Video: I Discuss Guantánamo and My Work with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks on Consortium News
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I’m delighted to be posting the video interview I undertook recently, discussing my work articulating and opposing the ongoing 22-year horror story of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and my work with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011, with Cathy Vogan and Elizabeth Vos of Consortium News, the independent news website established in 1995 by the late investigative journalist Robert Parry, which is now run by Cathy and Joe Lauria.
After the interview, I met Joe and Cathy at an event for Julian Assange in London, and was pleased to find two like-minded souls in the unending struggle to expose the truth about the state of the world, and to resist further crimes and abuses of power by those in charge.
In the interview, I began by explaining how I had become involved in the Guantánamo story, in 2006, and the forensic investigative work that was required to piece together — from documents reluctantly made publicly available by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation, including, for the first time, the names and nationalities of the prisoners — a coherent narrative about who was held in Guantánamo, and how the overwhelming majority of the 779 men and boys held there by the US military since January 2002 had no connection with terrorism, for my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007.
An Assessment of the Importance of the Classified Guantánamo Military Files Released by WikiLeaks and My Role in Analyzing Them
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 of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
I’m currently waiting to be called as a witness in the notorious extradition case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently taking place in the Old Bailey, and, as a result, I haven’t been posting about the hearings, which began three weeks ago, and have one week left to run, since the hearings began, when I wrote an article entitled, The Ongoing and Unjustifiable Persecution of Julian Assange. For information about disagreements in court regarding my testimony, see this post by Craig Murray, and for detailed information about the events of the last three weeks, see his daily reports, and those of Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof. Gosztola has also produced this guide to all the journalists and organizations covering the hearings in the absence of dedicated daily coverage by any mainstream media.
My involvement with Assange’s extradition hearing came about because, nine and a half years ago, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo that had been leaked by US soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. The release of the files followed the release, in 2010, of the “Collateral Murder” video, showing US helicopter pilots killing civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and laughing about it, extensive war logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars, and over 250,000 US diplomatic cables.
Julian Assange is now fighting to prevent his unjustifiable extradition to the US, to face charges under the Espionage Act that would mean life in prison if he were to be convicted. And what’s profoundly alarming about this, as should not even need saying at all, is that Assange’s alleged crimes are not crimes at all.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
