Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo and WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files with Misty Winston on TNT Radio

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My thanks to the great activist radio host Misty Winston for having me on her “Cognitive Dissonance” show on TNT Radio recently, to discuss Guantánamo in general, and, in particular, the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011, over the course of an hour.

I’ve spoken with Misty before, and it was excellent to follow up with her about Guantánamo, which is so largely ignored these days by most media outlets. The show is available here, and I’ve also embedded it below.

Misty began by running through the significance of the Guantánamo files released by WikiLeaks, on which I worked as a media partner, and then asked me to provide an update on the situation at Guantánamo right now, where 36 men are still held, 20 of whom have been approved for release — although, as I’ve frequently pointed out, approving men for release but then not setting them free makes the process of approving them for release meaningless.

Misty then asked me to discuss the many reasons why what purports to be the evidence against the men held at Guantánamo throughout its long history is worthless, in which I began by discussing the fundamental problem of defining soldiers as terrorists, and of shredding all the normal rules regarding depriving people of their liberty, and pointed out how there was no effective screening process whatsoever when it came to assessing those who were seized, and, in fact, those on the ground were instructed to send every Arab who came into US custody to Guantánamo.

I proceeded to explain how, as a result, the US authorities knew almost nothing about the men who ended up at Guantánamo, but were told that they were all “guilty,” necessitating the extraction of information from them in a manner that I compared to a witch-hunt, and I then spoke about how the files released by WikiLeaks revealed the names of supposed witnesses for the first time, enabling anyone who cared about the problems with the supposed evidence at Guantánamo to establish that, for a variety of reasons, many of these witnesses were serial liars.

We also discussed the absurdity of the charges against Julian Assange, given that all the published files were leaked by Chelsea Manning, who has already been punished for doing so, whereas WikiLeaks’ role in publishing those files was exactly the same as all the prominent and prestigious mainstream media outlets who also published that same information simultaneously, and in partnership with WikiLeaks, and I expressed my incredulity that the Biden administration has not dropped what I described as a “fundamentally unprosecutable case,” on the basis that, under Obama, when Biden was vice president, the Democrats concluded that prosecution was impossible because of its unacceptable impact on press freedom.

There was much more in the show — including a discussion of the underlying absurdity of the Periodic Review Boards, and the shameful case of Khaled Qassim — and I hope you have time to listen to it all, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

Note: For more, see the archive of Misty’s shows here.

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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.