12.7.24
Many thanks to my truth warrior colleague Chris Cook, in western Canada, for having me on his Gorilla Radio show again to discuss last week’s General Election in the UK, following up on my article, Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly.
Our interview, available on Chris’s Substack here, took place in the second half of the one-hour show, following his interview with journalist and author John Helmer about Russia and Ukraine.
Chris and I spent most of our half-hour interview discussing the collapse of the Conservative Party — who lost two-thirds of their seats — after the 14 unbearably long years of their increasingly deranged rule, which became noticeably more septic after the vote to leave the EU in 2016, and also discussing the largely empty promise of their replacements, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer, who, because of the vagaries of Britain’s antiquated and anachronistic ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, won a landslide victory, despite securing less votes than Jeremy Corbyn did as Labour’s leader in the General Elections of 2017 and 2019.
Now in power, Labour will be required to do something noticeable to address the wreck of a country that they have inherited from the Tories, but despite picking a few pieces of low-hanging fruit — scrapping the Tories’ discredited plan to send refugees on a one-way trip to Rwanda, and dropping the Tories’ NIMBYist ban on onshore wind turbines — it remains to be seen how they propose to create economic growth when they are so deeply in bed with the neo-liberal big business interests that are largely responsible for ruining everyone’s lives for the last 40 years.
Also of concern are two other troubling facts: firstly, that economic growth is now nothing more than yesterday’s dream, as the future will be dominated forever by the nightmare of climate collapse, which requires de-growth and a radical rethinking of the very basis of capitalism; and, secondly, that Starmer and his cabinet are enthusiastic NATO warmongers, committed to Ukraine’s unwinnable — and World War Three-threatening — war with Russia, and have also done almost nothing to date to suggest that they have any problems with joining most of their western allies in continuing to prop up the vilest regime that anyone conscious has ever seen endorsed so wholeheartedly by the west; namely, the messianic genocidal regime in Israel, which continues to regard the purpose of its existence as being the elimination of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip.
So broken is the voting system in the UK that Labour’s victory almost entirely fails to reflect the changing face of British politics, in which there are now five main parties in England. As well as Labour and the Tories, these are the resurgent Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, who more than doubled their vote, and finally secured more than one MP (they now have four), and a late and noxious arrival, Reform UK, headed by the perennial bellyache and bargain basement fascist Nigel Farage, who, despite his ridiculousness, was the driver of the Brexit vote’s success, and has now returned to try to mobilise Britain’s armchair fascists — over four million of them, according to the election results, although fortunately many of them are old, and few of them seem to be particularly fit.
Israel’s Guantánamo
Towards the end of the show, Chris and I found the time to discuss another horror story from Israel — the recent release, after nine months in Israel’s Negev Prison, of Moazzaz Obayat (also identified as Muazzam Obayat), a former bodybuilder from Bethlehem, reduced to a broken wreck of a human being, who, in testimony after his release, compared Israel’s prisons for Palestinians to Guantánamo (see this Middle East Eye article for more about his imprisonment).
While conceding that there are similarities — not least because the Bush administration took inspiration from Israel’s prisons for Palestinians because its policy of “administrative detention” provided a template for open-ended, arbitrary imprisonment without charge or trial — I explained how, although Guantánamo was also, especially in its early years, a place of great physical violence, where a handful of prisoners were left disabled after attacks by guards, and where at least six of the nine men who died there between 2006 and 2012 died in mysterious circumstances, a more apt analogy would be the prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where prisoners were processed before their transfer to Guantánamo in 2002-03, and where numerous prisoners died as a result of brutal physical violence, including Dilawar, a taxi driver seized by mistake, whose story was the focus of Alex Gibney’s harrowing documentary ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, released in 2007.
However, while US soldiers were clearly encouraged to believe that everyone in their custody was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as a grave incitement to violence, the manner in which Israel’s Palestinian prisoners have been treated, especially since the attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, seems even more vengeful, savagely violent and excessive, and even more unaccountable, with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) completely banned from visiting, and with, in some of the prisons at least, prisoners held seated on the ground and completely immobile for months, forbidden from communicating with one another under any circumstances, and forbidden from praying, all while being almost starved to death, and regularly beaten with such relentlessly savagery that many have had bones broken, and an untold number have died.
Where this strikes me as particularly different from the “war on terror” — excluding the CIA “black sites”, where prisoners were held completely incommunicado while being tortured — is that elsewhere the prisoners themselves rose up against the ban on moving or speaking to one another, and especially the ban on praying, undertaking hunger strikes in Bagram and Guantánamo, and, in the latter, physically resisting their oppression, although at Guantánamo, of course, the ICRC have always had access, even if, in a few cases, a handful of prisoners regarded as particularly significant were hidden from ICRC representatives.
In conclusion, I expressed my shock that, while horrendous torture prisons exist that are run by other regimes around the world, in those countries that claim to be democratic rather than autocratic, the Israeli regime has exceeded the horrors of the US, in its “war on terror”, just as savagely as they have shredded international humanitarian law in their nine-month assault on the civilians of Gaza Strip, where their hunger to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide still seems to know no bounds.
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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 you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.
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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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One Response
Andy Worthington says...
Well, I tried to share this on Facebook, as I always do with my articles, but it was removed by Meta’s unaccountable police bots, for “contravening community standards on spam”, which makes no sense, of course. Will it be restored after a review? Who knows? Will I now be nervous about publishing anything that I’ve devoted time and energy to, out of a fear that I’ve crossed some unknowable red line and will have my post removed, and, perhaps, my account restricted? Yes, of course. How I hate our arbitrary, unaccountable social media overlords.
...on July 12th, 2024 at 8:46 pm