Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer, TTIP and the Corporate Takeover of our Lives with Richie Allen on Volcania Radio

14.10.14

Yesterday, I spent a delightful half-hour speaking to Richie Allen, a colleague of David Icke, for his show on Volcania Radio, which is streamed live via various sites, including David Icke’s, and is available below via YouTube. It’s also on David Icke’s site here.

Richie asked me first about Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner in Guantánamo, and I ran through his story, his health problems, and the disgraceful fact that he is still held, even though, for the last seven years, the US government has been saying that it no longer wants to hold him, and the UK government has been calling for his return.

Richie and I also spoke about the specific torture program that was official policy at Guantánamo in the early years, which involved, amongst other things, prolonged isolation, forced nudity, the use of extreme heat and cold, the use of loud music and noise, the use of phobias, and the euphemistically named “frequent flier program,” whereby prisoners were subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation, being moved from cell to cell every few hours over a period of days, weeks or even months, to prevent them from sleeping adequately. The use of this particular package of torture techniques only came to an end when the prisoners secured access to lawyers after a Supreme Court victory in June 2004 — although I was at pains to stress to Richie that Guantánamo remains a place that is beyond the law, and that should not exist in a society that claims to be civilized.

In the second half of the show we spoke about the the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed new EU-US trade deal that is deeply alarming, because, as I explained in a recent article promoting my photos of a protest against TTIP in London at the weekend (part of a day of action across Europe), and my interview with RT, “the defenders of TTIP try to assure us that we have nothing to worry about, but as these are essentially the same people who, for 30 years, have been transferring power to corporations and banks at the expense of the people — and from hugely important public services like the NHS — it is foolish for anyone to think that they have our best interests at heart.”

I also spoke about how legitimate fears about TTIP, and of corporations being in a position to bully their way into key roles in our public services and elsewhere in society in large part through intimidation, because they have bottomless pockets and aggressive lawyers, echoed fears that NHS campaigners, myself included, identified in relation to the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which established Clinical Commissioning Groups of GPs to oversee 80% of the NHS budget, and put doctors in a position of being fearful of being sued if they turn down multinational corporations seeking a slice of NHS business.

Richie and I also spoke in greater detail about how politicians as a whole (with a few brave exceptions) always put corporate interests above the needs of the people, the illegitimacy of the Tory-led coalition government, the failure of the first-past-the-post voting system, the self-destructive obsession with privatization, and much more besides, and I hope you have time to listen to the show, and to share it if you find it useful.

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).