Welcome to Andy Worthington

My analysis of the shameful news that, just two days after plea deals were announced in the cases of three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — whereby the death penalty would be dropped in exchange for guilty pleas and the promise of life sentences instead — defense secretary Lloyd Austin has revoked those plea deals. The three men include Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, and the plea deals provided what appears to be the only viable conclusion to the legal impossibility of successful prosecuting them after their torture for three and a half years in various CIA “black sites.” Efforts to prosecute them have been ongoing since 2008, but are primarily stuck in a kind of “Groundhog Day,” because the men’s lawyers correctly seek to expose the torture to which they were subjected, while prosecutors seek to hide it, although over the last two years prosecutors have been working towards the plea deals, having apparently accepted that successful prosecutions are impossible. Austin’s capitulation — to Republican criticism, and to what appears to be the Democrats’ own commitment to a type of endless vengeance when it comes to the “black site” prisoners — is therefore a deplorable failure to accept the compromises needed to bring this sordid chapter in US history to an end, as well as to provide the remaining prisoners with adequate physical and mental health treatment, as required under international humanitarian law, and it is to be hoped that his “undue command influence” will be successfully challenged in court.

Photos from, and my review of the wonderful WOMAD world music festival that took place from July 25 to 28 in the grounds of Charlton Park in Wiltshire. I’ve been attending WOMAD every year since 2002 as part of my wife’s community arts group, Dot to Dot, in which we entertain the children in the festival’s World of Children area, where, this year, we charmed the kids with a giant bee figure, Queenie. Amongst the extraordinary musicians who lifted my soul this year were DAM, the Palestinian hip-hop group featuring the rapper Tamer Nafar, Nana Benz du Togo, a brilliant five-piece voodoo feminist group, the Senegalese legend Baaba Maal, and a multi-generational highlife band from Ghana.

Linking to and discussing an interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, which I’ve published as a podcast on my YouTube channel. In the 50-minute interview, recorded on July 13, and featured on Andy’s weekly show, we spoke about the UK General Election, and my relief at being rid of the cruel, corrupt and incompetent post-Brexit Tories. However, I also expressed my doubts about the incoming Labour government led by Keir Starmer, with worries about his authoritarianism, his approach to protest (and here I discussed the recent draconian sentencing of five climate activists for a Zoom call), and his support for war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We also spoke about the new political landscape in the UK — or England in particular — where there are now five main parties, but they are not adequately represented in Parliament because of the antiquated and unjust ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, and how we desperately need a proportional representation system to properly reflect voters’ choices. We also spoke about the release of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, after five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh, and how his release was a ray of light in an otherwise darkening world, and we also spoke about the ongoing injustices of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where 30 men are still held, 16 of whom have long been approved for release.

My report on a devastating advisory opinion on July 19 by the International Court of Justice regarding Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) over the last 57 years, and concluding that it is, and always has been in contravention of international humanitarian law. Despite the unprecedented breadth and depth of the opinion, Israel has been ignoring rulings, opinions and resolutions regarding the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 1967, and yet nothing has led to it ever being restrained. This opinion needs to be followed by sanctions — hopefully via the UN General Assembly — or international humanitarian law and the United Nations itself will end up throughly discredited.

My response to the draconian and vindictive sentences — the longest ever handed down in the UK for non-violent protest — delivered by a British judge, Christopher Hehir, to five climate activists yesterday. Their crime? Taking part in a Zoom call to plan disruption to the M25 to highlight the climate crisis and to get the British government to commit to a ban on new oil and gas extraction in the UK. The sentences — of four and five years — are, as Michel Forst, the UN rapporteur for environmental defenders, explained, “purely punitive and repressive.” The reason Judge Hehir was empowered to deliver such punitive sentences was because of two horrendous Acts of Parliament, passed by the recently departed Conservative government, via two malignant home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, which specifically targeted the right to protest, and essentially criminalised non-violent, mildly disruptive protest. This legislation needs to be overturned by the new Labour government, but as I explain in my article, I fear that “Keir Starmer — and Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary — fundamentally share the contempt Patel and Braverman had for any kind of protest that causes any kind of inconvenience whatsoever.” The right to engage in non-violent, mildly disruptive protest is at the heart of what separates supposed liberal democracies from autocratic regimes, and it is crucial that it is upheld in the UK, because, otherwise, those engaged in its suppression, to preserve a cosy capitalist status quo, are failing to accept that it is precisely this status quo that is killing us all, because, as I also explain, “man-made climate collapse is the greatest threat humanity has ever known, as is demonstrably true, and as is becoming ever more apparent with every passing day.”

Examining yet another facet of the ongoing chronic injustice at Guantánamo — the recent sentencing, for war crimes, of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, Guantánamo’s most profoundly disabled prisoner, who suffers from a chronic degenerative spinal disease, which, despite seven operations at the prison, has not been adequately resolved, and will in all probability eventually leave him paralyzed. A 62- or 63-year old Iraqi Kurd, whose real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, al-Iraqi has been held at Guantánamo for over 17 years, after being held in a CIA “black site” for six months. Although the US authorities initially tried to tie him to Al-Qaeda and terrorism, the main charges against him ended up relating to his time as a military commander in Afghanistan at the time of the US-led occupation. At his sentencing, al-Iraqi was profoundly apologetic to the family members of those who were killed as a result of his orders in Afghanistan; however, the military jury delivered the maximum sentence, of 30 years, although this was reduced to ten years via a plea deal he agreed to two years ago. Nevertheless, this means that he will not be released until 2032, which still seems hugely punitive, given his contrition, his medical condition, and the fact that, when his sentence ends, he will have been held for 26 years in total.

My recent interview with Chris Cook, on his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, about the UK’s recent General Election, and also about Israel’s horrendous prisons for Palestinians, following the release of a particular prisoner, Moazzaz Obayat (also identified as Muazzam Obayat), horribly broken by torture, who compared the prisons to Guantánamo. As I explained to Chris, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that they’re even worse.

My analysis and endorsement of the evidently reasonable assessment, by three health experts, in a letter to The Lancet, that the true death toll in Gaza massively exceeds the 37,396 direct deaths, as most recently reported last month, because of the indirect deaths involved in every conflict — those resulting from disease, the destruction of health facilities, and the absence of food and water, for example — and may be at least 186,000, if not many more. It’s somewhat surprising that it’s taken so long for medical experts to make an assessment, given the long history of research into indirect deaths, which has established that indirect deaths in the ‘90s and 2000s were “between three and 15 times the number of direct deaths.” The experts chose a ratio of 4:1, but, had they chosen 15:1, the estimate for the total number of dead would be 600,000. Shamefully, the western media have almost entirely ignored the assessment, but it’s important that those of us who care about bringing Israel’s genocide to an end publicize it as much as possible, to try to maintain pressure to end this unforgivable slaughter.

Photos from, and my report about the ten vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and around the world on July 3, 2024, the latest in an ongoing series of monthly coordinated global vigils that began last year. The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and the next date is August 7.

My analysis of yesterday’s General Election in the UK, which, after 14 years, swept aside the Tories, and ushered in a Labour government under Keir Starmer, with a huge but disproportionate majority that didn’t reflect the number of votes received (less than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019), but rather the collapse of the Tories, finally undone after years of cruelty, incompetence and corruption, and facilitated by the sudden rise of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK Party, which helpfully split the right-wing vote. Wonderful though it is to see the back of the Tories, and also to see noticeable successes for the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and a number of independents including Jeremy Corbyn, power is now in the hands of Starmer and his cabinet, including his Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who secured victory despite having almost no policies that distinguish them from the Tories. I discuss my many concerns, criticising Labour’s adherence to neoliberalism, and urging it to be bold on re-nationalisation (especially of water), and expressing my shock that Starmer has so openly declared his opposition to any kind of rapprochement with the EU, even though Brexit has done more to damage the UK than anything else over the last eight years, wrecking trade, and leading to a disgraceful rise in racism, which, in the hands of the Tories’ parade of leaders in the years since, led to a morally repugnant fixation on making it illegal to be a refugee, and seeking to send asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda. I hope this anti-immigrant hostility will be abandoned, and I also hope that other draconian Tory innovations — in particular, an attempt to ban all meaningful protest, through the criminalisation of climate activism — will be ditched, although on this particular point I fear that Starmer, as the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has troubling authoritarian impulses that may not augur well for civil liberties. I also urge boldness — true boldness — on climate collapse, and end by expressing my fears for foreign policy under Starmer, most noticeably because of his uncritical support for Israel and its ongoing and unforgivable genocide in Gaza.