Video: Andy Worthington Calls for the Closure of Guantánamo Outside the White House on January 11, 2015

January 11, 2015 was the 13th anniversary of the opening of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, and I traveled to the US to take part in protests in Washington D.C. on the anniversary, as well as in other locations in the US, as I have done since January 2011.

I’m currently nearing the end of the tour, in Massachusetts, with a final date tomorrow in Chicago, but in the meantime I’m delighted to make available, via Witness Against Torture (and YouTube) the video of the rousing speech I gave outside the White House on January 11.

I spoke about We Stand With Shaker, the campaign I launched with activist Joanne MacInnes in November, calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and I also spoke about the 126 other men, calling for their release unless they are going to be tried — an outcome that only applies to around ten of the men still held. [Click on the photo to enlarge it].

The video is below. If you like it, please feel free to share it!

For all the videos of speakers and performers from January 11, please visit this Witness Against Torture page, where there are videos of all the speakers outside the White House (and Luke Nephew of the Peace Poets), as well as videos of performers at our final destination — after we’d marched to the Justice Department — an open area above the Washington D.C. Central Holding Cells where Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee performed “Welcome to the Terrordrome,” his excellent rap about the “war on terror.”

The video of Shahid is below:

I also want to mention “From Ferguson to Guantánamo,” the powerful event that took place at Witness Against Torture’s temporary HQ in Washington D.C. on the Saturday night, when a panel discussed endemic racism, the police’s impunity in killing black men, the bloated, racist and hideously punitive domestic prison system, the horrors of solitary confinement (in US prisons) and the horrors of Guantánamo. Those videos are available here, and I also recommend Jeremy Varon’s article for Waging Non-Violence, “Fighting racism and torture from Ferguson to Guantánamo.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.