Welcome to Andy Worthington

My report, illustrated with photos, and including videos, of the inspiring launch of the first UK exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ art, which took place on December 5 at Rich Mix in east London, and which runs until January 5. Mansoor Adayfi and I spoke at the well-attended event, with Mansoor, in particular, eloquently explaining how, after years of isolation and oppression, the opportunity to create artwork, after Barack Obama became president, was an absolute lifeline for many of the men, allowing them to express their creativity, and to connect with their memories and with the outside world. I also discuss the history of the exhibitions, which began in New York in 2017, but led to a clampdown by the Pentagon, and highlight the six artists featured in the exhibition, pointing out how one of them, Moath Al-Alwi, is still held despite having been approved for release for many years (as is the case with another artist, Khaled Qassim, not featured in the exhibition). I also note how, even for the other five men, who have been released, their post-Guantánamo existence is, in many cases, still profoundly and unjustly affected by the stigma of having been held at Guantánamo.

My analysis of the significance of December 9 and 10, as the dates when the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. December 10 also marks the 40th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention Against Torture, and December 9 the 10th anniversary of publication of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s groundbreaking report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. In a world of increasing chaos and depravity, in which it can appear that the mechanisms put in place after the Second World War no longer have any meaning, I argue that, in fact, efforts to prosecute individuals for genocide, and for war crimes and crimes against humanity, initially by UN-backed courts, and, since 2002, by the International Criminal Court, shouldn’t be dismissed, as demonstrated by the recent arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. I also celebrate the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly on generations of young people, assess the significance of the Senate torture report, and note how both the US and Israel remain in the spotlight for the torture and abuse in their prisons — at Guantánamo, and in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians. I also note how the sands of time can shift swiftly, as has just happened in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has fallen, and his almost indescribably monstrous prisons have suddenly been liberated.

My latest quarterly call for support for my ongoing Guantánamo work, in which I also promote a crucial new way to be informed about my various endeavors, via my brand-new Substack account, which bypasses censorship and algorithmic suppression by delivering all my news directly into your inbox.

Photos from, and my report about the ten monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and around the world on December 4, 2024. These vigils — the 23rd — marked the last opportunity for campaigners to urge President Biden to urgently implement a resettlement plan for the 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release. The next vigils will move, for one month only, from the first Wednesday of every month to Saturday January 11, 2025, marking the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening, and will resume on the first Wednesday of every month on Wednesday February 5.

Publicizing two letters sent to President Biden, urging him to take urgent action to free 16 men still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay (out of 30 in total) who have long been approved for release — between two and four years ago, and in three outlying cases nearly 15 years ago. The first letter (US and international) is signed by 100 individuals and organizations — including 36 former Guantánamo prisoners, 36 ex-US government officials, lawyers, academics, psychologists and public figures, and 28 rights organizations — while the second, UK-based letter is signed by 40 British MPs and peers, academics and the CEOs of UK rights organizations. The former prisoners signing the first letter include the authors Mansoor Adayfi and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and the supporters include Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the musician and activist Roger Waters. The UK letter includes 20 Parliamentarians, the Chief Executive of Amnesty International UK, and the film director Kevin Macdonald (‘The Mauritanian’).

The audio recording of “Life at Guantánamo: Writing Behind Bars”, a powerful and moving event that took place at Amnesty International’s London headquarters on Wednesday June 28, 2023, featuring former prisoners Mohamedou Ould Slahi (in person) and Mansoor Adayfi (by Zoom) in discussion, with Andy Worthington, about the enormous challenges they faced when it came to writing at Guantánamo, but how, almost against all odds, they overcame those challenges to create two books — Guantánamo Diary” and “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo” — which provide searing accounts of the almost incomprehensible injustices and brutality that they experienced at the prison.

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.”