The Struggle to Close Guantánamo and to Free Shaker Aamer: A Talk by Andy Worthington at Exeter University Amnesty International Society, Feb. 25

It’s something of a rarity these days for me to be asked to speak about Guantánamo to students in the UK, so I’m delighted to be going to Exeter University next Thursday (Feb. 25) to talk to the Amnesty International Student Society about my work on Guantánamo and the campaigns to get the prison closed — Close Guantánamo and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo (also see here) — and, in 2014-15, to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, via the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which involved persuading celebrities and MPs to stand with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer.

My talk is entitled, ‘The Struggle to Close Guantánamo and to Free Shaker Aamer,’ the Facebook page is here, and it’s a free event, open to the public, so if you’re at the university, or in the Exeter area and can come along, I’ll see you there. It’s a 6.30pm start, and the address is: the Amory Moot Room, Amory Building, Streatham Campus, home to the university’s law school. A map is here, on which the Amory Building is no. 29.

Please also note that if you’re at any other university and want me to talk about Guantánamo, I am generally available to do so — get in touch. If you’re in London or within striking distance of London, we can also combine a talk with a gig with my band The Four Fathers, playing politically-charged roots reggae and rock, with songs about Guantánamo (including ‘Song for Shaker Aamer‘, featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker), torture (‘81 Million Dollars‘, about the US torture program), and the Tories’ cynical and brutal ‘age of austerity‘ here in the UK, and the need for an economic revolution based on socialism and environmentalism (check out our album ‘Love and War’ here). The combination of a talk and live music is something we did with great success just before Christmas at Deptford Cinema — see the videos below:

And finally, here’s the description of next Thursday’s event that I sent to the Exeter University Amnesty International Society:

Andy Worthington is a journalist and human rights activist. He wrote the book on Guantánamo — The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, which tells the stories of all the men held at Guantanamo, via a forensic analysis of 8000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon. For ten years, Andy has been researching Guantánamo, writing about it, and campaigning to get it closed. In 2012 he co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign with US attorney Tom Wilner, and in 2014 he set up We Stand With Shaker with activist Joanne MacInnes, calling for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo.

Andy will be talking about his work, including the successful campaign to free Shaker Aamer, who was released in October 2015, and his new initiative, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo, calling for President Obama to fulfil his promise to close Guantánamo before he leaves office.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — 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. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.