Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

The prison at Guantánamo Bay —- and the plight of the 40 men still held there — has, in general, fallen so far off America’s radar that it is unsurprising that many in the US think that it has closed down.

So little interest is there in Guantánamo that the days when I was regularly asked to discuss it on US radio stations are, sadly, long gone, and so I was delighted last week to be asked to discuss it with Linda Olsen-Osterlund, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon.

The one-hour show is here as an MP3, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week I was delighted to be invited, with the filmmaker Nikita Woolfe, to discuss ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the documentary film Niki directed, and which I narrate — and, specifically, the ‘Inspire2Resist’ handbook Niki has put together, with a bit of help from me — on Dissident Island Radio, which describes itself as “a radical internet radio show broadcasting on the first and third Friday of every month from the London Action Resource Centre”, a wonderful community space in Whitechapel.

The show is here as an MP3 (and here on the website), and our section is from 27:30 to 46:00, with our reflections on resistance to the ‘regeneration’ industry, and the many forms it takes, including some mention of the ongoing resistance to ‘regeneration’ in Deptford, via the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign that I’m part of (and see the archive here and here). Our host, Patrick, had done his research, and the interview was exactly the kind of detailed discussion that rarely makes it into the mainstream media.

In discussing who the handbook is for, I stressed that anyone living in social housing is under threat, as councils, housing associations and housing developers continue to work towards destroying secure and genuinely affordable social housing, either through estate demolitions, or through other ongoing efforts to price people out of their homes — like the new rental regime introduced by Sadiq Khan, which I wrote about here. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

It’s nearly three weeks since the 17th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the flurry of media activity that accompanied that somber occasion — although, as is typical, with little or no interest from the mainstream US media — has now largely faded away.

In an effort to keep interest in Guantánamo alive, I will continue to write about it as much as possible this year, to campaign for its closure, and to speak about the need for it to be closed to anyone who shows an interest.

One such person is Chris Cook, in Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada, who has interviewed me on numerous occasions after my annual US visits to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the anniversary of its opening (see our interviews in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017). Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

How time flies. It’s almost a week since I left the US after my annual visit to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the anniversary of its opening, and here I am still posting videos and audio links of shows I took part in.

That’s a good sign, however. On the last two anniversaries, the focus on Guantánamo had almost entirely disappeared. Two years ago, we were caught in the limbo between the outgoing administration of Barack Obama and the imminent arrival of Donald Trump, and last year, after Trump’s first year in office, the outrage and exhaustion was such that Guantánamo barely got a look-in.

A year on, and you’d be excused for thinking that the situation would only be worse, but although that certainly seems true when it comes to Trump — now obsessed with his Mexican wall, and having shut down the federal government for the longest period in US history (marking a calendar month today) — it is not true of those opposing him on many fronts, including Guantánamo. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

I’m nearing the end of my ten-day trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the 17th anniversary of its opening, and in this article I’d like to follow up on my previous analysis of what I’ve found on trip, as explained in my article, On My Annual US Visit to Call for the Closure of Guantánamo, Reporting Resistance in Trump’s Shutdown America.

In that article, I linked to a panel discussion at the New America Foundation, and a radio show I undertook with Michael Slate, and below, bringing the story more up to date, I’m posting below the video of the vigil outside the White House, featuring Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Close Guantánamo, CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Defending Rights & Dissent, Justice for Muslims Collective, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

As ever, Witness Against Torture took the lead on actions across the capital during the week before the anniversary, while they were staying a local church and fasting, and their reports can be found here, here, here and here. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

I’m six days into my annual trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, on and around the 17th anniversary of its opening (on January 11), and while it would be foolish to suggest, in any sense, that there is going to be any sort of movement on Guantánamo from the execrable Donald Trump, it’s certainly noticeable that, for the first time for three years, there is a real energy in the movement to finally get Guantánamo closed.

Three years ago, there was an energy to the efforts to get Barack Obama to close Guantánamo before he left office (which didn’t work, but did lead to him reducing the prison’s population to just 41 men), but two years ago we were caught in a dreadful limbo between the end of Obama and the start of Trump, and last year everyone seemed pretty crushed by the grim realities of Trump’s first year in office.

In part, this is just one aspect of what looks to be a growing resistance to Donald Trump on numerous fronts, and of course it’s not insignificant that I arrived. on Monday evening, during Trump’s petulant government shutdown, in which, to pursue his vile racist obsession with a wildly expensive expansion of the wall between the US and Mexico, he has shut down the salaries of millions of Americans who work for the government. At the time of writing, I’m glad to note, the effects of the shutdown seem to be damaging him in terms of his popularity. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week I was in Bristol for a screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the new documentary film about the cynical destruction of council estates, and residents’ brave resistance to the destruction of their homes, which I narrate. The screening was at the People’s Republic of Stoke Croft, a pioneering community space in a once-neglected area of Bristol that has now started to be devoured by the insatiable profiteers of the “regeneration” industry. My article about the screening is here, and a brief report about the screening is here, and while I was there I was also interviewed by Tony Gosling for Bristol Community Radio, which is based in the PRSC complex.

Tony and I have known each other for many years, through a shared interest in Britain’s counter-culture, and it was great to take part in his politics show for the station as the author of two very relevant books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. Although we discussed the film, that interview has not yet been broadcast, because Tony’s primary focus was on discussing the traveller community of the 1970s and 80s, the free festival scene, focused particularly on Stonehenge and Glastonbury, and the Battle of the Beanfield, on June 1, 1985, when, with Margaret Thatcher’s blessing, 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD violently decommissioned the convoy of vehicles — containing men, women and children — that was en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.

To discuss the above, Tony had also contacted Sean, a veteran traveller, who still lives in a vehicle, and still upholds the DiY values of that time. We had a wonderful discussion over 40 minutes, which Tony has put on YouTube, illustrated with traveller photos by Alan Lodge, and which I’ve cross-posted below. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Last week, I was delighted to talk to Linda Olson-Osterlund for the morning show, Political Perspectives, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. Linda has been talking to me about Guantánamo for many years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to her. 

The show is available here — and here as an MP3 — and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful. Unfortunately, KBOO had a new telephone system, which didn’t allow foreign calls, and so the first 12 minutes of the show feature some music by Bill Frissell, before Linda introduced me at 12:20, prior to our interview beginning at 15:00.

Linda and I spent the first ten minutes talking about the habeas corpus petition submitted by lawyers for eleven of the remaining 41 prisoners at Guantánamo on January 11, the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison. As I explained in a recent article, the lawyers argued, as a press release by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights put it, that “[Donald] Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Last week I was delighted to be invited to discuss Guantánamo, George W. Bush, torture and the “war on terror” by Scott Horton, the libertarian, Texan-based radio host, and the author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, in which, as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg notes in a review, he “masterfully explains the tragedy of America’s longest war and makes the case for immediate withdrawal.”

Scott and I have been talking several times a year — and sometime more frequently — since September 2007, when we first spoke about the case of US “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla, tortured on the US mainland. Our interviews have generally been for 20-25 minutes, but for our latest interview the brakes were off, and we spoke for a whole hour.

The show is available here, or here as an MP3, and I wholeheartedly recommend it as a tour through the darkness of the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks, as manifested in CIA “black sites,” in the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” to torture prisons in other countries, in Guantánamo, and in the wars — and the accompanying lawless prisons — in Afghanistan and Iraq. We also looked at the sad failures of the Obama years — not only his failure to close Guantánamo, but how extrajudicial assassination by drones replaced the messy detention, rendition and torture program of the Bush years, but is no more legally or morally acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration, including my current US visit.

Last Thursday, January 11, was the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, as I have done every January since 2011, I traveled from London to join campaigners calling for the prison’s closure outside the White House — as well as taking part in other events on an around the anniversary.

This year, as I reported in an article, Telling Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo: My Report on an Inspiring 24 Hours of Protest and Resistance in Washington, D.C. on the 16th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, and in a photo set on Flickr, there was renewed energy for a fight to get Guantánamo closed, after a year in which campaigners and lawyers struggled to keep the focus on Guantánamo in the general tsunami of bad news emanating from the Trump administration.

We succeeded only when something so terrible happened that it erupted through the general patina of indifference towards Guantánamo — the treatment of hunger strikers, who claimed in September that the military, under new instructions, was no longer monitoring their health, the decision by the chief judge of Guantánamo’s broken military commission trial system to imprison the head of the defense team for defending the right of civilian attorneys to resign after they discovered that the government was spying on them, and the decision by the military, after an exhibition of the prisoners’ art went on display in New York, to overreact to the resultant humanizing of the prisoners (which they themselves had facilitated by providing art classes to the prisoners in the first place) by publicly threatening to burn all their artwork in future. Read the rest of this entry »