Dear friends, fans, followers and supporters,
For nearly two decades, I’ve devoted most of my working life — and much of my waking, non-working life — to the largely thankless task of exposing the truth about the prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the men and boys held there, revealing how most of them were not “the worst of the worst”, and had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or terrorism, railing against the abhorrent lawlessness and brutality of the prison, and campaigning assiduously to try and get it closed.
Throughout this time, I have been reliant on you, my readers, to support me in my work as the prison’s foremost independent opponent, a reader-funded independent journalist and activist, free of the lamentable indifference or amnesia of most of the mainstream media, and able to articulate freely and persistently why it is so important not to allow the victims of Guantánamo to be dehumanized, and why the prison is, and has been consistently, a legal, moral and ethical abomination.
As a result of my regular quarterly appeals for support, many of you have, over the years, made one-off donations, or, in some cases, have becoming subscribers, donating a regular amount every month — all of which is essential to allow me to continue to work towards Guantánamo’s eventual closure.
On Wednesday, I was delighted to talk once more with Chris Cook, for his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, which has been running weekly since 1999, and, in Chris’ words, “providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.” Chris first found me about 15 years ago, and has interviewed me regularly ever since, and if you’d like to hear our 30-minute interview, as well as an interview with the Canadian journalist, author, and activist Yves Engler, you can find it here on the Gorilla Radio Substack page.
My interviews with Chris often deal with the main focus of my work, the seemingly uncloseable prison at Guantánamo Bay, although we’ve also discussed numerous other topics over the years, including, over the last year, the grotesque genocide being undertaken by the State of Israel in the Gaza Strip.
We’ve also spoken frequently about Julian Assange, with whom I worked on WikiLeaks’ release of the Guantánamo Files in 2011, and much of our interview on Wednesday was taken up with a discussion of Julian’s testimony at a hearing of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg on Monday.
I recently returned from a ten-day digital detox, during a family holiday in Sicily, which not only involved me being completely offline — away from the internet and from all social media — but also involved me having no information whatsoever about the outside world, not watching any news or even glimpsing a single headline in a newspaper.
It was a liberating, albeit brief experience, and not just because summer holidays — unknown to the working class until the 20th century, and not widely involving foreign travel until the dawn of cheap flights and package holidays in the 1980s — are meant to be a time when we take a break from the stresses and strains of our working lives.
In my case, it was an important, perhaps crucial psychological break from an accumulation of often almost intolerable bleakness brought about by the particularly difficult times we’re all living through right now, largely involving the derangement of our leaders, and of almost all political discourse, all of which has been exacerbated by my presence in an often suffocating media and social media landscape.
Over the last week, racist far-right rioting has erupted in towns and cities across the UK, cynically engineered by provocateurs who used a horrendous homicidal attack on a children’s dance class in Southport on July 29, at which three girls were stabbed to death, to falsely suggest that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had recently arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in a small boat.
The reality was that the attacker was an evidently severely troubled 17-year old, born in the UK, whose Christian parents came to the UK from Rwanda, but the lies had a baleful life of their own, galvanising far-right groups and individuals from across the country, committed to Islamophobic violence, and connected via the swamp of unregulated or barely regulated social media and chat groups, to descend on Southport, just a day after the stabbings, where they targeted a mosque, fought with police officers, injuring 50, set fire to a police van, and damaged cars, homes and businesses.
The day after, July 31, the rioting spread to Hartlepool, where a mosque was attacked, Manchester and Aldershot, where hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked, and London, where rioters clashed with police in Whitehall.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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