Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses the Ongoing Injustice of Guantánamo with Chuck Mertz on “This Is Hell”

On Saturday, I was delighted to talk about Guantánamo past, present and future with Chuck Mertz, who hosts an excellent four-hour radio show, “This is Hell,” every Saturday on WNUR 89.3FM Chicago. Chuck and I have spoken several times in the seven and a half years since I began researching and writing about Guantánamo on a full-time basis, and we had a very thorough discussion on Saturday, which is available here. Scroll down to listen to my 45-minute interview, after interviews with Ann Jones, Juan Cole and Dana Becker, or listen to the whole show here, which also includes Jim Naureckas, Trevor Ewen and Jeff Dorchen.

Our latest discussion was triggered by Chuck’s horrified appreciation of my most recent article for Al-Jazeera, “At Guantánamo, a microcosm of the surveillance state,” in which I discussed the latest scandal to rock the permanently troubled military commission trial system at Guantánamo — a technical upgrade that, through incompetence, or through an aspect of the sweeping surveillance state exposed by Edward Snowden earlier this year, led to 540,000 confidential emails sent by military defense attorneys at Guantánamo ending up with prosecutors, and seven gigabytes of files disappearing completely.

This, for the record, is how Chuck described the show:

If Franz Kafka had access to 21st century technology, we could have booked him on the show to talk about the military commission trials of Guantánamo detainees. Defense files are given to the prosecution, the FBI spies on meetings between lawyers, and charges are sought against only 2.5% of total detainees at the site. Kafka wasn’t available to comment, but investigative journalist Andy Worthington knows the alienation and farcical nature of authority better than anyone outside Camp X-Ray’s walls.

The Kafkaesque military commissions were not all we discussed, of course. Chuck also asked me to run through the terrible situation facing the men still held — the 164 men in total who remain held, with no end in sight, despite 84 of them being cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency task force in January 2010, and despite their prison-wide hunger strike this year having provoked the president to promise that he would resume releasing cleared prisoners — a promise that, over four months later, has led to the release of just two men.

There was much more in the show — including, towards the end, a discussion of the need for there to be high-level accountability for the torture that became official US policy under George W. Bush — but I don’t want to discuss all the topics and the facets of the Guantánamo story that we discussed, because I very much hope that you have the time to listen to it in its entirety. It was a powerful interview, and I hope to have the opportunity to speak to Chuck again in the not too distant future.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and 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. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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