Welcome to Andy Worthington

I’m off to WOMAD for a week. While I’m gone, please check out ‘How the Middle Class Ruined Britain’, a really rather good documentary presented by the working class Tory stand-up comedian Geoff Norcott, featuring the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign.

My report about the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Summer Uprising’ last week, and, in particular, the significance of activists’ blockade of London Concrete in east London, as part of protests against the Silvertown Tunnel. This led to immediate arrests, unlike most of the group’s more theatrical manifestations in central London, and my conclusion is that, although the most remarkable consciousness-raising and political engagement has taken place over the last nine months via XR and Greta Thunberg, much more direct action is needed against polluters; for example, against the hugely environmentally polluting housing industry.

Marking 800 days since I first began posting a photo a day on Facebook (and later on Twitter) from my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which I cycle around London’s 120 postcodes, recording the fabric of the city and its changes, and which I actually began five years earlier, in May 2012.

My report about the publication of “CIA Torture Unredacted,” a 400-page report by Sam Raphael, Crofton Black and Ruth Blakeley, drawing on their nine years of research into the US’s post-9/11 torture program, and, over the last four years, their efforts to “unredact” key information concealed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the program, released in December 2014.

Analyzing a 2010 DoD report into the use of medical records in interrogations at Guantánamo, as secured by “FOIA terrorist” Jason Leopold, seven years after he first requested it. Plus a history of what preceded this report, and some accounts by prisoners themselves, as compiled by former prisoner Omar Deghayes after his release in 2007.

Publicizing a powerful new report, ‘Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo,’ by the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), thoroughly refuting claims by the US authorities that Guantánamo prisoners receive care equivalent to that of US service members.

Here’s the 25th chronological list of all my articles, covering the six-month period from July to December 2018, when news about Guantánamo was slow, and I became involved in the political occupation of a community garden in Deptford, in south east London, to prevent its destruction as part of a housing ‘regeneration’ project.

I report on an important case, argued by Tom Wilner, with whom I co-founded the ‘Close Guantánamo’ campaign in 2012, in which appeals court judges “reversed an eight-year rule that has prevented Guantánamo detainees from seeing and rebutting the evidence purportedly justifying their detention.” As Tom says, “This decision tears down the major barrier that has prevented the Guantánamo detainees from receiving a fair hearing.”

This year, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which I’ve been writing about most years since 2007, generally in relation to Guantánamo and the CIA torture program, I examine the latest horror story to emerge from the US, via Donald Trump’s migrant detention program, recently described by a visiting doctor as comparable “to torture facilities.”

In this year’s article marking the summer solstice, I contrast how the free festival pioneers urged revellers to “leave no trace”, in contrast to today’s throwaway culture, and, looking at the bigger picture, I urge anyone interested in the cycle of the seasons that Stonehenge so vividly represents to urgently get involved in environmental activism to try to prevent the worst effects of an already unfolding and unprecedented man-made environmental crisis that requires the whole of humanity to grasp that, collectively, we must all work out how to “leave no trace” if we are to sustain our existence on earth.