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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.

In the epidemic of disasters afflicting the world, it’s sometimes hard to even remember that, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the US government is still holding 30 men, detained for between 15 and 22 years, who, for the most part, have never been charged with crimes, and are imprisoned, apparently indefinitely, without charge or trial.

With just a fortnight to go until the US Presidential Election, these men’s plight has become politically invisible, even though their treatment — outside of all norms governing the deprivation of liberty of individuals — has, from the beginning, relied on their demonization and dehumanization as Muslims, with a clear line stretching from their fundamentally lawless imprisonment to the way that demonized and dehumanized Muslims are being treated in the Gaza Strip today.

Now suffering under their fourth president, the men at Guantánamo had some hope, when Joe Biden took office, that positive changes were on the horizon. NGOs and lawyers had lobbied his transition team, urging that, at the very least, he address the plight of those specifically imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, as opposed to those charged in the military commissions, a broken system, first introduced after the 9/11 attacks, before Guantánamo even opened, albeit one with some tangential connection to the law.

Read the rest of this entry »

Please listen to “Neo-Liberal Bullshit Blues” by my band The Four Fathers, with its verse about how “Donald Trump is no answer / He’s just a selfish and dangerous fool / He’s just another version / Of the Neo-Liberal Bullshit Blues.”

Like June 23, 2016, November 8, 2016 will go down in the history books as a day when dreams of progress and tolerance and hope were brutally dashed. On June 23, in the UK, a slim majority of voters who could be bothered to turn out to vote in the EU referendum gave a kicking to the British establishment and endorsed racism and xenophobia, damaging the economy for no discernibly important reason whatsoever, making us a laughing stock around the world, and resetting the UK’s default position on tolerance to one in which foreigners can be openly abused, and anyone foreign-born, or appearing to be foreign-born, can be treated as “the other.”

In the US, as Jonathan Freedland wrote for the Guardian today, “We thought the United States would step back from the abyss. We believed … that Americans would not, in the end, hand the most powerful office on earth to an unstable bigot, sexual predator and compulsive liar.”

And yet, that is exactly what happened, and the parallels with the UK are, unfortunately, illuminating. Voters gave a kicking to the establishment, represented by Hillary Clinton, and white voters turned to Trump, the showman who, like Nigel Farage, pretended to be a “man of the people,” even though that was patently untrue. Read the rest of this entry »