Andy Worthington's Blog, page 33

A “Cluster Covfefe”: Guantánamo Prisoner Majid Khan’s Damning Verdict on the Shambolic Military Commissions

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Good News! Haringey Council Ends Its £2 Billion Social Cleansing Deal with Predatory Developers Lendlease

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Good news is so rare these days on so many fronts that I want to celebrate what happened in Haringey, in north London, on Tuesday (July 17), when the new Labour council voted to halt the proposals, put forward by the previous Labour administration, to enter into a £2bn joint venture with the Australian property developer Lendlease, known as the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), which would have involved a significant amount of publicly-owned land and assets being transferred to the control of the new company. In housing activist circles, Lendlease are notorious as the profiteering destroyers of the Heygate Estate in Southwark, which is currently being replaced by a new development, Elephant Park, from which all the existing residents have been socially cleansed.

The FT, the only mainstream media outlet to cover the story positively, wrote that the council’s decision was “the latest sign of public anger over lucrative regeneration schemes.” and proceeded to explain that, had the scheme gone ahead, “Lendlease would have provided development expertise and earned fees for managing Haringey’s commercial property portfolio.” However, as the FT added, “the scheme, which would have built 6,400 homes over 20 years and redeveloped the Northumberland Park and Broadwater Farm estates, became the centre of a bitter political feud at the Labour-run council, with opposition from leftwing campaigners, residents and Liberal Democrat councillors.”

I first covered the story last July, after the entirely preventable Grenfell Tower fire brought into sharp focus how disposable those of us who live in social housing are, in the eyes of those supposedly responsible for our homes and our welfare, and I then made contact with campaigners from the StopHDV campaign, and played a benefit gig in support of the campaign in Tottenham in September with my band The Four Fathers.

I also continued to cover the story, as campaigners sought a judicial review, and as the de-selection of Labour councillors proved so successful that anti-HDV candidates were in a majority, and council leader Claire Kober resigned. That was hugely inspirational for housing campaigners everywhere, and in May’s council elections, the anti-HDV candidates duly secured a majority, leading to Tuesday’s vote.

As the council stated on Tuesday (see the document here, and specifically pp. 27-178), “The new administration was elected on the basis of a manifesto which stated, ‘The biggest challenge we face is delivering the new, decent, genuinely affordable housing that local people desperately need. We do not believe that the HDV provides the answer and we do not intend to progress with it.’”

As the council stated in two key paragraphs (4.3 and 4.4, on p. 30), explaining its reasoning:

The first reason is related to the approach taken to public assets within the HDV. The new administration does not agree with the proposed transfer of public assets out of 100% public ownership at the scale envisaged by the HDV proposals. The proposed project agreements would commit the Council to transferring the Commercial Portfolio and (subject to conditions being met) the Wood Green development sites to the HDV, which is in itself a large scale, multi-site transfer of assets out of sole Council control. In particular, the new administration believes on principle that the Council’s Commercial Portfolio should remain in Council ownership and subject to Council management, and should not transfer as a whole portfolio out of solely public ownership. Further, although it is correct that setting up the HDV would not – of itself – commit the Council to transfer any further sites into the HDV, the HDV proposals envisage that if it was ultimately to develop any further sites, these too would be on the basis of transfer of legal title to the HDV. A transfer on this scale is not an acceptable approach for the new Council administration.

The second reason relates to risk. In line with provisions in the Cabinet reports in November 2015 and July 2017, the Council has throughout the development of the HDV proposals, recognised that to proceed with the HDV came with a degree of risk, including those related to committing its commercial portfolio and, subject to satisfaction of conditions, land for development. These risks combined those to which the Council would have been directly exposed, and those to which it would have been indirectly exposed through its 50% stake in the HDV.

As the FT also noted, the newly elected councillors, under new leader Joseph Ejiofor, said they were “elected on a promise to build council homes on council-owned land”, and voted “to establish a council-owned company to provide affordable homes instead of the Lendlease deal.”

In response to the news that the council was withdrawing from the HDV, Lendlease sent a threatening letter, noting that, if the Cabinet “decides to attempt to reverse our appointment as the successful bidder, we will have no choice but to seek to protect Lendlease’s interests given our very significant investment over the last two and a half years.”

As the FT also explained, “According to cabinet papers, the council’s decision to scrap the project would result in Haringey having to pay Lendlease approximately £520,275 — equivalent to half of the costs for establishing the development company. The authority has already spent close to £2.5m on costs relating to setting up the HDV, including nearly £1.6m on legal advice.” The FT also noted that “Lendlease has spent about £4m on work related to the project, according to council documents.”

Responding to the council’s decision, StopHDV, which has been an exemplary grass-roots campaign, wrote, “We celebrate this great victory for people power and re-state our principles – No permission for demolition, No social cleansing!”

I wholeheartedly agree, and I join with StopHDV in savouring this victory, even though I am aware that other battles remain to be fought in Haringey — to save housing in Love Lane that is earmarked for destruction because it is uncomfortably close to the monstrous White Hart Lane development, which, to my mind, looks like nothing less than the type of excess that, in Rome, led to the creation of the Coliseum, and to save two blocks on the Broadwater Farm Estate. These have been identified as being unsafe by the council, but Broadwater Farm has been in the sights of estate destroyers for so long that it’s impossible not to see it as a stealthy way to start decommissioning the entire estate, even without the HDV.

Just as importantly, although the struggle in Haringey has provided hope to housing campaigners everywhere, we are all still under the yoke of a political culture that sees social housing as disposable, that sees the insatiable greed of private developers as something admirable, and that has no understanding of what genuinely affordable housing is for ordinary working people.

I know all about this struggle from my work in Lewisham where I set up the No Social Cleansing in Lewisham campaign, specifically to highlight the ongoing Save Reginald Save Tidemill struggle, to save a community garden and a block of council flats from needless destruction, and the threat to the Achilles Street estate in New Cross, and, of course, from other ongoing destruction or threatened destruction — close to home in Southwark and Lambeth, but also across London, as was made clear in March, when Green councillor and GLA member Sian Berry exposed the 34 estates that Sadiq Khan has approved for destruction, despite promising that there would be no more estate destruction without ballots.

This week, Sadiq Khan finally confirmed his ballots proposal, although, as the Guardian noted, although “[r]edevelopment schemes in London that would result in the demolition of social housing will only get city hall funding if existing residents approve the scheme in a ballot,” the measure announced by the Mayor on Wednesday “will not apply retrospectively, meaning it will have no impact on some hugely contentious plans by London councils to raze existing estates.”

For further analysis of the shortcomings of Khan’s proposals, do check out the response of Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing (ASH), but now, as I promised at the beginning, I’m going to call a brief halt to any further negative thoughts, and bask for a while in the warm glow of the StopHDV campaign’s victory in Haringey.

Note: For a couple of rather shamefully biased responses to the decision, see the BBC (“A ‘Momentum’ council which scrapped a major housing scheme has been accused of ‘throwing away’ £20m of investment”, and the Evening Standard.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

New Videos by The Four Fathers: ‘Rebel Soldier’, ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Grenfell’ Recorded Live

It’s been some time since I’ve posted an update about the activities of my band The Four Fathers, so I’m hoping to amend that by posting some recent videos — of ‘Rebel Soldier’ and ’Masters of War’, recorded at a street party in Brockley, in south east London, of ‘Grenfell’, recorded at a summer solstice party in the Old Tidemill Garden in Deptford, and of another song from that party, ‘Kicking the Poor’, used as a housing campaign song in Lewisham, where I live.

‘Rebel Soldier’, a driving reggae number, is an old folk song, which I gave a new tune and a reggae groove more years ago than I care to remember, while living in Brixton after I left university. It’s been a live favourite since The Four Fathers first started four years ago, and we generally open our set with it. The studio recording, from our first album, ‘Love and War’, is here, and the live video is also on Facebook here.

‘Masters of War’ was written and recorded by Bob Dylan in 1963, and, sadly, its sentiments remain just as relevant today as they were back then. It’s another live favourite, and another song we’ve been playing regularly since we first got together in 2014. The studio recording isn’t available online, but it is on the CD of ‘Love and War’, which you can buy here. Our second album, How Much Is A Life Worth? is also available on CD or to download, and you can also individually download any of our songs. Prices start at just 60p.

I wrote ’Grenfell’ after the entirely preventable fire last June in which 72 people died, a reggae lament remembering those who died, and calling for those responsible for the fire to be held accountable. A video of us playing it, with beatboxer The Wiz-RD, was recorded by a German TV crew last autumn, and has had nearly 2,500 views on YouTube and Facebook. This version (also on Facebook here) was recorded live at a summer solstice party in Old Tidemill Garden in Deptford, a beautiful community space that Lewisham Council wants to destroy, along with the 16 perfectly sound council flats of Reginald House next door, as part of its plans for the redevelopment of the old Tidemill school. I’m part of the campaign to save the garden and the flats from destruction, and what we’re trying to do is to persuade the council to do is to go back to the drawing board, and to come up with new plan that spares Reginald House and the garden, a perfectly feasible proposal that only requires their willingness to do it.

(For more information about Lewisham Council’s assault on social housing, see the No Social Cleansing in Lewisham campaign I set up last November, and also check out my archive of articles about the housing crisis, and ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the new documentary film by Nikita Woolfe, which I narrate).

I’m also including below ‘Kicking the Poor’, another video from the summer solstice party in which The Four Fathers were joined by the Rebel Choir, led by Rebecca Wade Morris, who organised the music for the solstice party, Harriet Vickers of the Commie Faggots, who also played a set, accordionist Flaky Jake and double bassist Viktor Bass. Other acts who appeared on the night were spoken word artist Potent Whisper and all-women ukulele group Ukadelix. I wrote ’Kicking the Poor’, which has become the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign song, as an adaptation of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, and it takes specific aim at Lewisham Council’s social cleansing plans.

I’ve also just stumbled on a video of the entire night’s music at the Commie Faggots’ monthly residence at the Royal Sovereign, in Clapton, London E5 back in May, when the great singer-songwriter Babar Luck also played. Our set begins at around 1:07, and features ‘Rebel Soldier’, ‘Riot’, ‘London’, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘She’s Back’, ’Grenfell’, our anti-Brexit anthem ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’ and ‘Fighting Injustice.’

I hope you enjoy the videos, and will share them if you do. On Monday we were in a recording studio for the first time in about a year and a half to record ‘Grenfell’ and ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’ with the legendary Charlie Hart (Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads, Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance). We’ll be doing overdubs and mixes next month, and will keep you posted about release dates.

In the meantime, do get in touch if you want us to play a gig, or want to help us out in any way, or if you just want to be on our mailing list.

And don’t forget that, as well as being on Bandcamp and YouTube, we’re also on Facebook and Twitter.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Really? Trump Lawyer Argues in Court that Guantánamo Prisoners Can Be Held for 100 Years Without Charge or Trial

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Photos: The London Protest Against Donald Trump’s UK Visit, July 13, 2018

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So yesterday a huge protest against Donald Trump, on his first visit to the UK since he became the US president 18 months ago, took place in London. The organisers estimated that almost 250,000 people had turned up, and I was delighted to see so many witty handmade placards, and so many young people showing up to tell Trump that he is not welcome here. Much of the focus, of course, was on his position as the world’s most powerful sexual predator, but there were also numerous placards taking aim at his recent and thoroughly disgraceful immigration clampdown, when he separated children from their parents and imprisoned them.

I was, of course, delighted to see large numbers of people — and particularly women and girls — protesting against Trump, but from the beginning of his presidency, when a visit was first planned, and then called off because of the anticipated scale of protests against him, I have made a point of stating that, while I understand the particular horror of Trump’s role as a sexual predator and people’s opposition to him on that basis, on everything else we should be out on the streets every day protesting against the vile Theresa May and her vile government. In her six years as home secretary, May was persistently racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and, of course, was behind the “hostile environment” for immigrants that led to people who were part of the post-war Windrush generation form the Caribbean being forcibly sent back to their countries of origin, despite having lived in the UK for decades.

That said, it is clear that the sheer size of yesterday’s protest ought to give us hope for the future, as it represented, in many ways, a coming together of the many, many different groups of people affected by Donald Trump and what he represents, and if we can do this for Trump then perhaps we can do it again once he’s gone home, and we’re still stuck wth the most ideologically bankrupt government of my lifetime, in which most of the issues that brought people together in such large numbers yesterday are still as relevant — a right-wing, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic government composed mostly of old white people, hopelessly embroiled in a Brexit nightmare of their own making, that, like Trump’s election, needs to be seen as the death rattle of this old white world.

In the US, as psychopaths continue to gun down children in schools, and the police continue to gun down black people in the streets, we have seen the Black Lives Matter movement arise in response, and, on gun control, fiercely articulate black schoolchildren calling for an end to this culture of death, maintained by the old white world.

In Britain, we also have our own response, via the solidarity that has grown up around the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire in west London last June, in which 72 people died because those responsible for their safety — at every level from central government to local government to the management company responsible for their homes, and the contractors employed to work on them — deliberately failed to put people’s lives above cost-cutting and profiteering.

In north Kensington, where the skeleton of Grenfell Tower still stands, the community that has come together to demand justice reflects those who died — hard-working, mostly immigrant families, very few of them white. These are the people overlooked, or looked down upon by the establishment, but, as well as establishing an implacable solidarity in the area, they have also attracted significant support from elsewhere in the capital, and from across the country.

The most powerful manifestation of people’s solidarity takes place on the 14th of every month, marking the date last June when the fire happened, in the Silent Walks around the area organised by survivors. I’ve been on three Silent Walks to date, and they are extraordinarily moving occasions, as we collectively meditate on those who lost their lives so needlessly, and engage in a speechless solidarity that has a real power to it.

To me, Grenfell is the epicentre of a new world, in which all those excluded and marginalised by the establishment — the poor, the young, the old, immigrants, the Black and Middle Eastern (BAME) members of British society, and sympathetic white people who refuse to engage in the absolutely unjustifiable white victimhood that fuels Brexit — are coming together to imagine a new world which puts the needs of all before the greed of the few, and re-imagines society accordingly.

The fundamental truth of Grenfell, which isn’t going away, is that, when you can die in your home, which was supposed to be safe, none of us who live in rented accommodation (half the UK’s households) are safe. We all need to be safe, and we all need not to have our homes treated as disposable, not just through the fatal erosion of safety standards, but also through the estate demolition programmes that are spreading throughout London like an epidemic, and that are largely driven by the Labour Party, whose councils around London are, in general, enthusiastically engaged in social cleansing, working with private developers to knock down council estates and to replace them with new developments from which almost all local people will be excluded, because they are fundamental unaffordable — however much politicians bleat about working hard to create properties that are “affordable.”

In the newspeak world of today, “affordable” literally means “unaffordable”, and this entire programme needs resisting and overthrowing before tens of thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of people are driven out of London, their homes replaced by empty flats bought by foreign investors, or rented by those who can just about manage to afford the exorbitant prices demanded by the unfettered greed of the various mafias involved in the housing market.

I hope you enjoy these few photos from yesterday’s protest, but, more importantly, I hope my words above have some resonance for you, and that, little by little, we can bring the new world that I and so many others are glimpsing into being.

Also see the album here:

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court Nomination, Has a Dangerous Track Record of Defending Guantánamo and Unfettered Executive Power

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Tomorrow, Lawyers Will Argue in Court That Donald Trump’s Guantánamo Policy Is “Arbitrary, Unlawful, and Motivated by Executive Hubris and Anti-Muslim Animus”

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RIP Steve Ditko: You, Jack Kirby and Wally Wood Opened My Eyes to a World of Heroic Fantasy

Today I’m remembering the US comic artist Steve Ditko, who has died at the age of 90, and was one of three comic artists who opened my eyes to the world of super-heroes — Marvel super-heroes — on a summer holiday in Devon in 1972, when I was nine years old.

On a wardrobe in a B&B where we were staying were pages from a couple of comics, Smash! and Pow!, which were published in the late 60s by Odhams Press, a subsidiary of IPC, featuring reprints of Marvel comics from the 1960s — especially, I remember, Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man, Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four, and Wally Wood’s Daredevil. 

All three titles were written by Stan Lee, whose abilities with characterisation and breezy dialogue helped to ensure that Marvel made super-hero comics cool in the 1960s, and made their main rivals DC, the home of Superman and Batman, look increasingly irrelevant.

However. while Stan may have had the patter, the vision came from the artists. Jack Kirby’s heroic, electric style epitomised the new face of super-heroes, creating a template that continues to fundamentally define the medium. The Fantastic Four started Marvel’s’ super-hero era in November 1961, and in the extraordinarily fertile few years that followed, Kirby, with Lee, also brought forth almost the entire basis of the Marvel Universe — Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man, the Avengers, featuring the revival of Captain America, which Kirby had created with Joe Simon back in the 1940s, and the original X-Men, as well the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, and a host of memorable villains from the galactic greed of Galactus to the deadly deviousness of Doctor Doom.

In those few corners of this nascent heroic universe left untouched by Kirby, other artists also left an indelible mark, and none more so than Steve Ditko, who, with Lee, created Spider-Man, still Marvel’s most popular character, and a hero whose costume is so definitive that it has barely changed in the 45 years since he first leapt out of the pages of Amazing Fantasy 15 (August 1962) to instant acclaim.

Ditko’s sinuous story-telling graced the first 38 issues of the Amazing Spider-Man, but as I also discovered after Marvel began producing their own weekly black and white British reprints in September 1972, just after my holiday, Ditko was also the creator of Dr. Strange, whose fantastical magical escapades involved surreal landscapes never seen in comics before — or since, to be honest.

The graphic flights of fantasy that emerged from the fertile imagination of Steve Ditko appealed to the nascent 60s counter-culture, even though Ditko himself almost certainly never took any psychedelic drugs at all. As Roy Thomas, the chief writer in the new wave of writers to succeed Stan Lee in the late 60s and into the 70s explained in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1971, ”People who read ‘Doctor Strange’ thought people at Marvel must be heads, because they had had similar experiences high on mushrooms. But … I don’t use hallucinogens, nor do I think any [comic] artists do.”

The third artist I mentioned above, Wally Wood, brought a kind of voluptuousness, and an extraordinary sense of light, to another great creation of the early 60s, Daredevil, created by Lee and veteran artist Bill Everett, who had created Namor, the Sub-Mariner, back in 1939, for the first comic by Marvel’s predecessor, Timely Comics.

Daredevil subsequently became one of my favourite comics — and the only Silver Age title I once owned an entire run of, before reluctantly selling it in the late 80s, but that’s perhaps a story for another time. Now that I’m hitting my stride with this, it might be fun to trace in more detail my journey from that wardrobe in Devon through Marvel UK’s reprints to my emergence, aged 11, as a full-on US Marvel Comics reader, enthralled by the freedom of Marvel’s world in the mid-70s — with Len Wein and Dave Cockrum reviving the X-Men in 1975 (and soon handing it over to Chris Claremont and John Byrne), with the wild Steve Gerber helming several assaults on the dominant US culture, via, for example, Howard the Duck, with Steve Rogers becoming so disillusioned with the US that he briefly gave up his Captain America identity and became Nomad instead, and with other wonderful experiments and new trajectories — the short-lived Killraven series, for example, inspired by War on the Worlds, and the masterly Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.

My way into this wonderful — and at the time, often quite anarchic — world was primarily via the great little shop Bogus, on Princes Avenue in Hull (in whose environs I grew up from 1966 to 1982), but also through visits to London to the shop with the best name ever, at the time located in St. Anne’s Court in Soho — Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, the precursor to Forbidden Planet, where I ended up working for a while in the late 80s.

By that time, I had largely grown out of the super-hero world, as it shattered beneath the onslaught of the visionary writer Alan Moore, and the graphic innovations of Frank Miller, moving instead into the world of graphic novels, and independent creators like the Hernandez brothers, the creators of Love and Rockets, only eventually returning to the super-hero world in 2012, when my son was 13, and enthralled by Marvel Studios’ first Avengers film, the wheel turning full circle, and Marvel, though now a corporate giant with a studio owned by Disney, still managing at times to excite and entertain and even, occasionally, to challenge assumptions.

As I say, however, perhaps these are stories better saved to be discussed in greater detail some other time. Back in June 1972, it was Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man, Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four and Wally Wood’s Daredevil that opened an eight-year old’s eyes to a world of heroic fantasy that was to have a genuinely lasting impression — currently, I realise to my muted horror, 46 years and counting!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

No Escape from Guantánamo: An Update on the Periodic Review Boards

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Today is the 20th Anniversary of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture: Will the Torture and the Impunity Ever Stop?

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