The Guantánamo Files: Al-Jazeera interviews Murat Kurnaz, Andy Worthington

On Thursday April 24, I was invited to take part in the Riz Khan show on al-Jazeera, with released Guantánamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, and Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief of Washington Monthly, whose latest issue features an extraordinary roll-call of politicians, military figures and other experts condemning the US administration’s use of torture. The show is based in Washington D.C., but I was interviewed in al-Jazeera’s studio across the river from the Houses of Parliament.

At the start of the show, Murat, who is here to promote his account of his horrendous five-year ordeal, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, spoke about the circumstances of his arrest and imprisonment, and Paul and I were then asked to talk about the use of torture, and the system of trials by Military Commission that was introduced in November 2001 by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers, including David Addington.

Both of us, it was clear, are hopeful that whoever leads the next administration will follow through on their promise to close the prison, and will put an end to the extraordinary flight from domestic and international law that has been engineered by the White House’s current occupants. Paul, I was happy to note, echoed the American people’s widespread revulsion at the use of torture, extraordinary rendition and imprisonment without charge or trial that I noted during my visit to the United States last month.

To watch the show on YouTube, see below.

Andy 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.