Updates on Trump’s Deportation Obsession and His Open Warfare on the US Courts, and My Interview on Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook
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Many thanks to Chris Cook in western Canada for having me on his weekly Gorilla Radio show on Wednesday to discuss the latest developments in the horrendous “war on migrants” that Donald Trump initiated when he took office three months ago. The interview is available here, on Gorilla Radio’s Substack, taking up the first half of the hour-long show, with Canadian author Ray McGinnis in the second half.
Chris and I last spoke in February, just after Donald Trump had started using Guantánamo to hold migrants — the majority of whom were Venezuelans, who were accused, without evidence, of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. I wrote about the use of Guantánamo for migrants in a series of articles here, here, here, here, here and here, with a summary on the Close Guantánamo website on March 21.
By that point, Trump had begun shifting his focus to an even more alarming location than Guantánamo, sending 238 Venezuelan migrants and 23 Salvadorians — all, again, accused of being gang members, without any evidence being provided — on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison (the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or, in English, the Terrorism Confinement Center) on March 15.
Video: “Guantánamo at 23”, My New America Event with Tom Wilner and Karen Greenberg, and My One-Hour Podcast Interview with Margaret Flowers
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. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
On the last day of Joe Biden’s presidency, it seems appropriate to be posting a video and an audio recording marking the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening, on January 11, and appraising the pros and cons of Biden’s tenure in relation to Guantánamo, even though the news today is, understandably, dominated by the extraordinarily welcome news that, after 470 days of the most monstrous and persistent genocidal assault imaginable, a ceasefire has begun today in the Gaza Strip.
This has finally allowed the Palestinians, for the first time since the brief six-day “pause” in hostilities for the exchange of hostages that took place at the end of November 2023, to stop having to live in permanent fear of losing their lives from Israeli bombing, snipers, drones and armed quadcopters.
The sense of relief is, frankly, unimaginable for those of us who have been obliged to watch the atrocities unfold from afar, but many Palestinians, long displaced from their homes, are, for the first time, realizing the unprecedented extent of Israel’s destruction of almost the entire built environment, as they make their way through what appears to be a post-apocalyptic hellscape, in search of the remains of their homes, and of the remains of their lost and murdered loved ones.
Photos and Report: Close Guantánamo Vigils Marking the 23rd Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, January 11, 2025
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. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
Saturday January 11 marked another gruesome and unforgivable milestone in the US’s ongoing long war on law and fundamental human decency — the 23rd anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, despite recent positive developments (the release of 15 men), another 15 are still held in varying states of lawlessness.
To mark the occasion, groups across the US and around the world, who have been admirably and diligently taking part in monthly coordinated “First Wednesday” vigils for the last two years calling for the prison’s closure, shifted the dates of their vigils to the anniversary — although normal service will be resumed next month, on Wednesday February 5.
Below are photos of the vigils in Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY and Detroit. A planned vigil in Los Angeles had to be called off because of the wildfires, and other groups held vigils on other days — Portland, OR on January 1, and Mexico City on January 8 — with the vigil outside the European Parliament in Brussels taking place this coming Thursday, January 16. Groups involved include various Amnesty International groups, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, Close Guantánamo, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the UK Guantánamo Network, and many other groups, with other organizations also supporting the vigils on an ongoing basis.
Video: I Discuss Guantánamo Past, Present and Future with David Swanson on Talk World Radio
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. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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.
Podcast: I Discuss the Shameful State of the World, and Resistance and Hope in 2025 with Andy Bungay for Riverside Radio
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If you have the time and the inclination, please check out my latest interview with my colleague Andy Bungay, posted below as a YouTube podcast, and originally broadcast, as the latest in an ongoing series of monthly interviews, during Andy’s shows last Saturday and Sunday on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London, and subsequently made available on his Mixcloud page here and here. I’m pleased to note that Andy also played the latest live recordings by my band The Four Fathers, as well as ‘They Don’t Care’, the latest online single by my son Tyler, the beatboxer and singer known as The Wiz-RD.
In a freewheeling 80-minute discussion, we focused on some of the many profoundly dispiriting events dominating our lives as 2024 draws to a close — the imminent return as the US president of Donald Trump, the ongoing genocidal carnage being inflicted by Israel on the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and the growing menace of catastrophic climate change.
All are thoroughly depressing topics, of course, but unlike last month, when my discussion with Andy, available here as ‘World on Fire: Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians’, was rather dark (almost certainly because of the intensity of Israel’s “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza), this month’s conversation was threaded through with resistance and hope.
Please Support My Guantánamo Work With a Donation, or Subscribe to My New Substack Newsletter
Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months.
Dear friends, fans, followers and supporters,
For nearly two decades, I’ve devoted most of my working life — and much of my waking, non-working life — to the largely thankless task of exposing the truth about the prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the men and boys held there, revealing how most of them were not “the worst of the worst”, and had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or terrorism, railing against the abhorrent lawlessness and brutality of the prison, and campaigning assiduously to try and get it closed.
Throughout this time, I have been reliant on you, my readers, to support me in my work as the prison’s foremost independent opponent, a reader-funded independent journalist and activist, free of the lamentable indifference or amnesia of most of the mainstream media, and able to articulate freely and persistently why it is so important not to allow the victims of Guantánamo to be dehumanized, and why the prison is, and has been consistently, a legal, moral and ethical abomination.
As a result of my regular quarterly appeals for support, many of you have, over the years, made one-off donations, or, in some cases, have becoming subscribers, donating a regular amount every month — all of which is essential to allow me to continue to work towards Guantánamo’s eventual closure.
Free the Guantánamo 16! Two Letters to President Biden; Signatories Include Former Prisoners, Ex-US Government Officials, UK Parliamentarians
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.
100 Former Guantánamo Prisoners, Ex-US Government Officials, Lawyers, Academics, Psychologists, Public Figures and Rights Organizations Send Letter to President Biden Urging Him to Free the 16 Men Still Held at Guantánamo Who Have Long Been Approved for Release; Second Letter is Sent by 40 British MPs and Peers, Academics and CEOs of UK Rights Organizations
Today, December 6, 2024, 100 individuals and organizations — including 36 former Guantánamo prisoners, 36 ex-US government officials, lawyers, academics, psychologists and public figures, and 28 rights organizations — have written to President Biden, with a second letter sent simultaneously by 40 British MPs and peers, academics and the CEOs of UK rights organizations, to urge him to take urgent action to free 16 men still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay (out of 30 in total) who have long been approved for release.
These decisions, which were unanimously agreed through robust, high-level US government review processes, took place many years ago — between two and four years ago, and in three outlying cases nearly 15 years ago.
The former prisoners signing the US and international letter include the authors Mansoor Adayfi and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and the supporters include Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the musician and activist Roger Waters.
The UK letter includes 20 Parliamentarians, the Chief Executive of Amnesty International UK, and the film director Kevin Macdonald (‘The Mauritanian’).
Audio: I Discuss ‘Life at Guantánamo: Writing Behind Bars’ with Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Mansoor Adayfi at Amnesty International’s London HQ in June 2023
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It’s taken a long time to make this available, but I hope that you’ll have the time to listen to the audio recording of a powerful and moving event that took place at Amnesty International’s London headquarters on Wednesday June 28, 2023.
‘Life at Guantánamo: Writing Behind Bars’ featured Mohamedou Ould Slahi, as the author of the best-selling Guantanamo Diary, and, from Serbia, via Zoom, Mansoor Adayfi, the author of Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, which was published in 2021. Mansoor was supposed to be with us in person, but had not been given a visa in time, although he has subsequently managed to successfully visit the UK on several occasions, including a memorable visit to the Houses of Parliament last October, which I wrote about here.
I was the moderator for the event, and Sara Birch, the Convenor of the UK Guantánamo Network, was also on the panel, and it was, I think it’s fair to say, a resounding success, with, in particular, a powerful rapport between Mohamedou, Mansoor and myself.
Guantánamo Art Exhibition Opens at Rich Mix in London on December 5, with Mansoor Adayfi and Andy Worthington
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’m delighted to announce that, on Thursday December 5, an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork, “Don’t Forget Us Here”, named after the 2021 memoir of former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, will be launching at Rich Mix, a cultural and community space in Shoreditch, at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA.
The exhibition will be running until January 5, with an opening event, starting at 6pm on December 5, featuring Mansoor and myself as speakers. It was organized by the UK Guantánamo Network (an umbrella group of organizations calling for Guantánamo’s closure), in collaboration with Amnesty International UK, and was put together by Lise Rossi and Dominique O’Neil, core team members of the UK Guantánamo Network, and Amnesty International members.
The exhibition — the first in the UK — is a version of an exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners that first opened at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City in October 2017, and that has since toured across the US, as well as in Berlin and the European Parliament.
Video: The Shame of Guantánamo – My One-Hour Interview with Kevin Gosztola for Unauthorized Disclosure
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.
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.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
