Welcome to Andy Worthington

Although the mangled corpse of Andrew Lansley’s wretched NHS reform bill was passed by Parliament a month ago, the fight to save the NHS is far from over. On the afternoon of April 24, the campaigning group 38 Degrees, which mobilised over half a million people to oppose the government’s plans to hack up the [...]

What a disgrace the Tories are. Even on the election trail two years ago, it was clear that they were sucking up to Rupert Murdoch in an even more ingratiating manner than previous parties on the verge of unseating the existing government. Moreover, it was, I contend, only public outrage — over the revelation that [...]

Please support my work! See Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four of Andy Worthington’s Definitive Guantánamo Prisoner List. Exactly a year ago,  I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of “The Guantánamo Files,” classified military files relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners who have been held [...]

Please sign the new e-petition here, and then ask all your friends and family members to sign (UK citizens and residents only). The original e-petition to the British government calling for the return of Shaker Aamer to the UK from Guantánamo, which was launched on February 14, has now been replaced with a new e-petition, [...]

Critics of the European Court of Human Rights, which, in February, refused to allow the UK to deport the Muslim cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan, were delighted when, on April 10, the court turned down an appeal by five other men who were seeking to prevent their extradition to the US, on the grounds that [...]

As published on the “Close Guantánamo” website. Please join us — just an email address required. With no fanfare — just an announcement on its website — the Pentagon informed the world on Thursday that two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, held for over ten years but recognized as innocent almost from the moment of their [...]

In the last few weeks, Guantánamo has been under the spotlight as, for the first time since President Obama took office, the military commission trial system — the government’s preferred method for trying terror suspects held in Guantánamo — has been readied for trying “high-value detainees”; those who, as well as being held in Guantánamo, [...]

On Tuesday April 24, from 6:30 to 8:30pm, I will be beamed into Room 407a of the New School, at 66 West 12th Street, in New York City, for a panel discussion, “The Human Face of Indefinite Detention: Shaker Aamer, Guantánamo and the NDAA,” with some good friends of mine — Col. Morris Davis, the [...]

When it comes to dealing with Muslim “terror suspects” in the UK, and recent rulings by the European Court of Human Rights preventing the British government from deporting Abu Qatada to Jordan, but approving the extradition to the US of Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad, Talha Ahsan and two other men, it is often difficult to [...]

On Monday, in the hope of drawing MPs’ attention to the ongoing disgrace of the detention at Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, with the support of Peace Strike, organised a demonstration in Parliament Square, to greet MPs as they returned from their Easter break, [...]