Video: On the 13th Anniversary of WikiLeaks’ Release of the Guantánamo Files, My Interview with the Julian Assange Defence Committee

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

13 years ago today, on April 25, 2011, WikiLeaks and a host of international newspapers — the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post, McClatchy, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, La Repubblica, L’Espresso and Aftonbladet — published, or began publishing “The Guantánamo Files,” a treasure trove of classified US military documents from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, the last of four significant releases, in 2010-11, of classified material leaked by Chelsea Manning, the first three being the Afghan and Iraq War Logs, and a vast archive of diplomatic cables.

I was also a media partner for the release of the files, having been asked by WikiLeaks, as an independent expert on Guantánamo, to investigate them, and to brief journalists from the mainstream media partners about their significance, which I did in the days following the release of the files on April 25. The publishing date had been brought forward abruptly, from an intended release date in May, after we heard that the Guardian and the New York Times had obtained them from another source, and were intending to preempt us with the files’ publication.

I still vividly recall getting a call about this on the evening of April 24, and then having to write an introduction to the files in a matter of hours, explaining their significance. This ended up on the front page of “The Guantánamo Files,” on the WikiLeaks website, as “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners,” and I also posted it on my website as “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies.”

Yesterday evening, I was delighted to talk to Emmy Butlin and other members of the JADC (the Julian Assange Defence Committee) about the significance of “The Guantánamo Files,” to mark the 13th anniversary of their release, and the video of our interview is posted below.

I began by discussing how I became involved with Guantánamo, in 2006, when I pieced together a coherent narrative about where and when the men held at Guantánamo were seized, and who they were, largely from a bewildering jigsaw of government documents that were released through Freedom of Information legislation. This research formed the basis of my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, and four subsequent and relentless years of work as a prolific independent journalist.

Moving on to 2011, I explained how I became involved with WikiLeaks, discussed the release of “The Guantánamo Files,” and their significance, and how it seems beyond coincidental that, just a week after their publication, the US government assassinated Osama bin Laden, shutting down all further discussion of the files, and allowing supporters of the prison to lie that it was the use of torture, and the existence of Guantánamo, that had led to bin Laden being located.

At the end of the show, I provided an update about the sad state of Guantánamo today — now over 22 years since it first opened, and with 30 men still held — and how fundamentally lawless it still is.

The above is an extremely brief synopsis, and I do hope you have time to watch or listen to the whole show, because of the opportunity I was given to explain all of the above in great detail.

I’m also pleased to note that, at the start and the end, Emmy played ‘Warriors’, the song I wrote about Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, recorded with The Four Fathers, which is available here on Bandcamp, and which I’ve also embedded below.

For more information about “The Guantánamo Files,” see my Democracy Now! interview, see this article I wrote for the 10th anniversary of their release, in 2021, and also see the 34-part series of articles I wrote in 2011-12, investigating the stories of 422 of the prisoners, based on their files.

* * * * *

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.