Video: I Discuss Guantánamo Past, Present and Future with David Swanson on Talk World Radio

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I’m delighted to be making available below the video of a half-hour interview that I undertook on Sunday with the great peace activist David Swanson, of World BEYOND War, for his Talk World Radio show, which is syndicated by the Pacifica Network throughout the US.

David and I have know each other for a long time, since my earliest visits to the US at the end of the Bush administration, and the start of the Obama presidency, although we haven’t seen each other for many years, and I haven’t before had the pleasure of being interviewed by him for his show, which he helpfully entitled, “Close Guantánamo While Its Victims Are Still Alive.”

Half an hour was a helpful amount of time to discuss a complicated story like Guantánamo with the attention to detail that it deserves, and I was more than happy to discuss the prison from its earliest days, as a facility designed to hold human beings without and rights whatsoever, and to torture them when the largely hapless individuals rounded up or bought in Afghanistan and Pakistan failed to provide the “intelligence” that those in charge of the “war on terror” demanded.

The video is below, via YouTube, and I hope that you have time to watch it, and that you’ll share it if you find it a useful overview of the horrors of Guantánamo as the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening approaches (this Saturday, January 11).

Of the many other aspects of the prison’s story that I discussed, I was pleased to discuss the two years, between 2008 and 2010, when the law, for the only time, reached Guantánamo via habeas corpus petitions that were reviewed by District Court judges who, in dozens of cases, found that the government had failed to establish that the men in question had any meaningful or provable connection to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and ordered their release.

Sadly, however, politically motivated appeals court judges then shut down the habeas process, returning the men still held — except for the handful put forward for trials in the military commission trial system, which is, itself, almost fatally tainted by the prior use of torture — into a lawless limbo, in which their only way to secure release from the prison was via administrative review processes, introduced by Obama, which have no legal weight, and resemble, most closely, the “administrative detention” that underpins so much of Israel’s flagrant abuse of the law in its vile prisons for Palestinians.

There has been some good news since we recorded this interview, as eleven Yemenis, long approved for release, were resettled in Oman on Tuesday, leaving just 15 men still held, but, for all of these men, it would be difficult to say that the situation they face is fundamentally different from when Guantánamo first opened 23 horribly long years ago.

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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 new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his 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.

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