Archive for November, 2023
8,000 Days of Guantánamo: On Dec. 6, Call For the Prison’s Closure Via the Global Vigils and the Close Guantánamo Photo Campaign
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
I often say that it’s easier to get blood out of a stone than it is to get a single prisoner out of Guantánamo — by which I don’t mean the handful of men charged with crimes, but those who have never been charged with a crime, and who, moreover, have been unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes.
Of the 30 men still held at Guantánamo, 16 are in this category, and throughout this year campaigners have been highlighting their plight through coordinated vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that I initiated in February, with the support of friends and allies from groups and organizations including Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait and the UK Guantánamo Network, which I’m part of, and whose monthly vigils outside Parliament, which resumed in September 2022 after a hiatus of many years, gave me the inspiration to try to expand the vigils internationally.
The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month at locations across the US and around the world, including London, Washington, D.C., New York, Mexico City, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Cobleskill, NY, Raleigh, NC, Brussels and Copenhagen. See here for the report about, and photos from the most recent vigils on November 1.
A Glimpse of Light in the Darkness, As Former Guantánamo Prisoner Mansoor Adayfi is Welcomed to the UK Parliament
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Sometimes, when darkness is all around, just one small ray of light is sufficient to keep hope alive.
A week ago, on November 15, amidst the almost all-encompassing darkness of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, that small ray of light was provided when former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi was welcomed into the Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament, by Chris Law, the SNP (Scottish National Party) MP for Dundee East, who is the co-chair of the recently established All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for the Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility.
Mansoor — the very definition of human irrepressibility — was held for over 14 years at Guantánamo before being resettled in Serbia in July 2016, where his outspoken nature and complaints about his treatment (which included a ban on travelling outside Serbia) led, for many years, to harassment and intimidation from the Serbian authorities.
This is a situation that only slowly began to change when he started having articles published in the New York Times, related to his involvement in “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay”, a significant exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which ran from October 2017 to January 2018.
Where Is The Outrage About Israel’s Profoundly Illegal ‘War on Hospitals’ in Gaza?
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Where is the outrage from western leaders, and the western mainstream media, about Israel’s ‘war on hospitals’ in Gaza?
Today, we hear that staff and patients at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, which was invaded by Israeli soldiers three days ago, have been ordered to evacuate, on foot, to the south of Gaza, even though that is impossible for the seriously ill and for the 35 premature babies who are still alive, after their incubators stopped working days ago because the hospital ran out of fuel.
Four of these babies have died in the last few days, but the rest are tenaciously clinging on to life, although Al-Jazeera noted that another five are now “severely ill.” Yesterday, doctors at the hospital reported that everyone in the intensive care unit had died as a result of the fuel ban.
Most of those in the hospital — nearly all of the many hundreds of patients and their families, most of the medical staff, and thousands of internally displaced people whose homes were destroyed in Israel bombing raids, and who have been sheltering in the hospital’s grounds — were made to leave the hospital this morning, with numerous witnesses, including Dr. Adnan Al Barsh, Al-Shifa’s Head of Orthopedics, explaining that they were “forced to leave at gunpoint.”
Radio: I Discuss Israel’s War on Gaza with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
I’m pleased to post below an interview about Israel’s war on Gaza that I undertook two weeks ago with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, which was previously included in a podcast here.
I hope you have time to listen to it, and that you’ll find it interesting. Anyone who knows my work will know that, when it comes to Guantánamo, which I’ve been writing about and speaking about for 17 years, I can talk about it eloquently at any time of the day or night, but this interview was the first time that I’d spoken publicly about Israel and Palestine. I have subsequently discussed it with Chris Cook on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, Canada, and I’m more than willing to discuss it in future with anyone who is interested in my perspective.
In my interview with Andy, I discussed my revulsion at Israel’s actions in Gaza, where, as of November 14, 11,320 people have been killed, including 4,650 children and 3,145 women, suggesting that it amounts to a genocide, a conclusion reinforced by several assessments, in the last few weeks, by experts in genocide.
The Siege of Gaza and Israel’s Premeditated Murder of Premature Palestinian Babies
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
For several days now, I’ve been haunted by a photo posted by doctors in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip — of premature babies huddled together as doctors and medical staff attempt to keep them alive.
The babies were previously being kept alive in incubators, but as a result of Israel’s medieval-style “complete siege” of Gaza, imposed 38 long, blood-soaked days ago, on October 8, when Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant announced that there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”, adding, “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly”, the fuel required to power the generators to provide electricity to the hospital has run out.
The plight of these premature babies — the death sentence to which Israel has subjected them, unless the siege is lifted — is particularly poignant for me, because my own son, now a healthy 23-year old man, was also born prematurely, at 30 weeks.
Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo Vigils, “Forever Prisoners” and Genocide in Gaza with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
My thanks to Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, in Victoria, Canada, for reaching out to interview me last week about the coordinated monthly vigils for the closure of Guantánamo which take place in London, across the US and around the world on the first Wednesday of every month, and which I initiated in February (following up on monthly vigils in London, which began last September) by reaching out to friends and colleagues elsewhere to join us. Chris and I have spoken many times over the years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to him.
Our interview takes up the second half of the one-hour show, beginning at 28:45, following an interview that is also worth listening to — with William S. Geimer, a peace activist, Professor Emeritus of Law at Washington and Lee University, a military veteran who resigned his 82nd Airborne commission in opposition to the war against Vietnam, the author of the book, ‘Canada: The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars’, and the founder of the Greater Victoria Peace School.
The interview is available here as an MP3, or here on the Gorilla Radio website, and it’s also embedded below.
Nov. 21: Guantánamo Event at SOAS with Andy Worthington, Moazzam Begg and Mansoor Adayfi
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
I’m delighted to announce that, a week on Tuesday, on November 21, I’m taking part in a panel discussion about Guantánamo in SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London, with two former prisoners, the British citizen Moazzam Begg, who is the outreach director at CAGE, and, via Zoom, Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen who was resettled in Serbia in 2016, after being held at Guantánamo for 14 years without charge or trial, and who has only this year secured the return of his passport, allowing him to travel to other countries. The chair of the event is Deepa Govindarajan Driver, an academic and trade unionist, and a legal observer in the Julian Assange case for the Unified European Left at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
The event, ‘The Legacy of the War on Terror: Guantánamo Bay’, is organised by SOAS ICOP (Influencing the Corridors of Power), which was set up to bring together politicians and university researchers to, as ICOP describe it, “address the democratic deficit that we believe results from encroaching government control on freedom of speech and assembly on SOAS and other campuses.”
The 90-minute event, with individual presentations followed by a Q&A session, runs from 7 to 8.30pm, and takes place in the Khalili Lecture Theatre, in the Main Building at SOAS, at 10 Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG. Entry is free, but you need to book in advance, via the Eventbrite page here. The event will be recorded, and a video will be made available afterwards.
Humanity’s Greatest Failure: Turning Genocide in Gaza into a Spectator Sport
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
In Gaza, the world is watching a genocide play out in real time, like a vast public spectacle, or, to provide a more current analogy, like the most gruesome reality show.
Over the last month, as the State of Israel has relentlessly bombed the 2.3 million civilians trapped in the “open air prison” of the Gaza Strip, killing over 10,000 people, including over 4,000 children, the world has watched as, via its mainstream media, neighbourhood after neighbourhood has been destroyed and the dead bodies of children and adults are dragged out of the wreckage, with barely a whisper of official dissent.
Political leaders in the west openly support it, news readers talk blandly of those who have died, as though it was some sort of unfortunate but natural occurrence, generally refusing to acknowledge that they have actually been killed, and almost always refusing to name the perpetrators, while armchair genocide supporters, in significant numbers, cheer it on via social media.
Rarely reported are the additional uncomfortable truths that, although voices from within Gaza regularly state that “nowhere in Gaza is safe”, they are unable to leave, even if they wanted to, because Israel has controlled all entry to and exit from the Gaza Strip since 2007, and they are also subjected to a “complete siege”, as promised by the defence minister Yoav Gallant on October 8, whereby supplies of water, food, fuel and medical supplies have been cut off.
Photos and Report: The Coordinated Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on November 1, 2023
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Genocide in Gaza: Death Toll Surpasses That of Srebrenica Massacre; 8,525 Palestinians Killed, Including 3,542 Children
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
As you read this, the death toll in Gaza, since Israel began bombing its 2.3 million captive civilians on October 7, has surpassed the number of people killed in the Srebrenica Massacre, during the Bosnian War of 1992-95, when, in a 72-hour period between July 13 and July 15, 1995, 8,372 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian soldiers, in what the Guardian, in 2020, described as “the only massacre on European soil since the second world war to be ruled a genocide.”
As of yesterday, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that at least 8,525 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli military bombardment began 25 days ago — a rate of 340 deaths a day, or 14 every hour, or one every four minutes, meaning that, by the weekend, it can be expected to reach 10,000.
Shamefully, however, although human rights experts and experts in international humanitarian law are already talking openly about Israel’s actions in Gaza being a genocide, the silence from political leaders in the west, and the mostly complicit mainstream media, is profoundly shocking. What, when this all over — as it must be one day, one way or another — will they say in their defence?
Who's still at Guantánamo?
