POSTSCRIPT: My article, “When America changed forever: Human rights ten years after 9/11,” is online on Overland‘s website here.
Back in April, just after WikiLeaks released the classified military documents relating to the Guantánamo prisoners on which I worked as a media partner, and which have consumed most of my time since, I received a welcome email out of the blue from Jacinda Woodhead, the associate editor of Overland magazine.
Overland was founded in 1954, and Jacinda described it accurately as “one of the oldest, most esteemed and most radical of Australia’s literary magazines.” Writing on behalf of the editor Jeff Sparrow, she asked if I would be interested in a commission to write a 3,000-word essay on what the 9/11 attacks, whose tenth anniversary falls in just two weeks, did to civil liberties and the rule of law in America.
Needless to say, I leapt at the opportunity, and the article, “When America changed forever: Human rights ten years after 9/11,” has just been published in the latest issue of Overland, issue 204. In it, I revisit the baleful history of America’s flight from decency and the rule of law under George W. Bush, and President Obama’s failure to throughly repudiate it, or to hold anyone accountable for the torture and lies that defined his predecessor’s administration.
Profiled here, the latest issue of Overland contains, in Jeff Sparrow’s words, articles that plumb the darkness of the last ten years, echoing the words of Georg Trakl, an Austrian poet who died in 1914, aged 27, and who wrote with power about the horrors of the First World War, for whom a “decaying generation … cold and evil” presided over “a dark future prepared/For the pale grandchild.”
As Jeff also states, the articles in this issue of Overland, which plumb the darkness of the 21st century so far, deal with “the normalization of torture and abuse, wars abroad and austerity at home, the ongoing immiseration of asylum seekers, and all the rest of it. But they’re also suffused with a modicum of optimism, a sense that, perhaps, the gloom is finally clearing.”
I certainly hope that is the case, but in the meantime, I hope to have alerted readers in Australia to my presence in print on the other side of the world from London, and if anyone in Australia or elsewhere would like to subscribe to Overland or buy the latest issue for AUS $14.95, the details are here.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.
