Welcome to Andy Worthington

My report about the passage of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which maintains restrictions on the release of Guantánamo prisoners, and on any moves towards the prison’s closure. These, sadly, have been part of the NDAA for many years, since the Republicans took control of Congress under President Obama. Sadly, although Democrats took control of the House in the 2018 midterms, they were unable to amend the repressive Guantánamo legislation in the final version of the NDAA that was consolidated with the Republican-controlled Senate.

Here’s a link to, and description of my most recent radio interview – about Boris Johnson’s lamentable victory in the UK’s recent General Election, and also about Guantánamo – with Chris Cook on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, Canada. Chris has been interviewing me on and off for ten years, mostly about Guantánamo, but occasionally about other topics, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk about the dangerous state of British politics in the wake of Johnson’s victory.

My discussion of a recent ABC News article highlighting, via attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, repressive and culturally inadequate treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo by medical personnel this summer, which led to all of the “low-value detainees” — 24 men in total —refusing to engage with medical staff. The situation now appears to have been partly resolved, but prisoners continue, as ever, to be shackled when meeting with military personnel, even though they offer no threat to them whatsoever.

My post-mortem on Thursday’s depressing General Election, which delivered a majority for the Tories under Boris Johnson, largely because of Johnson’s simplistic hammering home of a false promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ at every opportunity. The slow and agonising reality of getting Brexit ‘done’ may, however – if there is any justice – eventually derail his shallow and deeply mendacious premiership.

My call to arms for tomorrow’s General Election, urging people to vote tactically to get the Tories out, and also calling for urgent reform of our profoundly unfair and unrepresentative first past the post voting system.

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo, and my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’ Thanks for your support!

A cross-post of a statement of intent for 2020 – a US Presidential Election year – by the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I co-founded in 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner, with links to the new campaign posters for 2020, marking 6,575 days of the prison’s existence on January 11, and subsequent posters for 6,600, 6,700, 6,800 and 6,900 days.

Reappraising “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, the documentary film about Guantánamo, which I co-directed with Polly Nash, on the tenth anniversary of its release, following a recent screening to students at the University of Westminster.

A cross-post, with my own brief introduction, of a powerful open letter to the British home secretary Priti Patel by over 70 medical professionals from around the world, warning of their fears that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison, and facing extradition to the US, may die in prison, and needs “urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health.”

With “The Report,” about the Senate report into the CIA torture program, released on Amazon Prime on November 29, here’s a cross-post, with my own commentary, of an op-ed in USA Today by torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner Ahmed Rabbani.