Video: The Shame of Guantánamo – My One-Hour Interview with Kevin Gosztola for Unauthorized Disclosure

A screenshot of my interview with Kevin Gosztola for his ‘Unauthorized Disclosure’ podcast in November 2024.

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Many thanks to Kevin Gosztola for not forgetting about Guantánamo, and for spending an hour with me online last week to discuss in detail the grave legal and human rights abuses still taking place at the US’s shameful “war on terror” prison, as it nears the 23rd anniversary of its opening.

Kevin and I have known each other for many years, and our paths have crossed on occasion on the annual visits to the US that I undertook every January from 2011 to 2020 to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the anniversary its opening, as well as during his long dedication to addressing the persecution of Julian Assange, with whom I worked in 2011 on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo.

In recent years, he’s one of the few journalists to have maintained an interest in Guantánamo, interviewing me for his “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast on a more or less annual basis, in 2020, 2021 and 2023.

For our latest update, available below via YouTube, we began by discussing the half a billion dollars that it costs to keep the 30 men still held at Guantánamo — the 16 men in the “general population” who have all been approved for release, 13 other “high-value detainees”, charged in the military commissions, or, in three cases, held indefinitely without charge or trial as “forever prisoners”, and one man serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.

We then proceeded to discuss two particularly pressing concerns — the military commissions, and the plight of the men approved for release.

On the military commissions, we followed up on my recent article, Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago, in which I discussed the shameful situation whereby plea deals, carefully negotiated for the last two and a half years by prosecutors and defense attorneys for three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, signed at the end of July, were rescinded two days later by defense secretary Lloyd Austin.

This eminently sensible decision, which finally involved a recognition by prosecutors that the use of torture in CIA “black sites” had fatally contaminated the possibility of successful prosecutions, took the death penalty off the table, in exchange for confessions and life sentences, representing the only practical way for there to be closure — not only for the US establishment, humiliated internationally by its inability to successfully prosecute these men, but also, crucially, for the 9/11 victims’ families.

Now, however, the military judge in the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has thrown a colossal spanner in the works by ruling that Austin had no right to rescind the plea deals, paving the way, hopefully, for the submission of statements in January, before Donald Trump takes office and takes a wrecking ball to the entire operation — if, that is, the Biden administration can be persuaded not to appeal Judge McCall’s forensic humiliation of the Pentagon’s untenable thirst for unachievable vengeance.

Turning to the prisoners long approved for release but still held, we followed up on another recent article of mine, Free the Guantánamo 16: A Message to President Biden as His Time Runs Out, and discussed the horrendous plight of these men, who have been unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes, but are still held because those decisions were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists that can compel the government to free them if, as has become increasingly apparent since the most recent prisoner release, back in April 2023, the Biden administration has been unwilling to prioritize freeing them.

With time running out before Donald Trump takes over, once more sealing the prison shut, and with third countries having to be found that will offer new homes for these men (because of Republican Congressional bans on repatriating them), I explained how a plan to resettle most of these men in Oman, stopped over a year ago because of the unconnected events of October 7 in Israel, needs to be urgently revived, or a new country needs to be found that will take them in.

At the end of the show, Kevin turned his attention to my band The Four Fathers, who, nine years ago, were featured by Kevin as “Protest Song of the Week”, for our song for the campaign to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, on Shadowproof, the website that he ran at the time. This time around, Kevin promoted our new album, “Songs of Loss and Resistance”, which is available on Bandcamp, to download, or as a limited edition CD, and which features songs recorded over the last six years dealing with Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners”, the persecution of Julian Assange, climate collapse, the Grenfell Tower fire, and much more.

I’m grateful to Kevin for highlighting The Four Fathers’ ongoing protest music, and delighted to note that he has just revived his focus on protest music via The Protest Music Project on Substack — which, with his encouragement, I’ve also joined, and where I’ll be publishing a weekly newsletter linking to all my work on an ongoing basis. Please join me!

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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.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago

Khalid Shaykh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi, in photographs taken at Guantánamo in recent years.

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.





 

On July 31 this year, a truly historic event took place at Guantánamo — in the military commissions, the trial system established to prosecute prisoners charged with acts of terrorism.

After two and a half years of negotiations between three of the men charged in connection with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, their prosecutors and their defense teams, the Convening Authority for the Commissions, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan K. Escallier (who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), entered into three separate pretrial agreements (PTAs) with Khalid Shaykh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi. Of the five men originally charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, one other man, Ammar al-Baluchi, is still involved in negotiations regarding his case, while the fifth, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was ruled “unfit to stand trial” by a DoD Sanity Board last year.

Two days after the plea deals were announced, however, they were rescinded by the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in a decision that, shamefully, demonstrated a commitment to undying vengeance in defiance of reality on the government’s part, coupled with fear of even greater reality-defying vengefulness from Republicans.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Bleakness of Guantánamo, as Biden’s End Nears

A collage of photos from the monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that have been taking place across the US and around the world on the first Wednesday of every month for the last 20 months.

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.





 

I wrote the following article for 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.

In the epidemic of disasters afflicting the world, it’s sometimes hard to even remember that, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the US government is still holding 30 men, detained for between 15 and 22 years, who, for the most part, have never been charged with crimes, and are imprisoned, apparently indefinitely, without charge or trial.

With just a fortnight to go until the US Presidential Election, these men’s plight has become politically invisible, even though their treatment — outside of all norms governing the deprivation of liberty of individuals — has, from the beginning, relied on their demonization and dehumanization as Muslims, with a clear line stretching from their fundamentally lawless imprisonment to the way that demonized and dehumanized Muslims are being treated in the Gaza Strip today.

Now suffering under their fourth president, the men at Guantánamo had some hope, when Joe Biden took office, that positive changes were on the horizon. NGOs and lawyers had lobbied his transition team, urging that, at the very least, he address the plight of those specifically imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, as opposed to those charged in the military commissions, a broken system, first introduced after the 9/11 attacks, before Guantánamo even opened, albeit one with some tangential connection to the law.

Read the rest of this entry »

Radio: I Discuss the Aborted Guantánamo Plea Deals and the UK’s Far-Right Riots with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

Clockwise from top left: Lloyd Austin and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad; Sara Birch and Andy Worthington in Parliament Square as part of the monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo; the Gorilla Radio logo; and the far-right riots in the UK.

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.





 

Last week I was delighted to speak yet again with Chris Cook, who, for 25 years, has been running his Gorilla Radio show out of western Canada, “providing a forum”, as he describes it, “for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”

Chris and I have spoken countless times over the last 15 years or so, and last week we discussed the latest news regarding Guantánamo, as well as the recent far-right riots in the UK. The show is available on Gorilla Radio’s Substack page here, and our interview is in the second half of the one-hour show.

On Guantánamo, we followed up on my recent article, Lloyd Austin Cynically Revokes 9/11 Plea Deals, Which Correctly Concluded That the Use of Torture Is Incompatible With the Pursuit of Justice, looking at the plea deals agreed with three of the five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, which, however, only survived for 48 hours until they were revoked by defense secretary Lloyd Austin.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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).
Email Andy Worthington

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The Battle of the Beanfield

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Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion

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Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo

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