Video: The Annual New America Panel Discussion About Guantánamo, Featuring Karen Greenberg, Tom Wilner and Myself

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Almost every year since 2011, the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C. has generously hosted panel discussions about Guantánamo with the attorney Tom Wilner and I, at which we have been joined by a number of other guests.

At the time of that first event, Barack Obama was the president, and 173 men were still held. In 2012 we marked the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening, also launching the Close Guantánamo campaign, returning every year thereafter, except for 2014, when Tom and I were both too dispirited to summon up any enthusiasm. The 2016 event coincided with a “Countdown to Close Guantánamo” campaign, launched by Andy and Roger Waters on Democracy Now!, to put pressure on Obama to finally fulfill his promise to get the prison closed, but, when Obama left office, 41 men were still held, who then had endure four years of hostility from a president who had no interest in releasing any of them.

Having moved the events online in 2021, because of Covid, Tom and I and our by now regular companion, Karen Greenberg, the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, met again online a year ago to discuss Guantánamo on its 20th anniversary, when we were, I think it’s fair to say, caught been hope and pessimism, but this year, sadly, hope is losing that battle.

The video is below, with Karen opening the proceedings with an overview of the prison’s history, myself at 8:30, and Tom at 17:00, discussing the failures of the courts to uphold the law, followed by questions from the moderator, David Sterman, and from members of the audience.

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

The particular problem this year, as we discussed in our presentations — and as I was especially concerned to emphasize — is that, although only 35 men are still held at Guantánamo, and 20 of those men have been approved for release (16 of them under Biden), there has been no apparent progress towards releasing any of them.

This, sadly, is because inertia is the default position for Democratic administrations when it comes to Guantánamo, especially when the approvals for the men’s release were delivered solely by administrative review processes, which carry no legal weight.

As a result, these men remain as fundamentally without rights as they were when they were first brought to Guantánamo and declared to be “enemy combatants,” up to 21 years ago.

I hope — and I expect — that the government will actually free some of these men before we meet again in January 2024, but I hope it is apparent how truly abandoned they are right now, and I hope that, if you care, you will join me in doing what we can throughout this year to demand action from President Biden and from the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. As I asked in my presentation, is it not more cruel to approve men for release but then not to free them, allowing hope to flourish, than not to have even approved them for release in the first place?

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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.