Andy Worthington's Blog, page 41

Comic Book Star: My Role in a Comic Explaining Why Guantánamo is Such a Bad Idea, and Why It Must Be Closed

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.

 

Three weeks ago, while I was in the US on my annual tour calling for the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed, to coincide with the 16th anniversary of its opening, on January 11, I received some great news from a writer friend, Sarah Mirk, that a comic about Guantánamo, in which I featured, had just been published on the website of The Nib, “a daily comics publication that is part of First Look Media,” the organization set up in 2013 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, which also includes The Intercept.

The comic is entitled, Guantánamo Bay is Still Open. Still. STILL!, and Sarah had interviewed me for it in October, although I didn’t know at the time that I would actually be immortalized in comic form!

As I explained when I posted the link on Facebook, “OK, this is very, very cool. I am now a comic book star! What else is left to achieve? Sarah Mirk, who I met in 2009 when she came to the UK with former Guantánamo guard Chris Arendt for Cageprisoners’ powerful ‘Two Sides, One Story‘ tour of the UK, with Moazzam Begg and other ex-prisoners, interviewed me recently, and used that interview as the basis for a comic about Guantánamo, illustrated by the talented Australian artist Jess Parker.”

Sarah is a Contributing Editor for The Nib, and describes herself as “a multi-media journalist who explores issues around gender, politics, and history. She worked for four years as the online editor of feminism and pop culture non-profit Bitch Media, where she hosted the podcast Popaganda. She’s the author of the relationship guidebook Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules and the sci-fi graphic novel Open Earth.” You can find Jess’s Facebook page here, and her page on The Nib here.

As I also stated, the comic “explains very well the story of Guantánamo, and how and why it is still open.” I also encouraged people, “Do check it out, and share it far and wide!”

So I’m posting it again here on my website in part to mark for a second time my comic book immortality — because, you know, it would be cool even if I wasn’t a massive comics fan, which, although many of you may not know, I am, and have been since I first stumbled on some British reprints of Marvel comics, featuring the original exploits of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and others, on top of a wardrobe on a family holiday in Devon when I was eight years old, a discovery that was, for me, something akin to stumbling through a wardrobe and discovering Narnia!

In my teenage years I continued to devour Marvel Comics, branching out into more grown-up fare when Alan Moore arrived on the scene to revolutionise the concept of super-hero comics (and comics in general, to be fair), via V for Vendetta, Watchmen and Swamp Thing, to name a few of his celebrated projects, and also embracing other aspects of the comics world, like Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love & Rockets, for example, the work of Eddie Campbell, and Hugo Pratt’s masterly Corto Maltese.

I then drifted away from comics, although I retained an interest in the medium, particularly enjoying how Studio Ghibli — via films like Spirited Away, Porco Rosso and Totoro — mastered the art of creating films that looked spectacularly like graphic novels brought to life, and found my interests swinging back round to Marvel comics when the first movies began in 2000 with X-Men, and particularly when Marvel Studios began its run of wildly-successful films in 2008, largely capturing the fun and wonder that was so central to Marvel’s success in the 1960s, with Iron Man.

I’ve long thought that Guantánamo deserved some sort of proper comic treatment, and while I think that Guantánamo and the “war on terror” deserve a detailed graphic novel, or a full comics series, Sarah and Jess have created something excellent here, which ought to be printed in bulk and made available to all American schoolchildren, as well as — in a timely manner — explaining succinctly why Donald Trump was so wrong to issue an executive order last week officially keeping the prison open, and doing so in a manner that Trump himself might even understand. OK, he still might need someone to read it to him, but even he ought to be able to understand this comic’s powerful and compelling message.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Shouts Interview: Andy Worthington of The Four Fathers Discusses the Importance of Protest Music with Halldór Bjarnason

Check out The Four Fathers’ new album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ here.

Last month, I was delighted to be approached by Halldór Bjarnason, an Icelandic journalist and musician, asking if he could interview me for his website, Shouts: Music from the Rooftops!, which features interviews with musicians who make political music, including Andy White, from Belfast, Yuca Brava, “a political rapcore band from Puerto Rico”, War On Women, a feminist punk band from Baltimore, and Keyz, a 20-year old rapper from Sudan. The interview is here, and is cross-posted below.

As I noted when I posted the link to the interview on Facebook last night, the “questions, about my band The Four Fathers, and my songwriting, were very interesting — about how we got together, why we perform protest music, and whether I think there’s an audience for protest music these days.”

Introducing the interview, Halldór, noting that I am both a journalist and am musician, wrote that journalists have a responsibility to be voices for the voiceless, to hold power to account, and to be “courageous in seeking the truth.” He also noted that “[m]usicians do not bear the same responsibility exactly, although it can be argued they have a powerful voice” that often has an international reach. He also noted that, although some musicians do not manifest a “socially conscious message,” because they believe in creating music based on their emotions, “Others are more explicit in their lyrics or performance and send a strong message of protest out into the ethos in every single song,” adding, “The Four Fathers are of the latter type.”

My thanks to Halldór for taking the time to interview me, and I hope you have time to read the interview, and will check out our music if you haven’t already heard it.

Interview with Andy Worthington of The Four Fathers

Shouts: For those not familiar with your music, who are The Four Fathers?

Andy Worthington: We’re a group of fathers, from the borough of Lewisham, in south east London, and we got together in 2014 because we had all had various musical endeavours in our youth, and wanted to revisit them. We started off playing covers, but I soon started writing new material, and pretty soon my political consciousness found songs to be a useful vehicle for musical storytelling; protest music, essentially.

Shouts: You are a journalist and an activist as well as a musician. How about the rest of the band?

Andy Worthington: We’re a mixed bag — a gardener, a teacher, an architect and a full-time dad. Fortunately, we’re all left-wing politically, and the other band members have been happy to follow my forays into topical political songwriting.

Shouts: You recently published your second album. Can you tell us about the production process?

Andy Worthington: We found a local studio for our first album, ‘Love and War’ — Perry Vale Studios in Forest Hill, and liked it, so we returned there for our second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ We recorded the new album over several weekends in 2016, mixed it in early 2017, and then released songs as online singles until the album’s release in November.

How Much Is A Life Worth? by The Four Fathers

Shouts: How does the state of the world affect your songwriting, i.e. do you find it hard to strike a balance between releasing a song in time with a current issue and releasing it when it is ready as a piece of music?

Andy Worthington: I think there’s something to be said for being very topical, but we don’t have the facilities for that, and, in general, it takes me some time to come up with the lyrics, once I have the tune. (I don’t know where the tunes come from, but they generally come to me while cycling around London on my bike). To give two new songs as examples, one, ‘Grenfell’, was inspired by the terrible and entirely preventable fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in west London in June 2017. The tune — and the lyrics for the chorus — came to me quite quickly, but I spent the summer working little by little on the rest of the lyrics. For ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, which is about Brexit, the tune — and, again, the chorus — came to me quite quickly after the referendum in June 2016, but I decided the lyrics were too literal, and I wanted something slightly more poetic, and that took me many months to work out. A video of us playing ‘Grenfell’ live for a German film crew is below, and we hope to record both songs in a studio soon.

Shouts: What came first for you, the music or the journalism?

Andy Worthington: I was going to say the journalism, but in fact I’m from musical family, and was in choirs as a child, and in bands as a teenager and in my 20s. I also did some studio-based work in my 30s. I began working seriously as a writer in 2002, when I began writing my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, about Stonehenge and the British counter-culture, which was published in 2004, and I then followed up with a related book, The Battle of the Beanfield, in 2005. In 2006, I began researching and writing about Guantánamo, which I continue to do to this day, along with other writing and campaigning, and it was alongside this that I got involved with my friends in what became The Four Fathers.

Shouts: What made you want to use these two mediums to tell stories?

Andy Worthington:I suppose telling stories and/or the desire to communicate take many forms, and people find whatever vehicle suits them. For some people, that’s just one field, but I’ve always been interested in different forms of expression — writing is a big thing for me, of course, and it’s liberating that writing lyrics is in some ways different to journalism, but I’ve always loved singing, I’ve played the guitar since my 20s, I’ve also loved photography all my adult life, and continue to do that in various ways, and I’ve also engaged in other media — in film-making, for example, as the co-director of a film about Guantánamo, ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’, and recently as the narrator for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a documentary film about the destruction of social housing in London, and the residents who are resisting the destruction of their homes.

Shouts: What are some of the stories you care about?

Andy Worthington:I care about human rights and social justice. I want to see Guantanamo closed, as an icon of lawlessness in the “war on terror,” I want to see the rise of racism and xenophobia challenged, and I want to see the horribly greedy and aggressive form of current capitalism that has degraded the world and that is currently beginning to cannibalistically devour all but the rich in the western countries of its origin to be resisted and broken, so we can have a better system. That’s what my involvement in social housing campaigns is about, but it’s just as important here in the UK for people also to find way to, for example, save the NHS, the greatest achievement of the UK, from being destroyed by the Tories.

Shouts: What are the main differences you find between writing a book, a media article or a song lyric?

Andy Worthington: Well, a book is a huge project, in general, and a real challenge — although it is one I hope to do again. As for media articles, because I’ve been writing them for over ten years, often on a daily basis, I find them generally easy to do, especially as I largely self-edit my work, but lyrics are definitely more elusive.

Shouts: Besides the writing, journalism and music (as if it was not enough!), do you partake in other activism or social engagement?

Andy Worthington: I’m involved in various forms of campaigning, as well as writing and playing music, and since 2012 I’ve also been cycling around London on a daily basis taking photos across the whole city. Since last May, I’ve been posting photos once a day on Facebook, on a page called ‘The State of London’, and I hope to expand this project this year.

Shouts: Performing protest music such as yours, do find that it lands on deaf ears so to speak or do you feel there is willingness to take in music with a message?

Andy Worthington: I don’t think that there is, in general, an interest in protest music as there was when I was growing up. As a child of the 70s becoming a young man in the early 80s, politics was everywhere — the Sixties, and the protest music of the likes of Bob Dylan, was like the recent past, and a heady source of inspiration, and in my own teenage years the punk scene exploded into life, with its interesting crossover with the roots reggae scene. Both the singer-songwriters of the 60s and the 70s, aspects of the punk and post-punk scene (the Clash and the Two Tone movement, for example), and the roots reggae music of the late 70s, which I particularly love, and which was, of course, often militantly political, provided the direct inspiration for what I write for The Four Fathers, but I find that in general political protest has been cynically expunged from most modern-day music. It can still be found in aspects of youth culture — in the grime scene, for example — but there’s very little crossover in general between different scenes, so the general situation would seem to be one on which politics have been marginalised by self-censoring rock bands, by a bland corporate pop world, and by a juggernaut nostalgia industry, safely peddling people an aging facsimile of their youth. As a result, we’ve been trying to move more towards taking part in political events, where there’s a guaranteed audience that is probably prepared to listen as well be entertained.

Shouts: Do you find that there is an abundance of protest musicians out there today or on the contrary?

Andy Worthington: There are many, but they tend to be scattered around the country — and around the world. However, I’ve started to try getting some of them together, and in November, at the Birds Nest Pub in Deptford, a celebrated music venue, I put together an evening, under the heading ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’, featuring three bands (including The Four Fathers), two spoken word artists, a rapper and a socialist choir, and it was a huge success, and a clear demonstration that you can be both entertained and politically aware. I hope to do more gigs along the lines throughout 2018. Check out ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ here.

Shouts: Who are some of your favorite protest singers or socially conscious artists?

Andy Worthington: I still listen to many of the artists I grew up listening to, so lots of roots reggae and West African music, which I’m a huge fan of. I love Fela Kuti, I love Bob Marley, and numerous Jamaican artists from the same period, and I also love the conscious musicians of America from the same time — Gil Scott-Heron, for example. Currently, I have  a lot of time of some of the spoken word artists I know here and in the US — Potent Whisper here in the UK, who tells complex political stories in rhyme, and the Peace Poets from the Bronx in New York, who also perform uplifting spoken word pieces rooted in political struggle. I know them from my Guantanamo work, and my annual visits to the US to call for the closure of the prison on the anniversary of its opening, every January.

Shouts: What is on the horizon for The Four Fathers and for you?

Andy Worthington: More playing, wherever we can find what we hope will be appreciative audiences. And more recording, as we start work on our third album. We are always open to invites and suggestions.

Shouts: Thank you very much for participating and for the music you make. Anything else you’d like to shout from the rooftops?

Andy Worthington: Just my mantra from our song ‘Fighting Injustice’: “If you ain’t fighting injustice, you’re living on the dark side.” If everyone who claims to care about the state of the world actually did something, it would make a huge difference. But you have to believe it, shake off your apathy, stop shopping and screen-watching all the time, and actually do something. Remember: we are many, and they are few.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Haringey Leader Claire Kober’s Resignation Ought to Signal an End to Labour’s Frenzy of Council Estate Destruction, But 70 Labour Leaders Disagree

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

There was great news on Tuesday, as Claire Kober, the Labour leader of Haringey Council, announced her resignation, explaining that she will not be standing in May’s elections. Kober — and her close associates, like Alan Strickland, Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Housing — had imperiously decided to hand over all of Haringey’s social housing to the predatory international developer Lendlease, in what was laughingly described as a 50:50 partnership. Lendlease, however, has all the money, and what was intended to happen, via the £2bn deal for Haringey, was a large-scale version of what Southwark Council arranged for Lendlease at the Heygate Estate in Walworth: the destruction of council estates and their replacement with private developments for sale, or for rent at unaffordable prices.

At the Heygate, as I explained in an article last September, 1,034 homes, housing around 3,000 people, were demolished, most of which were socially rented, costing around 30% of market rents. 2,704 new homes are being built on the Heygate’s replacement, Elephant Park, but only 82 of those will be for social rent, with the rest laughably described as “affordable” in the biggest scam in the developers’ current lexicon. “Affordable” rents were set at 80% of market rents by Boris Johnson, in his miserable tenure as London’s Mayor, but that is actually unaffordable for the majority of hard-working Londoners.

As Aditya Chakrabortty of the Guardian explained when describing the Haringey proposal, known as the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), in July, “Haringey plans to stuff family homes, school buildings, its biggest library and much more into a giant private fund worth £2bn. It’s the largest scheme of its kind — ‘unprecedented’, in the words of backbench councillors. Together with a property developer, it will tear down whole streets of publicly owned buildings and replace them with a shiny town centre and 6,400 homes.”

As I put it in an article following up on Chakrabortty’s Guardian article, he “described how he ‘grew up nearby,’ and can see that the area ‘needs investment,’ but pointed out that ‘this is something else entirely: it is privatisation, even if the council holds on to a 50% share and claims otherwise.’ … [W]hen he last wrote about the Haringey plans, back in January, he was explicitly told by the council at the time that the private entity in charge of the redevelopment ‘had no targets for building social housing.’”

In the last six months, opposition to the HDV has built steadily, until Kober herself was almost completely isolated. Local campaigners mounted a formidable grass-roots campaign, Stop HDV, which I was glad to support in a small way, both through my writing and through my band The Four Fathers playing a benefit gig in Tottenham. They raised the money for a judicial review, and, towards the end of the year, de-selected pro-HDV councillors — or watched as pro-HDV councillors de-selected themselves — turning a pro-HDV majority into a unworkable minority for May’s forthcoming elections.

In addition, the local Labour MPs opposed the plans, and Jeremy Corbyn used the Labour Party conference to say that there should be no estate demolitions without ballots — which Kober had no intention of doing, as that would show something other than contempt for her tenants and leaseholders. The final blow came last week, when Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) voted unanimously to call on Kober to stop the HDV.

As the Guardian described it, The NEC acted after 22 Labour councillors in the borough wrote to the party urging it to intervene, saying the HDV would be difficult and expensive to get out of once the contract was signed. It pointed out that of the the 28 sitting councillors who support the HDV, only six had been selected to stand as candidates in the May 2018 local elections. Of all selected Labour candidates, including sitting councillors, 12 support the HDV and 45 oppose it.”

One insider told the Huffington Post that the “decision to effectively order a local Labour council to change policy” was “unprecedented.”

As Aditya Chakrabortty noted in a series of tweets on Tuesday, “Even after all the opposition from Haringey MPs, Corbyn’s team, the unions and locals, AND the selections, Kober and Strickland were still determined to push the HDV through. It’s over. She’ll be painted a martyr at the hands of Momentum and Corbyn — but the reality is that she refused to compromise with her own councillors (including those on the scrutiny committee) and local opposition. Councillors who opposed her got bullied. Locals got ignored. The crucial votes on the HDV were restricted to Kober’s hand-picked cabinet. Fifteen hundred pages of crucial documents were published just a week before the thing was passed. It was an abuse of democracy.”

He added, “It’s a victory for ordinary residents and activists who organised a campaign on a fiver here, a tenner there, who crowdfunded and staged fundraising gigs. In my years of reporting on housing, this is easily the single biggest victory for housing campaigners. Anyone who wants a fairer London should take heart from this.”

So where now?

Unfortunately, despite the NEC’s intervention, the leaders of 70 Labour councils across London and throughout the country wrote to the NEC to complain about its message to Claire Kober, calling its actions “dangerous and alarming”, “uncomradely and disrespectful” and “an affront to the basic principles of democracy.”

Strong words, even though, as Skwarkbox established, the NEC’s position was neither dangerous nor alarming. Their motion simply stated:

The NEC welcomes the urgent intervention of Labour LGA representatives and the appropriate shadow cabinet members in an effort to resolve the matter amicably in consultation with all of the interested parties.

If however that approach proves to be unproductive before the next scheduled full council meeting then the NEC strongly advises that the process to agree the HDV with Lendlease is paused and that contractual arrangements are not signed prior to May’s local elections after which they should be reviewed.

Moreover, in a brief report in the Evening Standard, two quotes were included from Peter John of Southwark Council and Lib Peck of Lambeth Council, both formally entrenched in the social cleansing camp. Peter John called the motion ”a dangerous precedent”, while Lib Peck said it was “an affront to democracy for a central committee to interfere with the democratic decisions of elected Labour councillors.”

In both their cases, it is clear that they have no time for any suggestion by the NEC  —or anyone else, for that matter — that their housing “regeneration” plans might, like Claire Kober’s, be entirely inappropriate, involving the unnecessary destruction of estates, widespread social cleansing, and the creation of new properties that are completely unaffordable for local people.

What’s troubling, however, is how many other heads of Labour councils across London also signed the letter — 13 more, making 15 in total, as well as 55 others from across England. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the research undertaken by Architects for Social Housing, who have established that 195 council estates in London’s 21 Labour-run boroughs are facing or have faced demolition, social cleansing and “regeneration”, but this letter seems only to confirm that an alarming number of councils are telling the NEC to leave them alone, in no uncertain terms, because al of them are engaged in — or planning to get engaged in — the murky business of social cleansing their boroughs in the company of private developers who know nothing about — and care nothing about — any kind of social responsibility.

The London council leaders who signed the letter — and two Mayors, including the Mayor of Lewisham, where I live, and where I recently set up the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ campaign—  are listed below:

Barking & Dagenham: Councillor Darren Rodwell, Leader of the Council

Brent: Councillor Muhammed Butt, Leader of the Council

Ealing: Councillor Julian Bell, Leader of the Council

Enfield: Councillor Doug Taylor, Leader of the Council

Greenwich: Councillor Denise Hyland, Leader of the Council

Hammersmith & Fulham: Councillor Steve Cowan, Leader of the Council

Harrow: Councillor Sachin Shah, Leader of the Council

Hounslow: Councillor Steve Curran, Leader of the Council

Lambeth: Councillor Lib Peck, Leader of the Council

Lewisham: Sir Steve Bullock, Executive Mayor

Merton: Councillor Stephen Alambritis, Leader of the Council

Redbridge: Councillor Jas Athwal, Leader of the Council

Southwark: Councillor Peter John, Leader of the Council

Tower Hamlets: Mayor John Biggs, Executive Mayor

Waltham Forest: Councillor Clare Coghill, Leader of the Council

The letter was also signed by Councillor Adam Hug, Leader of the Labour Group on Westminster Council.

Interestingly, five Labour leaders in London didn’t sign it:

Camden: Councillor Georgia Gould, Leader of the Council

Croydon: Councillor Tony Newman, Leader of the Council

Hackney: Philip Glanville, Executive Mayor

Islington: Councillor Richard Watts, Leader of the Council

Newham: Sir Robin Wales, Executive Mayor

Georgia Gould was listed in the signatories of the letter that was first published in the Sunday Times, but, as Skwarkbox reported, she said “she explicitly informed the letter’s creators that she did not want her name on it – yet it appeared in the Sunday Times and was only removed after her denial.”

Sqwarkbox added that the letter “was not ‘sent’ by the council leaders”; rather, an email sent in the name of Nick Forbes, the leader of Newcastle Council, “went round to council leaders all over the country on Friday and Saturday, pleading with them to add their names to his letter.”

There have, however, been no more reports of other leaders complaining, but Georgia Gould’s refusal to be included certainly makes sense, as she, and Philip Glanville in Hackney and Richard Watts in Islington, are all neighbours of Claire Kober’s, and have seen how damaging the Lendlease scandal has been. I leave it to residents to let me know if this is simple self-preservation, or if these three boroughs are taking a different approach to that favoured in Haringey, and pursued with enthusiasm in South park and Lambeth and elsewhere, and I’m also interested to hear from anyone with knowledge of the situation in Croydon. Robin Wales’ silence, however, I suspect is because of his poor track record, and his desire to get reelected in May, as anyone familiar with the powerful E15 campaign will know.

As for the Labour council leaders who signed the letter, I’d love to hear from residents and campaigners in those boroughs about what their “regeneration” issues are. I’d love to see a London-wide campaign established, and I also think it’s crucial that Labour councillors pursuing a policy of social cleansing need to be challenged in May’s election — by rival candidates, by being put on the spot and challenged to change their views, and, if necessary, by people refusing to vote for them.

The London Clearances took a step back on Tuesday when Claire Kober resigned, but across London an epidemic of social cleansing will still take place unless we the people rise up against it. Whether deluded or dishonest, those responsible for housing policy must not be allowed to fulfil their intentions, which, if they go ahead, will lead to tens of thousand of people — perhaps hundreds of thousands of people — being kicked out of their homes and pushed out of London in the next ten years.

So please, rise up and fight back!

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

The Hideous Pointlessness of Donald Trump’s Executive Order Keeping Guantánamo Open

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.

 

Reading Donald Trump’s pompously-entitled “Presidential Executive Order on Protecting America Through Lawful Detention of Terrorists,” which officially keeps the prison at Guantánamo Bay open, reversing a policy of closing it that was held by both of his predecessors, Barack Obama, and, in his second term, George W. Bush, is to step back in time to when Bush and his administration sought to defend their lawless escapade — back in his first term, before the novelty soured.

Straight after the 9/11 attacks, in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Congress authorized the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

That document underpins the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo, a detention power the Supreme Court defended in June 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, approving imprisonment until the end of hostilities for the men held at Guantánamo, and, as I have frequently noted, essentially setting up, as a result, a parallel version of the Geneva Conventions, a bizarre development without precedent.

Nevertheless, although this situation has stood for all this time, it is depressing to see Trump’s executive order wheel out, as though there was anything fresh or relevant about it, the tired old mantra that, “Consistent with long-standing law of war principles and applicable law, the United States may detain certain persons captured in connection with an armed conflict for the duration of the conflict” — and as though it is not absurd that this alleged “conflict” has now gone on for longer that both World Wars put together — and also to claim that “[d]etention operations at U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay shall continue to be conducted consistent with all applicable United States and international law, including the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.”

That mustiness you smell? It’s a tired old administration — a bunch of old white men weary after just one year in office — revisiting laws and decisions made in 2001, 2004, 2005, as though they were yesterday, when that is not the case. It is now 16 years and a month since Guantánamo opened, and to behave as though it is still 13, 14 or 17 years ago is inappropriate.

In seeking to justify revoking Section 3 of President Obama’s Executive Order 13492 of January 22, 2009 (Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities), ordering the closure of the prison at Guantánamo, Trump’s executive order claims that “some of the current detainee population represent the most difficult and dangerous cases from among those historically detained at the facility,” and, as a result, “there is significant reason for concern regarding their reengagement in hostilities should they have the opportunity.” This, however, is essentially meaningless, as no one has been suggesting that dangerous prisoners should be released.

What those of us who have spent many long years seeking the closure of Guantánamo want are meaningful reviews for those not charged, release for those deemed not to be a threat, and credible trials for those allegedly responsible for terrorist offences, but what we have instead is a place where the law went to die — where men are held indefinitely without charge or trial, where these alleged to have committed significant acts of terrorism (including the 9/11 attacks) are caught in a Groundhog Day loop of endless, interminable pre-trial hearings in a system (the military commissions) that is unfit for purpose, and where, crucially, no one can be freed unless the president wants them to be freed.

Once you take that on board, it seems clear that Trump’s executive order — officially keeping open a prison that wasn’t going to be closed unless he wanted it to be — is, primarily, a symbolic gesture, and it is hard not to conclude that it his announcement is intended to do two things; to show the world the extent of his contempt for Muslims, and to specifically rescind whatever Barack Obama did, which, presumably, annoys him so much because of his fundamental racism, and a petulant, vindictive streak in his own character.

So what is Trump’s position on the men still held? Well, the executive order refers to the military commissions, but fails to demonstrate any understanding that they are a broken system, and that the federal courts have a much better track record of successfully prosecuting terrorists. The order also mentions the Periodic Review Boards, referring to other prisoners who “must be detained to protect against continuing, significant threats to the security of the United States, as determined by periodic reviews,” and also mentions that anyone sent to Guantánamo in future “shall be subject to the procedures for periodic review established in Executive Order 13567 of March 7, 2011 (Periodic Review of Individuals Detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station Pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force), to determine whether continued law of war detention is necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States.”

What is not clear from the order is that 26 of the 41 men still imprisoned are also still subject to PRBs, although lawyers for the men still held do not believe that, under Trump, the process offers genuine hope that any of them will be approved for release — in large part because of Trump’s own assertions that no one should be released from the prison. Also of concern are the five men still held who were approved for release under Obama — three by the Guantánamo Review Task Force of 2009, and two by the PRBs — and as a result lawyers for eleven of the men still held filed a habeas corpus lawsuit three weeks ago asking the government to justify its detention policy, and accusing Trump of being engaged in arbitrary detention, In response, District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly recently set a deadline of February 16 for the government to respond.

In contrast, Trump’s own words show him continuing to cling to some dystopian fantasy world of law-free imprisonment that was tired and discredited over a decade ago. In his speech last night, he said, “We must be clear. Terrorists are not merely criminals. They are unlawful enemy combatants. And when captured overseas, they should be treated like the terrorists they are.” As my friend, the journalist Shilpa Jindia, explained, “I never thought I’d hear the words ‘enemy combatant’ uttered seriously again.”

Trump also added, with reference to reports of recidivism on the part of former prisoners whose credibility is questionable, to put it mildly, “In the past, we have foolishly released hundreds of dangerous terrorists, only to meet them again on the battlefield. So today, I am keeping another promise … to keep open the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.”

Trump should, instead, have paid attention to what George W. Bush said in his 2010 memoir, Decision Points: “While I believe opening Guantánamo after 9/11 was necessary, the detention facility had become a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies. I worked to find a way to close the prison without compromising security.”

Or as Lee Wolosky, Obama’s special envoy at the State Department for closing Guantánamo, said after the executive order was issued, “Practically, not much is expected to change with Trump’s new order. But as a symbolic matter, it changes a great deal because the two presidents before him were trying to close Guantánamo because they recognized that it was a detriment to our national security.” Trump’s executive order, however, “reaffirms his interest in perpetrating a symbol that has greatly damaged the United States.”

There is one final aspect to the executive order that obviously excites Trump — a suggestion that the US “may transport additional detainees to U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay when lawful and necessary to protect the Nation,” and, allied to this, his demand that, “Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense shall, in consultation with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence, and the heads of any other appropriate executive departments and agencies as determined by the Secretary of Defense, recommend policies to the President regarding the disposition of individuals captured in connection with an armed conflict, including policies governing transfer of individuals to U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay.”

Trump has repeatedly wanted to send new prisoners to Guantánamo, but advisers have undoubtedly warned him that there are serious doubts about whether the Authorization for Use of Military Force can be stretched to accommodate ISIS or other groups. The executive order tries to suggest that the AUMF’s reference to “associated forces” endorses detention for whoever Trump wants to imprison, on the basis that, as it alleges, “the United States remains engaged in an armed conflict with al‑Qa’ida, the Taliban, and associated forces, including with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” but it is by no means certain that this opinion is valid, and will not open up a new can of legal worms that anyone with any sense would want to avoid. And in any case, as noted above, for anyone apprehended who is accused of involvement in terrorist activities, by far the best location for them is a federal court room rather than Guantánamo.

So there we have it — a pointless executive order, reeking of Islamophobia and racism, with, at its core, a stupidity so glaring that it reveals a president who doesn’t even understand that what he’s keeping open was going to stay open anyway.

And for the men still held? Well, it seems that the military commissions will continue to limp on, in an affront to the most basic notions of justice, and that everyone else will continue to be held in a shameful limbo of imprisonment without charge and without an end in sight until the courts say that enough is enough.

To my mind, that time was reached when Trump took office, and I fervently hope that the habeas petition that is currently being dealt with in the District Court in Washington, D.C. lands a serious blow on Trump, to shatter his complacent notion that he can shut the door on anyone leaving Guantánamo ever again, and to reinvigorate, within the US establishment, the very necessary argument that, for America to regain any sense of itself as a country that respects the rule of law, Trump’s executive order must be resisted, and Guantánamo must be closed.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Good News: Court Orders Trump Administration to Explain Its Position on Guantánamo After A Year of Shocking Inaction

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.

 

Two and a half weeks ago, on the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, lawyers for eleven of the 41 men still held at Guantánamo, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve, and other legal firms, filed a habeas corpus lawsuit with the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which, as I explained in an article at the time, drawing on a CCR press release:

[I]t “argues that Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’”

CCR Senior Staff Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei said, “It’s clear that a man who thinks we should water-board terror suspects even if it doesn’t work, because ‘they deserve it, anyway’ has no qualms about keeping every last detainee in Guantanamo, so long as he holds the jailhouse key.”

CCR’s press release also stated, “The filing argues that continued detention is unconstitutional because any legitimate rationale for initially detaining these men has long since expired; detention now, 16 years into Guantánamo’s operation, is based only on Trump’s raw antipathy towards Guantánamo prisoners – all foreign-born Muslim men – and Muslims more broadly,” adding that “Donald Trump’s proclamation that he will not release any detainees during his administration reverses the approach and policies of both President Bush and President Obama, who collectively released nearly 750 men.”

On January 18, Judge Coleen Kollar-Kotelly (who ruled on several Guantánamo habeas corpus cases before the appeals court gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the prisoners) responded, “requiring the government to explain its Guantánamo policy with respect to the men now petitioning the court,” as Scott Roehm, the Washington Director of the Center for Victims of Torture, explained in an article for Just Security, adding, “Specifically, the judge ordered the government to provide the following information by Feb. 16”:

(i) The Government shall include a brief summary of its policy with respect to the Guantánamo Review Task Force (“Task Force”) and the Periodic Review Boards (“PRB”), including whether the Task Force, PRB, and/or another component of the Government tasked with reviewing the files of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, continues to consider whether to release or transfer those prisoners, and specifically (a) whether the Government intends to transfer the Petitioners previously designated for transfer by the Task Force and/or PRB, and (b) whether the Task Force, PRB, and/or another component of the Government tasked with reviewing the files of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is presently considering releasing or transferring the Petitioners who were not previously designated for transfer.

(ii) The Government also shall include a short summary as to the detainment status of each Petitioner.

These demands — requiring the government to explain what its position is with regard to the high-level government review processes established under President Obama (and particularly the parole-type Periodic Review Board process that led to 36 men being freed in Obama’s last few years in office), whether it intends to honor previous decisions to release five prisoners, and to meaningfully review the cases of the 26 other men who are not already charged in the military commission trial system, and also calling on it to provide meaningful information on each of the 41 men still held — is a huge step forward after the deliberate inaction of Trump’s first year.

As Shelby Sullivan-Bennis of Reprieve, who represents prisoners including Abdul Latif Nasser, one of the five men approved for release but still held, stated in a tweet after the ruling was issued, “Well, today the court ordered Trump to articulate a damn policy on Guantánamo & explain why my clients who’ve never been charged w[ith] a crime AND were unanimously cleared for release (including the Moroccan author of this birthday card [see left]) remain locked in that black hole. A good day.”

In the last year, in contrast to Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s demands, Trump’s position on Guantánamo has involved him sporadically continuing to make provocative but groundless comments about the prison and the men held there. It was also leaked that he intended to keep Guantánamo open, and that he wanted to send new prisoners there. This latter threat has, thankfully, not come to pass, almost certainly because Guantánamo has no actual purpose beyond warehousing people in a despicable kind of lawless limbo, or attempting to prosecute them in a hopelessly broken trial system, and the federal courts actually have a solid track record when it comes to prosecuting terrorists.

On the former point, keeping Guantánamo open actually requires no effort on the part of the president, because there is no actual mechanism for closing it, and lawmakers have passed legislation preventing any prisoner from being brought to the US mainland for any reason, thereby preventing its closure. Nevertheless, obviously obsessed that President Obama had issued an executive order on his second day in office in January 2009, establishing that the prison should be closed, Donald Trump is now, according to a State Department leak reported by Politico, planning to issue an executive order formally rescinding the bulk of Obama’s executive order, as I discussed in an article entitled, Leak Reveals How, In Counter-Productive, Backwards Move, Donald Trump Plans  to Issue New Executive Order Keeping Guantánamo Open.

According to Politico, Trump may announce his executive order as early as tomorrow’s State of the Union address, making Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s order even more significant than it already was.

As CCR explained in a press release after the ruling:

However the Justice Department may respond in court, the administration’s actions and stated intentions have already spoken loudly. President Trump has declared that no detainee should be transferred from the prison. Accordingly, there has been no forward movement on Guantánamo for a full year. Men approved for transfer are still languishing with no prospect of release. Offices of special envoys tasked with negotiating transfers with foreign governments are officially or effectively defunct [see here]. And the Periodic Review Boards, while continuing in form, are devoid of real substance [see here].

As we’ve said before, context also matters. The President has demonstrated, through vulgar words and deeds, his animus toward Muslims and non-white foreigners. With respect to suspects of terrorism in particular, he has gone so far as to call for overt torture. It is plain to us that Trump has no intention of moving any detainee out of Guantánamo, and won’t, without the intervention of the court. The only acceptable position at this point is for the prison to close and for the men who remain detained to be charged or released.

For now, few further words are needed. If Trump is determined to proceed with his despicable proposal to officially keep Guantánamo open, it is absolutely imperative that he faces a serious obstacle where it counts the most — in the courts that, lest we forget, are supposed to provide a check on unfettered and/or irresponsible executive power.

Note: For further information, see Scott Roehm’s Just Security article, which includes links to three amicus briefs — one filed by the Center for Victims of Torture, one filed “on behalf of a collection of Muslim, faith-based, and civil rights community organizations,” which “puts the president’s approach to Guantánamo in the broader context of his demonstrated anti-Muslim animus,” and one “filed on behalf of constitutional law and criminal procedure experts,” which “dives deeply into why the Constitution prohibits continued indefinite detention at Guantánamo.”

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Leak Reveals How, In Counter-Productive, Backwards Move, Donald Trump Plans to Issue New Executive Order Keeping Guantánamo Open

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.

 

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 first responses that occurred to me when I saw the news, via Politico, that a leaked State Department cable revealed that Donald Trump was planning to issue an executive order keeping the prison at Guantánamo Bay open — in other words, rescinding President Obama’s unfulfilled 2009 executive order pledging its closure — was, firstly, how leaky this administration is, and, secondly, how Trump seems obsessed with overturning anything associated with his predecessor.

Just a week into Trump’s presidency, last January, the New York Times obtained a leaked executive order in which he proposed to keep Guantánamo open, to prevent further prisoner releases, and to reintroduce torture and “black sites,” rescinding not only Obama’s executive order regarding the closure of Guantánamo, but also his executive order banning the use of torture and ordering “black sites” closed.

He was shouted down on the latter, by everyone within the US establishment who had been stung by how close they had come to prosecution over the brutal and unnecessary post-9/11 CIA torture program, which the Senate Intelligence Committee witheringly dismantled in its 2014 report. However, his desire to keep Guantánamo open never went away, even though advisers surely told him that sending anyone there was impractical, as the courts have a solid track record of successfully prosecuting those accused of terrorism, and Guantánamo’s history reveals it as little more than a place of torture and abuse, intended to be beyond the reach of the US courts, which wrecks viable prosecutions, and, throughout its existence, has routinely warehoused insignificant prisoners at colossal expense.

In February, another leak revealed that Trump was planning to bring Islamic State prisoners to Guantánamo, raising problems regarding the scope of the detention policy that underpins Guantánamo’s existence — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed shortly after the 9/11 attacks, which covers al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but not IS. In August, officials told the New York Times that Trump was still undeterred, and was still hoping to expand the use of Guantánamo, a non-leak that broke with an established pattern of disgruntled officials working against the administration, whose contempt for the bureaucracy of government and its offices is, sadly, all too clear.

On the second point — Trump’s apparent hatred for Obama— it is hard not to conclude that it is motivated as much by racism as it is by a well-recorded vindictive streak in Trump’s character. Both, however, are demeaning traits to be expressed by the President of the United States.

As for a third point — the substance of the planned executive order — it is worth noting that, in practical terms, Guantánamo was not closing anyway. As Politico described it, “The order has limited practical effect: Obama was never able to make good on the order amid resistance from members of Congress, who blocked his efforts to move detainees to prisons in the United States and raised concerns that released inmates could revert back to terrorism.”

However, as Politico also notes, “for Trump, it is a powerful political statement,” fulfilling his campaign promise to keep the prison open, and to “load it up with bad dudes.”

I don’t mean to underestimate how horrendous it will be if Trump goes ahead with his plans. If he does issue the executive order, he will be sending the world a message that he idiotically endorses the continued existence of the pointless and exhausted facility at Guantánamo Bay, which cripples the delivery of justice to the small number of men genuinely accused of terrorist crimes, and delivers only endless illegal purgatory to lower-level prisoners who should have been sent home long ago.

However, I concede that that is a message that, sadly, those of us working towards the prison’s closure for so many years have been unable to get across to the majority of the American people, who remain entranced by the Bush administration’s lies that Guantánamo held “the worst of the worst,” and the minority of the American people who support Donald Trump and are happy for him to revive Guantánamo as though it has any purpose beyond expressing Islamophobia, racism, and contempt for the law.

In practical terms, the executive order is expected to be issued soon. Politico reported that “a person familiar with the issue” said that Trump was “expected to announce plans to sign the order during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, or in the days before or after the address,” and although the cable noted, “At this time, we are not aware of any plans to bring additional detainees to Guantánamo Bay,” it also apparently “instructs US diplomats to begin informing officials from other countries about the executive order after the State of the Union speech, though embassies in London, Paris, Berlin and a few other cities can begin filling in foreign governments on Monday ‘with the request that they should not discuss the matter publicly until after the address.’”

The cable also “includes talking points designed to assuage the concerns of allies likely to criticize Trump’s decision.” Politico added — both unnecessarily, and with a coyness typical of the US mainstream media — that Guantánamo “is reviled in Europe and beyond as a symbol of US excess in the fight against terrorists and the use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques that critics equate with torture,” but reading between the lines the mention of “talking points” is a clear concession that, if the executive order goes ahead, Trump will face serious criticism from allies around the world.

The cable also states that the executive order “does not signal a significant policy shift with respect to detentions. Rather, it affirms Guantánamo Bay will continue to remain open and serve as one of several options the United States maintains for the detention of terrorists.” Following on from this, it is also noted that the executive order “will direct the Defense Department, in consultation with the State Department and other agencies, to ‘recommend criteria to the President for determining detention disposition outcomes for individuals captured on the battlefield,’” also explaining that, “Currently, the United States employs a number of different options for disposition, including transferring individuals to host governments or pursuing prosecution in a US court,” which “remain viable options.”

While the above suggests an overall position in which little has changed, it is still to be hoped that Trump can be persuaded to walk back from officially endorsing the continued existence of a prison that has done so much over the last 16 years to tarnish America’s name as a nation founded on the rule of law, and which claims to respect the rule of law. Guantánamo’s continued existence mocks those claims every single day that it remains open.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses “Guantánamo, Torture and the Trump Agenda” with Carl Dix at Revolution Books in Harlem, Jan. 16, 2018

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.

 

I’m delighted that the video is now available of my speaking event, “Guantánamo, Torture and the Trump Agenda,” at Revolution Books in Harlem, which took place last week as part of my annual visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison on and around the anniversary of its opening — on January 11.

This year — the 16th anniversary of its opening, and the first anniversary in which it was open under the control of Donald Trump — I was particularly aware of the passage of time, and the prison’s horrendously long existence. As a result, I came up with a revival of the Gitmo Clock that I first set up under President Obama in 2013, counting how many days the prison has been open — 5,845 days on the anniversary, and 5,859 days today — and if you’re interested at in the closure of Guantánamo, then please get involved. Posters for every 25 days are available on the Gitmo Clock website, and the next poster is for 5,875 days on February 6. Please take a photo with the poster, and send it to us, and we’ll post it on the Close Guantánamo website and on social media.

In my various talks on my trip, and in discussions with fellow activists, I also made frequent allusions to how long the prison has been open, noting that my son, who just turned 18, was only two years old when Guantánamo opened, and asking people to think about how long it would take them to think of 5,845 things, one for each day the prison has been open. I’d actually like to make a video featuring one image of each day Guantánamo has been open, and if you’re a filmmaker, and this is of interest to you, then do get in touch.

The video is below, via Vimeo, on Revolution Books’ Vimeo channel:

Guantánamo, Torture and the Trump Agenda from Revolution Books on Vimeo.

At Revolution Books, I decided that I would run through Guantanamo’s history, as I perceived it, and also run through my involvement with researching it under the Bush administration, when it was still largely shrouded in secrecy, telling the story of the men held there, and working to get it closed, via the various endeavours I have undertaken along the way — over 2,000 articles, a film, the Close Guantánamo campaign, the We Stand With Shaker campaign, work with the United Nations and WikiLeaks and other organizations — all to end up, after eight disappointing years under President Obama, with Guantánamo still open, and inaction and verbal hostility the hallmark of Trump’s first year in charge of America’s most notorious lawless prison.

I hope you have time to watch the video, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful. I’m grateful to everyone who turned up — some old friends and supporters, and some new faces — and I’d particularly like to thank Carl Dix for introducing me and moderating the evening. Carl is a a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and became a revolutionary while imprisoned for two years in Fort Leavenworth for refusing to fight in Vietnam, one of six GIs in Fort Lewis, in Washington state, who refused orders to go to Vietnam in 1970. Carl has a deep and measured analysis of America’s crimes, helping to place Guantánamo into a wider domestic context, and his questions to me, and the questions posed by the audience members, helped to create a memorable evening, and one that, I hope, bears repeated scrutiny through this recording.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

British MPs Urge Donald Trump and Senate Committees to Close Guantánamo

[image error] 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.

 

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 the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a cross-party group of British MPs have written to Donald Trump, and to Republican Senators John McCain and Bob Corker, the chairs of two influential Senate Committees (the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations), to urge action on Guantánamo after a year in which no prisoner has been released, despite five of the 41 men still held being approved for release, between 2010 and 2016, by high-level government processes established under President Obama. Throughout 2017, Donald Trump also made it clear that he has no interest in closing the prison, and would like to expand its use.

Almost as soon as Trump took office last January, a leaked draft executive order revealed that he wanted to keep Guantánamo open, wanted to send new prisoners there, and wanted to “suspend any existing transfer efforts pending a new review as to whether any such transfers are in the national security interests of the United States.” He also wanted to reinstate torture and the use of CIA “black sites.”

Trump’s enthusiasm for torture was immediately rebuffed by a wide range of critics, including many in his own administration and his eagerness to send new prisoners to Guantánamo has also not led to any new arrivals at the prison, for sound reasons that we hope remain flagged up throughout the rest of his presidency. Set up to be beyond the reach of the US courts, Guantánamo was never about justice or due process, but about using torture and abuse and then hiding it, and as the troubled history of the military commissions reveals, once prisoners have been tortured, it is difficult, if not impossible to bring them to justice. Trump’s advisers have undoubtedly also told him that US courts have a strong track record of successfully prosecuting those accused of terrorism.

When it comes to releasing prisoners, however, Donald Trump has done nothing. The role of Guantánamo envoy, established under Obama to deal with transfers from the prison — and to monitor transferred prisoners for security reasons — has been allowed to lapse, as we reported last April, and even last August Trump was still reportedly trying to work out how to expand the use of Guantánamo rather than accepting the need for its closure.

Tom Wilner and I, the co-founders of Close Guantánamo, met with British MPs to discuss Guantánamo in December, and are delighted that a cross-party group, all with experience of working towards the closure of Guantánamo, are seeking to establish communication with the administration from outside the US, picking up the baton of engagement and pressure that was exerted under both of Trump’s predecessors when it came to Guantánamo — George W. Bush, who opened Guantánamo, but who faced increased pressure from America’s allies throughout his presidency, and who ended up conceding that it should be closed, and Barack Obama, who promised to close it but never managed to do so, and who, in 2013, was subjected to serious international criticism when the prisoners, appalled at being abandoned, as Obama failed to release anyone after Congress raised cynical obstacles to the release of prisoners, embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike that attracted international criticism of his inaction.

We commend the MPs for the letter, and also for the Early Day Motion calling for the closure of Guantánamo and the release of prisoners approved for release, which was tabled by Chris Law MP on January 9, and has, to date, been signed by 38 MPs. If you’re in the UK, you can urge your MP to sign it by writing to them here.

Below is the text of the MPs’ letter:

The 16th anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp

To: Donald J. Trump, President of the United States

Senator John S. McCain, Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee

Senator Robert P. Corker Jr., Chairman, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

January 11 marks the 16th anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. 41 men remain imprisoned there. Five were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama but are still held. 26 others have never been charged with any wrongdoing but have no prospect of release through trial. The others, although charged, are languishing in a failed military commission system that has been unable to provide them with a fair trial.

The continued detention of these men without due process violates the most fundamental democratic values and undermines both the United States and its allies in their fight against international terrorism. As members of the Parliament of its oldest and closest ally, we call on the United States finally to close this prison. It has been open far too long.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Mitchell MP (Conservative, Sutton Coldfield)

Andy Slaughter MP (Labour, Hammersmith)

Tom Brake MP (Liberal Democrat, Carshalton and Wallington)

Chris Law MP (SNP, Dundee West)

Caroline Lucas MP (Green, Brighton Pavilion)

The MPs are all members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Guantánamo, established in 2016 as a follow-up to the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, which successfully sought the release from Guantánamo of UK resident Shaker Aamer in 2015.

Andrew Mitchell and Andy Slaughter were Vice Chairs of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group. They visited Washington, D.C. in May 2015 to seek his release, with David Davis MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP. Tom Brake and Caroline Lucas were also members of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and Chris Law is the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Guantánamo.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Photos: This is NOT the Face of America – Resistance to Donald Trump on the Women’s March in New York, Jan. 20, 2018

See my photos on Flickr here!
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.

 

Last month, when I was discussing with Debra Sweet, the national director of the campaigning group the World Can’t Wait, how long to stay in the US on my annual trip to call for the closure of Guantánamo on and around the anniversary of its opening on January 11, we decided that it was worth staying for the Women’s March on January 20. Debra has been coordinating my January visits to the US since 2011, and I had stayed until January 21 last year, and took part in the colossal 500,000-strong march in New York, and we both felt that there was no good reason to miss it this year, as it promised yet again to be an opportunity for millions of women — and men — to tell Donald Trump what they think of him.

Last year, there was a huge outpouring of anger at the arrival in the White House of Trump, who had somehow become president despite his extraordinary unsuitability for the role: his complete lack of political experience, and his very public deficiencies — his rudeness, his vindictiveness, his inability to complete even a simple coherent sentence, his sordid history as a sexual predator, and the groundless illusion of his success as a businessman. This thoroughly unpleasant figure had particularly appalled women because of his “grab ‘em by the p*ssy” comment that had been revealed during the election campaign, but that had somehow failed to derail him.

A year on, the anger against Trump is surely more palpable, and more based on experience, than a year ago. This president is a bitter joke, the dysfunctional head of a dangerously right-wing version of the Republican Party, who governs by tweet, and constantly threatens,and tries to deliver on policies that reveal a profound and troubling racism: his attempted Muslim travel ban, for example, and the marked increase in his assault on the most vulnerable members of US society — the immigrants on whom the US economy depends, but whose presence, as with Brexit and immigrants in the UK, is perceived by self-pitying white people as being the source of their economic woes, rather than the truth: that it is the fault of the neoliberal machinery of political and big business, a world which, fundamentally, Donald Trump is as much a part of as the “elites” for which his supporters have nothing but contempt.

As a man, Trump’s unsuitability for high office has continued to offend women across the US and around the world. This is not to say that philanderers have not been in the White House before — and as the case of Harvey Weinstein has shown us, men in positions of power regularly use that power to prey, sexually, on those they have power over. And yet, as the stories of liaisons with porn stars and secret pay-offs pile up like a carnal car crash around the bloated figure of the president, binge eating junk food like the last days of Elvis, it is impossible not to shake the sense that the distaste the reports of his antics create is of a severity that cannot be ignored.

[image error]On the left, for example, is the headline of the New York Daily News on January 18, after In Touch magazine published a frank 2011 interview with Stormy Daniels, one of several porn stars with whom Trump had sex (and then paid $130,000 to keep her quiet), in which, with astonishing creepiness, he compared her to his daughter.

How can this be acceptable?

And the horrors just keep coming. Yesterday morning, after switching on my computer, what hit me first of all in the blizzard of social media was Stormy Daniels’ graphic description of Trump’s genitalia. No wonder he can’t come to the UK, America’s closest ally, because the protests against him would be too embarrassingly huge to brush off, and no wonder women in the US are so appalled that he remains president.

The protest in New York was not quite as huge as last year, but it was still big, noisy, passionate and articulate, with at least a few hundred thousand people marching, and thousands of witty hand-made signs. A few of those are featured in my photos, which I hope you have time to look at, and will share if you like them. I’m also pleased to see that a large number of marches took place in cities and towns across the country, including places with, a year ago, greater support for Trump than cities like New York.

I hope that, after this year’s march, people don’t just go home and forget about the power we have in numbers, as, essentially, happened last year, when we settled into a horrible pattern whereby we waited, every day, for fresh horrors from Trump and his Twitter account.

Nor do I have much faith in the organizers’ most prominent development from last year — of getting women involved in the forthcoming mid-term elections, and working on behalf of the Democrats. I don’t want to dismiss every woman who wants to be a Democratic lawmaker as necessarily compromised, or to belittle those women who want to support them, but the party’s track record is not good. Hillary Clinton lost to Trump not just because she failed to connect significantly enough with voters, with her elitism and her ties to Wall Street and corporate America, and not just because of the racist backlash against Barack Obama, but also because, in eight years, the Democrats under Obama had failed to deliver a compelling narrative about how their time in power had genuinely delivered progress and improvement to the lives of the ordinary working people of America — and with good reason, as the Democrats still, fundamentally, subscribe to the same neoliberal system embraced by the Republicans, an obsessively profit-driven system with little time for the need son human beings (apart from CEOs and shareholders), which i have seen described,with alarming accuracy, as a system that tries to make as many people as possible feel as insecure as possible for as much of the time as possible.

For a proper change, we need to think about how we can organize from the ground up, and to imagine a new kind of politics, of the people, and not of those who tell us they lead us, but whose fine words then turn out to be lies, as they protect the interests of those who pay them, and whose interests are diametrically opposed to the welfare of ordinary hard-working Americans.

To get rid of Trump and the poison he exudes and stands for, along with the rest of poisonous Republicans around him, we need a profound change, more profound than a tick in a box on election day can deliver.

Alse 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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.

Video: On 16th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo, Andy Worthington Tears Into Donald Trump for His Failure to Close the Prison, and His Defense of Endless Imprisonment Without Charge or Trial

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, including my current US visit.

 

Last Thursday, January 11, was the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, as I have done every January since 2011, I traveled from London to join campaigners calling for the prison’s closure outside the White House — as well as taking part in other events on an around the anniversary.

This year, as I reported in an article, Telling Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo: My Report on an Inspiring 24 Hours of Protest and Resistance in Washington, D.C. on the 16th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, and in a photo set on Flickr, there was renewed energy for a fight to get Guantánamo closed, after a year in which campaigners and lawyers struggled to keep the focus on Guantánamo in the general tsunami of bad news emanating from the Trump administration.

We succeeded only when something so terrible happened that it erupted through the general patina of indifference towards Guantánamo — the treatment of hunger strikers, who claimed in September that the military, under new instructions, was no longer monitoring their health, the decision by the chief judge of Guantánamo’s broken military commission trial system to imprison the head of the defense team for defending the right of civilian attorneys to resign after they discovered that the government was spying on them, and the decision by the military, after an exhibition of the prisoners’ art went on display in New York, to overreact to the resultant humanizing of the prisoners (which they themselves had facilitated by providing art classes to the prisoners in the first place) by publicly threatening to burn all their artwork in future.

For this year’s anniversary, lawyers for eleven of the prisoners filed a new habeas petition, which I wrote about here, and which, as the Center for Constitutional Rights explained in a press release, “argues that Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’”

Outside the White House, the protest, led by Witness Against Torture, and including Amnesty International USA and numerous other groups, was sharply focused on Donald Trump, his disgraceful inaction, his poisonous rhetoric and the plethora of racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic policies he has introduced since coming to office — including the many iterations of his Muslim travel ban, and the marked increase in deportations.

My speech, which opened proceedings on Thursday, is below, filmed and made available on Vimeo by Justin Norman, the media director of Witness Against Torture.

Andy Worthington Speaks on the 16th Anniversary of Guantánamo from Shrieking Tree on Vimeo.

As I explained when I posted it on Facebook, it was a fiery speech, in which “I ran through a brief history of 16 years of anger and disappointment with Presidents Bush and Obama, and ended up in fury at Donald Trump for his disgraceful refusal to even contemplate releasing a single prisoner — even though five of the 41 men still held were approved for release by high-level government review processes under Obama.” I added, “As I will continue to insist, until Guantánamo is finally closed, indefinite detention without charge or trial cannot ever be accepted as a norm.”

I also launched the new Close Guantánamo photo project, asking people to take photos with posters showing how long Guantanamo has been open (5,845 days on the anniversary, and 5,853 days today) and to make their own voices heard in telling Trump to close the prison once and for all. Details of that project are here, and I do hope you’ll get involved, and will share this video if you find it helpful.

I already posted an Associated Press video recorded at the protest (of me discussing the anniversary, as well as former NCIS agent Mark Fallon, and Pardiss Kebriaei of CCR), and the video of the panel discussion at New America on the afternoon of January 11, and I hope soon to be able to post the video of my talk at Revolution Books in Harlem, which took place on Tuesday.

I was also interviewed for two radio shows just before the anniversary — with Bob Connors for the Peace & Justice Report on WSLR, Sarasota Community Radio, on January 10, which can be found here (scroll down to Jan. 10). It was a great 40-minute interview, with the opportunity for me to give a properly detailed analysis of the story of Guantánamo, and I’m also delighted that Bob played my song ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, the title track of my band The Four Fathers’ new album. I hope to be able to speak to Bob again in the not too distant future.

I also spoke to Jerome McDonnell for Worldview on WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station. I’ve spoken to Jerome before, and he’s always a well-informed host. That show is available here (under January 10, 2018), and here as an MP3, and the 52-minute show also includes Uri Freidman of the Atlantic discussing “national security adviser H.R. McMaster’s ideology around a possible nuclear confrontation” with North Korea, and Jacqueline Litzgus, a professor of biology at Laurentian University, talking about freshwater turtles. My interview begins 30 minute into the show.

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 the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for 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).

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, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see 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.