Video: “Guantánamo in 2020: What is the Future of the Prison Camp after Eighteen Years?” at New America, Jan. 13, 2020

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Today I’m delighted to be posting, via YouTube, the hour-long video of a panel discussion and Q&A session about the prison at Guantánamo Bay — and the need to close it — which I took part in at the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C. on January 13, two days after the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison.

Also taking part was the attorney Tom Wilner, with whom I co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in 2012. Tom was Counsel of Record for the Guantánamo prisoners as they successfully sought habeas corpus rights before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008 — although those rights have since been gutted by ideologically malignant appeals court rulings — and we are grateful to New America for hosting a panel discussion about Guantánamo with us every year on or around the anniversary. The moderator for this year’s anniversary event was Melissa Salyk-Virk, Senior Policy Analyst in New America’s International Security Program.

As I hope readers have realized via my various articles about the anniversary, and my ten-day US visit to call for the prison’s closure — this year there was a real urgency, indignation and passion to the calls for the prison’s closure and of the need for urgent change in the political leadership in the US expressed by myself and other campaigners.

The video is below, and I hope you have time to watch it, and will share it if you find it useful.

As I explained when I posted a link to the video on Facebook, “Tom and I were resolute in our anger and disappointment that this monstrous failure of justice is still open, and scathing about Donald Trump’s refusal to consider the need for it to be closed, or even to consider releasing any of the 40 men still held under any circumstances, even though five of them were unanimously approved for release by high-level review processes under Barack Obama, and even though only nine of them are facing or have faced trials.”

I added, “When it comes to Guantánamo, sadly, the men held, for the most part indefinitely without charge of trial in defiance of what the US claims to be its own values and its respect for the law, have not only been failed by the president, but also by Congress and also by the courts.”

I believe that Tom and I made clear the failures of all three branches of the US government to deal properly with Guantánamo, as well as the failures of the US media, and, sadly, the American people themselves, in general, to appreciate what Guantánamo is and why its continued existence is so unacceptable.

We also, I hope, managed to convey the human reality of what it means to have a prison that will stay open forever if there is no significant political change: a reality of men never charged with a crime, never — in many cases — even accused of anything more than having fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago, getting older, getting ill, and being consigned to death in Guantánamo, ten, 20, 30, even 40 years from now. Faced with this future, how can any decent American not demand significant political change in this election year?

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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 the 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.

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