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I’m delighted to announce that, on Thursday December 5, an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork, “Don’t Forget Us Here”, named after the 2021 memoir of former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, will be launching at Rich Mix, a cultural and community space in Shoreditch, at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA.

The exhibition will be running until January 5, with an opening event, starting at 6pm on December 5, featuring Mansoor and myself as speakers. It was organized by the UK Guantánamo Network (an umbrella group of organizations calling for Guantánamo’s closure), in collaboration with Amnesty International UK, and was put together by Lise Rossi and Dominique O’Neil, core team members of the UK Guantánamo Network, and Amnesty International members.

The exhibition — the first in the UK — is a version of an exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners that first opened at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City in October 2017, and that has since toured across the US, as well as in Berlin and the European Parliament.

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Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.

Last week I paid a visit to DIY Cultures, a wonderful — and wonderfully packed — one-day event celebrating zines and the DIY ethos at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, curated by a core collective of Sofia Niazi, my friend Hamja Ahsan and Helena Wee, and was pleasantly reminded of the presence of the counter-culture, perhaps best summed up as an oppositional force to the prevailing culture, which has long fascinated me, and in search of which I am currently bouncing around ideas for a writing project I’d like to undertake.

Next week it will be exactly ten years since I started publishing articles here — on an almost daily basis — relating, for the most part, to Guantánamo and related issues. Roll back another year, to March 2006, and my Guantánamo project began in earnest, with 14 months of research and writing for my book The Guantánamo Files.

Before that, however, I had been interested more in notions of the counter-culture than championing and trying to reinforce the notion that there are absolute lines that societies that claim to respect the law must not cross — involving torture and imprisoning people indefinitely without charge or trial. Read the rest of this entry »