Video: ‘The Legacy of the War on Terror – Guantánamo Bay’ at SOAS with Andy Worthington, Moazzam Begg and Mansoor Adayfi

4.12.23

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A screenshot from the video of ‘The Legacy of the War on Terror: Guantánamo Bay’, at SOAS on November 21, 2023. Andy Worthington is holding up a poster marking 8,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence, taking place on December 6. To get involved in the campaign, take a photo with the poster, available here, and send it to the Close Guantánamo campaign. All this year’s photos are available here.

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On November 21, I was delighted to take part in ‘The Legacy of the War on Terror: Guantánamo Bay’, a well-attended panel discussion about Guantánamo at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London, with two former Guantánamo prisoners, the British citizen Moazzam Begg, who is the outreach director at CAGE, and, via Zoom, Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen who was resettled in Serbia in 2016. Also joining us via Zoom was Deepa Govindarajan Driver, an academic and trade unionist, and a legal observer in the Julian Assange case for the Unified European Left at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

The chair — and organizer — was Nina Arif, and the meeting was convened by SOAS ICOP (Influencing the Corridors of Power), an organization set up to bring together politicians and university researchers to “address the democratic deficit that … results from encroaching government control on freedom of speech and assembly on SOAS and other campuses”, a particularly topical purpose right now, as Palestinian voices are being silenced.

I must note, however, that much of this silencing is coming from within universities and other institutions without any prompting from central government, an alarming trend that ought not to be allowed to proceed unchallenged, and that is also particularly pernicious in light of the crimes being committed by Israel, and the necessity for criticism of the Israeli government to be able to take place without being shut down through false allegations that it constitutes anti-semitism.

The video of the event is below, via YouTube, and I hope that you have time to watch it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

I spoke first, running through Guantánamo’s long history of fundamental lawlessness, and explaining how, apart from a two-year period from 2008 to 2010, the law has never adequately applied at Guantánamo, and the majority of the 30 men still held are as fundamentally without rights as they were when the prison opened on January 11, 2002.

I was followed by Mansoor, who gripped the crowd with his usual exuberance, and Moazzam, who, while normally very measured, was noticeably indignant — angry even — about his experiences at Bagram prison in Afghanistan prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, where he witnessed two men murdered by US forces; perhaps, I thought, because he had recently visited Afghanistan with Al Jazeera, and had revisited Bagram.

After Deepa spoke about other aspects of Guantánamo’s illegality, there was a lively Q&A session, and it was particularly heartening to see so much interest from the audience, when, as I’d established at the start of the event, so many of them weren’t even born on January 11, 2002, when the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened.

* * * * *

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 (see the ongoing 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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.


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4 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on facebook, I wrote:

    Here’s my latest article, linking to a video of ‘The Legacy of the War on Terror: Guantanamo Bay’, a great panel discussion that took place at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies), in London, on November 21, 2023, at which I was a speaker, along with former prisoners Moazzam Begg​ and, via Zoom, Mansoor Adayfi​, as well as the academic Deepa Govindarajan Driver.

    The chair and organiser was Nina Arif​, for SOAS ICOP (Influencing the Corridors of Power), set up to bring together politicians and university researchers in relation threats to freedom of speech and assembly on SOAS and other campuses – quite timely, in these challenging times.

    I hope you have time to watch it!

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    Pam Hardy wrote:

    Will read tomorrow. I thought I hated the US after Vietnam but it turned into something worse with Guantanamo. A depraved and fascist society has no moral compass, and it deserves the presidents it gets.

  3. Andy Worthington says...

    It’s hard to argue with that assessment, Pam, and look at them now, financing and supporting a genocide in the full view of the world, and seemingly unconcerned or unaware of quite how many people aren’t fooled by the relentless Zionist propaganda that they continue to support and amplify. I’m not sure the US has ever sunk so low.

  4. Andy Worthington says...

    For a Spanish version, on the World Can’t Wait’s Spanish website, see ‘Vídeo: El legado de la guerra contra el terrorismo – Guantánamo’ en SOAS con Andy Worthington, Moazzam Begg y Mansoor Adayfi’: http://www.worldcantwait-la.com/worthington-legado-guerra-contra-terrorismo-gtmo-en-soas-con-andy-worthington-moazzam-begg-mansoor-adayfi.htm

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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