Welcome to Andy Worthington

My report about the welcome ceasefire in Lebanon, hopefully bringing to an end Israel’s campaign of terror, which began two months ago with its pager attacks, and its assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and which has continued with tactics drawn from its 14-month assault on Gaza — devastating attacks on residential areas in Beirut and elsewhere, attacks on hospitals and ambulances, using false claims of Hezbollah involvement, and the forced evacuation and complete destruction of villages in the south. Sadly, as I note, the ceasefire has had absolutely no impact on Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, where, predictably, the non-stop atrocities of the last 14 months have continued, despite the arrest warrants issued last week by the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Instead, just today, it has been reported that Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister for food security and a member of the Israeli security cabinet, has said that the Israeli military will “remain in Gaza for years”, even though he had no suggestions for how the almost entirely displaced population of over two million people, reduced to the barest subsistence-level survival, would be provided for, made no mention of reconstruction plans, and had nothing to offer regarding Gaza’s future governance, except for an insistence that Hamas would have no role in it.

In my latest article about Israel’s seemingly unending assault on the Gaza Strip and its people, I focus on what, to me, has always been the most disturbing aspect of Israel’s actions, and of the west’s largely unquestioning support — the widespread desire for the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. The trigger for my article was a video posted by the Israeli anti-genocide activist B.M., of the mother of a young woman killed on October 7, claiming, at a Knesset meeting, that there are “no uninvolved” in Gaza, and stating that “all of them have blood on their hands, all of them are guilty, and all of them need to be annihilated.” I examine how psychically disturbed it is to argue that 2.3 million people deserve to be killed for the death of one person, but note how widespread this sentiment is in Israel as a whole, and I identify its origins in the multi-generational entrenchment of persistent fear in the mentality of European settler-colonial projects, of which Israel is, fundamentally, the last in a long and bloody history of settler-colonial horrors, with added messianic fanaticism and a violently self-pitying obsession with portraying itself as history’s only victim. I also ask how the western powers who have fully supported Israel since last October can continue to do so when the supposed ally to whom they consistently pledge “ironclad” support is so extraordinarily genocidal, obsessed with the extermination of an entire people in a way that not even the US was in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and I try to untangle the mix of Holocaust guilt, manipulation by prominent pro-Israeli individuals and organizations, and the baleful resuscitation of western settler-colonial history that underpins it all.

Promoting an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ art — the first in the UK — at Rich Mix in London, with an opening event on December 5 at which I will be speaking, alongside former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, whose 2021 memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here”, provides the title of the exhibition.

My report about the extraordinarily welcome news that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has today issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. For the last 14 months, blow after blow has rained down on international accountability, and the very foundations of, and viability of international humanitarian law, as shown by Israel’s impunity in launching a process of extermination in northern Gaza nearly two months ago, after a year of non-stop genocidal assaults on the whole of the Gaza Strip, in the ever-growing archive of compelling, but largely ignored reports by UN experts, and, just yesterday, by the US’s veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Today’s announcement, however, finally restores the credibility of mechanisms designed to ensure that no political leaders can get away with claiming that the rules don’t apply to them, and that they can endlessly indulge in war crimes and crimes against humanity against a trapped, besieged and starved civilian population that they have been persistently trying to exterminate. As Israel and the US, predictably, rail against the issuing of the arrest warrants, the rest of the west’s leaders, who have fully supported Israel, and the mainstream media who have done the same, ought to be quaking with fear today, as they recognize, I hope, that, as I describe it, “all their efforts to pretend that Israel, uniquely in history, has been entitled to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with complete impunity, have, all along, been legally indefensible.”

Linking to and discussing my recent, in-depth, one-hour interview with Kevin Gosztola for his “Unauthorised Disclosure” podcast, in which we discussed Guantánamo, with a specific focus on the military commissions, and the recent ruling by the 9/11 trial judge refuting defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s claim that he had the right to revoke plea deals agreed in July with three of the 9/11 co-accused, and on the plight of the 16 men still held who have long been approved for release, and for whom President Biden urgently needs to find new homes before his presidency comes to an end. Kevin also promoted ’Songs of Loss and Resistance”, the new album of protest music by my band The Four Fathers, harking back to the ‘Protest Song of the Week’ feature that he ran on his previous site, Shadowproof, where he publicized our very first release nine years ago.

My analysis of the hugely important ruling in the military commissions at Guantánamo by Judge Matthew McCall, the military judge in the 9/11 trial, who has ruled that defense secretary Lloyd Austin had no right to revoke the plea deals that were agreed three months ago with three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi. The plea deals, which took the death penalty off the table in exchange for life imprisonment, and, crucially, involved confessions from the three men that would constitute some kind of closure for the 9/11 victims’ families, took two and a half years to negotiate and arrange, after prosecutors finally recognized that the torture to which the men were subjected in CIA “black sites” was so horrific that it made the notion of successful prosecutions fundamentally unviable. Judge McCall forensically analyzed Lloyd Austin’s revocation of the plea deals, and found, unerringly, that he had no right to do, having handed responsibility to the Convening Authority, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan Escallier (previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), who had full authority to approve them. It is to be hoped that the government doesn’t appeal, as it is threatening to do, because the plea deals are the only way to bring to an end a broken process, fatally infected by the use of torture, that has been mired, for the last 12 years, in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings with no trial date in sight.

With just two months to go until President Biden cedes power to Donald Trump, it’s crucial that pressure is exerted on the Biden administration to secure the release from Guantánamo of 16 men, never charged with a crime, who have long been approved for release — for between two and four years, and in three outlying cases for nearly 15 years. Urgent action is essential, because it is clear that Trump will seal Guantánamo shut, as he did in his first term in office. The scandal of these men’s ongoing imprisonment is that the decisions taken to approve them for release were made by high-level administrative processes, which have no legal weight, meaning that no mechanism exists to compel the government to actually free them if they find it inconvenient or to do so. An additional complication is that most of them are Yemenis, and US law prevents the return of prisoners to Yemen. However, over a year ago, a plan to resettle them in Oman was finalized, but was called off after the October 7 attacks in Israel. That plan urgently needs reviving, or, if that isn’t possible, another country needs to be found that will offer these men new homes. The alternative — another four years of entombment under Donald Trump — doesn’t even bear thinking about.

My recent hour-long interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio in south London, posted to my YouTube channel after it was broadcast, in which we discussed the ongoing horrors in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and my contention that our leaders, unable to accept that, for 40 years, their beloved neoliberalism has actually been killing us, have suffered a psychic derangement and have embraced endless war instead.

My obituary for former Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Rahim Rabbani, who died on November 1 at just 57 years of age. A chef, he was seized with his brother Ahmed, a taxi driver, during a number of house raids in Karachi, in Pakistan, on September 11, 2002, and the brothers spent a year and a half in CIA “black site” torture prisons before being flown to Guantánamo in September 2004, where they were held without charge or trial for 18 and a half years until their release in February 2023. The US authorities claimed that they were “Al-Qaeda facilitators”, but never put them on trial, suggesting that their supposed evidence was non-existent. Nevertheless, the brothers were repeatedly recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by various high-level government review processes until May 2021, when Abdul Rahim was recommended for release by a Periodic Review Board, with a similar recommendation for Ahmed following in October 2021. Unfortunately, inadequate medical treatment at Guantánamo, and the inadequate provision of care in Pakistan after his release, contributed significantly to Abdul Rahim’s death, a problem that afflicts numerous former prisoners, and that was highlighted in a withering report last year by UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, after a visit to the prison, and numerous meetings with former prisoners.

Photos from, and my report about the nine monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and around the world on November 6, 2024, the day after the US Presidential Election that, alarmingly, will see Donald Trump reinstalled in the White House on January 20. It was a difficult day, of course, although it sharpened all our realizations that now President Biden has no more excuses for inaction, as he has just two months left to salvage something of a legacy on Guantánamo by finding new homes for the 16 men long approved for release who are still held.