Andy Worthington’s TV and radio appearances

My analysis of the momentous events of the last few days, as a ceasefire has begun in Gaza, and the last remaining living Israeli hostages have been freed in exchange for 1,968 Palestinians, including 1,718 hostages seized in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and held without charge or trial. I condemn the dehumanization of the Palestinians in most of the western media, in contrast to the attention paid to the Israelis, especially as so many of the Palestinians had so evidently been severely mistreated, and I point out how the media’s bias has prevented it from noting that 55 of those freed were healthcare workers, seized in the unforgivable war on Gaza’s hospitals that Israel has been waging relentlessly for the last two years. I also puncture the balloon of Donald Trump’s pomposity, noting that, although he pushed for the ceasefire deal, he has not put forward a credible plan for post-genocide Gaza beyond an unacceptable suggestion that its governance would be overseen by colonial overlords. I insist that Palestinians must be allowed to decide their own future, as part of a necessary process of securing their independence, in line with the recent recognition of the existence of the State of Palestine by numerous western countries. What is needed most urgently, as Israel is already trying to undermine the ceasefire deal, is for western countries and Arab nations to insist on being allowed to begin undertaking massive debris-clearing and reconstruction operations in Gaza, alongside a massive increase in humanitarian aid, as winter creeps in on a population that is still as deprived of all of the basic necessities of life as it was before Trump began hogging the spotlight.

My report about Israel’s monstrous targeted murder last night of the extraordinarily hard-working Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif and four of his colleagues from Al Jazeera Arabic, in which I mourn their loss, dissect Israel’s lies about their involvement with Hamas, and criticize the western media for never having platformed Palestinian journalists in their reporting. I also express my fears that the murders were deliberately intended to create a media blackout for the imminent planned invasion and occupation of Gaza City, home to a million surviving Palestinians, where, it seems horribly probable, Israel is planning to replicate the “genocide within a genocide” that took place in northern Gaza from October last year until the ceasefire in January this year, which both Anas Al-Sharif and another murdered colleague, Hossam Shabat, covered assiduously. As I ask, “Is there any hope left, or will Israel’s darkness engulf us all?”

In an update on the legal challenges to the Trump administration’s decision, three months ago, to invoke the little-used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send 238 Venezuelans on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s CECOT prison for alleged terrorists, I look at a recent ruling by Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which, after comparing the treatment of these men to the lawless ordeal endured by K., the lead character in Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial”, he ordered the administration to arrange for the men to have habeas corpus hearings. Judge Boasberg did so because of the failure of the administration to demonstrate that they had made any efforts to establish whether, as they alleged, these men were members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang, noting that “significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.” The administration, predictably, has appealed Judge Boasberg’s ruling, which will now make its way to the D.C. Circuit Court, where, back in April, one appellate judge memorably declared that, the last time the Alien Enemies Act was used (in the Second World War), “Nazis got better treatment than has happened here.” I also look at how Trump’s “war on migrants” — and his use of the CECOT prison — has been influenced by the “war on terror”, the prison established at Guantánamo by George W. Bush, and the CIA’s “black site” torture program, and I also examine the well-chronicled lack of evidence against these Venezuelan men, the troubling manner in which many of them were sent to El Salvador even though they had ongoing immigration appeals, and the recent revelation that some of them also had Temporary Protected Status. Introduced under Joe Biden, TPS applied to hundreds of thousands of migrants, but it has also been under fire from Trump, and in two recent cases the Supreme Court, alarmingly, complied with his requests to strip these and other protections from nearly 900,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, which could lead to another tsunami of detentions and deportations.

YouTube clips from my recent interview with Misty Winston on Due Dissidence, plus links to the whole 90-minute interview on Rumble, X and Substack, in which we discussed the forgotten “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, where 15 men are still held, Donald Trump’s grotesque “war on migrants”, in which he has used Guantánamo as a location for performative cruelty, and the even more alarming deal he reached with El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele, to send migrants on a one-way trip to Bukele’s mega-Guantánamo, the CECOT prison that wouldn’t exist without the template for indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that was provided by the Bush administration at Guantánamo. I was particularly concerned to highlight the similarities between “the war on terror” and the “war on migrants,” both of which explicitly involve, or involved imprisoning people without any form of due process, claiming a national emergency as justification, and to stress quite how alarming it is that this template has been extended to potentially encompass millions of hapless migrants in the US. As I said to Misty, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that, in Donald Trump’s white supremacist America, no one of color is safe anywhere.

Marking the 40th anniversary, today, of the Battle of the Beanfield, the largest and most violent peacetime assault on civilians in modern British history, when a convoy of of 140 vehicles, home to around 500 individuals and families, was attacked with astonishing ferocity by around 1,400 paramilitarized police drawn from six countries and the MoD, as they tried to make their way to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. To mark the occasion, I run through the history of the free festival movement, the year-long persecution that preceded the violence of the Beanfield, its context as part of a broader assault on Thatcher’s perceived “enemies within”, who also included the striking miners, and the ways in which new forms of dissent arose in the wake of the Beanfield, most notably via the rave scene and the road protest movement. Nevertheless, the increasingly authoritarian laws passed after the Beanfield, and after the last major unlicensed gathering at Castlemorton in 1992, attacking the way of life of Gypsies and travellers, and severely curtailing our right to gather freely, have paved the way for recent legislation targeting environmental protestors, which is so draconian that a single campaigner stepping into the road to slow down traffic can be immediately arrested, and many dozens of climate activists are serving excessively long prison sentences for non-violent protest. Sadly, what has been revealed in particular over the last 40 years is how increasing authoritarianism is cumulative; once imposed, draconian laws are rarely, if ever repealed.

A week is a long time in Donald Trump’s “war on migrants”, and in my latest long read I provide a detailed analysis of the last seven days of ongoing legal challenges, up to and including the Supreme Court, to prevent the administration from sending Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, which I have previously described as a mega-Guantánamo, where tens of thousands of men are held indefinitely without charge or trial. I also report on interventions by elected representatives of Congress in an effort to secure the return of men wrongly sent to the CECOT prison. The Supreme Court has previously issued rulings demanding that no one be deported without a habeas hearing, and that a Maryland resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador because of an “administrative error”, be returned. However, both rulings have been shamefully ignored by the Trump administration, which has continued to send men to El Salvador without a hearing, and without any effort by the executive branch to demonstrate that it has evidence establishing that they are gang members, as alleged. In cahoots with El Salvador’s dictatorial president Nayib Bukele, the administration has also refused to secure the return of Abrego Garcia. In a third ruling, on April 19, the Supreme Court imposed a temporary ban on any Venezuelans being sent to El Salvador, pending further review. The administration has not yet sought to imperiously sweep that ban aside, but their every action to date has shown complete contempt for the Supreme Court, and for the many other lower courts across the country that have been resisting its outrageous claims to have the right to send Venezuelans to the CECOT prison without providing any evidence that they are gang members, and with every indication that, in fact, the deportations are fundamentally arbitrary, based largely on ICE officials’ flawed assessments of the significance of the men’s tattoos, and with many of the men deported from ICE facilities despite having ongoing hearings regarding their asylum claims. The battle here, as I discussed this week with Chris Cook, on his Gorilla Radio show in Canada, which I link to in my article, is very clearly one in which the Trump administration believes it has the right to deport migrants on a one-way trip to a brutal and unaccountable prison in another country, without any due process, and without any interest in whether or not they are guilty of any crime whatsoever, and is also determined to try to crush any and all opposition in the courts to what it regards as its right to exercise unfettered executive power — or, as we might want to more accurately describe it, executive tyranny.

My assessment of the almost inestimably important case of Mahmoud Khalil, the legal US resident abducted on March 8 and taken to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana for deportation. Targeted for his involvement in student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza at Columbia University, Khalil’s abduction and his intended deportation are a glaring example of the Trump administration’s intention to shred the First Amendment to support Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza, although they are framing it as a “national security” matter. The Secretary of State, the pliant and dim-witted Marco Rubio, seeks to justify Khalil’s deportation by invoking a barely-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which gives him the authority to deport non-citizens if he has “reasonable ground to believe that [their] presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” If successful, the Trump administration will be able to deport any green card holder or visa holder who has engaged in any kind of non-violent opposition to Israel’s genocide, a startling development which would not only formally make the US into a dictatorship, in which freedom of speech (or even thought) is not allowed; it would also do so in the service of a foreign country, Israel. This is a position that, as I describe it, “lays bare how the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, prioritizes Israel’s interests over its own, in what really ought to be seen as a betrayal of America’s self-interest — or even as an act of treason.” Although an immigration judge rubber-stamped Khalil’s deportation on Friday, a legal challenge is ongoing in federal court in New Jersey, and we must all hope that it is successful, although it seems certain that it will be a protracted process that will last for many years. Its importance, however, cannot be underestimated. As I say, “It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of the US depends on it.”

My detailed examination of Donald Trump’s cynical and provocative announcement, last week, that he had issued an executive order for the massive expansion of an existing migrant detention facility on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay to hold 30,000 migrants as part of a monstrous “war on migrants” that has been unfolding since he took office just two weeks ago. I look at how Trump drew on the use of the facility to hold, at one point, 25,000 Haitian and Cuban migrants in the 1990s, and also at how he is using the proximity of the nearby “war on terror” prison to suggest that the migrants are “terrorists”, who should be held without rights, and how officials in his administration have reinforced this notion by describing those to be sent to the facility as “the worst of the worst.” I also examine the deeply troubling legal basis — or the lack of it — when it comes to holding migrants at Guantánamo, which has long been used by the US government as a “law-free zone”, and question who it is intended for, when Trump has already massively expanded the use of “expedited removal” to allow immigration enforcement agents in the US to remove undocumented migrants and send them back to their home countries without being able to meet with a lawyer or have any kind of immigration hearing. This is especially troubling as reports emerge of the first arrivals at the migrant facility, and I wonder, in particular, if Trump will, as I describe it, seek to create “a new law that would explicitly endorse holding undocumented migrants at Guantánamo indefinitely on the basis that they pose a direct threat to the US and its security as ‘invaders’ or ‘terrorists.’”

The video of my half-hour interview with the great peace activist David Swanson for his Talk World Radio show, which is syndicated by the Pacifica Network throughout the US, in which I was very helpfully and generously given the time to explain the many crimes of Guantánamo past, present and future. As David helpfully entitled the show, “Close Guantánamo While Its Victims Are Still Alive.”

My latest interview with Andy Bungay, recorded for his Riverside Radio show in London as part on an ongoing series of monthly interviews, and made available here as a stand-alone podcast. In a freewheeling 80-minute discussion, we focused on some of the many profoundly dispiriting events dominating our lives as 2024 draws to a close — the imminent return as the US president of Donald Trump, the ongoing genocidal carnage being inflicted by Israel on the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and the growing menace of catastrophic climate change. All are thoroughly depressing topics, of course, but our conversation was threaded through with resistance and hope, based on my assessment that societal tipping points may arrive unexpectedly when we are failed so persistently by our leaders, whichever political party they represent, as is very clearly the case right now.