Welcome to Andy Worthington

Today, Bandcamp, the US online music service, is waiving its fees to help musicians, so please feel free to buy any of the studio recordings by my band The Four Fathers, including our brand-new online single, ‘The Wheel of Life’, a meditation on mortality and living in the moment.

An update on the coronavirus crisis, looking in particular at the difficulties accompanying the lifting of lockdown restrictions, with a positive focus on reduced office use and an end to overcrowded rush-hour public transport, but cautionary reflections on a general economic over-reliance on mass tourism, which afflicts London almost as much as it does other overcrowded holiday destinations like Venice and Barcelona.

An important update from the military commissions at Guantánamo, normally a ‘Groundhog Day’ of broken justice, where a judge has ruled that Majid Khan, a “high-value detainee” who agreed to a plea deal in 2012, should be allowed to have his sentence reduced because of the torture he was subjected to in CIA “black sites.” This is the first time such a decision has been taken, and it is to be hoped that Khan will now be released before the previously agreed date of 2031.

My thoughts on the summer solstice this year, as COVID-19 kept revellers from Stonehenge for the first time since the 1990s, when an exclusion zone imposed after the Battle of the Beanfield was in place. Also included: a video of my band The Four Fathers playing a set for the Virtual Stonehenge Free Festival set up by my friend Neil Goodwin to tide us through these times of isolation.

Some rare good news on the Guantánamo front, as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), whose mission is “to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere,” and whose resolutions are supposed to be binding on the US, which is a member state, has determined that the US was responsible for the “torture, abuse, and decade-long confinement without charge” of Djamel Ameziane, held for nearly 12 years at Guantánamo, from 2002-13, and has recommended that the US should provide “adequate material and moral reparations” for the human rights violations that he suffered.

Today marks three years since the Grenfell Tower fire, which led to the deaths of 72 people, and which only occurred because those responsible for the safety of the residents put cost-cutting and profiteering before their lives. Three years on, shamefully, no one responsible has been held accountable.

Marking the anniversary of a sequence of deaths at Guantánamo that I have long described as the “season of death,” when, between May 30 and June 9, in 2006, 2007 and 2009, five prisoners died. They were all suicides, according to the authorities, but all five were long-term hunger strikers, who resisted the brutality and illegality of their confinement, and were not, therefore, obvious candidates for suicide, and many valid accounts have been put forward challenging the official stories.

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo, which I have been working to try and get closed for 14 years now, and my ongoing photo-journalism project, “The State of London’, which has been attracting significant attention lately, via the photos I have been taking during the coronavirus lockdown. As an independent freelance journalist and activist, I rely on your support to enable me to continue my work, so if you can help out at all, please do. It will be very greatly appreciated!

Promoting a letter to defense secretary Mark Esper, initiated by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and also signed by 14 other Senators, asking for clarification of what the Pentagon is doing to protect the prisoners at Guantánamo, and US military personnel, from the coronavirus COVID-19.

It’s 35 years since 1,400 police, on the instructions of Margaret Thatcher, violently crushed a convoy of men, women and children trying to get to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. The Battle of the Beanfield remains one of the most indefensible episodes of state violence in our lifetimes, and, while it didn’t crush dissent, it paved the way for sustained efforts to do so on the part of successive governments.