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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

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.

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 wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

I have nothing but praise for “Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison,” a brand-new book, just published by Abrams, which was written by Portland-based multi-media journalist Sarah Mirk, and illustrated by a number of talented graphic artists.

I should say upfront that I was the fact checker for the book, having been in contact with Sarah for many years. In 2018, I appeared, in comic book form, illustrated by the Australian artist Jess Parker, in Guantánamo Bay is Still Open. Still. STILL!, a story in the comics anthology magazine The Nib, for which Sarah is an editor, based on an interview she had conducted with me in October 2017.

Previously, I had met Sarah in London in January 2009, when she came to the UK with former Guantánamo guard Chris Arendt for an extraordinary tour of the UK, also featuring former prisoner and British citizen Moazzam Begg (released in 2005) and other ex-prisoners, called “Two Sides, One Story,” which was organized by the advocacy group Cageprisoners (now CAGE).

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.

Three weeks ago, while I was in the US on my annual tour calling for the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed, to coincide with the 16th anniversary of its opening, on January 11, I received some great news from a writer friend, Sarah Mirk, that a comic about Guantánamo, in which I featured, had just been published on the website of The Nib, “a daily comics publication that is part of First Look Media,” the organization set up in 2013 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, which also includes The Intercept.

The comic is entitled, Guantánamo Bay is Still Open. Still. STILL!, and Sarah had interviewed me for it in October, although I didn’t know at the time that I would actually be immortalized in comic form!

As I explained when I posted the link on Facebook, “OK, this is very, very cool. I am now a comic book star! What else is left to achieve? Sarah Mirk, who I met in 2009 when she came to the UK with former Guantánamo guard Chris Arendt for Cageprisoners’ powerful ‘Two Sides, One Story‘ tour of the UK, with Moazzam Begg and other ex-prisoners, interviewed me recently, and used that interview as the basis for a comic about Guantánamo, illustrated by the talented Australian artist Jess Parker.”

Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday August 1, I’ll be taking part, via teleconferencing, in “The Grotesque Injustice of Guantánamo: An Insiders’ Account,” an event in Portland, Oregon organized by peace activist and Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson and Laura Sandow, a US Navy veteran, who was serving at Guantánamo when George W. Bush’s “war on terror” prison opened in January 2002.

Brian was the commander of a security unit in Vietnam, and is a trained lawyer and criminologist. He recently participated in a hunger strike in Portland in solidarity with the Guantánamo hunger strikers, and is the author of Blood On The Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson (PM Press, 2011).

Laura first asked me to be involved back in June, when she and Brian had decided to put an event together, and her request coincided with the publication of her story in the online comic magazine Symbolia, in a powerful strip written by the journalist Sarah Mirk, based on an interview with Laura, and drawn by Lucy Bellwood. See this Think Progress article for excerpts from Laura’s story. As she explained to me in a recent email, “The more people that understand this atrocity [the prison at Guantánamo Bay], the more likely we are to prevent it from becoming an acceptable course of action for future policy decisions.”

The event is sponsored by Veterans for Peace Chapter 72, and takes place in the Buchan Room at the First Unitarian Church, 1226 SW Salmon Street, Portland, Oregon 97205, beginning at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30 pm, and there is a suggested sliding-scale donation of $5 to $20 for the event, although the organizers stress that no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Read the rest of this entry »