Check Out My New Song ‘O Palestine’, Released to Support Vital Humanitarian Relief in Gaza
With just two days to go until the unforgivable second anniversary of the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and with hopes diminishing that the ‘Peace Plan’ pushed by Donald Trump will actually bring the grotesque and seemingly endless murder of Palestinian civilians to an end, the timing seems appropriate for the release of ‘O Palestine’, a new song of mine, which I wrote in the early months of Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, and opposing the genocide and western support and complicity.
The song was recorded as a collaboration with my son Tyler (beatboxer The Wiz-RD), on which I play guitar, Wurlitzer piano and Hohner Bass 2, with Tyler beatboxing, and it was produced by the great Charlie Hart, best known for working with the late Ronnie Lane, who also produced The Four Fathers’ last album, Songs of Loss and Resistance.
Grenfell to Gaza: Deadly Hierarchies of Race and Class on the 8th Anniversary of the Grenfell Tower Fire
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Eight years ago today, the world awoke to a vision of horror — an inferno of flame engulfing a residential tower block of social housing in North Kensington in west London.
72 people died in the fire, by far the largest loss of life in any housing fire in modern British history.
From the beginning, for those paying attention, it was clear that this was a disaster that should never have happened, brought about through the persistent neglect of the block, and, in particular, through its recent refurbishment, which had involved it being “prettified” with insanely flammable cladding, a deranged situation that had been facilitated and allowed through the homicidal greed of the international manufacturing companies involved, and the shameful deregulation of safety standards by central and local government.
Eight years on, however, despite a long and expensive public inquiry, no one has been held accountable for the failures and omissions that led to the fire.
Video: The Shame of Guantánamo – My One-Hour Interview with Kevin Gosztola for Unauthorized Disclosure
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Many thanks to Kevin Gosztola for not forgetting about Guantánamo, and for spending an hour with me online last week to discuss in detail the grave legal and human rights abuses still taking place at the US’s shameful “war on terror” prison, as it nears the 23rd anniversary of its opening.
Kevin and I have known each other for many years, and our paths have crossed on occasion on the annual visits to the US that I undertook every January from 2011 to 2020 to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the anniversary its opening, as well as during his long dedication to addressing the persecution of Julian Assange, with whom I worked in 2011 on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo.
In recent years, he’s one of the few journalists to have maintained an interest in Guantánamo, interviewing me for his “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast on a more or less annual basis, in 2020, 2021 and 2023.
The Four Fathers Release ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’, Marking Julian Assange’s 50 Days as a Free Man
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Thursday August 15 marked 50 days since Julian Assange landed in Australia as a free man, after five years in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, fighting his proposed extradition to the US for publishing — with some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers — classified US files leaked by Chelsea Manning. Prior to his time in Belmarsh, he had spent nearly seven years confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, where he had successfully sought asylum in June 2012, until his asylum was abruptly withdrawn in May 2019.
To mark the occasion, The Four Fathers have released ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’, an amended version of our song ‘Warriors’, about Julian and Chelsea, which we first released in February, with the last two lines changed to celebrate Julian’s 50 days of freedom.
In the original, I sang that the price of Julian’s actions was “Extradition and life imprisonment and the end of the freedom of the press”, while the new version changes that to “Five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh until a plea deal set him free” — the plea deal that he signed in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a US Commonwealth in the Pacific, prior to his arrival back in Australia on June 26, where he was reunited with his wife and his sons.
Britain’s 9/11 and Cannibalistic Capitalism: The Grenfell Tower Fire, Seven Years On
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You might be thinking that’s an outrageous analogy. Apart from the visual similarities between burning towers, how can I compare an attack by a foreign entity on the tallest buildings in New York’s banking centre with an unfortunate accident that befell the inhabitants of a tower block of social housing in a historically deprived area of west London?
The reason I make the analogy is because the Grenfell Tower fire, on June 14, 2017, wasn’t an accident, as such; it was the inevitable result of a system of deliberate neglect, and the deliberate erosion of safety standards, for those living in high-rise housing, which came about because of the deliberate creation of what I believe we’re entitled to call cannibalistic capitalism; or, if you prefer, economic terrorism, knowingly inflicted on civilians by politicians and almost the entire building industry.
Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians for political or ideological aims, and at Grenfell, seven years ago, 72 people died because, over the previous four decades, a system of providing safe and secure rented housing was eroded and largely erased, replaced with a new ideology that, under Margaret Thatcher, sought to eliminate the state provision of housing, selling it off via the notorious ‘Right to Buy’ policy, demonising those who still lived in social housing, portraying them as shirkers and scroungers and reclassifying them as inferior, or second-class citizens, cutting funding for maintenance and repairs, and transferring as much of the remaining social housing as possible to less accountable, or, seemingly, completely unaccountable public-private entities.
Video: On the 13th Anniversary of WikiLeaks’ Release of the Guantánamo Files, My Interview with the Julian Assange Defence Committee
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13 years ago today, on April 25, 2011, WikiLeaks and a host of international newspapers — the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post, McClatchy, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, La Repubblica, L’Espresso and Aftonbladet — published, or began publishing “The Guantánamo Files,” a treasure trove of classified US military documents from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, the last of four significant releases, in 2010-11, of classified material leaked by Chelsea Manning, the first three being the Afghan and Iraq War Logs, and a vast archive of diplomatic cables.
I was also a media partner for the release of the files, having been asked by WikiLeaks, as an independent expert on Guantánamo, to investigate them, and to brief journalists from the mainstream media partners about their significance, which I did in the days following the release of the files on April 25. The publishing date had been brought forward abruptly, from an intended release date in May, after we heard that the Guardian and the New York Times had obtained them from another source, and were intending to preempt us with the files’ publication.
I still vividly recall getting a call about this on the evening of April 24, and then having to write an introduction to the files in a matter of hours, explaining their significance. This ended up on the front page of “The Guantánamo Files,” on the WikiLeaks website, as “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners,” and I also posted it on my website as “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies.”
Held for 600 Days Since Being Approved for Release from Guantánamo: Khaled Qassim, a Talented Artist
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Sunday (March 10) marked 600 days since Khaled Qassim (aka Khalid Qasim), a 47-year old Yemeni, was unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by a Periodic Review Board, a high-level US government review process.
That decision took place on July 19, 2022, but nearly 20 months later Khaled is still awaiting his freedom, a victim, like the 15 other men unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, of an inertia at the very top of the US government — in the White House, and in the offices of Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State.
For the last year and a half, an official in the State Department — former ambassador Tina Kaidanow — has been working on resettling the men approved for release, most of whom, like Khaled, are Yemenis, and cannot be sent home because of a ban on their repatriation, inserted by Republicans into the annual National Defense Authorization Act in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, and renewed every year since.
On Gorilla Radio, Chris Cook Plays ‘Warriors’, and We Discuss Julian Assange, Guantánamo, Genocide in Gaza and George Galloway
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Thanks to Chris Cook for having me on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, in western Canada on Wednesday to talk about a number of topics. The one-hour show is available here, on Chris’s Substack account, and my interview took part in the first half.
Chris began by asking me about the recent by-election victory, here in the UK, of George Galloway, the former Labour MP, who destroyed both Labour and the Tories on a platform opposing their unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which, of course, is also opposed by a majority of the population. As he stated in a tweet after his victory, “Gaza is the moral centre of the world right now.”
Chris asked me about the government’s hysterical response, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivering a special address to the nation to complain about the threat posed by a democratically-elected MP, but with, of course, a darker undercurrent of groundless suggestions that British democracy is under threat from “Islamist extremists” — all part of the desperate, flailing efforts of the British establishment to criminalize all criticism of Israel’s actions as anti-semitic.
The Four Fathers Release New Song, ‘Warriors’, About Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, To Coincide With Julian’s Last UK Appeal Against Extradition to the US
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Yesterday, The Four Fathers released ‘Warriors’, my song about Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, which we released to coincide with the first of two days of hearings at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, marking Julian’s last UK appeal against his extradition to the US. If extradited, he will face espionage charges relating to the classified US files, leaked by the US whistleblower Chelsea Manning, which were released in 2010 and 2011, in conjunction with some of the world’s most prominent newspapers.
It’s available below via Bandcamp, where you can listen to it for free, and buy it as a download if you like it.
I worked with Julian and WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011, which were hugely important, as they revealed the shocking extent to which the US’s so-called “intelligence” was based on statements made by profoundly unreliable witnesses — prisoners subjected to torture and other forms of abuse, or bribed with better living conditions.
Radio: ‘Guantánamo Voices’ on Resonance FM, Featuring Sarah Mirk, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Me, and Music by The Four Fathers
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I’m delighted to promote a one-hour show, ‘Guantánamo Voices’, produced by comics journalist and broadcaster Alex Fitch for Resonance FM, the London-based non-profit community radio station, specializing in the arts.
The show is based on two interviews and one recording of an event — interviews with myself, discussing Guantánamo’s history, recorded last week to mark the 21st anniversary of the opening of the prison, and with comics creator Sarah Mirk, whose wonderful graphic novel anthology, ‘Guantánamo Voices’, was published by Abrams in 2020. I reviewed it here, and was also thrilled to be featured in a comic about Guantánamo that was written by Sarah and published in The Nib in 2018.
The event recorded by Alex, featuring former prisoner and author Mohamedou Ould Slahi and myself, took place at the University of Brighton in March last year, during Mohamedou’s first UK speaking tour, which I wrote about here when I first met him, after years of writing about him, and campaigning for his release. Please also see the video here of a Q&A featuring both of us in Tunbridge Wells, following a screening of ‘The Mauritanian’, the feature film based on Mohamedou’s story, directed by Kevin Macdonald, and also feel free to check out my article about the screening and the tour here.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
