Welcome to Andy Worthington

My response to the police violence at the peaceful vigil for Sara Everard on Clapham Common, and its curious timing, coinciding with the second reading of home secretary Priti Patel’s horribly authoritarian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, which seeks to legislate meaningful protest out of existence.

Marking 1,400 days since I began posting a photo a day, with accompanying text, on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’, from my nearly nine years of photos taken on daily bike rides throughout the capital, with particular reference to the last year that I have spent photographing and reporting on London under Covid.

My quarterly fundraiser, in which I’m trying to raise $2,500 (£2,000) to support my Guantánamo work over the next three months, and marking 15 years since I first began working on Guantánamo on a full-time basis. If you can make a donation to support my work, which is all reader-funded, it will be very gratefully received.

My report on the news that the Afghan government has submitted an amicus brief to a US court in the case of Asadullah Haroon Gul, one of the last two Afghans in Guantánamo, arguing for his long-overdue release. Of the 40 men still held, Gul is one of 22 identified as “forever prisoners,” because of their ongoing and thoroughly unjustifiable imprisonment without charge or trial.

A link to, and my discussion of a Zoom event about Guantánamo, organized by veterans’ and peace groups, primarily in California, which took place on February 21, featuring myself, Mansoor Adayfi and James Yee as speakers.

A link to, and discussion of my recent half-hour interview about Guantánamo with Bob Connors and Tom Walker on their show, “The Peace and Justice Report,” on WSLR 96.5, a community radio station in Florida, in which I discussed what we might expect from the Biden administration, the importance of the new film, “The Mauritanian”, based on the best-selling memoir of former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and much more.

My report on the death, at the age of 60, of former Guantánamo prisoner Ibrahim Idris, who is the only prisoner to have been freed because his attorney managed to persuade the Justice Department that he was so mentally and physically ill that he could not pose a threat to the US.

A fundraising appeal for my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which I started nearly nine years ago, for which I have no institutional backing, and am reliant on your support. If you’re one of the project’s followers, any donation you can provide will be very gratefully received.

My response to statements about the Biden administration’s proposed closure of Guantánamo that were made on February 12 by White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who, asked whether President Biden would shut the prison before the end of his presidency, told reporters, “That certainly is our goal and our intention.”

My review of “The Mauritanian,” the film based on the best-selling memoir “Guantánamo Diary” by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who, based on nothing more than suspicion, was subjected to a horrendous torture program at Guantánamo in 2003, and, despite the case against him collapsing, wasn’t released until 2016.