Welcome to Andy Worthington

In my first article about Boris Johnson since he became the almost unspeakably unsuitable Prime Minister of the UK, I look at his chronic failures, and also profile his chief advisor, the alarming maverick Dominic Cummings, enthusiastically promising to deliver a “no-deal” Brexit by October 31 – in his case, to fulfil some warped dream of destroying the entire British political establishment.

Marking the 17th anniversary of the “torture memos,” written by John Yoo and approved by Jay S. Bybee, I look at how the US’s decision to embark on a torture program continues to undermine justice, as defense lawyers for the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks are taking exception to claims that the use of torture on their clients can be sidestepped because “clean teams” of FBI agents later interrogated them non-coercively. The lawyers claim – and have evidence to back it up – that actually the “clean teams” were working quite closely with the CIA throughout the whole process.

My review of this week’s WOMAD world music festival in Wiltshire, looking particularly at how, although it was a wonderful festival, the global environmental crisis hung over proceedings, as, to my mind, it hovers over everything these days, demanding that we get involved in bringing down the entire suicidal capitalist system that is destroying us.

An article in defence of social housing – and calling for a massive project of building new council homes – on the centenary of the 1919 Addington Act, introduced by the Liberal (and later Labour) politician Christopher Addison, which established the UK’s first major council-led homebuilding programme.

I’m off to WOMAD for a week. While I’m gone, please check out ‘How the Middle Class Ruined Britain’, a really rather good documentary presented by the working class Tory stand-up comedian Geoff Norcott, featuring the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign.

My report about the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Summer Uprising’ last week, and, in particular, the significance of activists’ blockade of London Concrete in east London, as part of protests against the Silvertown Tunnel. This led to immediate arrests, unlike most of the group’s more theatrical manifestations in central London, and my conclusion is that, although the most remarkable consciousness-raising and political engagement has taken place over the last nine months via XR and Greta Thunberg, much more direct action is needed against polluters; for example, against the hugely environmentally polluting housing industry.

Marking 800 days since I first began posting a photo a day on Facebook (and later on Twitter) from my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which I cycle around London’s 120 postcodes, recording the fabric of the city and its changes, and which I actually began five years earlier, in May 2012.

My report about the publication of “CIA Torture Unredacted,” a 400-page report by Sam Raphael, Crofton Black and Ruth Blakeley, drawing on their nine years of research into the US’s post-9/11 torture program, and, over the last four years, their efforts to “unredact” key information concealed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the program, released in December 2014.

Analyzing a 2010 DoD report into the use of medical records in interrogations at Guantánamo, as secured by “FOIA terrorist” Jason Leopold, seven years after he first requested it. Plus a history of what preceded this report, and some accounts by prisoners themselves, as compiled by former prisoner Omar Deghayes after his release in 2007.

Publicizing a powerful new report, ‘Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo,’ by the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), thoroughly refuting claims by the US authorities that Guantánamo prisoners receive care equivalent to that of US service members.