Welcome to Andy Worthington

OK, I admit that the heading is more accurate in relation to Tony Blair’s sniping at Gordon Brown in his recently released memoir than it is to the issues that really concern us here — Iraq, Guantánamo, and the “War on Terror” — but I couldn’t resist using it.
So what are Blair’s revelations about his [...]

After a summer hiatus, the first in a series of autumn screenings of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, takes place at 11 am on Sunday September 12 at the Renoir Cinema in the Brunswick Centre, London WC1 (nearest tube Russell Square, and see a [...]

Surprise is the last thing that anyone ought to feel on hearing the news that the Obama administration “has shelved the planned prosecution,” in a trial by Military Commission, “of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged coordinator of the Oct. 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen,” as the Washington Post reported on Thursday, [...]

As combat operations officially end in Iraq, nearly seven and a half years after the Bush administration’s illegal invasion, it is difficult to know how to summarize succinctly the tragic cost of the enterprise. I retain nothing but disdain — and a desire for accountability — for those who initiated this criminal, and criminally ill-conceived [...]

Last November, I was delighted to meet Peter Jan Honigsberg, Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco, and the author of Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on Terror, when he enthusiastically agreed to show the Guantánamo documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself) [...]

I don’t want to spend much time discussing the opposition to the building of the Park51 Project, a $100 million mosque and cultural center two blocks from the site of the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, as such a response to an assault on the First Amendment to the US Constitution [...]

Every now and then, when the authorities at Guantánamo want to demonstrate how well catered for the prisoners are, a story emerges that purports to demonstrate how well-stocked the prison library is, and how the prisoners are enjoying a range of titles, including J.K. Rowling’s best-selling series of Harry Potter novels.
The first time I recall [...]

The following interview with Faraj Hassan Alsaadi was conducted by Cageprisoners and published in August 2007, and I’m cross-posting it in memory of Faraj, who died in a motorbike accident on August 16. Imprisoned without charge or trial, or held under a control order, from May 2002 until December 2009, when his control order was [...]

As I sit here trying to come to terms with the death of Faraj Hassan Alsaadi, who died in a motorbike accident on August 16, it seems to me that nothing can throw us as much as an unexpected death. In Faraj’s case, it is deeply distressing that he leaves behind a wife and three [...]

On August 12, the US administration’s intention to proceed with the war crimes trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, was temporarily delayed when Khadr’s military lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapsed in the courtroom in Guantánamo [...]