Victoria Brittain | |
---|---|
Born | Victoria Catherine Brittain 1942 (age 81–82) |
Nationality | British |
Occupation(s) | Journalist, author, human rights campaigner |
Victoria Brittain (born 1942) [1] is a British journalist and author who lived and worked for many years in Africa, the US, and Asia, [2] including 20 years at The Guardian , where she eventually became associate foreign editor. [3] [4] In the 1980s, she worked closely with the anti-apartheid movement, interviewing activists from the United Democratic Front and the Southern African liberation movements. [5] A notable campaigner for human rights throughout the developing world, [6] Brittain has contributed widely to many international publications, writing particularly on Africa, the US and the Middle East, and has also authored books and plays, including 2013's Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror.
Brittain was born in India and was three or four years old when she went to Britain – as she said in a 2018 interview: "My father was part of the so-called British Empire and he was like a leftover from that period." [7]
Brittain has lived and worked in Saigon, Algiers, Nairobi, London and Washington, DC, and has reported from more than two dozen African countries, as well as the Middle East, particularly Palestine and Lebanon, and Cuba. [8] She worked for The Guardian for more than two decades and has written for many other outlets and publications, including Afrique/Asie, Le Monde Diplomatique , The Nation , Race and Class . [8] In 1993, MI5 began a three-year surveillance operation (including phone-tapping and bugging her house) against Brittain as a total of £250,000 of money had arrived in her bank account, possibly laundered from Libyan sources. It was later discovered that this money was from the Ghanaian military officer Kojo Tsikata. Brittain had agreed to channel Tsikata's funds for a libel case against The Independent through her personal account; unbeknown to her, Tsikata was receiving funds for his suit from Libya. [9]
Her work has focused on human rights and she has written widely and given lectures related to Guantanamo Bay prison. [10] Her activist writings and work encompass plays – Guantanamo (Tricycle Theatre, 2004), with Gillian Slovo, [11] and The Meaning of Waiting (Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, 2010) [12] – and broadcasts on various media outlets. [4] She was a consultant to the United Nations on the impact of conflict on women, also the subject of a research paper for the London School of Economics. [13]
Books that she has written or edited include Moazzam Begg's co-authored work Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar (2006). [14] Brittain is a trustee of Prisoners of Conscience [15] and of the Ariel and Melbourne Trust. [16] She was a founder member of the annual Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008, [4] and is a trustee of the Palestine Book Awards. [17]
As of 2020, Brittain is chair of Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation with a focus on UK foreign, military and intelligence policies. [18]
In 1966, Brittain married Andrew Knight, by whom she had a son. After their divorce, she married another journalist, Peter Sharrock.
Muhammad Ismail Agha is an Afghan national who was among some 15-21 juveniles held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camps. He is believed to be 13 or 14 years old when arrested by Afghan soldiers. Detained without charge, he was released on January 29, 2004, and returned home.
Katharine Teresa Gun is a British linguist who worked as a translator for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In 2003, she leaked top-secret information to The Observer concerning a request by the United States for compromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the 2003 United Nations Security Council, who were due to vote on a second UN resolution on the prospective 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef is an Afghan diplomat who was the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan before the US invasion of Afghanistan.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a Mauritanian engineer who was detained at Guantánamo Bay detention camp without charge from 2002 until his release on October 17, 2016.
Moazzam Begg is a British Pakistani who was held in extrajudicial detention by the US government in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility and the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp, in Cuba, for nearly three years. Seized by Pakistani intelligence at his home in Pakistan in February 2002, he was transferred to the custody of US Army officers, who held him in the detention centre at Bagram, Afghanistan, before transferring him to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held until January 2005.
Murat Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was held in extrajudicial detention by the United States at its military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba beginning in December 2001. He was tortured in both places. By early 2002, intelligence officials of the United States and Germany had concluded that accusations against Kurnaz were groundless.
Gillian Slovo is a South African-born writer who lives in the UK. She was a recipient of the Golden PEN Award.
Richard Dean Belmar is a British man who was held in extrajudicial detention in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He was first detained in Pakistan in 2002 and sent to Bagram Theater Internment Facility, then Guantanamo. He was not charged, and was returned to the United Kingdom on 25 January 2005.
Sir Patrick Jeremy Walker, KCB was a British civil servant who was Director General (DG) of MI5, the United Kingdom's internal security service, from 1988 to 1992.
Said Salih Said Nashir is a citizen of Yemen, held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. His Internment Serial Number is 841.
Jillian Becker is a South African-born British author, journalist, and lecturer, who specialises in research about terrorism. Her work includes Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (1977).
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
Enemy Combatant is a memoir by British Muslim, Moazzam Begg, co-written by Victoria Brittain, former Associate Foreign Editor for The Guardian, about Begg's detention by the government of the United States of America in Bagram Detention Facility and at Camp Echo, Guantanamo Bay and his life prior to that detention. It was published in Britain as Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey To Guantanamo and Back (ISBN 0-7432-8567-0), and in the US as Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar (ISBN 1-59558-136-7). In the US, the foreword was written by David Ignatius of The Washington Post.
Torturing Democracy is a 2008 documentary film produced by Washington Media Associates. The film details the use of torture by the Bush administration in the "War on Terror."
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian writer and human rights activist and animal rights advocate. She is the author of several books, and the founder of a non-governmental organization, Playgrounds for Palestine. She lives in Pennsylvania. Her first novel, Mornings in Jenin, was translated into 32 languages and sold more than a million copies. The sales and reach of her debut novel made Abulhawa the most widely read Palestinian author of all time. Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky And Water, was sold in 19 languages before its release, and was published in English in 2015. Against the Loveless World, her third novel, was released in August 2020, also to critical acclaim.
Cage is a London-based advocacy organisation which aims to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror. Cage highlights and campaigns against state policies, developed as part of the War on Terror. The organisation was formed to raise awareness of the plight of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere and has worked closely with former detainees held by the United States and campaigns on behalf of current detainees held without trial. Cage was formerly known as Cageprisoners, and is ordinarily styled as "CAGE".
Andy Worthington is a British historian, investigative journalist, and film director. He has published three books, two on Stonehenge and one on the war on terror, been published in numerous publications and directed documentary films. Articles by Worthington have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, AlterNet, ZNet, the Future of Freedom Foundation and Amnesty International, and Qatar-based Al Jazeera. He has appeared on television with Iran-based Press TV In 2008, he began writing articles for Cageprisoners, and became its Senior Researcher in June 2010.
The Guantanamo Trap is a documentary film about four individuals whose lives were changed by their association with the Guantanamo Bay detention camps. The film was directed by Thomas Wallner and won the special jury prize at the 2011 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
Edmund Clark HonFRPS is a British artist and photographer whose work explores politics, representation, incarceration and control. His research based work combines a range of references and forms including bookmaking, installations, photography, video, documents, text and found images and material. Several of his projects explore the War on Terror.