About me

Welcome to my website. Here you can find information about my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/University of Michigan Press), including reviews by released Guantánamo detainee Moazzam Begg, lawyers Clive Stafford Smith, Marc Falkoff and Candace Gorman, authors Stephen Grey and Peter Bergen, film-maker Ken Loach, and film producer Marty Fisher.

I’m a freelance historian and journalist. Having spent several years looking at the undercurrents of post-war British social history — in particular the clash between the state and some of its most outspoken critics (protest movements, travellers and alternative communities) — I turned my attention to the “War on Terror” in 2006. Like many decent-minded citizens of the world, I had been deeply concerned, from the moment Guantánamo opened in January 2002, that the US administration’s response to 9/11 was both cruel and misguided, but although I conducted some research in the years that followed, it was not until March 2006, when I read Enemy Combatant by the released British prisoner Moazzam Begg, that I asked myself the fateful question, “Who’s in Guantánamo?” The quest to answer this question consumed over a year of my life, and led to the creation of The Guantánamo Files.

To coincide with the publication of The Guantánamo Files, I started providing additional information about the prisoners that I was unable to include in the book. See here, here, here and here. More will follow throughout 2008. In May 2007, I also started using this site to comment on the latest developments at Guantánamo and in the wider “War on Terror.” See the homepage (or choose from Previous Posts at the top of each page, or Categories on the sidebar) for these articles, many of which were initially published on CounterPunch, the Huffington Post, Anti-war.com, AlterNet, ZNet and Indymedia. In February 2008, I co-wrote a front-page news story with Carlotta Gall for the New York Times, and have also had articles published in the Guardian, Index on Censorship, Socialist Review, the Daily Star, Lebanon and Wordt Vervolgd, the monthly magazine of Amnesty International in the Netherlands. I also write for the website Nth Position, and am grateful to the British human rights group Cageprisoners for making so much of my work available.

Since September 2007, I have also undertaken various TV interviews — with the BBC, Al-Jazeera, the Islam Channel, Press TV, INN World News and others — plus dozens of radio interviews (mainly with progressive stations in the United States, but also on one memorable occasion on BBC Radio 5 Live), plus other interviews by phone or email, and a number of speaking engagements, including the Radical Book Fair in Edinburgh (with Arun Kundnani), and various other talks with Moazzam Begg, Zachary Katznelson, senior counsel at Reprieve, and former Guantánamo chaplain James Yee. Recent appearances have included Q & A sessions following screenings of the Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side at the Frontline Club (with Moazzam) and at the ICA, a talk to a group of sixth-formers in Bromley and a panel discussion in Brighton on the UN’s International Day In Support of Victims of Torture.

In March 2008 I visited the United States to promote the book, an inspiring trip that involved numerous TV and radio interviews, and events at Columbia University in New York (with colleagues from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights) and the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

In March 2008 I also began working as Communications Manager for Reprieve, the legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.

Please contact me if you would like to interview me, or if you would like to engage me as a speaker. Alternatively, you can contact my publicists at Pluto Press (+44 (0)20 8348 2724) or contact Mary Bisbee-Beck (bisbeeb@umich.edu) or Stephanie Grohoski (sgrohoski@umich.edu) at the University of Michigan Press.

You can also find information on this site about my previous books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion (one of 50 books chosen as part of the London Libraries’ promotion, A Book with a View, which ran from May to September 2007), and The Battle of the Beanfield, which can be ordered through this site.

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My first book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, a social history of Stonehenge described by SchNEWS as ‘by far the best bit of modern British social history I’ve seen’, was published by Alternative Albion, an imprint of Heart of Albion Press, in June 2004. I also compiled and edited The Battle of the Beanfield, published by Enabler Publications in June 2005.

As a journalist, my pre-Guantánamo work was published in The Guardian, Fortean Times, The Idler, Festival Eye, SchNEWS, British Archaeology, Pagan Dawn, Pentacle, 3rd Stone and on the Nth Position website.

In June 2006, I compered a Battle of the Beanfield 21st anniversary reunion at the Assembly Rooms in Glastonbury (see Beanfield reunion photos), and I also gave a talk about paganism, politics and civil liberties at the Libra Aries Bookshop stall at the Strawberry Fair in Cambridge. I also appeared at the Big Green Gathering in August, where I gave an overview of festivals, alternative communities and protest movements from the 1960s to the present day.

In 2004 and 2005 I toured around the country with an exhibition of photos of the Stonehenge festivals and the Battle of the Beanfield (including photos by Alan Lodge, Adrian Arbib and Tim Malyon). This was shown at the Glastonbury Festival, the Kingston Green Fair, the Strawberry Fair in Cambridge and the Stroud Arts Festival (Space 05), and also at pioneering cooperative social centres in Brighton (the Cowley Club), Bristol (Kebele), London (the Vertigo Club) and Nottingham (the Sumac Centre).

I also gave talks about Stonehenge at the Big Green Gathering and the Shambala Festival, Rainbow 2000 camps in Wales and the Forest of Dean, and at various venues in Cambridge (Libra Aries Books), London (Housmans Bookshop, The Urban 75 Offline Club, The Moot with No Name, SELFS, London Earth Mysteries, the South London Radical History Group and the Brockley Max arts festival), Manchester (New Aeon Books), Oxford (Oxford Pagan Circle), Penzance (Cornish Earth Mysteries Group) and Slough (the Fenner Brockway Memorial Lecture — with human rights lawyer Louise Christian and Labour activist Walter Wolfgang — at the FennerFest arts festival). Some of these events involved screenings of the excellent — if harrowing — 1991 Beanfield documentary Operation Solstice, directed by Neil Goodwin and Gareth Morris.

I’ve also occasionally been invited to conferences — ‘Megalithomania!’ in 2002, organised by 3rd Stone and Strange Attractor, the Pagan Federation International Conventions in 2003 and 2004, and ‘Exploring the Maltese Prehistoric Temple Culture’, an international conference in Malta in 2003. In 2006 I gave a talk at the first Pagan Network Convention, held in London in March, and was also part of an inter-disciplinary conference in Bristol, ‘The Cultural Reception of Prehistoric Monuments 1600-2000′, organized by the historians Ronald Hutton and Joanne Parker, which took place in April. And in May I spoke about the pagan reinvention of Stonehenge and Avebury at the first Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury, an exciting weekend that also featured the likes of Robin Heath and John Michell.

When not railing against global injustice (or delving into new facets of Britain’s counter-cultural history), I live quietly in south London with my wife and son.