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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.

For our latest update, available below via YouTube, we began by discussing the half a billion dollars that it costs to keep the 30 men still held at Guantánamo — the 16 men in the “general population” who have all been approved for release, 13 other “high-value detainees”, charged in the military commissions, or, in three cases, held indefinitely without charge or trial as “forever prisoners”, and one man serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.

We then proceeded to discuss two particularly pressing concerns — the military commissions, and the plight of the men approved for release.

On the military commissions, we followed up on my recent article, Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago, in which I discussed the shameful situation whereby plea deals, carefully negotiated for the last two and a half years by prosecutors and defense attorneys for three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, signed at the end of July, were rescinded two days later by defense secretary Lloyd Austin.

This eminently sensible decision, which finally involved a recognition by prosecutors that the use of torture in CIA “black sites” had fatally contaminated the possibility of successful prosecutions, took the death penalty off the table, in exchange for confessions and life sentences, representing the only practical way for there to be closure — not only for the US establishment, humiliated internationally by its inability to successfully prosecute these men, but also, crucially, for the 9/11 victims’ families.

Now, however, the military judge in the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has thrown a colossal spanner in the works by ruling that Austin had no right to rescind the plea deals, paving the way, hopefully, for the submission of statements in January, before Donald Trump takes office and takes a wrecking ball to the entire operation — if, that is, the Biden administration can be persuaded not to appeal Judge McCall’s forensic humiliation of the Pentagon’s untenable thirst for unachievable vengeance.

Turning to the prisoners long approved for release but still held, we followed up on another recent article of mine, Free the Guantánamo 16: A Message to President Biden as His Time Runs Out, and discussed the horrendous plight of these men, who have been unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes, but are still held because those decisions were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists that can compel the government to free them if, as has become increasingly apparent since the most recent prisoner release, back in April 2023, the Biden administration has been unwilling to prioritize freeing them.

With time running out before Donald Trump takes over, once more sealing the prison shut, and with third countries having to be found that will offer new homes for these men (because of Republican Congressional bans on repatriating them), I explained how a plan to resettle most of these men in Oman, stopped over a year ago because of the unconnected events of October 7 in Israel, needs to be urgently revived, or a new country needs to be found that will take them in.

At the end of the show, Kevin turned his attention to my band The Four Fathers, who, nine years ago, were featured by Kevin as “Protest Song of the Week”, for our song for the campaign to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, on Shadowproof, the website that he ran at the time. This time around, Kevin promoted our new album, “Songs of Loss and Resistance”, which is available on Bandcamp, to download, or as a limited edition CD, and which features songs recorded over the last six years dealing with Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners”, the persecution of Julian Assange, climate collapse, the Grenfell Tower fire, and much more.

I’m grateful to Kevin for highlighting The Four Fathers’ ongoing protest music, and delighted to note that he has just revived his focus on protest music via The Protest Music Project on Substack — which, with his encouragement, I’ve also joined, and where I’ll be publishing a weekly newsletter linking to all my work on an ongoing basis. Please join me!

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

I’m delighted to announce the release, on Bandcamp, of ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, the new album by The Four Fathers, marking ten years of our existence as a south London-based band playing mostly original folky, rocky, reggae-inflected protest music.

The album, our third, and a belated follow-up to our second album, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, released in November 2017, was recorded, sporadically, over the last six years, in sessions in July 2018, December 2019, July 2022 and January 2024, with the great Charlie Hart, a multi-instrumentalist and producer, best-known as a member of Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance in the 1970s and ‘80s, who also plays electric piano and accordion on three of the songs. Do check out Charlie’s work if you don’t know it, as he is currently involved in two very worthwhile musical projects — the Equators, an epic collective of talented players of African-tinged jazz and r’n’b, and a revival of Slim Chance, mostly featuring musicians who played with Ronnie in the band’s bucolic heyday, following Ronnie’s exodus from the excess of the Faces.

The long genesis of the album was caused by personnel changes, the huge disruption of Covid in 2021 and 2022, and the difficulty of getting everyone together to rehearse, and, most specifically, to work on arrangements of the songs in the gaps between work commitments and, more recently, the kinds of family illnesses that begin to afflict those of us in our 50s and 60s with ageing parents.

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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.

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Today is my birthday.

59 years ago, in Salford Maternity Hospital, my mother brought me into this world during one of the coldest winters in modern history, believed to have been the coldest since the winter of 1739-40.

59 years on from my birth, as I reflect on all that has happened to me in the 21,550 days of my life — all my struggles, my achievements, my loves, my joys, my sorrows, and my persistent inability not to question what those in authority tell me — and as I also reflect on the political and cultural changes of these many decades, I am struck by how this is all in the past, and how the pulse of life itself, which inhabits a continuous present that so many of us struggle to accept, is now located in a world in which bleak winters, like that of 1962-63, will never happen again.

When we look at why that is, one abiding truth becomes clear. Life on earth is a chemical miracle, one that requires a fine balance between its various components to maintain an atmosphere in which life is abundant. We know of nowhere else in the universe where life teems as it does on earth, and yet, because of capitalist greed and hubris, and a dangerous disconnection from nature, we are undermining the miracle of life, changing the atmosphere, primarily through our use of fossil fuels, into one that that will make the world inhospitable.

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On the 20th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — a disgraceful anniversary that should never have come to pass — President Biden sought to divert attention from his general inaction on Guantánamo in his first year in office by announcing that five men had been approved for release from the prison by Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type process established under President Obama. 

What was less widely reported was that another prisoner, Khaled Qassim (aka Khalid Qasim), held for nearly 20 years, had his ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial approved by a Periodic Review Board, not because of any crime he has committed — the board members recognised his “low level of training and lack of leadership in al Qaida or the Taliban” — but because of his “inability to manage his emotions and actions”, his “high level of significant non-compliance in the last year”, and his “lack of plans for the future if released.”

The decision reveals a fundamental weakness in the PRB system, a purely administrative process, which is not legally binding, and has, essentially, replaced reviews of prisoners’ cases in the courts via habeas corpus petitions — a process that led to dozens of prisoners having their release ordered by the courts between 2008 and 2010, when cynical, politically motivated appeals court judges passed rulings that shut the process down.

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Recently I spoke to Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, for his show ‘The Chiminea’, which was broadcast on Boxing Day, and is available here on Mixcloud.

Andy and I have been speaking for several years, and it’s always great to talk to him.  Our 50-minute segment of the two and a half hour show began just under 21 minutes in, when Andy played ‘Fighting Injustice’, the first of three songs by my band The Four Fathers, which has long been a live favourite, and whose chorus is something of a mantra of mine — “If you ain’t fighting injustice / You’re living on the dark side.”

We then began our discussion by taking about my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which I began in 2012, and which involves me cycling and taking photos on a daily basis throughout London’s 120 postcodes, and, since 2017, posting a photo a day, with an accompanying story, on Facebook.

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Last Thursday, February 27, marked a sad anniversary for environmental activists and housing campaigners, as it was the first anniversary of the destruction of the 74 mature and semi-mature trees that made up the magical tree cover of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, in south east London, which provided an autonomous green space in a built-up urban area, and also mitigated the worst effects of pollution generated by traffic on nearby Deptford Church Street, where particulate levels have been measured at six times the safety levels recommended by the World Health Organisation.

Unfortunately, the struggle to save the trees, which had been ongoing since 2012, largely took place before environmental activism went mainstream, via the actions of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, although this was not just an environmental issue. The destruction of the garden was also part of a proposal by Lewisham Council and housing developers to build a new housing development on the site, one that desperate, dissembling councillors sought to sell to the public as providing much-needed new social homes, when the reality, as with almost all current housing developments, is that a significant number of the new homes are for private sale, existing council housing is to be destroyed, and its replacement will be homes that are described as “affordable”, when they are no such thing.

Instead, the allegedly “affordable” component of the development is a mixture of properties at ‘London Affordable Rent’, which, in Lewisham, is 63% higher for a two-bedroom flat than traditional social rents, and ‘shared ownership’, a notorious scam, whereby, in exchange for a hefty upfront payment, occupants are made to believe that they own a share of the property (typically 25%), whereas, in reality, they are only assured tenants unless they find a way to own the property outright, and, along the way, have to pay rent on the share of the property that they don’t, even nominally, own, and are also often subjected to massive — and unregulated — service charges.

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Listen to the single here on Bandcamp, and please buy it as a download. All takings will be donated to Grenfell charities. The recording was produced by acclaimed musician and producer Charlie Hart, who also plays accordion on it.

Exactly 500 days ago, Britain changed in a way that has haunted me ever since, as 71 people died in an inferno that engulfed Grenfell Tower, a tower block in west London (one other survivor died in January this year, taking the death toll to 72).

This was a disaster that should never have happened, and that only occurred because those responsible for the structural integrity of the tower, and the safety of its residents, had decided that cost-cutting and profiteering was more important than people’s lives.

Those responsible include the Tory government, which failed to enforce recommendations after the Lakanal tower fire in Peckham in 2009, and actively worked to cut “red tape” when it came to housing regulations, Kensington and Chelsea Council, which abdicated responsibility for its tenants, handing their safety over to Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), an organisation that, although responsible for all of the borough’s social housing (consisting of more than 10,000 homes) repeatedly ignored explicit warnings by tenants’ representatives that they were living in a potential deathtrap.

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Today is 350 days since the defining UK-based horror story of 2017 — the fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in north Kensington, in west London, on June 14, 2017, killing 71 people, and leading to the death of a 72nd person this January. You can find profiles of all 72 victims here.

Last summer, I wrote a song about the fire for my band The Four Fathers, lamenting those whose lives were so “needlessly lost”, and calling for those responsible — “those who only count the profit not the human cost” — to be held accountable. We first played it live, at a benefit gig for a housing campaign in Tottenham, in September, recorded it with a German TV crew at the end of October, and released the video in December, and we have continued to play it live across the capital and elsewhere, making a small contribution to the effort to refuse to allow those responsible for the disaster to move on without a serious change in the culture that allowed it to happen. 

That culture — cost-cutting in the search for profits, rather than ensuring the safety of tenants and leaseholders — came from central government, from Kensington and Chelsea Council, from the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which had taken over the management of all the borough’s social housing, and from the various contractors involved in the lethal refurbishment of the tower, when its structural integrity was fatally undermined. Read the rest of this entry »

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A few months ago, I was delighted to be approached by Pavel Troughton, a student at London College of Communication (LCC), part of the University of the Arts London (UAL), who was writing an article about protest music for the student magazine Artefact. I promoted it at the time via social media, but I never got round to commenting on it here, so I thought now would be a good time, as my band The Four Fathers continue to play protest music, and to try to gauge what interest there is, or isn’t, in music that challenges the political realities of modern life, via the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ gigs I’ve been organising, our appearances with bands like the Commie Faggots, who play theatrical singalong protest music, and our recordings, available via Bandcamp.

I met Pavel Troughton at a cafe near my home in Brockley, south east London, and we had a wide-ranging discussion about the role of protest music today, which is of great interest to me, as I grew up at a significant time for protest music, as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s, not only following punk bands, post-punk bands and the Two-Tone movement, but also drawing on protest music from the 60s and early 70s as well. 

In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and with the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s so comparatively recent, it was difficult not to be politicised at that time. Some of the punks pretended to be apolitical, but really that was an affectation. Of course, many musicians only pretended to be political to get laid or get rich (or both), as had also been true in the 60s and early 70s (does anyone really think the colossally materialistic hornbag Mick Jagger genuinely had any interest in being a ‘Street Fighting Man’, for example?), but political engagement and counter-cultural impulses were genuine in this period, and elements of that effortlessly survived into the 90s, when, after Margaret Thatcher’s eventual fall from grace, John Major struggled to maintain control of a country in which dissent was widespread, via the iconoclastic hedonism of the rave scene and the extraordinary pagan and anarchic energy of the road protest movement. For more on the above, feel free to check out my books Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, which have chapters on this period in modern British history. Read the rest of this entry »