Andy Worthington’s Photos on Flickr: Protest 2012 – Guantánamo, Aafia Siddiqui and Shaker Aamer

Since setting up my new Flickr account last week, I’ve posted three sets of photos from my US tour in January, to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison – in New York, on the national day of action in Washington D.C., and in San Francisco and Chicago.

This latest set contains photos from a number of campaigns and protests in which  I’ve been involved this year, since I returned from the US — my visit to Brussels to show “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (the film I co-directed with Polly Nash) at the European Parliament, and two protests in London — a rally for the imprisoned Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui outside the US embassy in London on the 9th anniversary of her initial disappearance in Pakistan, and a protest outside Parliament calling for the return to the UK from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. Other protests — with UK Uncut and Occupy London — can be found here, here, here and here.

My thanks to the MEPs Jean Lambert, Sarah Ludford and Ana Gomes, for their persistence in exposing the injustices of Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” and to the Justice for Aafia Coalition and the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign for their hard work on behalf of Dr. Siddiqui and Shaker Aamer.

For US Independence Day on July 4, Aafia Siddiqui’s family has launched an urgent initiative requesting that supporters send postcards to the US State Department calling for the release of Aafia Siddiqui, to bring to an end her unjust 86-year sentence. As the campaign notes, “We request all postcards are sent by 4th July 2012, to coincide with Independence Day, where the concepts of freedom and liberty are celebrated in the US.” Copies can be downloaded from the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition, and readers in the UK can get postcards sent to them by emailing info@justiceforaafia.org.

For Shaker Aamer, cleared for release from Guantánamo for over five years, but trapped by the inactivity of both the US and UK governments, those who are interested in trying to secure his return to the UK are requested to sign an e-petition to the UK government, which needs 100,000 signatures by next April to be eligible for a Parliamentary debate. Only British citizens and residents can sign it, but anyone anywhere in the world can sign the international petition on the Care 2 Petition Site, which will be delivered to both the US and UK governments when it reaches 10,000 signatures.

I hope you enjoy the photos. More will be coming soon, from my visit to Kuwait in February to raise awareness of the plight of the last two Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantánamo, Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah.

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, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.