Podcast: Guantánamo’s Forgotten Prisoners, Trump’s “War on Migrants” and the Horrors of El Salvador’s CECOT Prison on Due Dissidence

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This article was originally published on May 27 on the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Many thanks to Misty Winston for interviewing me two weeks ago for her show on Due Dissidence, a channel that we might call an alt-left alternative to the plague of alt-right streaming channels that dominate so much social media.

Misty and I have spoken many times before, beginning in the days when she was an indefatigable activist for Julian Assange, and, after finding a temporary home on various other platforms, it was great to catch up with her on a channel that, I hope, values her presence.

We spoke for 90 minutes, and the show was live-streamed on Rumble, and also on X, and was subsequently posted in its entirety on Substack.

Two excerpts have also been posted on Due Dissidence’s YouTube channel, and I’ve embedded them below, although I do hope that you’ll watch the whole show if they whet your appetite.

We discussed the forgotten “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, where 15 men are still held, Donald Trump’s grotesque “war on migrants”, in which he has used Guantánamo as a location for performative cruelty, and the even more alarming deal he reached with El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele, to send migrants on a one-way trip to Bukele’s mega-Guantánamo, the CECOT prison that wouldn’t exist without the template for indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that was provided by the Bush administration at Guantánamo.

I’ve previously written about Trump’s “war on migrants”, and his use of Guantánamo, here, and here, and also here, and you can also find many more articles here on my website.

Much of our discussion focused on the deliberately cruel and arbitrary nature of the Trump administration’s “war”, with no evidence provided that the deported migrants were gang members, as alleged, with many of the men deported despite having ongoing asylum appeals, and with, notoriously, one man — Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — sent to CECOT via an administrative error.

The Trump administration has fought back against numerous court rulings seeking to rein in their blatant lawlessness, and officials have also contemptuously refused to contemplate taking any action to remedy their mistakes — in Abrego Garcia’s case, launching a black propaganda campaign reviling him in an attempt to erase their mistake.

I was particularly concerned to highlight the similarities between “the war on terror” and the “war on migrants”, both of which explicitly involve, or involved imprisoning people without any form of due process, claiming a national emergency as justification.

In the “war on terror”, however, this applied to Muslims who had to be rounded up abroad, but in Trump’s “war”, the victims are not just migrants in ICE detention centers, but any migrant anywhere on the US mainland, with millions of people living and working in the US at risk of being abducted, “war on terror”-style, and ending up, potentially, being sent on a one-way trip to a mega-Guantánamo in another country.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say, as I discussed with Misty, that, in Donald Trump’s white supremacist America, no one of color is safe anywhere.

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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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage 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 and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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