I’ve also embedded the interview below:

And this is how Dennis described the show:

Today on Flashpoints, we continue our series on ten years of torture at Guantánamo: we’ll be joined by Andy Worthington, author of the book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, and producer of the film “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Also we’ll be joined by Bay Area anti-torture activist Stephanie Tang: and we’ll feature an extended interview with Emmy award winning talk-show host Phil Donahue who will talk about politics, war, Bradley Manning, and why he’s on the stump for congressional candidate Norman Solomon.

On January 11, during the day of events to mark the 10th anniversary, I was interviewed twice on WBAI in New York: firstly, on a cellphone on the steps of the Supreme Court by Andrea Sears, for inclusion in the WBAI Evening News. That seven-minute interview is available here, and in it I had the opportunity to address all the issues raised by the anniversary, and also to mention the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and website, and the petition on the White House’s “We the People” website, calling on President Obama to close the prison as he promised three years ago, which I encourage readers to sign, as 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6 to secure a response and to show the strength of feeling that exists.

After the walk from the White House to the Supreme Court, and the powerful speeches there, I went for a late lunch with Jen Nessel and Kevi Brannelly of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Debra Sweet of The World Can’t Wait, and afterwards, as I made my way in a cab to Russia Today, for the interview available here, I spoke for ten minutes to Robert Knight for his show, Five O’Clock Shadow. That interview is available here, and it starts about 29 minutes into the hour-long show, which also features Frida Berrigan of Witness Against Torture.

After the RT show, I wandered downtown D.C., which gave the appearance of being permanently swathed in rain, in something of a daze, wandering into Chinatown, and then back downtown until I finally figured out my bearings, and, rather absurdly, walked all the way to Union Station in the rain, where I finally picked up a cab for the shortish ride back to where I was staying.

The next morning, when the rain miraculously departed as swiftly as it had arrived, I was picked up for a half-hour TV interview for Atlantic Television news, which is not yet available online, and then returned to the house for a half-hour interview with an old friend, Linda Olson-Osterlund of KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon. That interview is available here, and, as Linda explained:

January 11th 2012 is the 10th anniversary of  the opening of the Guantánamo Prison. Protests against this monument to Imperial impunity are happening in London, New York City, Washington D.C. and San Francisco, Portland OR and other cities around the US. London journalist, activist and author Andy Worthington joins host, Linda Olson-Osterlund to talk about closing Guantánamo and freeing the prisoners that are not convicted of a crime. He reports on Wednesday’s protests and the growing movement to close Guantánamo as well as the challenges it faces.

Linda also featured the logo of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign on her site, linked to the website, and spoke to me about that ongoing campaign.

After that interview, Robert, a supporter of The World Can’t Wait, picked me up and drove me to Dulles International Airport for my six-hour flight to San Francisco, which gave me an opportunity to catch up on some lost writing opportunities. At the airport, I was met by an old friend from previous visits, Curt Wechsler of The World Can’t Wait, and we then met up with WCW supporter MaryAnn Thomas, who was putting me up for the night in Oakland. After a meal and an opportunity to catch up, I caught a few hours sleep at MaryAnn’s in preparation for a very early start the next day.

In Berkeley, I appeared on KPFA’s “Morning Mix,” hosted by Mickey Huff of Project Censored, in an hour-long show, co-hosted by Peter Phillips, Professor of Sociology at UC Davis and Abby Martin of Media Roots, which also featured Pardiss Kebriaei calling in from the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, Almerindo Ojeda, the director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas at UC Davis, which has an excellent, ongoing Guantánamo project, and the singer-songwriter David Rovics, who I had not met before, who performed two of his powerful songs in the studio. The show is available here, and I’ve also embedded it below:

As soon as the KPFA show was over, MaryAnn drove me across the Bay to the hills above San Francisco, for an appearance on “Your Call” on KALW, with Rose Aguilar. Rose and I had met on a previous visit, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss Guantánamo with her again, and also with Scott Horton, law professor and contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, who was calling in from New York. The show is available here, and afterwards I met up with two more old friends from previous visits, Stephanie Tang and Joey Johnson of The World Can’t Wait, and we drove back down the hill to UC Hastings Law School, for “Ten Years of Guantánamo: A Discussion with Andy Worthington and Jason Leopold.”

That event, which took the form of a fascinating conversation, was filmed, and will hopefully be available soon. Afterwards, I had the opportunity to catch up not only with Jason (the lead investigative reporter of Truthout), but also with other old friends who had arrived especially for the day — psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye and former SERE instructor Michael Kearns.

That evening, Jason and I — and David Rovics — attended a fundraising dinner for The World Can’t Wait, when I was reunited with other friends from my last visit in October 2010, for “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week — but I had to leave rather sooner than I would have wished, to take another flight, this time to Chicago, where I was met by another WCW activist, Jay, and where I stayed with Candace Gorman, the attorney for two Guantánamo prisoners (one of whom, Abdul Razak Ali, is still held), whose outspoken blog is here, and took part in a successful screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” at Loyola University Chicago School of Law with a panel of Guantánamo attorneys including Candace, Len Goodman (who represents the Afghan prisoner Shawali Khan) and Andy Moss (who represents Umar Abdulayev, the last Tajik prisoner in Guantánamo).

Afterwards, we went out for a meal in a great seafood restaurant with other friends, including Joe Scarry, an associate producer of the Guantanamo film “The Response,” Marissa, a formidable activist with Occupy the Southside, and activist Gregory Koger, and then Joe, Jay, Debra and I took a drive around Chicago, involving a walk down to the shore of Lake Michigan, which was the unadulterated tourist moment of my trip — the visit to the Hill three days before being rather more politically charged.

On Sunday, as I began to lose my grip on what day of the week it was, Debra and I flew back to New York, and were picked up by my old friend The Talking Dog, who looked after me in Brooklyn for my last 24 hours, where, although politics were pretty consistently on the agenda, my public events were over, and I also found time to do some last minute shopping for my family, before the long, jet lag-inducing return home, from which I’m still recovering.

I do, however, wish to thank everyone who helped to facilitate my trip and to make me so welcome, and I also hope to visit again soon. After all, just because it’s a Presidential election year, it’s no reason not to mention Guantánamo, and to call repeatedly for its closure. To do anything less would be to capitulate to the most cowardly form of political manoeuvring, and some outrages — like the ongoing existence of Guantánamo — are too important for that.

Note: Please join the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and sign the White House petition 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, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see 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.

The previous day, I was interviewed by VOA News’ Urdu Channel, after the panel discussion I took part in at the New America Foundation with Congressman Jim Moran, Col. Morris Davis and Tom Wilner, for a report on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and I include that below, for the benefit of any Urdu speakers. The third interview, a detailed half-hour exploration of Guantánamo past, present and future, was with Brian Becker of Atlantic Television News, and I’ll make it available here as soon as it’s online.

Note: Please visit the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and sign up to join a growing body of people demanding that President Obama fulfill his unfulfilled promise to close the prison. Please also sign a new White House petition on the “We the People” website calling for the closure of Guantánamo. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6.

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, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see 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.

It feels like more than a week, as it has been such a busy time, first of all in New York, which I wrote about here, and, for the last two days, in Washington D.C., where the horrors of Guantánamo were dreamt up, where those who could close it have failed or refused to do so — the administration, Congress and two particular courts (the D.C. Circuit Court and the Supreme Court) — and where a number of significant events took place to push for the closure of the prison.

I’ll discuss these in another article very soon, but for now I wanted to thank the hosts of three radio shows who have interviewed me in the last week, and to make those shows available to readers who might appreciate my commentary on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo.

On Monday January 9, in Santa Fe, the film I co-directed with Polly Nash, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” was screened for the anniversary, and to coincide with this screening, Mary-Charlotte of Santa Fe Radio Café broadcast an interview with me that was recorded before I left the UK. That interview is available here, and it was a great pleasure to speak with Mary-Charlotte, who first interviewed me several years ago. I hope it led to some people deciding to attend the screening, and I hope that the screening went well, as I am regularly told by my American friends that the film always has a powerful impact on US audiences.

Also before I left the UK, I met with, and then recorded a brief commentary about Guantánamo on its 10th anniversary, which was included in a program called Speaker’s Corner on a community radio station in London with Noémie Adam and Rajiv Bera, two former students from the LSE (the London School of Economics) who are now volunteering with the legal action charity Reprieve. I had previously met Noémie in connection with a screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” that she arranged at the LSE two years ago, and it was great to meet up with her and Raj near my home, to discuss the state of the world over a cup of coffee, and then to record my segment for the show, which also featuring commentary by Asim Qureshi of Cageprisoners, and, in the studio, Chris Chang of Reprieve. The show is here, and a blog entry about it is here.

The last of the three radio shows discussed in this article took place last Friday, after I arrived in the US, when I spoke to Michael Slate of KPFK in Los Angeles last Friday while I was visiting the offices of The World Can’t Wait (the sponsors of my trip to the US). Michael and I have spoken several times, and it was a delight to speak to him again, even though the circumstances of my visit are far from cheerful, because he has followed my work and understands the depth of the crimes and failures involved in the Bush administration’s establishment of Guantánamo, the Obama administration’s inability to close it, and the obstruction of lawmakers and certain judges towards bringing this bleak emblem of America’s disregard for the law to an end. The interview is here, and I hope, over the next few days, to also be able to provide links to the four radio interviews I took part in — on shows in Berkeley, New York and Portland, Oregon — while I was in Washington D.C., as well as video of some of the events in which I was proud to be involved.

Note: Please visit the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, whose logo is displayed above, and sign up to join a growing body of people demanding that President Obama fulfill his unfulfilled promise to close the prison. Please also sign a new White House petition on the “We the People” website calling for the closure of Guantánamo. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6.

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, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see 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.

For the 171 men held, as I explained, the situation is bleak as we approach the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening (in January 2012), as there now appears to be no way that any of them will ever leave the prison, given the indifference of the administration to their fate, and the hostility of lawmakers and certain crucial right-wing judges (who have been deciding detention policy in the D.C. Circuit Court). I also spoke about the current horror of the National Defense Authorization Act, which is being discussed in Congress, and which contains a vile proposal from lawmakers, insisting that, in future, all terror suspects be held in mandatory military custody, and not held as criminal suspects or given federal court trials.

As mentioned above, Scott and I also discussed the history of the Military Commissions and the six men who have been convicted or have accepted plea deals (David Hicks, Salim Hamdan, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, Ibrahim al-Qosi, Omar Khadr and Noor Uthman Muhammed), and this provided me with an opportunity to mention that Omar Khadr is still being held, even though he was supposed to return to Canada two weeks ago, according to the the terms of his plea deal.

We then turned to al-Nashiri’s arraignment, in which I ran though the history of al-Nashiri’s torture, and Scott and I discussed that, however much the Commissions have been tweaked, they remain the wrong venue for someone accused of terrorism, who should be tried in a federal court, with the fairness and transparency that will never be part of the system at Guantanamo.

In conclusion, I lamented how the Obama administration has refused to confirm that, should al-Nashiri somehow be acquitted, there is no guarantee that he would be released — a position which, of course, only confirms how far we have traveled from basic notions of decency, a sense of proportion, and respect for the law in the last ten years.

It was a pleasure to speak to Scott, as ever, and I hope you can listen to the interview, if you have 20 minutes to spare. For the record, this is how Scott described the show:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses the ten-year-long miscarriage of justice at Guantánamo; why Obama hasn’t expended any political capital to close the prison or end military commissions; the mere six Guantánamo prisoners who have either accepted a plea deal or been convicted of a crime; and why the Obama administration won’t release USS Cole bombing suspect Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri even if he is acquitted, making a mockery of the “justice” system.

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, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see 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.

I attended a Q&A session after a London screening of this film back in June, and also took part in a discussion about it on Press TV (available in two parts here and here), so I was pleased to be able to revisit it, especially as the story of Omar Khadr is so central to the injustices of Guantanamo, and also because, barring any last-minute horrors on the part of the Obama administration, he is due to be released from Guantanamo to Canada on October 31.

Khadr was only 15 when he was seized in July 2002, after a firefight in which he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a US soldier — although serious doubts have been expressed about whether he actually threw the grenade, as he was apparently unconscious, face down, and half-buried under rubble at the time, and his lawyers claimed that the initial reports of the firefight were amended afterwards to incriminate him.

The whole story of his treatment, as I told Scott, has been disgraceful, both on the part of the US administration under George W. Bush and also under Barack Obama, and also of the various Canadian governments over the last nine years. America initially abused him under President Bush, but last fall hit a new low under President Obama, when Khadr agreed to a plea deal in his trial by Military Commission, signing a disgraceful document in which he accepted responsibility for the actions he took when he was 15, in a situation in which he had been placed by his father, and accepted that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who was not allowed to engage in combat with US forces under any circumstances.

America, disgracefully, may have abused a child and, just as disgracefully, have unilaterally criminalized warfare for its enemies, making “war” against the US into a “war crime,” but Canada does not come out of this story any better, having consistently neglected Omar Khadr, despite his Canadian citizenship, as the footage of the interrogations, shown and discussed in this film, demonstrates – especially in the sections in which Omar weeps uncontrollably when he realizes that he has been betrayed by the country of his birth.

The blunt truth is that the Canadian government — and many Canadian people — have been content to blame Omar for the perceived sins of his father, Ahmed Khadr, an alleged fundraiser for Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan in October 2003, and to ignore the fact that, when it comes to the rights of child soldiers in other conflicts, Canada has led the way in calling for rehabilitation and not punishment, but when it comes to Omar Khadr, the only response has been hypocrisy and cruel indifference.

It was great to speak to Scott again, and I hope that, if you have 20 minutes to spare, you can listen to the show. In addition, if you’re interested in seeing the film, please check out the website, and please also feel free to check out my archive of articles about Omar Khadr here.

And this, for your information, is how Scott described the show:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses the film You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo about child soldier and Canadian citizen Omar Khadr’s interrogation in Guantánamo; Khadr’s travails in Afghanistan, where he was nearly killed by a US airstrike then captured and accused of killing a medic; the US government’s decision to treat child soldiers as regular prisoners in contravention of international norms; and how military commissions have made it a war crime to fight against US invasions and occupations.

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, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see 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.

In discussing the legacy of the attacks, I was asked whether or not America is safer today than ten years ago, and particularly whether it is significant that there have been no further terrorist attacks on US soil. In response, I explained that the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration, with its two wars, and its vast, global program of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention, was depressingly disdainful of, and damaging to international laws and treaties, and was hideously counter-productive in that it further enflamed anti-American sentiment. Crucially, I also explained how there is no evidence that al-Qaeda had a follow-up to 9/11 planned.

I also spoke about Guantánamo, explaining how, because of the decision to declare a “war” instead of recognizing that the perpetrators of the attacks were criminals, and because of the further decision to invade Afghanistan but not to distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, we have ended with a situation in which the alleged perpetrators of the attacks, and others reportedly involved in international terrorism, have not been tried as criminals but continue to be held as “warriors” at Guantánamo, while the soldiers at Guantánamo (who vastly outnumber them) have mistakenly been regarded as terrorists, and deprived of the Geneva Conventions.

Moreover, of course, Guantánamo is still open, and now, it seems, cannot be closed, despite being a monstrous stain on America’s reputation, because, as I have written and spoken about extensively, President Obama has lacked courage, and the Republican Party, which has become the most negative, cynical Republican Party I’ve ever seen, has, with the help of much of the mainstream media, successfully played the fear card regarding Guantánamo, which has proved to be a win-win situation with a population trained so effectively to be cowed at every opportunity.

We also had time to discuss the disaster of the Afghan occupation, ten years after, in which US forces failed to win hearts and minds early on, and are now stuck in a quagmire to which there seems to be no end. Sadly, I did not have enough time to add that the decision not to hold soldiers as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions continues to have a distressing impact in Afghanistan, as I have reported before.

My thanks to Russia Today for getting in touch, and also to Skype for facilitating interviews from the comfort of my own home, and I look forward to further Skype interviews in future.

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, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, 700,000-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see 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.

The show is available here — or here on MP3 — or embedded below:

In the show, I ran through the story of the remaining 171 prisoners, explaining the role of the Guantánamo Review Task Force in proposing that 36 of these men should be tried, 46 should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and 89 should be released — with particular emphasis on how the 46 are regarded as too dangerous to release, even though there is not sufficient evidence to put them on trial (in other words, there is no evidence), and who the 89 are, and why they have been abandoned by the administration, lawmakers and the courts — the 58 Yemenis who cannot be released because of an unprincipled moratorium on releasing any Yemenis, in place since January 2010, and the 31 men from other countries who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture, and are waiting for another country to take them, in the absence of America accepting any responsibility for its own mistakes.

Vicki then asked me to discuss the story of Adel Al-Gazzar. An Egyptian humanitarian aid worker, seized in Pakistan, who lost a leg in US custody (through medical negligence), he was finally freed in Slovakia in January 2010, but returned to Egypt last month where he was promptly arrested in connection with a sentence he was given in his absence on trumped-up terrorism charges, and I had the opportunity to explain how his case was emblematic of the kind of destruction of innocent people’s lives that was typical of Guantánamo, where, crucially, the Bush administration prevented screening from taking place to separate combatants from civilians seized by mistake.

There’s much, more more in the show — Obama’s failures to close Guantánamo and to hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes, including torture, for example, as well as the unparalleled cynicism and negativity of Republican lawmakers, and the failure of the Supreme Court to restrain dangerous right-wing judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, who are now dictating detainee policy — but I’ll let you discover this for yourself, if you have an hour to spare.

It was a great show, and I’d like to thank Jim and Vicki for providing an hour to discuss Guantánamo, which remains an aberration and an abomination, just as it was under George W. Bush, but which, of course, has largely fallen off the mainstream media’s radar, both in America and around the world. If you like it, please do let people know.

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.

Filmed in Yemen, Poitras’ film follows Abu Jandal (aka Nasser al-Bahri), a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who left al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, and was imprisoned in Yemen when the attacks took place. He then became an extraordinarily valuable informant for the FBI, and was eventually freed. When Poitras met him, he was driving a cab in Sana’a, a charismatic figure, who, nevertheless, is either conflicted or ambiguous when it comes to his beliefs.

What is clear throughout, while Abu Jandal espouses his love of jihad but his hatred of terrorism, is his guilt that his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, for whom he secured paid work as a driver for Osama bin Laden, was still held in Guantánamo at the time the film was made, while he was a free man in Yemen. Hamdan was eventually freed at the end of 2008, after he became the first prisoner to be tried in a war crimes trial following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

For the “Cinepolicitics” show on Press TV, I joined presenter Russell Michaels, and  the Sunday Telegraph‘s film critic, Mike McCahill, to review “The Oath.” As Press TV noted, while McCahill “commends the fact that the film has no narration and shows rather than tells,” I “criticise the use of military courts to try the Guantánamo detainees by the US government.”

The show is available below, via YouTube, and if you have 25 minutes to spare I can wholeheartedly recommend it:

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.

However, readers in London who are interested in this film can see it tomorrow (June 19) in University College London (UCL), in central London, as part of a weekend of Guantánamo films put together by Dochouse. Based at Riverside Studios, in Hammersmith, Dochouse has been supporting and promoting documentaries in the UK since 2002. The “Exposing Guantánamo” weekend is part of the Open City London Documentary Festival, which also features “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I directed with Polly Nash).

For further information about “Exposing Guantánamo,” see my article here (providing further details about the “Exposing Guantánamo” weekend), in which I described “You Don’t Like the Truth” as follows:

This powerful new film features excerpts from seven hours of video footage of Canadian agents interrogating child prisoner and Canadian citizen Omar Khadr at Guantánamo over a four-day period in 2003. It reveals how his joy at meeting representatives of his own government turned to despair when he realized that they had not come to Guantánamo to help him, and important commentary on the footage is provided by Khadr’s US and Canadian lawyers, by journalist Michelle Shephard, by former US guard Damien Corsetti, and by former prisoners, including Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg. The footage was released by the Canadian courts after a ruling that Khadr’s rights had been violated, which was subsequently ignored by the Canadian government.

On Press TV, I discussed “You Don’t Like the Truth” on the Cinepolitics show, with host Russell Michaels and film critic Neil Smith. I made the first half of the 24-minute show available in my previous article (and it’s also on my YouTube channel), and I’ve now added the second part below.

As I explained previously, the show is an excellent introduction to the distressing treatment of Omar Khadr by the US, and by Canada, since he was captured, at the age of 15, in July 2002. This culminated, last October, with his disgraceful show trial, in which he accepted a plea deal and confessed to being an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” even though he was just a child, even though it is not actually illegal to fight US soldiers in wartime, and even though the US ignored its obligations to rehabilitate rather than punish juvenile prisoners, according to the UN Optional Protocol on the rights of children in armed conflict.

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.

The 32-minute show is available here, and this time around Scott not only publicised my recent fundraising appeal, which is ongoing, as I still have $400 to raise to reach my quarterly target of $2000, but also asked me to discuss the latest dismal news about Barack Obama, the President who failed. The specific spur for the show — as well as my fundraising appeal — was my recently completed five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” in which I told the stories of 84 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo that had never been told before.

However, we also touched on other topics, including the 9/11 trials (now in Guantánamo rather than a federal court in New York, because of Obama’s inability to exercise any kind of Presidential control, and his resultant capitulation to the warped ideology of the “War on Terror” that is still being peddled by the monsters of the right). We also spoke about the fawning British political classes and their mistaken adoration of Obama during his recent state visit, and how, in contrast, Obama “owns” Guantánamo and needs to be told that it is unacceptable for him to keep it open, however much criticism he receives from his own opponents in the US. Also, out of nowhere, we ended up discussing my solitary New York Times front-pager from February 2008.

This is how Scott described the show:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses his micro-fundraiser — give a few bucks to the world’s best Guantánamo reporter, why dontcha? — Andy’s very brief employ with NYT in 2008; the unknown Gitmo prisoners, the travesty of military commissions instead of federal court trials for KSM et al; Obama’s tour of Britain where he was treated like a demigod while still holding Brits in Guantánamo, his refusal to deal with Bush “legacy” issues like Gitmo, trials, torture and law with the likely consequence that all will become established precedent.

I hope you have half an hour to spare to listen to the show. Scott is a tireless advocate for a better world, and it’s always great to talk to him.

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.