Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Last week, the 45th “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., outside the Houses of Parliament in London, in Brussels, the home of the European Parliament, and in New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. Campaigners in Cobleskill, NY joined us on Saturday October 10, and, on the weekend of October 3-4, attendees at the AIUSA Los Angeles Western Regional Activism Conference also took part.

I remain, as always, immensely grateful to our small but dedicated global family of campaigners who come together once a month to metaphorically hold up candles around the world to show that not everyone has been engulfed in the general amnesia and indifference regarding the continuing existence of Guantánamo, and, just as importantly, to send a message to the 15 men still held that they haven’t been forgotten.

Please check out the photos below, and read on for my thoughts on this particular occasion, a month after the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that led to the establishment of Guantánamo, and with just three months to go until we mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, 2027. Next month, the vigils take place on November 4, the day after the US midterm elections, when, we hope, the malignant Trump administration will lose control of Congress, so that those of us who care about Guantánamo will be able to once more work with the handful of sympathetic Democrats who are capable of putting the unresolved scandal of Guantánamo back on the agenda. Do join us if you can!

I first established the monthly vigils back in February 2023, when Joe Biden was in the White House, and it seemed to me that our annual vigils, held on January 11 every year to mark the anniversary of the prison’s opening, weren’t enough to maintain pressure on the administration to address the fact that 20 of the 34 men still held at that time had been approved for release, but were still imprisoned. Over the last two years of the Biden administration, our efforts maintaining visibility for Guantánamo and the men still held helped to secure the release of 19 of the 34 men still held, including most, but sadly not all of those approved for release.

As I noted when I posted the flier for this month’s vigils, although only 15 men are still held at Guantánamo, out of the 779 men and boys held at the prison since it first opened, they are all still held in “states of such fundamental lawlessness that if any other country — with one exception, as discussed below — was holding people in similar conditions they would be subjected to international condemnation.”

As I explained, “Six are held without charge or trial (like the overwhelming majority of the 779 individuals held throughout Guantánamo’s unforgivably long history), six have been charged with terrorism-related crimes but are caught up in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings because of the taint of the torture to which they were subjected in CIA ‘black sites’, two have been convicted (with one serving a life sentence in solitary confinement), and one is in legal limbo after being ruled unfit to stand trial because of psychosis brought on by his torture in the CIA ‘black sites.’”

The exception I mentioned in my post is, of course, the State of Israel, which is currently holding 9,265 Palestinian “security prisoners” in its gulag of torture prisons for Palestinians. 4,520 of these prisoners — nearly six times as many prisoners as have been held at Guantánamo throughout its nearly 25-year history — are held without charge or trial, under “administrative detention”, inherited from the British, or as “unlawful combatants”, under a law passed in 2002, around the same time that George W. Bush stripped the men and boys held at Guantánamo of all their rights as human beings by defining them as “unlawful enemy combatants.”

In addition, since October 7, Israel has also refused to allow the ICRC (the International Committee of the Red Cross), the only international and objective monitor of prison conditions, to visit any of the Palestinian “security prisoners.” This is an almost totally ignored scandal whose significance can readily be appreciated through a recognition that, even at the height of its global “war on terror”, the Bush administration allowed ICRC visits to almost every prisoner at Guantánamo, and only excluded the ICRC from its CIA “black site” torture prisons, where 119 prisoners were held.

For further information, see my recent post about Israel’s ongoing ban on ICRC visits, in defiance of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, and please see below additional photos from last week’s vigils, including some specifically noting the similarities between Guantánamo and Israel’s prisons for Palestinians. These comparisons were made all the more pointed and powerful because last week’s vigils took place on October 7, marking the third anniversary of the attacks on southern Israel by militants who broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, but also, more horrifically, marking the start of Israel’s response, the almost unimaginably depraved ongoing genocide, which I marked in an article entitled, Three Years of Gaza as a Ghetto of Genocidal Extermination.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage 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 and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Last Wednesday, the 44th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world — in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit, outside the Houses of Parliament in London, and outside the European Parliament in Brussels. Friends in San Francisco joined us, as did two former Guantánamo prisoners, Mansoor Adayfi in Belgrade, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi in the Netherlands.

Campaigners in Washington, D.C., outside the heart of the beast, the White House, were unable to make the “First Wednesday” date, and, instead, held a vigil on Friday September 11, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to the Bush administration’s sickening, brutal and counter-productive global “war on terror”, and the establishment of Guantánamo, the last physical manifestation of that failed war, whose polluting influence has contaminated US law to this day.

Last Wednesday’s vigils coincided with a grim milestone in Guantánamo’s history — 9,000 days of the prison’s existence, and at all the vigils supporters held up the Close Guantánamo campaign’s 9,000 days poster, the latest in an initiative that has been running since January 2018, marking every 100 days of the prison’s existence with photos of supporters standing with the posters to show support for our unsilenceable demand for the hellhole of Guantánamo to finally be closed.

We received over 50 photos in total, all of which can be found here on the Close Guantánamo website. Some of these photos are also posted below, along with photos from the vigils, and I hope you’ll also read on for my reflections on how and why Guantánamo has always been, and always will be a grotesque and irredeemable legal, moral and ethnical abomination that pollutes the soul of the US every day that it is open, and for profiles of the 15 men still held in varying states of fundamental lawlessness.

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In a world of endless, pointless distractions, of 24-hour rolling news that means that people can’t even remember what happened yesterday, of a gloating genocide in Gaza that is tearing our hearts apart, but that no one can stop, and of extreme heat and drought that is telling us, globally, that our days on our unique, miraculous planet are well and truly numbered, because of our inability to stop burning fossil fuels, it’s nothing short of a miracle that, once a month, a handful of diligent activists across the US and around the world get together to hold coordinated vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The vigils — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., outside the Houses of Parliament in London, outside the European Parliament in Brussels, and in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY, Mexico City and Belgrade — began 43 months ago, in February 2023, as a concerted effort to prevent Guantánamo, routinely engulfed in the collective amnesia of the political and media establishments, from being entirely forgotten.

Please see the photos below, of activists from, amongst other groups and organizations, Amnesty International, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait, and read on for my assessment of why remembering Guantánamo and calling for its closure is still so essential, followed by more photos.

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Despite unprecedented global chaos caused by just two rogue nations — the US and Israel — who have wilfully eviscerated all the rules regarding the conduct of warfare over the last two and a half years, and massively increasing the geographical scope of their illegal actions over the last six weeks, campaigners across the US and around the world held their 39th monthly consecutive global vigils for the closure of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay last week.

On Wednesday April 1, campaigners gathered outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York City and Detroit, while other campaigners were outside the Houses of Parliament in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, and in Mexico City. The Saturday before, on “No Kings Day”, campaigners in San Francisco highlighted the rank injustice of the prison’s continued existence, with other campaigners, in Cobleskill, NY, joining on Saturday April 4, as part of weekly protests reflecting the demands of the times that have been running every Saturday for the last 25 years. There were also solo participants in Oakland, CA and in Liège, Belgium.

Please see below for photos from all of the vigils, and read on for my assessment of the importance of the vigils as part of wider resistance to the collapse into depravity  of all notions of any kind of moral order since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza 30 achingly long months ago.

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On March 4, the “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place in Washington, D.C., New York City, Detroit, London and Brussels, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi holding a solo vigil in Belgrade, and with campaigners in Cobleskill, NY joining us on Saturday March 7, when Gavrilah Wells, an Amnesty campaigner from San Francisco, also sent photos from AIUSA’s Human Rights Conference and AGM in Washington, D.C.

These were the 38th successive monthly vigils for the prison’s closure, after I initiated them in February 2023, following the example established by campaigners in London five months before, securing the support of friends and colleagues across the US, and in Brussels and Mexico City, who, ever since, have shown an implacable commitment to keeping Guantánamo and its many injustices visible, in defiance of the tendency of politicians and the mainstream media to behave as though it no longer exists.

I’m hugely impressed that so many vigils took place given the proximity of the date to the all-encompassing horror of the launch of the illegal and unprovoked joint US-Israeli “war” on Iran just four days before, which, like a black hole of injustice, has understandably swallowed up almost everyone’s time and energy.

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Between Saturday January 10 and Monday January 12, an impressive 18 vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world, marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of the prison, with a 19th taking place on January 15.

Eleven of these vigils were by campaigners who have been taking part in the monthly coordinated “First Wednesday” global vigils that I initiated three years ago, and that have been taking place every month ever since.

Seven of these are at locations in the US — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cobleskill, NY, and Portland, OR — while the other four are in London, Brussels and Mexico City, with former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi holding a solo vigil in Belgrade.

Eight more groups also joined us. Five of these were in the US — in Augusta, ME, Cleveland, OH, Greenfield, MA and Raleigh, NC, where annual vigils take place on a regular basis, and in Honolulu in Hawaii, while three others, initiated by Mansoor, took place in Rome, Italy, in Warsaw, Poland and at Shannon Airport in Ireland.

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Last Wednesday, December 3, groups of stalwart campaigners gathered across the US and around the world for the 35th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The “First Wednesday” vigils took place outside the White House in Washington, D.C., and in London, New York City, Brussels, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, OR, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also holding a solo vigil in Belgrade. Further vigils took place in Cobleskill, NY on Saturday December 6, and outside the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco on Sunday December 7.

As usual, the vigils involved committed campaigners from various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Veterans for Peace, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, the Peacemakers of Schoharie County, and various activist groups in New York City, with support from numerous other organizations, including NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture), whose banners feature prominently at some of the vigils.

Please see below for the photos, and comments from the participants, and read on for my reflections on the grimness of this particular milestone, as we near what ought to have been unthinkable — the 24th anniversary, on January 11, 2026, of the opening of the Guantánamo prison, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness.

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On Wednesday November 5, campaigners calling for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay — and an end to its more recent use to hold migrants seized in Donald Trump’s disturbing “war on migrants” — gathered at significant locations across the US and globally for the 34th successive monthly coordinated Close Guantánamo vigils.

The “First Wednesday” vigils took place in Washington, D.C., London, New York, Brussels, Portland, Detroit and Los Angeles — with San Francisco following on November 6, and Cobleskill, NY on November 8 — and former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also sending a photo from an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ art in Giessen, in Germany.

As ever, the vigils involved committed campaigners from various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Veterans for Peace, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, the Peacemakers of Schoharie County, and various activist groups in New York City, with support from numerous other organizations, and I’m immensely grateful to our small but dedicated family of global activists for their dedication to shining a light on an enduring injustice that, shamefully, has largely been swallowed up in amnesia and inertia.

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Last Wednesday, October 1, the world’s most dedicated campaigners for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay gathered, at significant locations across the US and globally, for the 33rd successive monthly coordinated Close Guantánamo vigils — in Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Brussels, Mexico City, Portland, Detroit, Los Angeles and Belgrade — with campaigners in Irvine, CA holding an indoor vigil, and with the redoubtable progressive outpost of Cobleskill, NY following on Saturday October 4.

The monthly “First Wednesday” vigils involve campaigners from various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, the Peacemakers of Schoharie County, and various activist groups in New York City, with support from numerous other organizations.

As ever, I’m immensely proud of our little global family of activists, all of whom recognize the significance of the enduring injustice of Guantánamo, and its baleful influence on brutal and unjust detention policies from Israel to El Salvador and, more recently, the US mainland, via the expansion of fundamentally lawless detention facilities run by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as part of the malignant “war on migrants” that Donald Trump launched when he took office in January.

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Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Last Wednesday, September 3, the 32nd consecutive monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place at five locations across the US — in Washington, D.C., New York, Portland, OR, Los Angeles and Detroit — and in London and Brussels.

In Kansas, Amnesty International USA death penalty abolition campaigners also joined in, as did former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi in Belgrade, and two dedicated Close Guantánamo supporters in Irvine, CA, and, on Saturday September 6, campaigners in Cobleskill, NY also took part. Mexico City had to cancel this month, but will be back on October 1.

My thanks as always to the dedication of everyone involved, from organizations including numerous Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, the Peacemakers of Schoharie County, and various activist groups in New York City, with support from numerous other organizations.

Please see below for photos from the vigils, and read on for my report, which this month focuses on the 24th anniversary, today, of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which not only led to the establishment of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and a network of CIA “black site” torture prisons around the world, but also led to a fatal erosion of the rules governing warfare and the treatment of individuals deprived of their liberty that haunt us to this day.

I was away for the “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure last week, on a much-needed trip to Italy with my family, where I undertook a thorough digital detox, switching off from all news of the outside world for eleven days, which I recommend to anyone who struggles not to be overwhelmed by the relentlessness of the 24/7 live-streamed horrors of the world in 2025.

My return, and my belated publication of these photos from the day, coincides, fortuitously, with the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US mainland on September 11, 2001, which continues to cast a baleful shadow on all of the supposed protections established after the Second World War governing the parameters of warfare and the acceptable treatment of prisoners, even if the relentless focus on it that was repeated every year has now faded away, as almost no one under the age of 30 in the US has any memory of it whatsoever.

The prison at Guantánamo Bay is the last corrosive bastion of the discredited flight from international and domestic laws and treaties that George W. Bush initiated when he launched a global “war on terror” in the wake of the attacks.

Just 15 men are still held — out of the 779 in total held by the US military since the prison was established four months after the 9/11 attacks, on January 11, 2002 — but all are still victims of the chaos that ensues when internationally agreed rules and laws are jettisoned in pursuit of vengeance; in the “war on terror”, via the claim that the severity of the the 9/11 attacks, in which 2,977 people were killed, was such that it represented a “new paradigm” for the conduct of warfare, in which “quaint” notions like the Geneva Conventions became irrelevant, torture was permissible, the entire world was regarded as a battlefield, and, as then-Vice President Dick Cheney memorably and chillingly declared shortly after the attacks, the US would cross over to “the dark side” to seek revenge and to ensure its future security.

The “black sites” may be long gone, but the damage caused by the recklessness, lawlessness and cruelty of the “war on terror” lives on, both at Guantánamo itself, where six of the 15 men still held — some previously tortured in the “black sites” — have, monstrously, been imprisoned for over two decades without charge or trial, and where the other men — most also previously tortured in the “black sites” — continue to be denied any fundamental justice. Although they have been charged with crimes, the method chosen for their prosecution, the military commissions, unwisely dredged up from the history books by the Bush administration, is so flawed that most of the cases remain deadlocked in a Groundhog Day of endless pre-trial hearings, in which the defense teams seek to expose the full details of the torture to which the men were subjected, while prosecutors do their utmost to prevent it.

Even for those freed — almost all as a result of administrative review processes, rather than any recognized legal basis — many, if not most, remain dogged to some extent by the taint of Guantánamo, with limited rights and limited freedom of movement, despite never having been charged with any crimes.

In numerous cases, men resettled in third countries, because successive US governments have regarded it as unsafe to repatriate them, have found that the elusive freedom they were promised has never materialized, and some have found post-Guantánamo life to be even more arduous and unjust than their experiences at Guantánamo itself, as their host countries have reneged on whatever promises were made in their secret resettlement agreements with the US, while the US itself has largely shown little or no interest in their fate, despite their continuing obligations under international humanitarian law.

Beyond the specific victims of the “war on terror”, the US’s flight from reason, law and decency post-9/11 has also made the world a much darker place, normalizing torture, normalizing indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, and normalizing a perilous notion of global warfare in which borders — and notions that any kind of military aggression can only be conducted between two parties that are officially at war — have become irrelevant.

Notoriously, the US itself not only launched two wars of aggression and occupation in response to the 9/11 attacks — in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also behaved as though it was also perfectly acceptable to kidnap people anywhere on earth, to establish torture prisons in other countries, and also to undertake air strikes and drone attacks on countries with which it was not at war.

On this particular anniversary, it’s appropriate, I think, to reflect on how much of the poisonous legacy of the US’s “war on terror” continues to reverberate in particular in the State of Israel, whose long and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people provided a template for the US’s post-9/11 policies of indefinite, extrajudicial imprisonment without charge or trial via the “administrative detention” policies that it has long used to hold Palestinians without charge and without rights in its vast network of abhorrent prisons in which the use of torture is also rife.

In Gaza, where, unthinkably, Israel is nearing the second anniversary of its relentless genocide of the Palestinian people in response to the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — and which President Biden, to his shame, explicitly compared to the 9/11 attacks — it’s worth reflecting that, although not explicitly described as such, Israel’s entire justification for its grotesque slaughter of civilians and its almost entire erasure of Gaza’s built environment is that it is engaged in its own “war on terror”, a war on Hamas in which it has deliberately blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, and frames its grotesque genocidal actions as a legitimate assault on “terrorists.”

In addition, while Israel has never shied away from extrajudicially pursuing and executing individuals abroad who it regarded as enemies — which it was engaged in long before 9/11 — it’s also difficult not to see its actions over the last 23 months — not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but also via its targeted assassinations of individuals in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and, most recently, in Qatar and Yemen — as being explicitly perceived within Israel (and in large parts of the US political establishment) as justified by the US’s post-9/11 assertion that, in pursuit of “terrorists”, the entire world is a legitimate battlefield.

If the US’s response to the 9/11 attacks was a disturbing assault on the post-WWII “rules-based order”, Israel’s actions over the last 23 months would seem to amount to the final nail in its coffin. The human cost has also been immense. By even the most conservative estimates, the US-led post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq killed 200 times as many people as were killed on 9/11. Officially, Israel has, to date, killed 60 times as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis killed on October 7, but, as experts have definitively established, that is a serious undercount, and Israel may already have passed that unforgivable ratio, confirming that, in the new world disorder that began the day after September 11, 2001, the relentless brandishing of the word “terrorist” is apparently sufficient to justify mass slaughter as revenge on a truly heartbreaking and unforgivable scale.

Hopefully, by next year, when we mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the genocide in Gaza will somehow have been brought to an end, but, even if it is, the monstrous crimes of both the US in its “war on terror” and Israel in its opportunistic reimagining of it (fully backed, of course, by the US and other western countries) need to be so robustly condemned that the blood-stained tide of 21st century history — in which powerful but fundamentally deranged nations have conceived of mass genocidal slaughter as “counter-terrorism” — are fundamentally held accountable so that “never again” might mean what it was meant to mean in the wake of the Nazis’ atrocities in the Second World War.

* * * * *

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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage 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 and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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