Video: Real News Network Report on the Rally and Protest to Close Guantánamo in Washington D.C. on January 11, 2011

Last Tuesday, the Real News Network was one of a number of media organizations, independent journalists and activists filming the rally outside The White House and the protest outside the Department of Justice calling for the closure of Guantánamo on the 9th anniversary of the prison’s opening, and I’m delighted to note that a six-minute report on the events, featuring footage of myself, Tom Parker of Amnesty International USA and Frida Berrigan of Witness Against Torture speaking outside The White House, and Carmen Trotta of WAT speaking outside the DoJ, is now available online, and posted below.

Also included in the report is footage of the fine words used by President Obama, on his second day in office, when he announced that he was issuing an executive order promising to close Guantánamo within a year, which, of course, failed to materialize, and footage of Obama announcing, a year ago, a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis (following the failed Christmas Day plane bomb plot by a Nigerian apparently recruited in Yemen), which, as I mentioned in my talk outside The White House, remains one of the major stumbling blocks to the closure of the prison, leaving 58 men cleared for relase held indefinitely as political prisoners.

Real News also picked up on Tom Parker’s assertion that men accused of involvement in terrorism at Guantánamo should be tried in federal court, as happened last year with Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and CIA “ghost prisoner,” whose trial was a success, despite being spun as a failure by critics desperate to keep the Bush administration’s ill-conceibed “War on Terror” alive.

The Real News Network feature is below, via YouTube, and readers may also be interested in an analysis of Guantánamo delivered a year ago by Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is available here.

Note: The photo above is by Sarah Hogarth. Please see here for all her photos from the day’s events, and if you’re interested in the issues raised in this film, then please watch this video of a panel discussion on the future of Guantánamo that I organized at the New America Foundation on the afternoon of January 11, featuring myself, Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in the Supreme Court, and Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

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.