Andy Worthington on Crooks and Liars, and Talking Torture with George Galloway

Over on Crooks and Liars, Nicole Belle located a recent interview I did with George Galloway on his TalkSPORT radio show, which I hadn’t realized was online. The nine-minute interview, recorded in a slightly Alan Partridgesque manner while I was sitting in the breakfast room of a Premier Inn in York, where I was staying for the night prior to an appearance on BBC1’s “The Big Questions”, came after the Court of Appeal delivered a resounding victory for accountability and open justice by ordering the government to release a summary of documents revealing how US agents had tortured the British resident Binyam Mohamed while he was held in Pakistan in 2002 — and how the British knew about it, but did nothing about it. Foreign secretary David Miliband had been arguing for 18 months that the release of the summary, written by two High Court judges, would threaten the intelligence-sharing relationship between the UK and the US, but the Court of Appeal was not persuaded — and, for good measure, Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, made a point of declaring that he did not believe MI5 could be trusted when it came to reports of its dealings with Mohamed.

The broadcast, located by Nicole, is posted below:

Nicole will be hosting a book chat about The Guantánamo Files on Crooks and Liars in the near future, but in the meantime, she also wrote the following (and then kindly cross-posted from my current fundraising appeal):

I don’t know that there is anyone on this planet who knows more about what went on at Guantánamo than independent journalist Andy Worthington, and that includes those inside the administration. Through incredibly hard work, diligence and a mountain of FOIA information, Andy has been chronicling this deepest, darkest chapter of American history.

Andy has written a book, The Guantánamo Files, that I am reading now and on which I will be hosting a book chat in the very near future. I can’t lie, it’s taking me longer to read it than it should, because I have to keep putting it down. There’s not a chapter I’ve read that I haven’t wanted to scream, “This should never have happened! This is not what a democratic country does! NOT IN MY NAME!” It is a detailed and unblinking look at not only a strange mixture of fear and incompetence, but of real evil as well.

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 (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.