Two Radio Shows: I Discuss Guantánamo with Buz Eisenberg and Misty Winston

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My thanks to former Guantánamo attorney Buz Eisenberg and activist Misty Winston for having me on their radio shows this week.

Buz has a show, “The Afternoon Buzz,” on WHMP 101.5 FM in Western Massachusetts, a hotbed of political radicalism and activism that I was fortunate enough to visit, back in 2015, on one of my annual visits to the US to call for the closure of Guantánamo on and around the anniversary of its opening. I met Buz during that visit, as part of a wonderful evening that has been preserved for posterity here.

I spoke to Buz on Tuesday, and our interview — which began with us discussing Ukraine, and our racist and xenophobic government here in the UK, and then involved a discussion of the two most recent releases from Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Qahtani and Sufyian Barhoumi, as well as other Guantánamo-related topics — took up the first half of the show. I hope you have time to listen to it, and if you have an hour to spare you can also listen to Buz’s other guests, director Sara Guerrero and Professor Elisa Gonzales.

On Wednesday, I spoke for an hour about Guantánamo — which gave me an opportunity to discuss possibly little-known aspects of its history at length — with Misty Winston, an activist who is prominent in the campaign in the US to secure the freedom of Julian Assange, and who has a regular show on TNT Radio, “a live 24/7 news talk station available globally,” which is based in Australia.

The show is here, and, as with Buz’s show, I hope you have time to listen to it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful. I hope to talk to Misty again in the not too distant future, to talk more about Guantánamo, and also to talk about the case of Julian Assange, as I worked with WikiLeaks on the release of classified files from Guantánamo 11 years ago, in 2011, and also submitted a statement to the High Court in London in 2020 as part of the case against his proposed extradition to the US.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), 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 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 you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

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 struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — 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.