New Close Guantánamo Video and Updated Campaign Song By Andy Worthington’s Band The Four Fathers

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Yesterday marked the end of Donald Trump’s first month in office — surely, the most disastrous first month of a presidency in living memory, with a ban on immigrants and visitors from seven mainly-Muslim countries that has been blocked in the courts, a Russian-linked scandal involving Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has resigned, and a widespread understanding that Trump isn’t fit for the job, and that his administration is severely dysfunctional.

In amongst his machine-gun fire of dreadful policies have come unnerving hints about his proposals for Guantánamo — keeping the prison open and sending new prisoners there, including Islamic State prisoners, and, initially touted but since abandoned, a plan to revive Bush-era torture policies with new CIA-run “black sites.”

While we await further news about Trump’s plans, I’ve been marking his first month in office with a new campaign video for the Close Guantánamo campaign that I founded five years ago with the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008. The video is also available on Facebook.

The video features photos of dozens of campaigners holding posters asking Donald Trump to close Guantánamo, which I’ve been posting on the Close Guantánamo website — one every few days — since inauguration day. Please join us! Print off a poster, take a photo with it, and send it to us. Please also feel free to include a message to Donald Trump, and, if you wish, let us know where you’re from, to show the breadth of opposition to his plans across the US and around the world.

The video also features ‘Close Guantánamo (2017 mix)’, a slightly remixed and reworked version of the song I wrote and played with my band The Four Fathers (also find us on Facebook and Twitter), which was featured in a previous campaign video three months ago. The new version features a new verse about Donald Trump and his “dystopian views,” and is available to listen to — and to buy as a download if you’d like to support the band — via the link below:

Thanks for your support. These are difficult times, and Donald Trump needs resisting on almost every front imaginable, but it also remains important that Guantánamo is not forgotten, and that, if Trump tries to send new prisoners there, we are all prepared to resist as loudly as possible.

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’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). 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.