Welcome to Andy Worthington

Linking to and discussing my recent, in-depth, one-hour interview with Kevin Gosztola for his “Unauthorised Disclosure” podcast, in which we discussed Guantánamo, with a specific focus on the military commissions, and the recent ruling by the 9/11 trial judge refuting defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s claim that he had the right to revoke plea deals agreed in July with three of the 9/11 co-accused, and on the plight of the 16 men still held who have long been approved for release, and for whom President Biden urgently needs to find new homes before his presidency comes to an end. Kevin also promoted ’Songs of Loss and Resistance”, the new album of protest music by my band The Four Fathers, harking back to the ‘Protest Song of the Week’ feature that he ran on his previous site, Shadowproof, where he publicized our very first release nine years ago.

My analysis of the hugely important ruling in the military commissions at Guantánamo by Judge Matthew McCall, the military judge in the 9/11 trial, who has ruled that defense secretary Lloyd Austin had no right to revoke the plea deals that were agreed three months ago with three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi. The plea deals, which took the death penalty off the table in exchange for life imprisonment, and, crucially, involved confessions from the three men that would constitute some kind of closure for the 9/11 victims’ families, took two and a half years to negotiate and arrange, after prosecutors finally recognized that the torture to which the men were subjected in CIA “black sites” was so horrific that it made the notion of successful prosecutions fundamentally unviable. Judge McCall forensically analyzed Lloyd Austin’s revocation of the plea deals, and found, unerringly, that he had no right to do, having handed responsibility to the Convening Authority, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan Escallier (previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), who had full authority to approve them. It is to be hoped that the government doesn’t appeal, as it is threatening to do, because the plea deals are the only way to bring to an end a broken process, fatally infected by the use of torture, that has been mired, for the last 12 years, in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings with no trial date in sight.

With just two months to go until President Biden cedes power to Donald Trump, it’s crucial that pressure is exerted on the Biden administration to secure the release from Guantánamo of 16 men, never charged with a crime, who have long been approved for release — for between two and four years, and in three outlying cases for nearly 15 years. Urgent action is essential, because it is clear that Trump will seal Guantánamo shut, as he did in his first term in office. The scandal of these men’s ongoing imprisonment is that the decisions taken to approve them for release were made by high-level administrative processes, which have no legal weight, meaning that no mechanism exists to compel the government to actually free them if they find it inconvenient or to do so. An additional complication is that most of them are Yemenis, and US law prevents the return of prisoners to Yemen. However, over a year ago, a plan to resettle them in Oman was finalized, but was called off after the October 7 attacks in Israel. That plan urgently needs reviving, or, if that isn’t possible, another country needs to be found that will offer these men new homes. The alternative — another four years of entombment under Donald Trump — doesn’t even bear thinking about.

My recent hour-long interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio in south London, posted to my YouTube channel after it was broadcast, in which we discussed the ongoing horrors in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and my contention that our leaders, unable to accept that, for 40 years, their beloved neoliberalism has actually been killing us, have suffered a psychic derangement and have embraced endless war instead.

My obituary for former Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Rahim Rabbani, who died on November 1 at just 57 years of age. A chef, he was seized with his brother Ahmed, a taxi driver, during a number of house raids in Karachi, in Pakistan, on September 11, 2002, and the brothers spent a year and a half in CIA “black site” torture prisons before being flown to Guantánamo in September 2004, where they were held without charge or trial for 18 and a half years until their release in February 2023. The US authorities claimed that they were “Al-Qaeda facilitators”, but never put them on trial, suggesting that their supposed evidence was non-existent. Nevertheless, the brothers were repeatedly recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by various high-level government review processes until May 2021, when Abdul Rahim was recommended for release by a Periodic Review Board, with a similar recommendation for Ahmed following in October 2021. Unfortunately, inadequate medical treatment at Guantánamo, and the inadequate provision of care in Pakistan after his release, contributed significantly to Abdul Rahim’s death, a problem that afflicts numerous former prisoners, and that was highlighted in a withering report last year by UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, after a visit to the prison, and numerous meetings with former prisoners.

Photos from, and my report about the nine monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and around the world on November 6, 2024, the day after the US Presidential Election that, alarmingly, will see Donald Trump reinstalled in the White House on January 20. It was a difficult day, of course, although it sharpened all our realizations that now President Biden has no more excuses for inaction, as he has just two months left to salvage something of a legacy on Guantánamo by finding new homes for the 16 men long approved for release who are still held.

Key findings from, and my analysis of a significant report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, issued on October 10, dealing with Israel’s notorious and unaccountable prisons for Palestinians. Always brutal and fundamentally lawless, involving military courts and “administrative detention” (endlessly renewable imprisonment without charge or trial), the prisons, in which children are also held, along with women and men, have quadrupled their population since October 7, 2023, from around 5,000 “detainees” to around 20,000. Conditions in the prisons have noticeably worsened, with the ICRC prevented from visiting, on the orders of security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and with torture and abuse systematic and widespread, incidences of rape taking place, and over 50 “detainees”, including doctors abducted from hospitals, having died in unexplained circumstances. Much of the focus is on the notorious Sde Teiman prison, where “detainees” seized in Gaza have been held, although the abuse is widespread throughout the entire prison system, which, at various points, I compare with the US’s barbaric treatment of prisoners in the CIA “black sites”, at Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and Guantanamo, often finding that Israel has not only matched, but also exceeded the depths of depravity to which the US sank in its “war on terror.” This is my second article about the Commission’s report, the first having focused on its sections detailing Israel’s “war” on Gaza’s hospitals and its healthcare system.

My reflections on the two-month occupation, and the subsequent violent eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction as part of an ill-conceived and inappropriate housing development, undertaken by the housing association Peabody, in conjunction with Lewisham Council. Six years on, building work is still not complete, with most of the flats in the dense and unattractive blocks raised on the ghosts of the garden unoccupied, and work still ongoing on the conversion of the former primary school into ‘luxury’ flats and townhouses for private sale. I conclude that the Tidemill re-development — now known as ‘Frankham Walk’ — is part of a downturn in the whole wretched business of “regeneration” that has been so dominant over the last 20 years, and make particular reference to Thamesmead, the Brutalist estate on the outskirts of south east London, where Peabody’s £2bn plan for its “regeneration” is stalling, and where the developer is also in conflict with tenants who want their properties refurbished rather than destroyed. I also discuss how the new Labour government, despite promises to build 1.5m new homes, has no vision whatsoever about how to build genuinely affordable housing, and remains wedded to the private developer-led model that has been such a disaster over the last two decades.

My latest long read about Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, focusing on the horrendous policy being implemented in the north, to ethnically cleanse or exterminate the entire remaining population, of around 400,000 people. Through a review of the first year of Israel’s assault, in which it claimed “the right to defend itself”, for which it received unconditional support from most of the government’s of the west, whilst also claiming that its aims were “eliminating Hamas” and rescuing the hostages seized on October 7 last year, I demonstrate how, with the implementation of this latest phase of its attacks, it has crossed a line into actions that cannot be defended through any of the excuses noted above. Israel has crossed a line by seeking to depopulate the whole of the north of the Gaza Strip, prior to it being declared a “closed military zone”, because the wholesale ethnic cleansing it has been undertaking for the last three weeks (allegedly to force everyone to evacuate to the south), accompanied by the intensity of its extermination of the civilian population, is making clear that its alleged aim of only pursuing military targets is nothing but a lie, behind which, as with Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon, stands a now-exposed and profoundly illegal hunger for repopulating northern Gaza, and southern Lebanon, with Israel settlements. I also focus on how western complicity in these crimes is being exposed like never before, as Israel’s pretence of self-defence has evaporated, and stress how important it is for those of us in the west to recognize how our governments have been so thoroughly colonized by Israel that our own freedoms are also gravely threatened, because, to protect Israel and to continue supporting its actions, despite their startling brutality and illegality, our leaders seem determined to permanently erode the right to free speech, the right to protest and the right to dissent in any meaningful manner whatsoever.

A crucial update on Guantánamo, with just two weeks left until the Presidential Election, in which I review Biden’s progress — or the lack of it — towards the prison’s closure over his nearly four years in office, look at what can be expected, and what should be pushed for after the election, and celebrate the importance of the efforts made by opponents of Guantánamo’s continued existence — via our ongoing monthly vigils, and our ongoing photo campaign — to pierce the fog of amnesia and inertia that engulfs the prison. With no one freed from Guantánamo for the last 18 months, I look at the plight of the 16 men still held despite being long approved for release, and mark the recent passing of Tina Kaidanow, the former ambassador appointed to facilitate resettlements for these men, whose efforts were stymied by her bosses when she negotiated resettlements in Oman that were cancelled because of the “political optics” after October 7 last year. I also examine the wreckage of the military commissions, where necessary plea deals with the 9/11 accused, whose prosecutions are impossible because of the torture to which they were subjected, were overruled by defense secretary Lloyd Austin, and I also provide a reminder about the absolutely devastating report and opinions about Guantánamo that were issued by UN Special Mandate holders last year, which were shamefully brushed aside by the Biden administration.