Welcome to Andy Worthington

Marking Earth Day, which began 56 years ago today, on April 22, 1970, I reflect on the visionary drive of that first event, when 20 million Americans took to the streets to call for the establishment of environmental protections, and how, under neoliberalism and the cult of the individual, the counter-cultural power of the 1970s and ‘80s started to dwindle from the 1990s onwards, even as the realities of man-made climate change were confirmed, and efforts began to get the countries of the world to agree on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By 2018, when meaningful change was still elusive, Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg managed to galvanize public opinion to recognize the severity of the crisis, although their impetus was lost when the Covid pandemic and its attendant lockdowns took place. Afterwards, I suggest, there was a widespread derangement amongst western leaders, who were unable to accept the threat to the neoliberal order that was glimpsed during Covid, and who were also haunted by the reality of climate collapse, and who responded, as I describe it, by “retreat[ing] into a regressive form of denial, resurrecting a primitive urge to lash out when confronted by problems of our own making, which, throughout human history, has all too often meant a descent into war as a violent and gratifying response that drowns out all other concerns.” When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this led to Vladimir Putin being defined by western leaders as the personification of evil, and, excruciatingly, they did the same again in October 2023, this time with Hamas. Simultaneously, following on from the passage of laws to suppress dissent following the actions of climate activists, these same leaders passed even more punitive laws to criminalize those who were opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and are now working with AI companies, who are horrifically redefining warfare through AI-driven military targeting, and are also working to implement the surveillance and control of entire populations. The best hope, right now, is that a huge energy crisis, precipitated by the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran, may, inadvertently, push the world into moving away from fossil fuels for renewables, as its unintended impacts may also disrupt the planned expansion of the deadly AI industry and other manifestations of the broken, extractive neoliberal capitalist system that will, otherwise, kill us all.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the release, by the Pentagon, on April 20, 2006, of the first ever publicly-released prisoner list revealing the names and nationalities of 558 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo at that point in time, after the prison had been almost entirely shrouded in a deliberate veil of secrecy for the first four years and three months of its existence, enabling torture and other abuse to take place, inflicted on men and boys held as “unlawful enemy combatants” without any fundamental rights whatsoever as human beings. A second list, revealing information about all 759 prisoners, was released in May 2006, and 20 more prisoners — mostly alleged “high-value detainees” — arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and also in 2007 and 2008, when transfers to the prison came to an end. The list was unwillingly released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation, via a lawsuit submitted by the Associated Press, and it provided the first significant key to enable me, as an independent researcher, to begin to build up a coherent picture of who was held at Guantánamo, by cross-referencing the list with other documentation, and to understand how and why the Bush administration had fundamentally misled the world by claiming that the prisoners were “the worst of the worst.” As I have always maintained, there was never any evidence that any more than a few percent of prisoners held at Guantánamo had any meaningful connection to Al-Qaeda or other groups allegedly involved in terrorism. My work led to the publication, after a year of incessant research and writing, of my book “The Guantánamo Files”, published in September 2007, and my subsequent work as an independent journalist and human rights activist, writing and publishing thousands of articles on my website, telling more of the prisoners’ stories, and campaigning to get the prison closed.

My review of the last week’s events relating to the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked war on Iran, beginning with the ceasefire talks in Pakistan between the US and Iran, which were derailed by the US’s undeserved arrogance, and in which questions were raised about whether or not Benjamin Netanyahu played a disruptive role from afar. I also examine the confusing response of Donald Trump who, in between lauding himself as Jesus and launching bitter attacks on the Pope, decided that blocking the already blocked Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t blocked before the war began, was a good idea. This, however, can only add to the growing global energy crisis that it’s already too late to avert, but that will only get worse until the US and Israel are somehow persuaded to back down. I also look at the forthcoming negotiations between Israel and Lebanon in Washington, D.C., which look doomed to fail, because Israel, fresh from its sickening day of massacres in Lebanon last week, is apparently insistent on carving up the whole of southern Lebanon into a deserted buffer zone and an active military zone lasting for an unspecified amount of time, while leaving the Lebanese government with an unfulfillable requirement to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah in the north, or face further military action. As always, the most disturbing aspect of this entire chaotic situation is Israel’s obsession with endless, murderous aggression, which must be curbed if the entire region is to have any opportunity for any kind of peace.

My reflections on the last five days of horrors, from Donald Trump’s expletive-filled post threatening Iran on Easter Sunday to his even more disturbing post on April 7 when he threatened Iran with nuclear annihilation, stating, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, and the widespread revulsion that greeted both posts, to the ceasefire deal agreed that evening, brokered with Pakistan, establishing a two-week period for negotiations aimed at ensuring a lasting peace. Israel, excluded from the negotiations, immediately launched attacks on Lebanon of unprecedented savagery, even though ending its hostilities in Lebanon was included in the ceasefire deal, either in an effort to sabotage the deal or to indulge in a last burst of sickening genocidal fury before complying. My feeling, as I describe it, is that, “Whatever comes next, it seems pretty clear that Iran has won, and that both Trump and Netanyahu have suffered spectacularly resounding defeats”, from which neither may recover. I can only hope that this will happen. As I explain, although it “wouldn’t fundamentally change the juggernauts of horror in either country, it might be enough of a break to pull us back from what, otherwise, looks like nothing less than an ever-growing and all-compassing darkness of bottomless depravity.”

26 photos from, and my report about the 39th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around April 1. In the article, I also provide a detailed analysis of how and why the great crimes of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” — imprisonment without charge or trial, including torture and other forms of abuse, and illegal wars in pursuit of regime change — have, through not being adequately challenged and repudiated, fed directly into the horrific atrocities of the last 30 months. The first of these is Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the torture, rape and murder in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, while, over the last six weeks, the US, the staunchest supporter of Israel’s genocide, has become directly involved in the Israeli model of devastating, lawless warfare, focused on as much arbitrary civilian death and destruction as possible, via its joint war with Israel on Iran, while Israel also repeats its Gaza playbook in Lebanon.

Linking to and discussing my interview with Chuck Mertz for his weekly show “This Is Hell!”, a Chicago-based “long-form political interview program”, now in its 30th year. Chuck is a well-prepared and knowledgeable host, and the hour-long format is conducive to detailed analysis and commentary, so it was an absolute delight to have the opportunity to discuss my recent articles, “900 Days of Genocide in Gaza”, and, in particular, another recent article, “The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran”, in a live setting, thinking out loud rather than writing in seclusion, which I always find exhilarating. I was particularly pleased to have been given the time to spell out in detail how Israel’s use of AI-driven military targeting was largely responsible for creating human carnage beyond imagining, as was revealed in the early months of the genocide by Israel’s +972 Magazine, whose reporters spoke to insiders who confirmed how AI was able to generate targets at a speed that was hundreds or thousands of times faster than humans could achieve — but only through sweeping definitions of who was a valid target, which were overbroad and error-strewn, and which, crucially, were subjected to almost no meaningful human oversight whatsoever. This model, eviscerating existing models regulating the conduct of warfare, to falsely justify colossal damage to civilian infrastructure and disproportionate civilian deaths, has now, of course, spread to Iran, with full US commitment, and also to Lebanon.

My analysis of the shameful decision yesterday, by Israel’s Knesset, to pass a new law making the death penalty mandatory for Palestinians convicted of killings in circumstances regarded as terrorism. The law, pushed in particular by Israel’s far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, doesn’t apply retroactively, meaning that it cannot be applied to the 1,329 Palestinian prisoners currently serving prison sentences on “security” grounds, including Marwan Barghouti, “the Palestinian Mandela”, imprisoned since 2002 after a blatantly unfair trial, for whom Ben-Gvir has a particular hatred. At present, however, no one knows how many of the many thousands of other Palestinian prisoners currently undergoing legal proceedings, or held without charge or trial under various lawless states of “exception”, might end up being targeted for execution. It’s also important to recognize that, if this new law isn’t struck down by Israel’s Supreme Court, or via international pressure, it’s reasonable to assume that further laws will be passed extending the death penalty’s reach. It’s also crucial to note that forthcoming legislation — dealing with the “Prosecution of Participants in October 7 Massacre events” — passed its first legislative hurdle on March 24, and is intended to establish special military tribunals for those accused of involvement in the October 7 attacks. This bill, as Amnesty International has explained, “authorizes the tribunal to impose the death penalty on those convicted and allows it to significantly deviate from standard procedural rules and evidentiary laws if it is ‘deemed necessary for the clarification of the truth and performance of justice.’” While the passage of this legislation cannot even begin to overshadow the horrors of Israel’s genocide over the last two and a half years, or the unparalleled brutality of its prisons, where over 9,000 Palestinians are currently held — and where over a hundred have been murdered without even the pretext of a death penalty bill — it does seem to me that this particular gesture, with its specific contempt for so much of the world’s retreat from capital punishment as a brutal anachronism, ought to cement Israel’s status as a pariah state that must no longer be indulged.

Today marks 900 days since Israel began its genocide in the Gaza Strip, a sustained assault of such naked and self-glorifying depravity, shamefully supported by most of the west, that it has left billions of us struggling to cope with what the very notion of our humanity means. It also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, one of over 270 Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel. To mark these grim anniversaries, I cycle though Israel’s atrocities, almost unbroken for two years, with the exception of a six-week ceasefire in January and February last year, noting how every red line regarding appropriate conduct in war has been eviscerated, and how Israel’s crimes are so numerous that it’s hard to even remember them all. I also update the story of Gaza since a supposedly permanent ceasefire was declared on October 10 last year. This brought to an end Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing, but in every other respect the genocide has continued, albeit more slowly. Crucially, humanitarian aid — and especially medical supplies — are still severely restricted, and Israel has retained complete control of 60% of the Gaza Strip, hemming the surviving Palestinian population into the remaining 40%, where they largely live in subsistence-level squalor. Crucially, I note how the template of Gaza’s extermination — the relentless killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure — has now expanded to Iran, since the US-Israeli “war” began three weeks ago, while Israel also seeks to replicate the Gaza model in Lebanon, and has also stepped up its violence in the West Bank. Where we go from here is still unknown. While Israel has very clearly descended into a psychotic mania that seeks the death of their “enemies” at every moment, I suggest that Trump’s supreme folly was allowing himself to be talked into joining Netanyahu in his deranged 40-year dream of destroying Iran, and wonder if there can be an “off-ramp” before he is held responsible for what, through the massive disruption to oil and gas supplies, is looking like a looming global economic crisis on an unprecedented scale.

My detailed analysis of a burning topic that ought to be of huge concern to us all — the rise of AI-driven targeting in warfare, which generates military targets hundreds or thousands of times faster than human analysts, but which is both unreliable, and dependent on parameters for targeting that are overly broad, and which, crucially, are generated so fast that, to secure “results”, the essential need for significant human oversight is being ignored. I trace the development of AI in warfare from its roots in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, as revealed through groundbreaking reports by Israel’s +972 Magazine, which showed how any sense of proportionality in wartime — avoiding the targeting of civilians in military actions, or their deaths as “collateral damage” — has been completely swept aside, along with almost all human checks on the AI’s targeting, leading to an unparalleled situation in which, according to the Israeli military, 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians — although my own assessment is that it may be closer to 95%. I also examine the deep involvement of US tech and AI companies in Israel’s genocide — including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic and Palantir — and bring the story up to date with the US’s direct participation in the genocidal Gaza model of AI targeting in its war on Iran, with inaccurate targeting exposed on the very first day of hostilities, when an elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, was hit, killing at least 168 people, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12. I conclude by stating that none of the major tech and AI companies can be trusted, because they are all, to varying degrees, embedded within our governments, and are all complicit in implementing, or seeking to implement sweeping programs of surveillance and control, which, as I describe it, “redefine not only war, but also peace; a peace that will not exist unless everyone in the countries they control live lives of quiet and docile obedience, with no dissent allowed.”

25 photos from, and my report about the 38th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, in which I also explain why the vigils remain important: firstly, because Guantánamo enshrined indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, the hallmark of dictatorships, as US policy, echoing and drawing inspiration from Israel’s brutal, lawless prisons for Palestinians, and inspiring Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s ever-expanding ICE detention facilities for US immigrants; and secondly, because, as the last bastion of the “war on terror”, it is also a powerful reminder of how that “war” led not only to the establishment of horrific, lawless prisons, but also, via the invasion of Iraq in particular, to the notion that the US could invade a sovereign nation based on lies, and, via Obama’s drone assassination program, to the notion that the US could extrajudicially murder anyone alleged to be a “combatant” without any form of due process, both of which helped Israel to seek to justify its genocide in Gaza, and are now being used by Trump to seek to justify his joint “war” with Israel on Iran.