Andy Worthington on Antiwar Radio: the Guantánamo film, Binyam Mohamed, Ali al-Marri and the definitive prisoner list

On Monday I had the pleasure of being interviewed — for the seventh time! — by the ever enthusiastic and ever indignant Scott Horton for Antiwar Radio — and the MP3 is here. We began by talking about my forthcoming documentary, which has the working title of “Outside the Law: The Story of Guantánamo,” and went on to discuss the return from Guantánamo of British resident and torture victim Binyam Mohamed, and, in particular, the accumulation of evidence confirming that the British government has been heavily involved in obtaining information through the use of torture.

We also discussed the case of Ali al-Marri, an American resident held as an “enemy combatant” for nearly six years in horrendous isolation, the Obama administration’s correct decision to transfer him into the federal court system, but the outstanding problem, which I discussed in my recent article, Why The US Under Obama Is Still A Dictatorship, that, by refusing to allow a pending Supreme Court review of al-Marri’s case to proceed, the new administration has kept open a loophole — in a lower court ruling relating to another US “enemy combatant,” Jose Padilla — concluding that the President can, if he wishes, hold any American as an “enemy combatant” without charge or trial. We also discussed “The Ratchet Effect,” whereby abuses of power enacted by governments are never fully reversed by subsequent administrations, and the importance of the Supreme Court in enforcing constitutional values in the “War on Terror.”

Scott also gave me the opportunity to publicize my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published last week, which provides links to the stories of around 400 prisoners, and references to where other stories can be found in my book The Guantánamo Files. This led to a discussion of how, even though over two-thirds of the prisoners have been released, they remain branded as “enemy combatants,” and another discussion about the reliability of the police and the intelligence services (with a particular focus on how, in the “War on Terror,” we’re encouraged, incredibly, to believe that the intelligence services are infallible), and I was also able to point out how important it is to establish the truth about the prisoners now that the Obama administration is actually conducting a detailed review of the prisoners’ cases, and how critical it is for people to know that, according to intelligence estimates established over the years, only 35 to 50 of the remaining 241 prisoners have any meaningful connection to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.