Horror at Trump’s Guantánamo: 53 Migrants Now Held Illegally and Incommunicado in the “War on Terror” Prison

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. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Since Donald Trump issued an executive order on January 29, to expand an existing migrant detention facility on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — the Migrant Operations Center — to hold 30,000 migrants, as part of the “war on migrants” that he cynically and malevolently embarked upon as soon as he took office, eight flights of migrants from immigrant detention facilities in the US — all, apparently, carrying Venezuelans — arrived at Guantánamo between February 5 and 12, containing 98 men in total.

This is alarming enough, because no information has been provided about the legality of these flights, to a naval base that has only previously been used for prisoners seized in the “war on terror”, in what is known as the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility, which opened in 2002, and, via its Migrant Operations Center, first used in the 1990s, for migrants intercepted at sea. The base has never before been used to hold foreign nationals brought from the US mainland, who should have the same rights of access to lawyers and contact with families that they would have had on the US mainland. There is no indication, however, that this is the case.

The administration has also provided no information about who these people are, beyond unverifiable claims about them being gang members, and why it is regarded as so important for them to be sent to Guantánamo when, it would seem, they could just as easily be returned to their home countries. Just as importantly, no information has been provided about why this operation has begun without Congressional approval, or Congressional funding.

Most significantly, however, recent reporting indicates that, of these 98 men, only 45 are being held in the Migrant Operations Center, while the other 53 are being held in Camp 6 of the “war on terror” prison, a medium-security facility with 200 cells, and communal recreation areas, which opened in November 2006, and has been used for nearly 20 years to hold hundreds of men in some of the most abusively isolated conditions ever implemented by the US government.

As I explained in an article last week, Trump is Illegally Holding Migrants Seized in the US in the “War on Terror” Prison at Guantánamo Bay, there is no legal justification whatsoever for holding these men in Camp 6. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which justifies the military imprisonment of foreigners at Guantánamo regarded as having some involvement with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces connected to the 9/11 attacks, “does not authorize military detention of migrants, criminals or anyone broadly designated as a ‘terrorist’ or member of a Foreign Terrorist Organization”, as the Center for Victims of Torture explained in a briefing, adding, to make the current violation clear, “Migrants cannot be lawfully held in military custody at Guantánamo”, and “The government does not have any legal authority to detain migrants in Camp 6.”

Because of the dubious legality of transferring migrants to Guantánamo from the US mainland, and the blatant illegality of transferring them to Camp 6 of the military prison, legal challenges have already begun, although none, yet, have touched on the dubious basis for emptying Camp 6, where three remaining “low-value detainees” were held, and moving them to Camp 5, where the 12 other “high-value detainees” are held, even though, until this point, the military had strenuously prevented the two groups of prisoners from ever having any contact with each other.

Legal challenges

Last Sunday (February 9) Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales of the Federal District Court for New Mexico granted a temporary restraining order blocking the transfer to Guantánamo of three Venezuelan immigrants held at Otero County Processing Center.

In a legal filing submitted earlier in the day by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyers for the men argued that “the mere uncertainty the government has created surrounding the availability of legal process and counsel access is sufficient to authorize the modest injunction”, adding that the men “fit the profile of those the administration has prioritized for detention in Guantánamo, i.e. Venezuelan men detained in the El Paso area with (false) charges of connections with the Tren de Aragua gang”, which originated in Venezuela’s prisons. When the first migrants were flown to Guantánamo on February 5, the DoD described them as “10 high-threat illegal aliens”, who were all allegedly “part of Tren de Aragua.”

On X, Baher Azmy, CCR’s legal director, called the ruling a “small but important win for clients otherwise bound to the latest iteration of the legal black hole.”

On February 12, the ACLU, CCR, and IRAP (the International Refugee Assistance Project) submitted a lawsuit to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on behalf of family members of three men identified as having been transferred to Guantánamo, and various organizations working on immigrants’ rights.

In a press release, the organizations stated, “The Trump administration has provided virtually no information about immigrants newly detained at Guantánamo, including how long they will be held there, under what authority and conditions, subject to what legal processes, or whether they will have any means of communicating with their families and attorneys.”

Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, “By hurrying immigrants off to a remote island cut off from lawyers, family, and the rest of the world, the Trump administration is sending its clearest signal yet that the rule of law means nothing to it. It will now be up to the courts to ensure that immigrants cannot be warehoused on offshore islands.”

In the lawsuit — a complaint and petition for the writ of habeas corpus — the lawyers stated, “For the first time in US history, the federal government has moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges” to Guantánamo, and “is holding them incommunicado, without access to attorneys, family, or the outside world.”

As they also noted, “Since their transfer to Guantánamo, the immigrant detainees have been denied the ability to visit, communicate with, or contact an attorney. Defendants have provided no information at all regarding mechanisms for attorneys or family members to contact or communicate with immigrants held at Guantánamo.”

As the lawyers added, “The isolation of the transferred immigrants at Guantánamo is stark compared to the attorney access protocols provided to ICE detainees in the United States”, where the detention facilities “are required to make schedules and procedures for attorney visitation and communication publicly available”, and there are “multiple, specific requirements for attorney-client access.”

The lawyers also explained, “Even under the best circumstances, attorneys will face several barriers to communicating with immigrant detainees held at Guantánamo given its remote location on a military base. However, at a minimum, the government can provide legal access to immigrant detainees held at Guantánamo through phone calls, video conferences, electronic mail, fax, and in-person visits, among other means.”

The lawsuit understandably focused on the migrants’ rights that are derived from having been held on the US mainland, which confers what should be inalienable rights that are not automatically available to foreign nationals seized abroad and taken to the military prison, or foreign nationals intercepted at sea and held in the Migrant Operations Center.

For the 32 years that detention facilities for foreigners have operated at Guantánamo, the US government’s ability to hold them has centered on their lack of any involvement whatsoever with the laws that exist on the US mainland, via cynical but enduring claims that, although the US has sole and total control of operations within the naval base, ultimate sovereignty rests with the Cuban government, from whom the land is leased.

However, although the lawsuit mentions the use of Camp 6, it stops short of emphasizing quite how depraved and troubling it is that, without any legal authorization whatsoever, Camp 6 has been co-opted as an essential part of Trump’s “war on migrants.”

The danger of analogies between the “war on terror” and the “war on migrants”

Cynical attempts by the Trump administration to create spurious analogies between the “war on terror” and the “war on migrants” have already been made abundantly clear through public statements made by administration officials describing them as “the worst of the worst”, echoing, as I explained last week, “Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious — and false — description of the men held in George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’ prison when it opened in 2002.”

Announcing his executive order, Trump claimed that the expanded migrant detention facility would house “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people”, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told CNN on January 30 that the expanded facility could be used to detain people who she described as “the worst of the worst”, and on February 2 Trump’s Border Tzar, Tom Homan, told Fox News, “The worst of the worst need to go to Guantánamo Bay.”

When the Department of Homeland Security posted photos of ten Venezuelan migrants being put onto the first flight to Guantánamo on February 5, they repeated that “The worst of the worst criminals will be held at the military facility”, while the DoD, in a separate press release, claimed that the men were “10 high-threat illegal aliens”, who were all allegedly “part of Tren de Aragua.”

However, the problems go much deeper than provocative language. The “war on terror” prison is a facility that, from the time of its opening over 23 years ago, has been specifically sealed off as much as possible from the outside world, a place of spectacular dehumanization and legal isolation, where, for the first two and a half years of its existence, the prisoners were held entirely without any rights whatsoever as human beings, and lawyers had to fight through the courts for the right to visit and represent them.

In addition, for the first four years and two months of the prison’s existence, the US government also maintained that it had the right not to tell the world who it was holding, a situation that only changed in March 2006, when they lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit and were compelled to release this basic but long-suppressed information about who was being detained.

Crucially, while there were some improvements to the regime at Guantánamo under President Obama, overall the conditions imposed on prisoners at the “war on terror” prison by the military — which, presumably, will be replicated for the migrants held there — are persistently and structurally dehumanizing, fundamentally lawless, and horribly isolating, as Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, made clear in a devastating report that she issued after becoming the first UN Rapporteur to visit the prison in February 2023.

In her report, Ní Aoláin highlighted how, in addition to chronic legal and medical deficiencies at the prison, its everyday operations, essentially unchanged since it opened, constitute cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, via persistent shackling, whenever the prisoners are moved, persistent and unjustifiable surveillance, and forced cell extractions and solitary confinement that “continue to be implemented disproportionately and over-expansively.”

She also highlighted the prisoners’ isolation from their families, not only because no family visits are allowed (even if family members could somehow afford to get to Guantánamo), but also because, although phone calls and video calls are allowed, unlike in the prison’s early years, they are not confidential, and are persistently subjected to cancellations and delays. As she described it, all the prisoners she met “evidenced unrelenting grief and trauma related to the inadequate and arbitrary access to their family at Guantánamo”, and family members she spoke to on other trips associated with her visit expressed the same anguish.

The hysterical cynicism of the “war on migrants”

It’s not entirely clear yet that the Trump administration is explicitly seeking to replicate the profound extra-legal isolation of the “war on terror” in relation to its “war on migrants”, but the signs are not promising.

According to the sweepingly hysterical and deeply racist rhetoric of Donald Trump and his administration, there is a “national emergency” on the southern border because of an “invasion” of “illegal aliens”, with the border “overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans.”

Meanwhile, within the US itself, “an unprecedented flood of illegal immigration” has apparently led to the presence of “many” immigrants who “present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans”, and others who are “engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities.”

In the dire scenario portrayed by Trump in his lurid executive orders and proclamations, the situation is so alarming that, allegedly, “Foreign criminal gangs and cartels have begun seizing control of parts of cities, attacking our most vulnerable citizens, and terrorizing Americans beyond the control of local law enforcement.”

If Trump’s assault on immigrants sounds like it’s being framed as a “war”, that’s because that is exactly what’s happening. This assault on migrants — potentially, all 13.3 million undocumented migrants in the US — is definitely being framed as a “war on migrants”, used to appeal to racists, and to show then how strong Trump is, and also to stoke fear, to keep people cowed and obedient, and to allow all kinds of violations of the law to take place to enable this performative and cynical cruelty to take place.

We’ve been here before — after 9/11

Disturbingly, we’ve been here before — 24 years ago, when, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a national emergency was declared, and the US’s Muslim population demonized to such an extent that, as reported in “Targets of Suspicion”, an Immigration Policy Center report in 2004, “More than 1,200 people, mostly Arabs and Muslims, were rounded up and detained” by the FBI and other agencies “in the days and weeks after 9/11”, some on tip-offs from “concerned” individuals, with many “held for months without charge” and “denied access to attorneys and to their families” and with most of them eventually deported “for minor immigration violations.”

In addition, in June 2002, the Bush administration introduced the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), commonly referred to as Special Registration, which disproportionately targeted the US’s Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities, and led to “about 14,000 people” being “put into removal [deportation] proceedings.”

The “worst of the worst” language being used by the Trump administration, the hysterical and sweeping denunciations of migrant criminality (in defiance of the actual evidence, which confirms that “undocumented people commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than US-born citizens”), and now the use of Guantánamo all indicate that the “war” framing is very definitely deliberate, and, at Guantánamo, those of us who have been following the story of the “war on terror” prison over the last 23 years are getting a chilling sense of déjà vu.

When the “war on terror” prison opened, and photos were gleefully made available by the Bush administration of the first arrivals at the prison kneeling on the ground in orange jumpsuits, chained and subjected to sensory deprivation, nothing was provided about their identities beyond the sweeping claim that they were “the worst of the worst.”

When lawyers began trying to represent the prisoners, they could only do so when family members whose relatives had disappeared in Afghanistan or Pakistan contacted them, presuming that they had ended up at Guantánamo, or having received notification that they were held there, via the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose representatives were the only people outside of the US government and its representatives, and foreign interrogators, who were allowed into the prison. For the most part, it was a costly and time-consuming process for lawyers to establish contact with family members and to visit them to establish the stories of the men who had disappeared.

This time around, while repeating the “worst of the worst” claims, but refusing to provide any names of the men in question, the government, via the DHS, nevertheless made photos available, although — perhaps because even they realized that it it would have caused too much of an uproar — the men were not hooded or otherwise kept anonymous and dehumanized, and, as a result, family members and friends were able to identify them, and to try to get legal representation for them.

Stories that undermine the Trump administration’s rhetoric

Already, doubts about the government’s rhetoric are being undermined by the stories of the three men represented in the lawsuit submitted last week, revealing them as a 37-year old car mechanic, a 25-year old barber, and a 23-year old in search of a better life in the US — a far cry from the DoD’s claims that they were “10 high-threat illegal aliens”, who were all allegedly “part of Tren de Aragua.”

It was, to be frank, impossible not to be reminded of the first flight of 20 men into Guantánamo over 23 years ago, when, at a press conference, Donald Rumsfeld aired his “worst of the worst” comments, and Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called them “very, very dangerous people” who “would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.”

In 2021, tracking them down, Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times refuted these outrageous claims, establishing that, although a few of them were senior Taliban military commanders, and one was an Al-Qaeda propagandist convicted at a military commissions trial in 2008, most were inconsequential, and had all been freed, including, eventually, a Tunisian man who had been unanimously approved for release by a high-level government review process 15 years ago, but who was only finally freed on December 20, 2024.

As history repeats itself horribly, it seems probable that most, if not all of the “high-threat illegal aliens” being flown to Guantánamo will also, eventually, be largely revealed as the victims of hysterical black propaganda.

The car mechanic, Tilso Ramon Gomez Lugo, 57, was transferred from the El Paso Processing Center in Texas, and was recognized in the photos made available by the DNI by his sister, Eucaris Carolina Gomez Lugo. According to his sister, “Mr. Gomez Lugo arrived in the United States in April 2024 and sought asylum. He passed a screening interview establishing that he had a ‘credible’ fear of persecution if removed from the United States and was then placed into full immigration removal proceedings. However, because he was pro se [representing himself], he was unable to adequately represent himself and received a final order of removal from the Immigration Judge on November 25, 2024. Mr. Gomez Lugo believed he was scheduled for removal in February 2025. He last contacted his family on Saturday, February 1, 2025, and asked for clothes for his flight. Ms. Gomez Lugo tried to arrange to send clothing to the El Paso Processing Center, where he was detained [but she] and her family have lost all contact with Mr. Gomez Lugo since February 1.”

A friend of his from north-west Venezuela told the Guardian, “I’ve known him since he was a child. He’s an educated boy who has no problems with anyone. He is someone with good parents, a hard worker and a good family – and very well-liked in the town we are from.” The friend also stated, “Trump had and has my support — but I do not agree with these extreme measures, especially against our compatriots.” As the Guardian added, like many Venezuelans the friend “backed Trump believing he would take a hard-line stance on their home country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.”

According to the commendable Migrant Insider website, the barber, Yoiker David Sequera, 25, had, like many Venezuelans, had to undertake an arduous journey through many countries to arrive in the US. Cutting hair since he was a child, having learned from his uncle, a master barber, he had dropped out of school at 13, and had begun an apprenticeship at his uncle’s barbershop, but, as the economic and political crisis in Venezuela grew, he “carried his barber kit through the Darién Gap, cutting hair along the way from Panama to Mexico City to fund his journey, according to migrants who traveled with him”, as Migrant Insider described it, adding that “Social media images show him advertising his barber services across Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, and the US.” The website added that documents they had reviewed indicated that “he had no criminal record in Venezuela or other Latin American countries.”

As Migrant Insider further explained, “In July 2022, he crossed the Rio Grande and surrendered to US border agents.” A relative said that he “delayed crossing to save money by working in Mexico”, because he “doesn’t believe in government handouts or taking charity if he can work instead.”

As he awaited the processing of his claim, he ”secured a job at a barbershop in California”, but, after he returned to Venezuela in May 2023, “to check on a property he was leasing to a caretaker”, who had disappeared, leaving the property “inaccessible”, he had “no legal means to re-enter the US, where he had been living and working”, and when he returned, with his case still pending, “along with millions of others”, and even though he had been granted Temporary Protected Status under President Biden, his return trip “made him ineligible.”

After crossing the Rio Grande again on September 12, 2024, he again surrendered to US border agents, but this time, “as a repeat entrant, he was detained at the El Paso Processing Center, where he cut the hair of fellow detainees.” Until he was flown to Guantánamo, he “called his family daily”, and had reportedly been “considering voluntary deportation to Mexico, unwilling to remain detained indefinitely.”

According to Migrant Insider, the third man, Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera, 23, was sent to Guantánamo “despite never having set foot in the United States as a free man, raising concerns about his treatment and the accuracy of accusations surrounding his detention.” According to his family, having “fled Venezuela’s economic crisis and violence”, he “had been traveling through Latin America for years,” via Colombia, in 2019, and then Panama and Guatemala, “where he worked to fund the remainder of his trip.” Having applied to enter the US “through the CBP One appointment system, designed to help migrants legally enter the US for asylum processing”, he “crossed into Mexico in 2024 and waited for his chance to enter the US legally, opting not to hire a coyote (smuggler) despite the risks.”

On December 31, 2024, he “received his long-awaited CBP One appointment”, and “was overjoyed by the prospect of entering the US legally.” However, “his experience took a turn after arriving at the El Paso Processing Center on January 19, 2025, the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration.” His family said that “he called them on February 3, 2025, to inform them that he was about to be released” but, the following day, he was put on the first flight of detainees sent from El Paso to Guantánamo, with his family members only learning about it through the photos made available by the DHS.

Although he has no criminal record, his family fear that he was targeted because he has four tattoos, which officials with the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) often use “as a ‘visual cue’ to wrongly label individuals as gang members, even though tattoos alone are not a reliable indicator of gang involvement.” As a relative in Venezuela said, “People here tattoo themselves, they color their hair, they dress stylish with Air Jordans. That doesn’t mean they are part of a gang. They just like the style.”

Despite strenuous efforts on their part, none of the family members have been able to secure any information from any government department about their relatives, and have not been able to contact them.

More dire lessons from the “war on terror”

These doubts about the government’s rhetoric and dehumanization are happening much quicker than happened with the “war on terror” prison, when it took time for lawyers to seek out the stories of the men suspected of being held, but none of this will lead to any practical distinction between the “war on terror” detainees and the migrant detainees if the Trump administration isn’t decisively prevented from being able to hold them incommunicado in a facility that was created to hold men incommunicado, and that was only very reluctantly obliged to allow legal representatives to visit and represent them.

Even now, as Fionnuala Ní Aoláin so devastatingly established in her report, the prisoners’ access to legal representation and their ability to communicate with their lawyers and their families is severely and deliberately compromised. Getting to Guantánamo is expensive and time-consuming, attorneys and detainees have persistently, over the years, been prevented from meeting, for unexplained or inadequate reasons, and every exchange that takes place between lawyers and their clients, details of which have to be written down by hand by the lawyers, is presumptively classified, and can only be made public after screening by a Pentagon review process, which decides whether any of it can be unclassified, or whether it will remain classified, after which the documentation is only available by personally visiting a specific facility in Virginia.

Given the total and unprecedented control over the running of the “war on terror” prison by the military, it is difficult to imagine that any fundamentally different process will operate for the migrants now being held there, who are much more likely to be subjected to all of the same rules and restrictions than to be granted a parallel system that conforms to the requirements of their treatment and processing under US law.

Pushing back

As the government continues to spout its inflammatory rhetoric, with Kristi Noem stating, yet again, “These individuals are the worst of the worst that we have pulled off of our streets,” and railing against the alleged “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters” who are being sent to Guantánamo, Jessica Vosburgh of CCR told the Guardian, “The US government has shared close to nothing” about the men, and are being “completely evasive with sharing names.” She added that “conversations with other detainees and relatives of those suspected to be in Guantánamo led her to believe that Noem’s descriptions of the detainees as ‘vicious’ criminals were ‘bald-faced lies.’”

As the Guardian reported, “A senior Department of Homeland Security official said all of those sent to Guantánamo had ‘committed a crime by entering the United States illegally’”, although that, of course, is a far cry from the lurid descriptions of unspeakably violent men being touted by his boss.

The official added that, “In addition to holding violent gang members and other high-threat illegal aliens, Guantánamo Bay is also holding other illegal aliens with final deportation orders. Every single alien at Guantánamo Bay has a final deportation order.” As the Guardian noted, however, the official made these assertions “without offering evidence that any of the detainees had links to gangs or crime.”

In a separate report, CBS News stated that, despite the administration’s rhetoric about “the worst of the worst”, discussions with two US officials and internal government documents seen by the news channel confirmed that, as well as “sending those with criminal records or suspected or known gang ties” to Guantánamo, “classified as ‘high-risk’ detainees”, the administration was “also sending nonviolent, ‘low-risk’ migrant detainees who lack serious criminal records or any at all.”

Lee Gelernt of the ACLU told the Guardian that all of the detainees were thought to be Venezuelan men, but added, “until we’re down there, we can’t be sure.” He also explained that, because the government was threatening to send thousands of people to Guantánamo, “I suspect at some point it’ll move beyond Venezuelans.”

The current focus of the government’s hostility certainly seems to be just Venezuelans, especially as, on February 3, as Reuters reported, Kristi Noem stated that the government was withdrawing Temporary Protected Status from 348,000 Venezuelans, “more than half of all Venezuelans in the program”, who, as a result, “could be deported and lose work permits in April.” Reuters also noted, however, that the Trump administration may well expand their targeting of those with Temporary Protected Status, which President Biden “greatly expanded”, so that it “now covers more than 1 million people from 17 nations, some in the US for decades, and they could face immediate deportation if they lose the status.” Reuters also reported that the Trump administration was “preparing to end a Biden-era legal entry program under which some 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with US sponsors can live and work in the US.”

Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, said that the migrants being sent to Guantánamo had fallen into “a legal black hole” (a description long used to describe the “war on terror” prison), stating, “You can’t call your relatives and you can’t get contact with your lawyers. So it’s really, really isolated. It’s basically just like warehousing away people without recourse [to justice], and the inability to contact the outside world is intense.”

She added that she believed that the Guantánamo transfers “were designed to please Trump’s base”, as “political theater, cruelty theater, harsh-on-immigrants theater”, while Wells Dixon of CCR stated, “All we really know is that the Trump administration is trying to evoke the terrible images of Guantánamo in order to appear tough on illegal immigration in the United States. That’s what this is about. This is not about law or policy. It’s a catastrophic human rights disaster.”

With Border Tzar Tom Homan telling a US radio show on Tuesday that “approximately 14,000 undocumented immigrants have been arrested” since Trump took office, and that “border crossings have also decreased by 92% during the same period”, it is imperative that human rights organizations, lawyers representing migrants, and responsible journalists are supported as much as possible in their efforts to stop this phony “war” before it gets completely out of hand.

Stopping border crossings is stupidly counter-productive from an economic perspective, because people only make arduous journeys from poorer countries to richer countries because there are opportunities to do jobs that no one else want to do, but the US’s internal “war on migrants” is a much bigger threat to fundamental values, and threatens to be as brutal and repugnant as the cruel stupidity of the “war on terror” unless it is brought to an end.

* * * * *

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 new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his 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.