Welcome to Andy Worthington

A cross-post, with my own introduction and detailed analysis, of an op-ed for the Nation by retired Rear Admirals Donald J. Guter and John Hutson, calling for the prisoners still held at Guantánamo who have not been charged with crimes to be freed — 28 men in total out of the 40 still held; eleven already approved for release (two just today), and 17 others, aptly described as “forever prisoners.”

I remember the 72 people who lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire exactly four years ago, through profiteering and cost-cutting on the part of those responsible for their safety, and I also look at how, since then, the cladding scandal that became so apparent at Grenfell now involves millions of people in unsafe tower blocks across the country, many of them leaseholders, who bought their homes in good faith, but now find themselves in unsafe and worthless properties, abandoned by the government and the developers of their homes, and facing bills of up to £100,000 to remove the dangerous cladding that was installed through no fault of their own.

My analysis of an NBC article last week that suggested that President Biden is “quietly” moving to “start closing Guantánamo ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11,” but that doesn’t live up to its promise, not least in its suggestion that Biden wants to begin releasing prisoners, but doesn’t yet want to re-establish the role of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, even though it is impossible to work out how prisoners might be freed without the envoy’s assistance.

My article marking the 15th anniversary of the death at Guantánamo of three prisoners — all long-term hunger strikers and fiercely resistant to the brutal lawlessness of the prison — who, according to the US authorities, died in a “suicide pact,” although that explanation has been robustly challenged on several occasions in the intervening years.

My quarterly fundraiser, in which I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work writing about Guantánamo, and campaigning to get the prison closed, as an independent reader-funded journalist and activist.

A detailed examination of the current Guantánamo cases before the US courts, some involving a long-running struggle for due process rights, others involving the imminent end to the war in Afghanistan, and another involving severe mental health issues. There are glimmers of hope in the litigation, but it already seems clear that the Biden administration is intent on resisting judicial interference when it comes to Guantánamo, and is more interested in making decisions about whether or not to release prisoners through the purely administrative Periodic Review Board process, which, just last month, approved three long-standing “forever prisoners” for release.

Today marks the 36th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, when the police, under Margaret Thatcher, destroyed, with unprecedented violence, a convoy of vehicles containing men, women and children, as they tried to make their way to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. Despite the trauma caused that day, the Tories continued to persecute Travellers, passing punitive legislation in 1986 and 1994, and now, under Priti Patel, are seeking to outlaw the entire nomadic way of life through a draconian clampdown on “trespass” in the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

A cross-post, with my own introduction, of a recent CNN article looking at how US support for the Chinese government’s assertion that the Uyghur prisoners held at Guantánamo were terrorists not only continues to dog the men released from the prison between 2006 and 2013, but has also reinforced the Chinese government’s rationale for its brutal and horrendous “re-education” camps in Xinjiang province, where at least a million Uyghurs have been detained arbitrarily and have been subjected to human rights abuses.

My detailed report about some extremely encouraging news from Guantánamo: that three men, including the prison’s oldest inmate, Saifullah Paracha, have been approved for release from the prison by Periodic Review Boards, the high-level government review process established under President Obama.

A cross-post, with my own introduction, of a New York Times op-ed calling for the closure of Guantánamo by Lee Wolosky, who was the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure from 2015-17 under President Obama, and whose words ought to carry weight with the Biden administration.