TV and radio: Andy Worthington responds to the verdict in Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial

The aftermath of Salim Hamdan’s trial at Guantánamo was a busy time, as TV and radio stations called Reprieve — and contacted me through my website — for comments on the verdict and its significance.

First up was Afshin Rattani of Press TV, who called on Wednesday shortly after the verdict was announced (but before Hamdan was sentenced), and interviewed me for a TV news feature that is available via YouTube below (a transcript is also available here). This was followed by an interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide and another with CBS affiliate Newstalk 710 KIRO Radio in Seattle, where I spoke on the Dave Ross Show just after Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, who was wrongly imprisoned on trumped-up charges of spying in 2003. The one-hour show, which tackled the issues in depth, is available here.

On Thursday I was interviewed on the phone for a news item that was broadcast on the Islam Channel in London, and then did a 20-minute interview with Lenny Charles in New York for a broadcast on the INN News World Report, which will, I suspect, be made available online soon (a previous interview with Lenny is available on YouTube here and here).

In the evening I spoke to the BBC’s Asian Network in Birmingham, and on Friday, after the sentence had been announced, I enjoyed a lengthy interview with Linda Olson-Osterlund for KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon. A previous interview with Linda is available here, and it was a pleasure to speak to her again, and to be involved in a wide-ranging discussion that went far beyond the specific issues relating to Salim Hamdan’s trial, although at present the show is not yet available online.

This is probably a good time to mention a few other interviews from the last few weeks, which are available online. On July 19, when the London Guantánamo Campaign began a six-day vigil outside the US embassy in London in the run-up to the 30th birthday of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident and torture victim who is still held at Guantánamo, I did a short filmed interview for a new website, Human Rights TV, which is available here.

And shortly after, I was interviewed by a Finnish radio station, Arenan, for a feature on Guantánamo aimed at young, Swedish-speaking listeners, which is not something I get to do everyday. Excerpts from the show are available here and here.

Andy Worthington was the Communications Manager for Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent over 30 prisoners in Guantánamo, in 2008, and 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.