Archive for January, 2026

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If just one photo captures the callous, ghoulish, cruel and heartless opportunism of those who see the world only through a lens of business opportunities and maximum profit-making for themselves and their cronies, it’s the photo above, an AI-generated vision of what was pitched to the world on January 22 as “New Gaza”, a futuristic high-rise coastal tourist resort on the shoreline of the Gaza Strip.

The image is from a PowerPoint presentation by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a prominent real estate investor, at the official launch of Trump’s “Board of Peace”, which took place at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

Other slides in the presentation showed “New Rafah”, a brand-new city featuring 100,000+ “Permanent Housing Units”, and plans for the eventual expansion of this “new city” model across the whole of the Gaza Strip, with these new residential areas flanked by industrial complexes featuring “data centers” and “advanced manufacturing.”

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Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

In the Gaza Strip, the remaining Palestinian population, who have survived two years and three months of the most diabolically well-publicized and even relentlessly celebrated genocide in history, which is still ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than before, are squeezed into just 42% of their homeland — 60 square miles in total, less than the size of Washington, D.C.

The rest, the other 58%, has been occupied by Israeli forces since a ceasefire was declared on October 10, when they withdrew to an arbitrary “Yellow Line” that was meant to be temporary, a phase in a staged withdrawal from the whole of the Gaza Strip, but which is regarded by the occupiers as a new and permanent border with Israel.

Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, which was mainly negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the US, although Donald Trump, predictably, made it all about himself, even staging a “Peace Summit” in Egypt to which world leaders were invited to fawn over him, Israel was prevailed upon to stop its relentless bombing raids, and its ongoing and merciless ground invasion of Gaza City, in return for the immediate release of all the surviving Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023.

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Between Saturday January 10 and Monday January 12, an impressive 18 vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world, marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of the prison, with a 19th taking place on January 15.

Eleven of these vigils were by campaigners who have been taking part in the monthly coordinated “First Wednesday” global vigils that I initiated three years ago, and that have been taking place every month ever since.

Seven of these are at locations in the US — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cobleskill, NY, and Portland, OR — while the other four are in London, Brussels and Mexico City, with former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi holding a solo vigil in Belgrade.

Eight more groups also joined us. Five of these were in the US — in Augusta, ME, Cleveland, OH, Greenfield, MA and Raleigh, NC, where annual vigils take place on a regular basis, and in Honolulu in Hawaii, while three others, initiated by Mansoor, took place in Rome, Italy, in Warsaw, Poland and at Shannon Airport in Ireland.

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In what amounts to an extraordinary admission of guilt regarding their historic complicity in the US’s post-9/11 torture program, it was announced on January 11, the 24th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, that the British government has reached a “substantial” out-of-court settlement with Abu Zubaydah.

Abu Zubaydah, whose real name is Zain al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was the first and most notorious victim of torture in the CIA’s post-9/11 program of extraordinary rendition and torture, which involved the establishment of secret torture facilities in pliant countries around the world — Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Morocco — as well as in US facilities in Afghanistan.

He was held and tortured in all of these CIA “black sites” for three years and five months from April 2002 until his transfer, in September 2006, to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since without charge or trial.

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Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

With all the horrors going on in the world right now, it’s easy to forget about the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and yet, this Sunday, January 11, campaigners around the world — myself included — will be marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of this uniquely lawless facility, which opened on January 11, 2002 when the first flight of 20 prisoners arrived from US prisons in Afghanistan.

We’ll be marking this grim anniversary with vigils across the US and around the world, at which we’ll also be calling for freedom or long-delayed justice for the 15 men still held, and for an end to Donald Trump’s illegal use of the prison to hold migrants seized in the disgraceful, racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office for the second time nearly a year ago, promising the largest deportation program in US history, and setting loose armed and unaccountable thugs on the streets of US towns and cities.

Although the existence of the “war on terror” prison has been largely lost in a fog of amnesia for more years than most of us care to remember, it still remains hugely significant that, for 24 years now, and on an ongoing basis, successive US governments have lawlessly claimed that they have the right to hold people at Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial, or, if they are to be charged and tried, to do so in a broken system, the military commissions, that, after 24 years, must be irrevocably judged to have proven itself incapable of delivering justice.

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