For the last 320 days — that’s just seven weeks short of an entire year — the State of Israel has been engaged in the most brazen and visible genocide in the whole of human history, publicly supported by most of the governments of the west, murdering the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip (mostly civilians, and half of them children) at an average rate of 125 a day, or five every hour, in an onslaught on a trapped civilian population that is unprecedented in its scale and ferocity.
These figures come from the most recent assessment, by the Gaza Strip’s shattered Health Ministry, that over 40,000 of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million (2% of the entire population, or 1 in every 50 of its inhabitants) have been killed over the last ten and a half months, although the true death toll is undoubtedly many times higher.
As Dr. Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, told the Guardian, “This number, 40,000, includes only bodies that were received and buried.” In addition, “About 10,000 airstrike victims were thought to remain entombed in collapsed buildings”, Dr. al-Hams said, “because there was little heavy equipment or fuel to dig through steel and concrete ruins looking for them.”
Thursday August 15 marked 50 days since Julian Assange landed in Australia as a free man, after five years in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, fighting his proposed extradition to the US for publishing — with some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers — classified US files leaked by Chelsea Manning. Prior to his time in Belmarsh, he had spent nearly seven years confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, where he had successfully sought asylum in June 2012, until his asylum was abruptly withdrawn in May 2019.
To mark the occasion, The Four Fathers have released ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’, an amended version of our song ‘Warriors’, about Julian and Chelsea, which we first released in February, with the last two lines changed to celebrate Julian’s 50 days of freedom.
In the original, I sang that the price of Julian’s actions was “Extradition and life imprisonment and the end of the freedom of the press”, while the new version changes that to “Five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh until a plea deal set him free” — the plea deal that he signed in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a US Commonwealth in the Pacific, prior to his arrival back in Australia on June 26, where he was reunited with his wife and his sons.
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.
In genuinely dispiriting news, Spencer Ackerman has reported, via his Forever Wars website, that the majority of the 28 former Guantánamo prisoners from Yemen who were resettled in Oman between 2015 and 2017 have been forcibly repatriated to their home country over the last few weeks.
The news is particularly dispiriting because, until now, the Sultanate of Oman had appeared to be one of the most successful countries involved in resettling former Guantánamo prisoners, all unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, but who could not be safely repatriated.
This was either because the State Department regarded it as unsafe for them to be sent home (on the basis of human rights concerns, or concerns about their potential recruitment or targeting by forces hostile to the US), or because provisions inserted by Republicans into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) proscribe certain countries, including Yemen, from receiving their citizens (again, for reasons of national security), or, in a few cases, because they were essentially stateless.
Last week I was delighted to speak yet again with Chris Cook, who, for 25 years, has been running his Gorilla Radio show out of western Canada, “providing a forum”, as he describes it, “for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”
Chris and I have spoken countless times over the last 15 years or so, and last week we discussed the latest news regarding Guantánamo, as well as the recent far-right riots in the UK. The show is available on Gorilla Radio’s Substack page here, and our interview is in the second half of the one-hour show.
On Guantánamo, we followed up on my recent article, Lloyd Austin Cynically Revokes 9/11 Plea Deals, Which Correctly Concluded That the Use of Torture Is Incompatible With the Pursuit of Justice, looking at the plea deals agreed with three of the five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, which, however, only survived for 48 hours until they were revoked by defense secretary Lloyd Austin.
On Wednesday (August 7) campaigners for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay marked 18 months of monthly coordinated global vigils for the prison’s closure at seven locations across the US — Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cobleskill, NY and Los Angeles — and in London and Brussels, with a delayed vigil taking place the day after in Mexico City. The campaigners represent numerous organizations committed to the closure of Guantánamo, including Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture) and the UK Guantánamo Network, with numerous other supporting organizations.
Over the last week, racist far-right rioting has erupted in towns and cities across the UK, cynically engineered by provocateurs who used a horrendous homicidal attack on a children’s dance class in Southport on July 29, at which three girls were stabbed to death, to falsely suggest that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had recently arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in a small boat.
The reality was that the attacker was an evidently severely troubled 17-year old, born in the UK, whose Christian parents came to the UK from Rwanda, but the lies had a baleful life of their own, galvanising far-right groups and individuals from across the country, committed to Islamophobic violence, and connected via the swamp of unregulated or barely regulated social media and chat groups, to descend on Southport, just a day after the stabbings, where they targeted a mosque, fought with police officers, injuring 50, set fire to a police van, and damaged cars, homes and businesses.
The day after, July 31, the rioting spread to Hartlepool, where a mosque was attacked, Manchester and Aldershot, where hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked, and London, where rioters clashed with police in Whitehall.
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.
In depressing but sadly predictable news regarding the prison at Guantánamo Bay and its fundamentally broken military commission trial system, the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has stepped in to torpedo plea deal agreements with three of the men allegedly involved in planning and executing the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which were announced just 48 hours before in a press release by his own department, the Department of Defense.
The three men in question are Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and, although the full details of the plea deals were not made publicly available, prosecutors who spoke about them after the DoD’s press release was issued confirmed that the three men had “agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial.”
The plea deals, approved by the Convening Authority for the military commissions, Army Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals, would finally have brought to an end the embarrassing and seemingly interminable efforts to prosecute the three men, which began sixteen and a half years ago, and have provided nothing but humiliation for four successive US administrations — those led by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
In a world wracked by climate collapse and a uniquely shocking western-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip, reasons for believing that there is an essential goodness to humanity can be difficult to perceive, beyond the actions of brave climate activists and the millions of ordinary people who have repeatedly protested to try to bring an end to Israel’s indefensible industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
Ii may have been a small gesture in response, but, in its 42nd year, WOMAD, the world music festival founded by Peter Gabriel and colleagues in 1982 and located, since 2007, in the grounds of Charlton Park, a stately home in Wiltshire, brought its usual vivid and vibrant reminder that human beings, for all their failings, are also capable of great creativity and love.
I’ve been attending WOMAD every year since 2002 (with the exception of the COVID years, in 2021 and 2022, when it was cancelled) as part of Dot to Dot, a children’s workshop crew run by my wife Dot in the World of Children area, one of the festival’s great examples of inclusivity from its very earliest incarnation. As Chris Pritchard, one of WOMAD’s founders, explained in the liner notes for ‘Live at WOMAD 1982’, released last year, “A huge procession of children opened the [first] festival, wearing masks and wielding musical instruments made with the help of the teaching pack. Giant Indonesian puppets, created by Welfare State International, led them to the main stage.”
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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