Welcome to Andy Worthington

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.

Here’s the 25th chronological list of all my articles, covering the six-month period from July to December 2018, when news about Guantánamo was slow, and I became involved in the political occupation of a community garden in Deptford, in south east London, to prevent its destruction as part of a housing ‘regeneration’ project.

I report on an important case, argued by Tom Wilner, with whom I co-founded the ‘Close Guantánamo’ campaign in 2012, in which appeals court judges “reversed an eight-year rule that has prevented Guantánamo detainees from seeing and rebutting the evidence purportedly justifying their detention.” As Tom says, “This decision tears down the major barrier that has prevented the Guantánamo detainees from receiving a fair hearing.”

This year, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which I’ve been writing about most years since 2007, generally in relation to Guantánamo and the CIA torture program, I examine the latest horror story to emerge from the US, via Donald Trump’s migrant detention program, recently described by a visiting doctor as comparable “to torture facilities.”

In this year’s article marking the summer solstice, I contrast how the free festival pioneers urged revellers to “leave no trace”, in contrast to today’s throwaway culture, and, looking at the bigger picture, I urge anyone interested in the cycle of the seasons that Stonehenge so vividly represents to urgently get involved in environmental activism to try to prevent the worst effects of an already unfolding and unprecedented man-made environmental crisis that requires the whole of humanity to grasp that, collectively, we must all work out how to “leave no trace” if we are to sustain our existence on earth.

As the Supreme Court turns down a request for a review of his case by Moath al-Alwi, a Yemeni held at Guantánamo without charge or trial for over 17 years, I examine the significance of a statement made by Justice Stephen Breyer, questioning whether the court’s decisions over the last 15 years – and particularly in relation to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in June 2004 – have led to an endorsement of “perpetual detention.” The answer is yes, but it remains to be seen if the court is willing or able to tackle such a profound and lingering injustice.

It’s exactly two years since the Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people people died because those responsible for their safety – from central government to the local council, the management company in charge of the towers, and various contractors involved in its fatal refurbishment – prioritised cost-cutting and profiteering instead. As survivors continue to call for justice, and housing reforms to protect those in social housing, I join those calls, reflecting on how, across London and the country as a whole, those in social housing continue to be treated as disposable, whether through living in towers with unsafe cladding, or living on estates that continue to be cynically demolished as part of the ‘regeneration’ industry that is actually a tool for social cleansing.

Here’s a link to, and discussion of my recent radio interview with Andy Bungay of Wandsworth’s Riverside Radio, in which we discussed Guantánamo, and the housing crisis in London, and Andy played songs by my band The Four Fathers, about Shaker Aamer and Grenfell.