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.

 

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist 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.

 

For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has been engaged in an unspeakably horrific genocide in Gaza, in which, at a bare minimum, over 70,000 people — mostly civilians — have been murdered, as well as massively increasing the number of Palestinians, to over 9,000, who are held in a grotesque and largely arbitrary apartheid prison system, for Palestinians only, in which torture is mandatory, rape is widespread, and over a hundred Palestinians have been murdered in that same time period.

With Israel also engaged, over the last month, in the largely indiscriminate carpet-bombing of civilians in Lebanon and Iran, it’s hard to imagine that this brutal, sickeningly and knowingly lawless and permanently warmongering entity could sink any lower into the depths of depravity, but yesterday the Israeli Knesset managed just that, passing a “Death Penalty for Terrorists” amendment to its already bloated and draconian prison legislation regarding Palestinians.

As Amnesty International explained in a news release today, “The new law explicitly creates two legal frameworks for the use of the death penalty in the occupied West Bank, excluding the illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and in Israel.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

 

It’s over two weeks since Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, died at the age of 84, and, after a brief flurry of mainstream media activity, in which the immensity of his war crimes and crimes against humanity (for which he was never indicted)  was largely whitewashed through mentions of how, although he was a “divisive” figure, he was also a towering presence in US politics, the media moved on, only waking up again yesterday when his funeral service was held in Washington, D.C., at which former presidents and vice presidents, lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices all ignored the horrors of his legacy.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden attended, as did former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. Also present were the Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi. former House Speaker John Boehner, former national security advisor John Bolton, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan.

Biden’s attendance struck me as particularly grimly appropriate, because his “ironclad” support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which he referred to the attacks of October 7, 2023 as Israel’s 9/11, has always struck me as nothing less than a transfer of Cheney’s lawless and violent post-9/11 policies of vengeance from the US itself to Israel, a parallel made all the more alarming because, of course, Israel is a foreign country, even though Biden’s actions did more than any previous president to foster the illusion that, actually, the US is nothing more than a colony of Israel.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist 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.

 

On June 19, 2024, Khaled Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, became the first lawyer to visit a notorious detention facility for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, located inside the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev Desert, one of several detention facilities established after October 7, 2023 to hold Palestinians seized in Gaza.

Speaking to +972 Magazine a week after his visit, Mahanjeh drew a pertinent comparison with the treatment of Muslim prisoners in the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror”, but concluded that Israel’s behavior was even worse.

“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”, he said, adding, “I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7. I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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. 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.

 

NOTE: On June 18, I was interviewed by Chris Cook for his weekly, hour-long Gorilla Radio show about this article. You can find the show here, and I’m in the second half, after Dan Kovalik talking about Israel’s war on Iran in the first half.

* * * * *

On June 4, in a memorable, 69-page memorandum opinion, Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., began a ruling relating to Venezuelan migrants deported by the Trump administration to a mega-prison for alleged terrorists in El Salvador by quoting from Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” in which the protagonist, Josef K., “awakens to encounter two strange men outside his room,” and “realizes that he is under arrest.” However, “When he asks the strangers why, he receives no answer. ‘We weren’t sent to tell you that,’ one says. ‘Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.’”

As Judge Boasberg added, “Bewildered by these men and distressed by their message, K. tries to comfort himself that he lives in ‘a state governed by law,’ one where ‘all statutes [are] in force.’ He therefore demands again, ‘How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?’ ‘Now there you go again,’ the guard replies. ‘We don’t answer such questions.’ Undeterred, K. offers his ‘papers’ and demands their arrest warrant. ‘Good heavens!’ the man scolds. ‘There’s been no mistake.’ ‘[O]ur department,’ he assures K., is only ‘attracted by guilt’; it ‘doesn’t seek [it] out . . .  That’s the Law.’ ‘I don’t know that law,’ K. responds. ‘You’ll feel it eventually,’ the guard says.”

As Judge Boasberg proceeded to explain, “Such was the situation into which Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, and scores of other Venezuelan noncitizens say they were plunged on March 15, 2025. In the early morning hours, Venezuelans held by the Department of Homeland Security at El Valle Detention Facility in Texas were awakened from their cells, taken to a separate room, shackled, and informed that they were being transferred. To where? That they were not told. When asked, some guards reportedly laughed and said that they did not know; others told the detainees, incorrectly, that they were being transferred to another immigration facility or to Mexico or Venezuela.”

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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

In a lawsuit submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on Saturday (March 1), the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) asked the Court to urgently intervene to “put a stop” to what they accurately describe as the Trump administration’s “cruel, unnecessary, and illegal transfers” of migrants to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As the groups explained in a press release, transferring migrants to Guantánamo from the US mainland is a policy “without any legal authority, in violation of federal law and the US Constitution.”

The central premise of the lawsuit is that, although foreign nationals have been held at Guantánamo before — in a Migrant Operations Center established in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, and, most notoriously, in the “war on terror” prison established in January 2002, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness — the foreign nationals being sent to Guantánamo by Donald Trump have legal and constitutional rights that cannot be wished away through the traditional subterfuge of pretending that US law doesn’t apply at Guantánamo because, technically, it is only leased from the Cuban government, which has ultimate sovereignty.

In relation to the Migrant Operations Center and the “war on terror” prison, this subterfuge has, shamefully, been largely successful, but, as the rights groups argue compellingly in their lawsuit, because the current migrants have been previously held on the US mainland, even though their asylum claims were ultimately unsuccessful, and they have all been subjected to “final removal” orders, they are still protected by the US Constitution, and by US law; specifically, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Huge congratulations to the Washington Post for highlighting the brutality and dehumanization taking place at the migrant detention facility that has been in operation for the last three weeks in the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and, specifically, through the use of one particular cellblock in the existing “war on terror” prison, Camp 6, where the majority of the more than 200 migrants flown to Guantánamo from the US mainland have been held since detention operations began on February 4.

Washington Post reporters spoke to three of the 178 Venezuelan men held there between February 4 and February 20, when, with one exception, they were all repatriated to Venezuela via Honduras — with that one exception, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, flown back to ongoing detention on the US mainland.

Since then, however, 17 more migrants arrived on February 23 — seven from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by the New York Times — with another nine following on February 24, during a visit by defense secretary Pete Hegseth. All are reportedly being held in Camp 6.

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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

NOTE: Please see the important postscript at the end of this article, about Trump’s revival of flights just after it was published. The struggle continues.

On Thursday (February 20), the Trump administration’s short-lived attempt to turn the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba into a migrant detention facility holding up to 30,000 migrants — a plan announced via an executive order on January 29, and which, as it developed, involved, with astonishing illegality, co-opting a block in the long-established “war on terror” military prison to hold the majority of these men — seemed to stunningly collapse as all but one of the 178 migrants flown there since February 4, all Venuzuelans, were deported back to Venezuela via Honduras. The one man not repatriated was brought back to the US mainland.

It will be difficult for the Trump administration to spin this as anything other than an abject humiliation, and a powerful reminder that a president doesn’t rule by executive order, or with unfettered executive authority; he — or she, if that day ever comes — has to work with Congress, which passes laws and appropriates funding, and has to operate within the constraints of US law, as interpreted through the judiciary.

Trump’s Guantánamo plan openly showed contempt for all of the above. It was never clear that any authority existed to hold migrants seized on the US mainland at the naval base, where a Migrant Operations Center, in operation since the early 1990s, had only ever been used for Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea, to prevent them from landing on the US mainland and claiming the rights to legal assistance that entailed.

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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Since Donald Trump issued an executive order on January 29, to expand an existing migrant detention facility on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — the Migrant Operations Center — to hold 30,000 migrants, as part of the “war on migrants” that he cynically and malevolently embarked upon as soon as he took office, eight flights of migrants from immigrant detention facilities in the US — all, apparently, carrying Venezuelans — arrived at Guantánamo between February 5 and 12, containing 98 men in total.

This is alarming enough, because no information has been provided about the legality of these flights, to a naval base that has only previously been used for prisoners seized in the “war on terror”, in what is known as the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility, which opened in 2002, and, via its Migrant Operations Center, first used in the 1990s, for migrants intercepted at sea. The base has never before been used to hold foreign nationals brought from the US mainland, who should have the same rights of access to lawyers and contact with families that they would have had on the US mainland. There is no indication, however, that this is the case.

The administration has also provided no information about who these people are, beyond unverifiable claims about them being gang members, and why it is regarded as so important for them to be sent to Guantánamo when, it would seem, they could just as easily be returned to their home countries. Just as importantly, no information has been provided about why this operation has begun without Congressional approval, or Congressional funding.

Read the rest of this entry »