Video: I Discuss Guantánamo and My Work with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks on Consortium News

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I’m delighted to be posting the video interview I undertook recently, discussing my work articulating and opposing the ongoing 22-year horror story of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and my work with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011, with Cathy Vogan and Elizabeth Vos of Consortium News, the independent news website established in 1995 by the late investigative journalist Robert Parry, which is now run by Cathy and Joe Lauria.

After the interview, I met Joe and Cathy at an event for Julian Assange in London, and was pleased to find two like-minded souls in the unending struggle to expose the truth about the state of the world, and to resist further crimes and abuses of power by those in charge.

In the interview, I began by explaining how I had become involved in the Guantánamo story, in 2006, and the forensic investigative work that was required to piece together — from documents reluctantly made publicly available by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation, including, for the first time, the names and nationalities of the prisoners — a coherent narrative about who was held in Guantánamo, and how the overwhelming majority of the 779 men and boys held there by the US military since January 2002 had no connection with terrorism, for my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007.

The video, via YouTube, is posted below:

I also discussed how, four years later, when I had subsequently published hundreds of articles, following up on my book, and providing a critical running commentary on Guantánamo, I was approached by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to be a media partner for the release, in April 2011, of the Guantánamo Files, classified military files from Guantánamo, and the last great treasure trove of classified US government documents from the files leaked by Chelsea Manning in 2010.

I also explained how much of my role consisted of attempting to brief the mainstream media partners for the files’ release (the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post, McClatchy, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, La Repubblica, L’Espresso and Aftonbladet) about the significance of the information they contained — primarily, that they contained previously unknown information about the first 200 or so prisoners to be released, that they contained photos of many of the men, visually identifying them for the first time ever, and that they put names to allegations that had previously been anonymous, enabling diligent researchers to investigate whether or not these supposed witnesses — mostly the men’s fellow prisoners — were reliable or not.

Few were interested in this task, sadly — and, ironically, the best mainstream media coverage on this crucial aspect of the files was undertaken by the Guardian, which had fallen out with Julian, and had published the files, with the New York Times, after securing them from another source — but I established some of this crucial context in my introductory article to the files, published on WikiLeaks’ website, and followed up with a detailed assessment in a series of 34 articles on my website covering 422 of the 765 files released.

I also spoke about the situation at Guantánamo now, where 30 men are still held, 16 of whom have been unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, but are still held because the decisions taken to approve them for release were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists that can oblige the US government to actually free them if, as is apparent, the Biden administration is unwilling to prioritize their release.

This shameful situation, deprioritizing the release of men held for years since being approved for release, recently emerged most shockingly with news that the release of eleven of these men had been indefinitely postponed after the attacks on Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7, which I wrote about in my article, Guantánamo Scandal: Eleven Men Were Set to Be Freed Last October, Until “Political Optics” Shifted After Hamas’ Attack on Israel.

I also spoke about the “forever prisoners”, the three men still held who have neither been charged nor approved for release, focusing on the case of one of these men, Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was first introduced, and describing how, although he was initially described as the No. 3 in Al-Qaeda, along with other claims that certain intelligence officials knew to be untrue, the US government has subsequently walked back from all these claims, and yet he still remains largely silenced, despite never being charged with a crime, in large part fulfilling the request for “reasonable assurances that he will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life,” which was cabled to CIA headquarters by his interrogators in a CIA “black site.”

There was much more in the interview — my discussion of the importance, for example, of a number of damning UN reports and opinions about Guantánamo that were published last year and largely ignored, and a detailed discussion about how and why the rounding up of prisoners was so desperately flawed — but I’ll refrain from discussing them here, and hope that you have time watch the whole interview, and that you’ll share it if you find it instructive.

My thanks again to Cathy and Elizabeth, and I hope that this is just the start of a continuing association with Consortium News.

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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 (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.