Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo and Julian Assange on the Peace and Justice Report on Sarasota Community Radio

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On Wednesday, I was delighted to talk for 30 minutes to Bob Connors and Tom Walker of the Peace and Justice Report on Sarasota Community Radio on WSLR 96.5 FM, which describes itself as “cover[ing] local, state, national and international social justice issues.” featuring “a wide variety of guests whose views are underrepresented in the mainstream media.”

We spoke about Guantánamo, past, present and future, and also about the US torture program and the plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, imprisoned in the UK and fighting his proposed extradition to the US to face espionage charges.

The show is embedded below:

My interview started six minutes in and ended at 34:40, and in it I ran through Guantánamo’s history, and my involvement with it, and expressed my sorrow about how most people nowadays have completely forgotten about the prison, even though it continues to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial, which ought to be a source of profound shame to US citizens who respect the rule of law.

In the course of the show, I discussed how disgraceful it is that the men held at Guantánamo are not held according to any acceptable standards of detention, and cannot be released unless the president — and to some extent Congress — wants them to be. And, of course, with Donald Trump as president — who tweeted that “there must be no more releases from Gitmo,” even before he became president — it is clear that they have no prospect of ever being released.

This would be completely unacceptable even if the 40 men still held were all “the worst of the worst,” as the Bush administration claimed about all the men held (most of whom of course, have been released), but as it is — and as I explained in my most recent article — five of those 40 were approved for release by high-level review processes under President Obama, but are still held because Trump doesn’t want to release them, and there is no mechanism to force him to do so.

Only nine men — some accused of serious acts of terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks — are facing or have faced trials, in a broken system, the military commissions, that seems incapable of delivering justice, while the 26 others are “forever prisoners”, regarded as “too dangerous to release” by a high-level government review process established by President Obama. That process — the Periodic Review Boards — approved another 38 men for release, and is ongoing under Donald Trump, but not a single prisoner has been approved for release since Trump took office, and, over the last year, the prisoners have given up on PRBs, as I most recently explained in an article, No Escape from Guantánamo: Former Child Prisoner Boycotts Broken Review Process, Calls It “Hopeless”, which we discussed on the show, with reference to the subject of the article, Hassan bin Attash.

At one point, I was asked why I had embarked on this project of trying to get Guantánamo closed, pointing out that there are, for example, many miscarriages of justice in the US’s domestic judicial system. I didn’t disagree, of course, although I pointed out that, on the US mainland, “there is an existing judicial system that’s being abused, whereas at Guantánamo there’s no system at all.” As I also pointed out, “the behavior of the US at Guantánamo is exactly what we would expect from a brutal, lawless dictatorship, and yet the US claims to be a country founded on the rule of law, and which respects the rule of law.”

Towards the end of the show, we also discussed “The Report,” the new movie about the extraordinary creation of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s torture program, and the small group of American heroes, led by Pentagon staffer Daniel Jones, who researched and wrote it, which I wrote about recently in an article entitled, CIA Torture Report Author Says More Than 119 Prisoners Were Held in “Black Sites” and More Than Three Were Waterboarded

At the end of the show I was also asked to talk about Julian Assange, who I wrote about most recently in an article entitled, As a Frail and Confused Julian Assange Appears in Court, It’s Time For the UK to Stop His Proposed Extradition to the US, and Chelsea Manning, and I was pleased to close my interview by stressing to listeners that Assange is a publisher, and that the proposal to charge him with espionage for revealing embarrassing US government secrets is truly alarming, because there is, very fundamentally, no difference between WikiLeaks’ work and that of, for example, the New York Times or the Washington Post, and if Assange was to be successfully prosecuted, it could well spell the end of press freedom in the US.

It was a pleasure to talk to Bob and Tom, and I hope you have time to listen to the show.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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.