Video: Andy Worthington Speaks About Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker in New York, Plus Lawyers Ramzi Kassem and Omar Farah

26.1.15

I’m still catching up with some of the media from my recent US tour, and delighted that, just a few days ago, a film-maker called Edward Briody posted videos from the event I took part in in New York on January 8. Entitled, “Close the US Torture Camp at Guantánamo NOW: Stand with Shaker Aamer, Fahd Ghazy & all the Prisoners Unjustly Held,” the event was introduced by Debra Sweet, the national director of the campaigning group World Can’t Wait (who organized my tour), and, as well as me, featured two lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners — Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York, where where he directs the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic, and Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

It was a great event, at Rutgers Presbyterian Church on West 73rd Street. Around 80 people braved the extremely inclement weather to come and listen to us talk — me speaking about We Stand With Shaker, the campaign I launched with activist Joanne MacInnes in November, to call for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and in particular to put pressure on David Cameron to secure Shaker’s return as swiftly as possible.

I also spoke about Guantánamo in general, just three days before the 13th anniversary of the opening of the prison, making particular reference to the dubious information, masquerading as evidence, that, in 2009, President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force used to recommend that 48 of the remaining prisoners should continue to be held without charge or trial because they were “too dangerous to release,” even though the task force conceded that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial.

The video of my talk (introduced by Debra) is below:

Ramzi actually spoke before me, and also spoke about Shaker Aamer (as well as Guantánamo in general), as he is one of Shaker’s lawyers — along with Clive Stafford Smith, the founder and director of Reprieve. The video of Ramzi’s talk (also introduced by Debra) is below:

I’m also posting below the video of Omar’s talk, in which he spoke particularly about his client Fahd Ghazy, a Yemeni who was just 17 years old when he was seized in late 2001, and is one of 43 Yemenis still held who were first approved for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009. During the event, we also showed CCR’s film about Fahd Ghazy, “Waiting for Fahd,” as well as the short promotional video for We Stand With Shaker, featuring my band The Four Fathers playing “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the song I wrote for Shaker.

Note: For other videos, see me speaking outside the White House on January 11 (and other videos from the anniversary here), and the New America panel discussion on January 12 (with me, Tom Wilner and Morris Davis), and you can listen to various radio shows I took part in here.

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).