Welcome to Andy Worthington

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.

Marking 600 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, I report on how, despite robust criticism and threats of “concrete action” by western leaders, nothing “concrete” has emerged at all to disrupt Israel’s ongoing slaughter of civilians, still averaging 100 deaths a day. I also report on the cynical and broken efforts to implement a US- and Israeli-backed food delivery scheme, which collapsed into chaos on its first day yesterday, as the system, alarmingly resembling a concentration camp, was overwhelmed by starving Palestinians, some of whom were subsequently shot and killed. The aid plan, which includes intrusive interrogations and biometric screening, is, of course, a deliberately engineered exercise in humiliation and control, also designed to shut down existing aid organizations, and especially UNRWA, the UN organization that has been successfully supporting Palestinians for 75 years, but which Israel has smeared as a front for Hamas, without providing any proof, and which it also despises because it advocates for all exiled Palestinians’ UN-mandated “right to return.” UNWRA and other aid agencies have a demonstrable ability to distribute aid where it is needed, and have full warehouses in Jordan and Egypt. In addition, over 9,000 trucks are waiting on the border, but Israel’s only intention is to keep on starving Palestinians to death, and preventing the delivery of urgently needed medical supplies. As we mark 600 days of the genocide, instead of progress, Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have, instead, been doubling down on their messianic genocidal messages, continuing to implicate Israel’s supporters in policies of extermination drawn from the Old Testament, which, as I note, “scared me when I read it as a child, as it should anyone who believes that humanity cannot survive or thrive when weighed down by ancient hatreds.”

Last week, after starving Palestinian civilians for eleven weeks, and bombing them relentlessly for the last two months, Israel stepped up its aggression, launching “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” with even more savage bombing, and announcing its intention to militarily occupy the whole of Gaza, to erase every remaining building, and to force the surviving population into a concentration camp in the south, prior to an illusory program of “voluntary migration.” Plumbing unparalleled depths of depravity, after 19 months of unbearable horror, Israel’s genocidal endgame has finally provoked condemnation from its allies in the west, who, until now, have whispered barely a word of dissent. The foreign ministers of 22 countries and three senior EU officials issued a strongly-worded demand for the resumption of aid to prevent mass starvation, while the governments of the UK, France and Canada specifically threatened “concrete actions” if Israel continued its “wholly disproportionate” escalation, its starvation policies and its plans for the “permanent forced displacement” of the population, which, as they noted, “is a breach of international humanitarian law.” Words mean nothing to Israel, of course, and, if its allies are serious, they must follow up with arms embargoes, sanctions and more, but it remains noteworthy that so many countries are now turning against Israel, no doubt because the extent of its renewed escalation of hostilities and the impact of its starvation siege are so severe that they have suddenly become aware that they need to be seen to have made the right noises for when, inevitably, there will be a legal and moral reckoning. Hopefully, this turning of the tides is significant, reinforcing the recent warning, by opposition politician Yair Golan, that Israel, which is “kill[ing] children as a hobby”, that it “is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was”, and the admission by an Israeli Foreign Ministry official that “the world is not with us” and that “No one will want to be identified with Israel.”

An urgent update on the situation in Gaza, as Israel launches “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, which can only be regarded as its “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem”, with all the historical echoes that entails. Israel’s plan, announced 12 days ago, is to militarily occupy the whole of the Gaza Strip, to destroy all its remaining buildings, and to drive the surviving population to the south, to be held in a concentration camp where vetted individuals, subjected to biometric screening, will be allowed food, provided every two weeks, but only at the barest of subsistence levels to prevent death by starvation. Via posts from those trapped in Gaza, I report on the unprecedented escalation of military activity over the last two nights, as the severity of the attacks, and the death toll, have, shamefully, matched the scale and intensity of the earliest days of the genocide. I condemn western leaders for their continued inaction, and reserve particular contempt for Donald Trump, who, in his four-day tour of the Gulf, failed to say or do anything to help the Palestinians by calling for a renewed ceasefire and the resumption of desperately-needed humanitarian aid to stave off mass starvation, even after Hamas obliged him by releasing the US-Israeli soldier Edan Alexander. Instead, he revived his absurd proposal to remake Gaza — this time as a “freedom zone”, rather than “the Riviera of the Middle East” that he proposed in February, and has continued to endorse the “voluntary migration” of the entire population. Is he wilfully complicit, or just a rambling and incoherent fool? Sadly, no one even seems to know.

Photos from, and my report about the coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and in London, Brussels and Mexico City on May 7, 2025. The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place on the first Wednesday of every month for 28 months, and have gained greater resonance under Donald Trump and his “war on migrants”, in which he has cynically used Guantánamo, and, more recently, has also sent migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, a mega-Guantánamo that, arguably, wouldn’t exist at all without the template provide by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, and shamefully maintained by every president ever since.

In my latest article, I follow up on Israel’s new plans for an escalation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, cutting through the failures of media commentators to establish what the plans actually reveal, which is nothing less than the extermination of the entire population. Everything about the plans is diabolical, including the screamingly illegal proposal to militarily occupy the whole of the Gaza Strip and to force the surviving population to the south, to be hemmed into a tightly-controlled area in which aid, at the barest of subsistence levels, will be provided by private contractors, but only to those who have submitted to monitoring and the use of facial recognition technology. However, it is the last component of the plan — for the “voluntary migration” of the population — that is even more troubling than the proposals for total military occupation and for a kind of techno-concentration camp. This is because, as few commentators seem to want to acknowledge, no country is willing to take in significant numbers of Palestinian refugees. Egypt and Jordan have persistently refused, because of legitimate fears of massive unrest were they to be complicit in mass ethnic cleansing, and in the countries of the west, as I describe it, “anti-immigrant sentiment is more virulent than at any other time in living memory.” As I proceed to explain, the proposal for “voluntary migration” is, therefore, nothing but an illusion that is being used by Israel to disguise its true intent, which, without any viable escape route for the Palestinians, consists solely of continuing extermination, either “a quick death by Israel’s ongoing military assaults, or a slow death via hunger, dehydration, and the myriad murderous outcomes of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s entire medical system.”

I write to bear witness, to be counted as someone who didn’t stay silent as the most grotesque western-backed atrocities in most of our lifetimes were taking place in Gaza, but my heart has been breaking for the last two months as Israel resumed its genocide after breaking the six-week ceasefire, firstly via the reimposition of a complete siege on all supplies of food, water, medical supplies and fuel, and then, for the last six weeks, via a resumption of its intensive bombing of the civilian population. In my latest long read, I repeatedly condemn western politicians and the mainstream media for their persistent failure to challenge Israel, or to tell the truth about the genocide, and, with no end in sight to Israel’s screamingly illegal project, over the last two months, of coercion and murder to pressurize Hamas to free all the hostages and to surrender, with the only “reward” being the supposed “voluntary migration” of the rest of the population, I turn to Israel itself as perhaps our best hope, as, over the last month, over 140,000 former officials, members of the military and academics have openly condemned the resumption of the genocide. I also highlight the baleful role played by Donald Trump, both in his support for the resumption of Israel’s genocide, and in his assault on freedom of speech in the US via the kidnapping and intended deportation of peaceful students whose only “crime” has been to oppose the genocide, and I provide a warning about how “a depraved darkness within Israel itself has been deliberately spread so thoroughly throughout the western world that we are left gazing at the face of a renascent fascism, leeringly suggesting that there is nothing to protect any of us.”

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 latest long read, a detailed account of Trump’s “war on migrants”, from the slew of “Presidential Actions” to Guantánamo and then, most monstrously, the deal with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador involving a one-way trip for Venezuelan migrants from the US to Bukele’s horrendous CECOT prison, a mega-Guantánamo, where men are held indefinitely without charge or trial in brutal conditions. I run through the legal challenges, up to and including the Supreme Court, and the horrendous reality that most of the men transferred are not gang members, as alleged, and that the Trump administration has no evidence that they are, that it doesn’t care, and that it is trying to hide this truth behind claims of “national security” secrecy. I also focus on two particularly egregious cases of injustice: that of Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela, who was sent to the CECOT prison despite having an ongoing asylum claim in the US, and the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian resident of Maryland, who had protected status explicitly preventing his deportation to El Salvador, but who was sent to the CECOT prison because of an “administrative error”, and the truly chilling implications of the refusal of both the Trump administration and Bukele to bring him back, defying an order by the Supreme Court. As I say, “If the courts don’t prevail, and if the majority of the Justices in the Conservative-dominated Supreme Court don’t firmly grasp the enormity of how they are being snubbed and sidelined, and thoroughly assert their authority, the US will be entering truly perilous and lawless territory, in which no one — or, at least, no one who isn’t, essentially, a powerful white supremacist — will be safe.”