Video: Outside The White House and the DoJ, Andy Worthington Slams President Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo on the 9th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening

On January 11, I was one of several speakers at a rally to mark the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo outside The White House (organized by, and including speakers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Witness Against Torture, Amnesty International USA, and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows), as well as other groups, including The World Can’t Wait. The other speakers, as mentioned here, were Tom Parker, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy and policy director of terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights, Pardiss Kebriaei, Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney representing men detained at Guantánamo, Valerie Lucznikowska of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Frida Berrigan of Witness Against Torture, and peace activist Kathy Kelly reading out a statement by former prisoner Omar Deghayes. For more on the context of the days calls for urgent action from President Obama, Congress and the American people, see my article, The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo.

All the speeches were filmed by a number of media organizations and individuals, and I hope to make footage of the entire rally available soon, but in the meantime I’m posting below a short report by Press TV, featuring a brief clip of my speech, and part of an interview outside the Department of Justice, following a procession of 173 hooded protestors in orange jumpsuits who had walked from The White House, as well as a clip of Valerie Lucznikowska’s speech:

More extensive coverage of the protest outside the Department of Justice, including a short speech I gave, and other interviews and speeches (with peace activists Ruth Hooke and Ray McGovern, and peace poet Luke Nephew), filmed by the wonderfully dedicated activist Bill Hughes, is below, via YouTube:

Note: The photo at the top of this article (click to enlarge) is by Sarah Hogarth, whose many photos of the day’s protests are available here, and I hope to be posting some of my favorite images in a separate article soon.

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 and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), 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.