British prisoners in Guantanamo

Remembering the long campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was finally released eight years ago, on October 30, 2015, and the We Stand With Shaker campaign, involving photos of MPs and celebrities standing with an inflatable figure of Shaker, which I ran with the activist Joanne MacInnes in the last year of Shaker’s imprisonment.

Promoting a very special event on Sunday 22nd October in Conway Hall in London, ‘Grassroots Protest: Activism from Below’, in which I’ll be discussing the We Stand With Shaker Aamer campaign of 2014-15, and my ongoing work on Guantánamo, and writer, editor and activist Leila Hassan (Race Today) will be discussing her involvement in the anti-racist movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In the long quest to hold accountable the US officials responsible for the rendition and torture of prisoners in the “war on terror”, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently delivered a historic ruling, agreeing to investigate the cases of four of these men, including two British nationals, Binyam Mohamed and Bisher al-Rawi, who, as well as being held in CIA “black sites”, were also held at Guantánamo.

My report about an application for a judicial review, submitted by the NGO Reprieve and the MPs Dan Jarvis and David Davis, regarding the British government’s refusal to hold a judge-led inquiry into the UK’s post-9/11 complicity in torture, first promised by David Cameron over nine years ago, but not delivered.

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.   How short memories are in this goldfish world of ours. Less than a month ago, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security […]

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.   Please join us in urging Donald Trump to close Guantánamo. Take a photo with a 6,000 days poster, either […]

Exactly one year ago, on October 30, 2015, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in the US’s disgraceful “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, arrived home in the UK, a free man. Prior to his release, Shaker had been told that the US no longer wanted to hold him in 2007, under George […]

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2700 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo for the next three months.   Yesterday, I visited Shaker Aamer at his home in London, to record a short video message to President Obama, of Shaker urging the president to close the the US prison […]

Today, London-based band The Four Fathers release the Fighting Injustice EP online, via Bandcamp, in two versions: one for the UK and one for the US. The EP features three reworked songs from the band’s debut album, ‘Love and War’, released last summer, written by lead singer Andy Worthington, a journalist and human rights and […]

Last Friday, during my brief US tour to campaign for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison (on Jan. 11), I was invited onto Democracy Now! with my friend and supporter, the music legend Roger Waters, the chief songwriter with Pink Floyd. […]