Welcome to Andy Worthington

Promoting the global vigils this weekend, on Saturday January 10 and Sunday January 11, marking the unforgivable 24th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay on January 11, where 15 men are still held, although none are detained on anything resembling a legally sound basis. Six are held without charge or trial, six face charges in a broken trial system, the military commissions, that are incapable of delivering justice, one is in legal limbo after being judged mentally unfit to stand trial, another, severely disabled, agreed to a plea deal, and another is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement after a one-sided trial 17 years ago in which he refused to mount a defense. Please join us if you find this ongoing but largely forgotten injustice intolerable, and if you can’t be present in person, feel free to join us by sending in a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking how long Guantánamo will have been open on January 11 — 8,767 days — as part of an ongoing photo campaign we’ve been running every 100 days, and on the anniversaries of the prison’s opening, since 2018.

Marking 800 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, I point out how, although the relentless carpet-bombing stopped with the ceasefire deal two months ago, nothing else has improved for the Palestinians, and I condemn the western media for moving on, by returning to Joe Biden’s visit to Israel in October 2023, in which he described the attacks on October 7 as equivalent to 15 9/11s. I explain that, after 800 days, the Palestinians have suffered the equivalent of 3,500 9/11s, and that, if the number of deaths in Gaza were scaled up to reflect a proportionate death toll in the US, it would mean that ten million Americans would have been killed. The western media’s complacency is also damning because Israel breaks the ceasefire on an almost daily basis, and has also refused to honor its commitment to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza on daily basis, leaving the Palestinian people still short of food, medical supplies and fuel, with no provision whatsoever for reconstruction, and, crucially, living in makeshift tents that provide no protection against the kinds of extreme winter weather that recently hit Gaza via Storm Byron. I also condemn the west’s lack of interest in Israel’s stalled military withdrawal from Gaza, in which, instead of preparing to withdraw completely as agreed in the ceasefire deal, they are reinforcing the line of their current withdrawal, the so-called “yellow line”, giving them control of 58% of Gaza, into what senior officials have described as a “new border.” Meanwhile, all of Trump’s grandiose plans for an International Stabilization Force and a neo-colonial “Board of Peace” appear to be floundering, as US, EU and Israeli officials attempt to implement plans to establish “compounds” for obedient, screened Palestinians behind the “yellow line”, while doing nothing to address the destruction in the other 42% of the Strip. This is an outcome that seems to be nothing more than a fulfilment of Israel’s plans, earlier this year, to occupy most of Gaza and to herd the remaining population into “concentration camps.” The genocide isn’t over, and we must not be silent.

Celebrating a significant court ruling last week, in the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, ruled definitively that the Trump administration’s use of Guantánamo to hold migrants with final deportation orders flown from ICE detention facilities on the US mainland was and is completely illegal under immigration law (the Immigration and Nationality Act), and is also “impermissibly punitive” as a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It’s been ten months since Trump began using Guantánamo to hold migrants, and five months since lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) submitted a lawsuit on behalf of two Nicaraguan nationals held at Guantánamo at the time, and also on behalf of every other migrant in “a similarly situated class.” It’s unknown as yet if the Trump administration will appeal, but it’s abundantly clear from Judge Sooknanan’s ruling that there are absolutely no grounds for doing so. The use of Guantánamo to hold migrants was a vile example of performative cruelty, meant to terrify all migrants in the US, and would-be migrants elsewhere, and its demise is long overdue.

Marking Human Rights Day and the 77th anniversary of the UN’s adoption of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, as well as the adoptions of the Genocide Convention 77 years ago and the Torture Convention in 1984, I reflect on how this ought to be a time when our mainstream media and our politicians should publicize these commitments, and ask “probing questions about the extent to which the post-WWII struggles to prevent genocide and torture and to defend fundamental human rights are being observed or are being flouted, and what both the aspirations and their frequent betrayals say about us as societies.” Instead, however, fundamental human rights are chronically endangered, for one particular reason — Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, fully supported and facilitated by countries headed up by the US, the UK and Germany, but also, as UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese identified in a recent report, by 60 other countries worldwide, most, but not all, in the west, providing military, political and economic support. Francesca Albanese called for urgent intervention to support the Palestinians, but what is on the table instead is continued Israeli aggression, and Trump’s shameful “Peace Plan”, which whitewashes Israel’s genocide and torture, and sidelines the Palestinians instead of recognizing that the only viable route to peace is via Palestinian self-determination and independence. Otherwise, as I conclude, “If Israel and its complicit partners in genocide win, there will be nothing left to protect further atrocities taking place anywhere that brute force can prevail. We need human rights at least as much now as we did 80 years ago, when the UN was founded in the ashes of the Second World War, and those of us who care about our common humanity must be prepared to fight for it, or face an even darker future.”

Photos from, and my report about the 35th consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, OR, and in London and Brussels on December 3, 2025, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also holding a solo vigil in Belgrade, and with Cobleskill, NY joining on December 6, and San Francisco on December 7. These were the last vigils of 2025, and the last before next month’s vigils marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2026.

My analysis of the deeply flawed UN Security Council resolution on Gaza that was passed last week, which made Donald Trump the unelected and unaccountable emperor of Gaza for the next two years, at the head of a spectral “Board of Peace”, and also authorized the creation of an equally spectral “International Stablilization Force” to disarm Hamas. I note how the resolution fails to punish Israel for two years of genocide, and sidelines the Palestinians, with only the vaguest of mentions of “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” at some nebulous point in the future. I quote opposition to the resolution from Palestinian representatives and from Francesca Albanese, and I also explain why I think Trump’s plan will fail — not just because the practical support he needs will either be unacceptable, or will fail to materialize, but also because of the impossibility of quelling the Palestinian resistance. In addition, I think we should all take some comfort from the fact that, behind the scenes, the power imbalance in the United Nations, whereby the US can railroad a resolution through the Security Council the day before the General Assembly voted for a diametrically opposed resolution affirming “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”, including “the right to their independent State of Palestine”, cannot hide the fact that most of Trump’s support came from countries that criticized the lack of a clear route to Palestinian self-determination. Meanwhile,Israel retains control of 58% of Gaza, and seems reasonably content to try to ensure that the remaining population of Gaza, trapped in the remaining 42%, are held in dire conditions that resemble, as much as possible, the concentration camps that they envisaged for them when they escalated their genocidal assault in May this year. In the long run, however, I believe that Israel’s position is untenable, and that the only way out of the impasse is, indeed, for Palestinian self-determination and statehood to be prioritized.

My thoughts on the funeral of former US Vice President Dick Cheney, including my 20-minute interview with Rebecca Myles for WBAI Pacifica in New York, about Cheney’s legacy, and why he must never be forgiven, as the primary architect of the “war on terror”, the unapologetic driver of the CIA’s repulsive “black site” torture program, and the chief instigator of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. As I also note, despite Cheney’s opposition to Donald Trump, it was his enthusiasm for unfettered executive power throughout his career, but especially under George W. Bush, that fed directly into Trump’s notion of himself as a would-be emperor who refuses to acknowledge that there ought to be any constraints on his power. In my discussion about Cheney’s funeral, listing the high-profile attendees — and absences — I also focus in particular on the presence of Joe Biden, who so unforgivably replicated the US’s violent and lawless response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in his response to the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, which he shamefully described as “Israel’s 9/11”, as he offered Israel unprecedented and uncritical support for its own violent and lawless “war on terror.”

In a detailed analysis, I compare Israel’s prisons for Palestinians with US prisons in the “war on terror”, following comparisons that have been made between Sde Teiman, the notorious Israeli facility where a mass rape scandal took place, and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, noting that the most appropriate comparison is with the CIA’s “black site” torture prisons, as they were the only prisons in the “war on terror” from which the ICRC were excluded, as has happened, under Israel’s far-right National Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, throughout its entire prison system for Palestinians since October 7, 2023. Along with amendments to the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, first introduced in 2002, allowing prisoners to be held without any charge or access to lawyers for several months, this has meant that Israel has been engaged in a “black site”-style policy of enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention throughout a network holding thousands of people, dwarfing the numbers held by the US at the height of its “war on terror.” Both the US and Israel were, as I describe it, “driven by a terrifying all-consuming vengeance, by a determination that everyone they seized was a ‘terrorist’, and by claims that they were seeking ‘actionable intelligence’ to target everyone responsible”, and that, as result, they “shredded all protections for prisoners, with complete contempt for all international and domestic laws and treaties that were supposed to guarantee fundamental baseline protections from torture, abuse and murder.” I also bring the story up to date via more recent developments, including the horrific celebrations, within Israel, of the soldiers in the rape scandal as heroes, and a new bill in the Knesset, introduced by Ben-Gvir, which proposes the execution of Palestinian prisoners, and I end with condemnation of the western media, and western leaders, for having bought into discredited lies about atrocities on October 7, while largely failing to recognize or show sympathy for the Palestinians, subjected to genuine atrocities on a colossal scale ever since.

Photos from, and my report about the 34th consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, and in London and Brussels on November 5, 2025, with San Francisco joining on November 6, and Cobleskill, NY on November 8. Former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also sent a photo from an exhibition of prisoners’ art in Giessen, Germany. This month’s “First Wednesday” vigils also coincided with 8,700 days of Guantánamo’s existence, marked with the latest poster in an ongoing photo initiative by the Close Guantánamo campaign, and they also coincided with the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s re-election as president, although that was wonderfully overshadowed by the Mayoral Election victory, in New York, of Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim socialist immigrant — and, undoubtedly, an opponent of the continued existence of Guantánamo. The vigils also coincided with the death, at the age of 84, of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the primary architect of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, including the CIA’s repulsive torture program, as well as the main driver, using false information derived from the use of torture, of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Shamefully, as I note, “while Cheney passed away peacefully surrounded by his family, his victims continue to languish in Guantánamo, with no sign of when, if ever, any of them will either be released, or delivered anything resembling justice.”

Three weeks into the ceasefire in Gaza, which is still in place, even though Israel switches it on and off at will, and last night undertook unforgivable aerial bombardments killing over a hundred civilians, I examine the short-term and long-term problems with Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan.” Short-term problems include the delivery of humanitarian aid, which, although increasing, is still failing to meet the requirements in the ceasefire deal, while the long-term problems involve the future governance of Gaza. I look at the particularly poisonous impact of the refusal, by Israel and its supporters in the west, to differentiate between Hamas as the legitimate administrative government in Gaza, and its military wing, which, for two years, has underpinned its entire genocidal assault on a trapped civilian population, and reflect on how Hamas cannot be expected to disarm, or even to relinquish power, until a political solution is in place that involves Israel’s military withdrawal and Palestinian self-determination. I also look at how Trump’s proposal for an “International Stabilization Force” will fail without a political solution, as recently confirmed by King Abdullah of Jordan, and assess alarming indications that the US’s primary interest, as suggested by Trump in February, is not in securing a meaningful political settlement, but in redeveloping Gaza as a real estate project.