after ‘restraint’ by GEO Group staff.

Immigration Deaths and US Truth & Justice

Statements from other Ghanian detainees at the site alleged that Fusu had sustained massive blows from one officer who has later asked to change his “blood stained clothes so that no one would notice what happened” and that the officer concerned is now on leave “in order to pervert the course of justice“. There appears to have been no proper police investigation of his death.

Immigration Deaths and US Truth & Justice

The protesters walked down the private road leading to a BT facility which runs between the Harmondsworth and Colnbrook Detention Centres just north of Heathrow airport, ignoring a sign stating “No Tresspassers Allowed‘ with a banner ‘We will NOT let this death be Silenced‘ and made their presence obvious to the men imprisoned inside with a megaphone and some loud shouting.

Immigration Deaths and US Truth & Justice

The detention centres are surrounded by 20ft high stout metal fences, the lower half with metal sheeting and the top 10ft of a heavy metal gauze. Through this those on the upper floors of the centre could see the protest and we could see rather shadowy shapes watching us below, and could hear some shouting and people banging on the bars of the window as guards tried to stop them.

I walked with the protesters around the Harmondsworth site, watched by police and G4S security staff. When some protesters began kicking and stamping on the metal fence to make a noise, police and G4S security came to tell them they must stop and leave the site.

The police officer in charge read a notice charging the protesters with aggravated trespass and warning them that unless they left the site now they would be arrested, and that they were banned from returning withing 3 months. The protesters decided to leave rather than be arrested, and very slowly left the site.

As so often in cases involving custody deaths, the inquest was long delayed and only concluded around seven and a half years after Fusu’s death. It concluded that his death had been contributed to by neglect and multiple serious failures by the Home Office, GEO who were running the detention centre when he died, Primecare who were responsible for healthcare services, doctors and everyone else involved.

Deborah Coles, Director of INQUEST, said: “It is unconscionable that someone entrusted to the care of the state can die in this way. The jury have delivered a damning indictment of all of those responsible. Prince was failed at every level, by individuals and agencies who owed him a duty of care. He was treated in dehumanising way and as a discipline problem rather than as a seriously unwell man in need of compassion and medical care.

“His death comes as a direct result of the UK’s hostile immigration policies. This reinforced a toxic culture of indifference and neglect, where professionals who came into contact with Prince were simply unable to see the human being before them.”

No criminal charges have been taken against any of the companies or individuals involved in Fusu’s death. The CPS took years to decline to bring any charges of corporate manslaughter. After deciding to bring lesser charges under the Health & Safety Act 1974, they then reversed that decision.

More pictures at Noisy Demo after Immigration Death.


Truth, Justice and the American way? – US Embassy, Grosvenor Square

On US Election night the London Guantánamo Campaign hosted a protest outside the US Embassy at which various organisations raised human rights concerns about prisoners in the USA.

Among the other organisations with speakers at the event were Stop the War, tne Green Party, Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, Free Talha Campaign, Cageprisoners and more and there were also some performers between the speeches. And thre was a silence with candles being lit to remember the many who have been killed.

The protesters gathered around the statue of former president Eisenhower to one side of the Embassy frontage, which was being lit up for election eve with a laser projections of the stars and stripes.

The speakers highlighted shameful human rights abuses being carried out by the USA, particularly at Guantanamo, and called for whoever was elected President to close the prison camp and end the unlawful practice of extraordinary rendition. There were also those calling for the release of Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning, the whistle-blower jailed for releasing details of US war crimes.

Aisha Maniar, organiser for the London Guantánamo Campaign, said: “Four years ago, a new American president, Barack Obama, promised the world a change it could believe in. One change he put his name to in writing was the closure of Guantánamo Bay and the end of military tribunals there. That has not materialised; the American administration has added drone attacks to its repertoire of extralegal activity, expanded the scope of arbitrary detention without charge or trial, and over 160 prisoners remain at Guantánamo Bay after almost 11 years, including British resident Shaker Aamer.”

More at Truth, Justice and the American way?


US Shame – Jan 11th

Monday, January 11th, 2021

Many commentators after the recent Trump-induced invasion of the US Capitol said that the 6th January 2021 (1/6/21) is a date that will go down in history as a day of shame for the US, comparing it to December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. The latter was perhaps a little over the top, as that attack killed 2,403 US personnel, while the death toll after police let Trump supporters in to protest currently stands at five, three of these from health-related issues. But certainly it was a shameful day for US democracy – and a date that might well have been better compared to 1/11/02, 11th January 2002, the date when the first prisoners were held in illegal detention at Guantánamo Bay.

It was five years later than I first photographed a protest against this illegal detention, outside the US Embassy in London, still then in Grosvenor Square, where Amnesty International had brought over a hundred people dressed in orange jump suits to represent the detaines, forming them up into a large block in front of the embassy.

The following year on the sixth anniversary I photographed rather more demonstrations around London. Amnesty were back again outside the US Embassy, though the area in front of the embassy had been sealed off, presumably to prevent the protest taking place there. Instead it was on the street just to one side.

My next stop was the Regents Park Mosque, where I met a group of campaigners, some dressed in the now familiar orange jump suits, from the London Guantánamo Campaign and Cageprisoners who were handing out fliers calling for the closure of the Guantánamo prison camp at various sites around London all day. After giving them to people leaving the Mosque after Friday prayers I went with them to Paddington Green Police Station, where terrorist suspects were normally detained and questioned.

From there I returned to the US Embassy, where the pavement in front was now open again, and a small group from London Catholic Worker had come to hold a vigil. A man from the US Embassy came out and tried to get them to move away, but they stood their ground, lighting a circle of candles as it grew dark.

The final event of the day was a rally in Parliament Square, with speakers including former Guantánamo detainee Moazzam Begg (above) and leading campaigners for the closure of this illegal prison which has cast huge shame on the claims of the USA to be a freedom-loving democracy which upholds international law. Of course those claims have long been known to be largely sham, with the USA backing many of the world’s most repressive regimes, taking part in shady affairs such as the Bay of Pigs attempted invasion, and sponsoring coups such as the 1973 Chilean coup d’état that deposed the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende on ‘9/11’ 1973.

Although many detainees have been released – there was no evidence against the great majority who were simply foreigners who far various reasons in the wrong place at the wrong time, many held by militias and sold to the US who were offering considerable bounties – the camp remains open. President Trump in 2018 signed an executive order to keep the detention camp open indefinitely, and currently 40 prisoners remain there, still subject to torture and degrading conditions. Guantánamo remains a shameful blot on the United States.

2007
Close guantanamo 5th anniversary demonstration

2008
Six years of Guantanamo: Amnesty
London Guantanamo Campaign / Cageprisoners
Guantanamo – London Catholic Worker
Guantanamo – Parliament Square Rally

There are reports on many later protests calling for the closure of Guantánamo on My London Diary.