Video: The Shame of Guantánamo – My One-Hour Interview with Kevin Gosztola for Unauthorized Disclosure
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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.
World on Fire: I Discuss Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians with Andy Bungay
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If you have an hour to spare, and want to listen to the kind of political analysis of current events that is completely absent from mainstream media, I hope you’ll listen to me discussing the situation in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and the collective psychic derangement of our politicians in the west with Andy Bungay, recorded last weekend and broadcast on Andy’s show on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London.
Andy has interviewed me numerous times over the years, in connection with a variety of topics including Guantánamo and London’s housing crisis, and in July we spoke at length about the UK General Election, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the right to protest and the release of Julian Assange, leading to a new arrangement whereby, once a month, we’ll discuss topic of concerns in a new hourly slot on Andy’s show.
In this first monthly interview, posted below via YouTube, and featured as part of Andy’s whole show here, we began by discussing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which allowed me to discuss at length the “genocide within a genocide” that has been taking place for the last month in northern Gaza, via a truly abhorrent new plan that mixes starvation with extermination, the destruction of hospitals and efforts to displace the surviving population through ethnic cleansing, prior to Israeli colonization.
I Discuss Julian Assange’s Council of Europe Testimony and Social Media Censorship with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio
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On Wednesday, I was delighted to talk once more with Chris Cook, for his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, which has been running weekly since 1999, and, in Chris’ words, “providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.” Chris first found me about 15 years ago, and has interviewed me regularly ever since, and if you’d like to hear our 30-minute interview, as well as an interview with the Canadian journalist, author, and activist Yves Engler, you can find it here on the Gorilla Radio Substack page.
My interviews with Chris often deal with the main focus of my work, the seemingly uncloseable prison at Guantánamo Bay, although we’ve also discussed numerous other topics over the years, including, over the last year, the grotesque genocide being undertaken by the State of Israel in the Gaza Strip.
We’ve also spoken frequently about Julian Assange, with whom I worked on WikiLeaks’ release of the Guantánamo Files in 2011, and much of our interview on Wednesday was taken up with a discussion of Julian’s testimony at a hearing of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg on Monday.
Please Support My Reader-Funded Writing and Campaigning for Guantánamo’s Closure Over the Next Three Months
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 and supporters,
Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work as a genuinely independent journalist and activist, primarily in relation to my work on the US prison at Guantánamo Bay (on which I have written and published 2,600 articles over the last 17 years), but also touching on other topics that seize my attention, including, these days, two topics of colossal importance that are generally either misreported or under-reported by the mainstream media — Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the biggest “war” that any of us have ever experienced; namely, the war waged by humanity on a liveable climate, which is manifesting itself via the unmistakable signs of unprecedented climate collapse.
If you can help me to continue this work, please click on the “Donate” button above (or here) to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.
You can also join my monthly sustainers by making a recurring payment, ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and filling in the amount you wish to donate every month. If you are able to do so, a regular, monthly donation would be greatly appreciated.
Radio: I Discuss the Aborted Guantánamo Plea Deals and the UK’s Far-Right Riots with Chris Cook on Gorilla 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.
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.
Podcast: I Discuss the UK’s General Election, Warmongering, Protest and Julian Assange’s Release with Andy Bungay
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I’m pleased to have just posted on my YouTube channel the full audio recording of an interview I undertook on July 13, nine days after the UK’s recent General Election, with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south London. Some of what we discussed drew on the article I wrote just after the election, Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly.
Parts of the interview were broadcast live that evening, with the full interview subsequently included in a longer version of the show posted on Andy’s MixCloud page, as the latest instalment of a monthly show, the Colin Crilly Takeover, incorporated into Andy’s weekly show, The Chiminea.
It was a great pleasure to chat to Andy about the relief that so many people were feeling about being rid of the cruel, corrupt and incompetent Tory government, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to explain how so much of this derangement was because of Brexit, when, after Theresa May lost her struggle to try and make it work in a rational manner, we were burdened with a succession of dreadful Prime Ministers — Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — who fundamentally gave up on governing, and focused instead on deranged fantasies: treating the UK as a tabula rasa, a lawless blank slate which they intended to remake as little more than a corrupt kleptocracy and an authoritarian nightmare, a place where refugees would all be treated as criminals, and flown on a one-way trip to Rwanda, and any kind of protest was akin to terrorism.
Radio: I Discuss the Death of the Tories, Labour’s Dubious Victory and Israel’s Guantánamo with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio
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Many thanks to my truth warrior colleague Chris Cook, in western Canada, for having me on his Gorilla Radio show again to discuss last week’s General Election in the UK, following up on my article, Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly.
Our interview, available on Chris’s Substack here, took place in the second half of the one-hour show, following his interview with journalist and author John Helmer about Russia and Ukraine.
Chris and I spent most of our half-hour interview discussing the collapse of the Conservative Party — who lost two-thirds of their seats — after the 14 unbearably long years of their increasingly deranged rule, which became noticeably more septic after the vote to leave the EU in 2016, and also discussing the largely empty promise of their replacements, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer, who, because of the vagaries of Britain’s antiquated and anachronistic ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, won a landslide victory, despite securing less votes than Jeremy Corbyn did as Labour’s leader in the General Elections of 2017 and 2019.
Via a Fundamentally Devious US Plea Deal, Julian Assange Will Soon Be a Free Man
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In unexpected and truly heartening news, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange will soon now a free man, reunited, in his home country of Australia, with his wife Stella and their two sons, Gabriel and Max (born in 2017 and 2019), who have only ever seen their father behind bars.
Assange was released from the maximum-security HMP Belmarsh in south east London, where he had spent over five years —1,901 days — in legal limbo, fighting extradition to the US to face espionage charges relating to his work as a journalist and publisher exposing US crimes and war crimes.
From Stansted Airport, he is being flown to the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States, where, in exchange for his freedom, he has agreed to sign a plea deal admitting that he had “knowingly and unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning” to commit espionage against the United States by obtaining and disseminating classified national defence information.
Video: I Discuss “Is It Time for Gitmo to Close?” with Scottie Nell Hughes on Sovren Media
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.
If you have half an hour to spare, I hope you’ll watch my interview about the prison at Guantánamo Bay with Scottie Nell Hughes, on her show 360 View, as featured on the online TV channel Sovren Media, in which the other featured guest was the conservative talk radio host Steve Gill.
Scottie and I had spoken previously when she worked for RT America, between 2018 and the channel’s politically motivated closure in 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it was good to be given an opportunity to elucidate some of the many incontrovertible reasons why this festering sore from the US’s brutal and lawless post-9/11 experiments in torture, dehumanization and endless imprisonment without charge or trial should be shut down.
I’m glad to say that I was given plenty of time to explain the reasons that Guantánamo must be closed, and should have been “a long, long time ago”, as I put it — because it is, as I also explained, “a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and a great shame for the United States every day that it remains open.”
Quarterly Appeal: Please Support My Ongoing 18 Years of Campaigning to Close Guantánamo and My Work on Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
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.
It’s over 18 years since I gave my life over to telling the true story of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and the men and boys held there, and to the seemingly endless task of trying to get the prison closed.
I began with a book, The Guantánamo Files, which absolutely consumed 14 months of my life, and since then I’ve written over 2,000 articles, about every aspect of Guantánamo’s story, mostly here, but also, at various times, for the New York Times, the Guardian and Al Jazeera, as well as on the Close Guantánamo website, which I established with the US attorney Tom Wilner in 2012.
I also co-directed a film, ’Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’, released in 2009, and have worked with the United Nations, WikiLeaks, Reprieve and Cagepisoners (now CAGE International). I’ve also spoken publicly about Guantánamo at every opportunity, have undertaken numerous TV and radio appearances, and, more recently, via podcasts and other online media outlets, have written and recorded songs about Guantánamo (and the CIA’s “black site” torture program), and have launched numerous campaigns.
These include, most recently, an ongoing photo campaign involving posters marking every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence, and ongoing monthly coordinated vigils for the prison’s closure, which take place across the US and around the world on the first Wednesday of every month, and which have specifically focused on the 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release, but who are still held because the decisions taken to release them were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism whatsoever exists to compel the government to free them if, as is abundantly apparent, the Biden administration has no interest in prioritizing their release. In fact, as recently became clear, in the cases of eleven of these men, the Biden administration specifically prevented their resettlement after the events of October 7, fearing the “political optics” of doing so.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
