Andy Worthington is in Technorati’s Top 100 Politics Blogs

Thanks to you, my good friends who read my work, comment on it, share it on Facebook, Digg it, retweet it, and cross-post it (with links!), I’m not only in Technorati’s Top 30 World Politics Blogs, but have also made it into Technorati’s Top 100 Politics Blogs, in the company of Obsidian Wings, Liberal Conspiracy and Balkinization.

My thanks also to those who support me financially — Cageprisoners (for whom I started regular work this week as a senior researcher), the Future of Freedom Foundation, Truthout and my most enthusiastic readers — and also to those who regularly cross-post my work, including The Public Record, Eurasia Review, Counter Currents, Campaign for Liberty, The World Can’t Wait, Common Dreams, Uruknet, Dandelion Salad, Free Detainees and New Left Project. Please feel free to link to my work and to cross-post my articles if you like them. All I ask is that you preserve internal links, and link to those who employ me, if the articles first appeared on their sites. As I have explained before, as a freelance journalist working mainly in the new media, I am profoundly impressed by how the Internet not only rewards those who show dedication to a cause, but also rewards those who share information rather than guarding it jealously.

So please keep on supporting me, as I try to shine an unerring light on the crimes of the Bush administration (most recently through articles about five suspicious deaths in Guantánamo — in 2006, 2007 and 2009, and my promotion of an important UN report on secret detention), the failure of President Obama to thoroughly repudiate those crimes and to close Guantánamo, and the resurgence of aggressive right-wingers and cowardly Democrats with no respect for the law, and I’ll do my best to keep you informed, and, above all, to keep alive the stories of those who continue to pay a heavy price for the brutal, ill-conceived “War on Terror” — in Guantánamo, Bagram and elsewhere.

Thanks also for supporting me in my recent analyses of the crucial habeas corpus rulings in the District Court in Washington D.C., where judges have not only repeatedly exposed the extent to which coercive interrogations form the core of the supposed evidence against the Guantánamo prisoners, but have also inadvertently exposed the fundamental flaws in a detention policy that obliges them to approve the ongoing detention of men who, at most, were nothing more than foot soldiers for the Taliban in a conflict that had nothing to do with international terrorism, and has nothing to do with the current insurgency.

I’ll be reprising my complaints in an article to be published imminently, marking the second anniversary of Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruling granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, in which I support the publication of a recent report, “Habeas Works,” by Human Rights First and the Constitution Project, but raise, yet again, the fundamental error of holding soldiers as terrorists. In the coming week I’ll be reprising my “Guantánamo Habeas Week” project through analyses of the judges’ unclassified opinions in the cases of two prisoners who recently won their habeas petitions (Mohammed Hassan Odaini and Ravil Mingazov) and one (Omar Mohammed Khalifh, a Libyan) who lost his petition, and will also cover some other little-noticed aspects of the habeas litigation.

While I’m here, I’d also like to thank my friends on Facebook, who regularly share my work and comment on it, where I recently chalked up 3,300 friends. As I stated when I reached 3,000 friends, “I’m not so insecure or deluded that I think you’re all actually real friends, but this seems to me to be a sign of how great Facebook is for networking. And to my real friends — the ones who read my work and comment on it and share it — thank you for your support! I am nowhere without you.” If you’d like to join me on Facebook, I can be found here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.