Video: The Annual New America Panel Discussion About Guantánamo, Featuring Karen Greenberg, Tom Wilner and Myself

A screenshot of “Guantánamo at Twenty-One: What is the Future of the Prison Camp?”, an online panel discussion held by New America on Jan. 11, 2023, the 21st anniversary of the opening of the prison.

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.





 

Almost every year since 2011, the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C. has generously hosted panel discussions about Guantánamo with the attorney Tom Wilner and I, at which we have been joined by a number of other guests.

At the time of that first event, Barack Obama was the president, and 173 men were still held. In 2012 we marked the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening, also launching the Close Guantánamo campaign, returning every year thereafter, except for 2014, when Tom and I were both too dispirited to summon up any enthusiasm. The 2016 event coincided with a “Countdown to Close Guantánamo” campaign, launched by Andy and Roger Waters on Democracy Now!, to put pressure on Obama to finally fulfill his promise to get the prison closed, but, when Obama left office, 41 men were still held, who then had endure four years of hostility from a president who had no interest in releasing any of them.

Having moved the events online in 2021, because of Covid, Tom and I and our by now regular companion, Karen Greenberg, the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, met again online a year ago to discuss Guantánamo on its 20th anniversary, when we were, I think it’s fair to say, caught been hope and pessimism, but this year, sadly, hope is losing that battle.

Read the rest of this entry »

Free The Guantánamo 20: Events Marking the 21st Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison

The 20 men approved for release from Guantánamo but still held, an image put together by Andy Worthington for the Close Guantánamo campaign.

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.

With a heavy heart, the small but dedicated group of human rights activists from across the United States and around the world who, on a daily basis, are appalled by the continued existence of the fundamentally lawless prison at Guantánamo Bay are preparing to mark the 21st anniversary of its opening this Wednesday, Jan. 11.

This anniversary I’ll be in London (not the US as I was every Jan. 11 from 2011 to 2020), but I’m hoping that I’ll still be able to make waves, along with my American friends and colleagues, and this year I’m particularly focusing on the 20 men, out of the 35 still held — who have been approved for release, but are still held.

Photos of these 20 men are in the composite image at the top of this article, which I made a few days ago, and when I posted it on Facebook, I explained, “16 of these men have been approved for release since President Biden took office, while three others were approved for release in 2010, but are still held, and one other man was approved for release in the dying days of the Trump presidency.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Video: I Discuss “Guantánamo at Twenty: What is the Future of the Prison Camp?” with Tom Wilner, Karen Greenberg and Peter Bergen at New America

A screenshot of Andy Worthington with Tom Wilner, Karen Greenberg and Peter Bergen at “Guantánamo at Twenty: What is the Future of the Prison Camp?”, an online discussion hosted by New America on Jan. 11, 2022, the 20th anniversary of the opening of the prison.

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.





 

The 20th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay was marked by a flurry of mainstream media activity, and, for those us who work on Guantánamo regularly (or even incessantly), it was extraordinarily busy.

I worked almost non-stop on Guantánamo from 8.30 in the morning until 3am the day after, in what was probably the busiest day of my life, starting with a brief but helpful interview with BBC Radio Scotland (about two hours and 45 minutes into the show), and proceeding with a half-hour Turkish TV show with other experts, an online panel discussion at New America in Washington, D.C., and a Virtual Vigil hosted by Amnesty International and other groups. In between these events, I wrote and published an article calling for action from President Biden, posted 50 photos of Close Guantánamo supporters holding up posters calling for its closure, and also uploaded and posted a video of my band The Four Fathers playing ‘Forever Prisoner’, a new song I wrote about Khaled Qassim, one of the men still held indefinitely at Guantánamo without charge or trial.

Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting articles linking to these events, doing what I’ve been doing for most of the last 16 years: trying to keep a focus on the injustices of Guantánamo, and the ever-urgent need for it to be closed, when the mainstream media moves on (as it has done already after briefly remembering the prison on Tuesday).

Read the rest of this entry »

Karen Greenberg on Brett Kavanaugh, and How Guantánamo is Poisoning US Law

Brett Kavanaugh consumed with anger during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing prior to his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, and a photo of Guantanamo on the day it opened, January 11, 2002.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.




 

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 21 months since Donald Trump became president, it has become increasingly difficult for those of us who care about the necessity of closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay to keep this burning injustice in the public eye. 

Journalists who care have tried hard to find ways to not let Guantánamo be forgotten, and one of those journalists is Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, and the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, published in 2010.

Karen and I first got to know each other in the George W. Bush years, when my book The Guantánamo Files was published. She screened ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,’ the documentary film I co-directed, in New York in 2009, and has been a panelist on several occasions in the panel discussions Tom Wilner and I organize every January, on the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, at the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C. Read the rest of this entry »

Telling Donald Trump to Close Guantánamo: My Report on an Inspiring 24 Hours of Protest and Resistance in Washington, D.C. on the 16th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening

Some of the supporters of the new Close Guantanamo initiative, counting how many days Guantanamo has been open. Clockwise from top L: Alli McCracken of Amnesty International USA, Natalia Scott in Mexico, Susan McLucas in Massachusetts, Martin Gugino, representatives of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Kathy Kelly, Brian Terrell and Beth Adams in Washington, D.C. 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, including my current visit to the US.





 

Thursday, Jan. 11 was the 16th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and to mark the occasion, via the Close Guantánamo campaign I co-founded with the attorney Tom Wilner in 2012, we launched a new initiative: the Gitmo Clock, which counts how long Guantánamo has been open — 5,845 days on the anniversary. We’re encouraging people, throughout the year, to print the clock, take a photo with it, and send it to us, to put up on the website and to share via social media.

I arrived in New York from London on January 8, on my eighth annual visit in January to call for the closure of Guantánamo on and around the anniversary of its opening, and on Wednesday, January 10, I took the bus to Washington, D.C., to attend an event that evening, and to take part in a protest and a panel discussion the day after.

All were wonderful, inspiring occasions, providing an uplifting antidote to the anxiety and misery of life under Donald Trump as the repulsive, dysfunctional head of a disturbingly heartless Republican government. Read the rest of this entry »

16 Years of Guantánamo: My Eighth Successive January Visit to the US to Call for the Closure of the Prison on the Anniversary of Its Opening

A poster prepared by Witness Against Torture showing events in Washington, D.C. on an around Jan. 11, 2018, the 16th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo.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, and my imminent visit to the US, discussed below.





 

On Monday, I fly into New York from London for what will be my eighth successive January visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Despite the generally inhospitable climate and the unpleasantness of the cause, it has always been exciting to visit, as I have met and got to know the people who should be running the US — the campaigners, principled lawyers and ordinary citizens who have made a stand against the existence of the prison, recognizing it as a profound injustice, established in the heat of vengeance after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which is a source of shame to all decent Americans every day that it remains open.

A majority of Americans, unfortunately, don’t understand how important it is to rely on established and internationally accepted procedures when depriving people of their liberty. Those imprisoned should either be criminal suspects, charged as swiftly as possible and put on trial in a federal court, or prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, and held unmolested until the end of hostilities. At Guantánamo, however, the men held were deprived of all rights, and held as “unlawful enemy combatants” — “for the express purpose of denying them the rights that combatants normally receive,” as Human Rights First has explained in a briefing.

This would be bad enough, but the very basis for holding the men has always been a disgrace — although one, sadly, that has never received the mainstream coverage it cries out for. Contrary to claims that the men and boys held at Guantánamo were “the worst of the worst,” who were all captured on the battlefield, most were captured not by the US, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, who didn’t find them on the battlefield, and who often sold them to the US, which was paying bounties averaging $5000 a head for anyone who could be portrayed as a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Read the rest of this entry »

Karen Greenberg on Why America, and Its Values, Remain Imprisoned at Guantánamo As Long As The Prison Stays Open

A panel discussion about the future of Guantanamo at New America in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 2016 with, from L to R: Peter Bergen, Karen Greenberg, Andy Worthington and Tom Wilner.Please support my work! 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.

 

As we mark 60 days of Donald Trump’s reign as the clown-in-chief of the United States, those of us who care about the rule of law and America’s reputation will be breathing only a small sign of relief that, amongst the many appalling policies introduced by Trump in his first two months in office, an executive order officially keeping Guantánamo open and committing to sending new prisoners there has not yet been issued, despite being threatened (as I reported here and here).

However, the very fact that Guantánamo is still open is a cause for sorrow, overshadowing any relative sense of relief that Trump has, evidently, found it harder than anticipated to sell the expansion of Guantánamo to the grown-ups in his administration.

Below, I’m very pleased to be cross-posting an article encapsulating that sense of sorrow, written by one of the few writers I know who, like myself, has lived with, and agonized over the continued existence of Guantánamo for many long years — Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, published in 2010, and Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, published in 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

Video: Will Guantánamo Ever Close? Andy Worthington, Karen Greenberg and Tom Wilner at New America on Jan. 11

The panel at New America for the discussion, "Guantanamo Bay: Year 14," on jan. 11, the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison. From L to R: moderator Peter Bergen, panelists Karen Greenberg, Andy Worthington and Tom Wilner.Monday was the 14th anniversary of the opening of the dreadful, unforgivable “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where men are held without charge or trial, in defiance of all the laws and treaties that the US swore to uphold until the 9/11 attacks derailed those beliefs — or allowed the country’s leaders to deliberately jettison them in favor of something far more brutal and unaccountable.

On Monday, I attended the annual protest outside the White House organized by over a dozen rights groups, as the co-founder and co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, which played a part in securing the release from Guantánamo in October of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and as the co-founder of Close Guantánamo, a campaign I established in 2012 with the attorney Tom Wilner (who fought for the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights in the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008). The video of my speech outside the White House is here.

That afternoon, just around the corner from the White House, at New America (formerly the New America Foundation), Tom Wilner and I were joined by the academic Karen Greenberg for a panel discussion, Guantánamo Bay: Year 14, moderated by New America’s Peter Bergen, author, journalist and an old college friend of mine, which is posted below via Ustream. I’ll also post a YouTube link when it becomes available. Read the rest of this entry »

Close Guantánamo Now: Andy Worthington’s US Tour on the 14th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, January 8-18, 2016

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantanamo outside the White House on January 11, 2011. This year (2016) will be his sixth visit on the anniversary to call for the prison's closure as President Obama promised on his second day in office in January 2009.This Friday (January 8), I’m flying from London to Miami for a short US tour to coincide with the 14th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on January 11. I’ll be flying up to Washington, D.C. on the 10th, protesting outside the White House on the 11th, and moving on to New York City on the 13th, where I have an event lined up in Harlem on the 14th, and where I will be staying until the 18th.

I’m traveling as an expert on Guantánamo, with nearly ten years of experience as a researcher, writer, campaigner and public speaker about the prison and the men held there, the author of The Guantánamo Files, the co-director of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” and the co-founder and co-director of two campaigns: Close Guantanamo and We Stand With Shaker. I’m also hoping to return to the US later in the year with a new book, collection the nest of my writing about Guantánamo over the last eight years, and if you’re a publisher, or have funding ideas, or would like to stage an event for me as part of a tour when the book is published, then please get in touch.

Please also get in touch if you want to contact me on my forthcoming tour, either to interview me (for TV, radio or online) or to arrange a last-minute event. You can also contact Debra Sweet, the national director of the World Can’t Wait, who, as in previous years, is organizing my visit. And while I’m in New York, I’ll have a guitar, and will be delighted to play some of my political songs, including “Song for Shaker Aamer” and “81 Million Dollars,” about the US torture program, which I normally play with my band The Four Fathers. If any musician would like to play with me, do get in touch. Read the rest of this entry »

“Close Guantánamo,” Says Prison’s First Commander, Adds That It “Should Never Have Been Opened”

In an important op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, Maj. Gen. Mike Lehnert of the Marines, the first commander of Guantánamo, has called for the closure of the prison. Maj. Gen. Lehnert built the open air cages of Camp X-Ray, the “war on terror” prison’s first incarnation, in just four days prior to the arrival of the first prisoners on January 11, 2002.

As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Lehnert initially bought into the hyperbole and propaganda about the prisoners, stating, soon after the prison opened, “These represent the worst elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We asked for the worst guys first.” However, he soon changed his mind. In early February 2002, he provided an important insight into how, contrary to what senior Bush administration officials were saying in public, the uncomfortable truth was they they had no idea who most of the prisoners were. “A large number claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status,” he said, adding, “Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

Unfortunately, the Bush administration responded not by acknowledging that it had, with a handful of exceptions, bought and rounded up civilians and low-level Taliban conscripts, but by aggressively interrogating the men over many years and, in many cases, introducing a torture program involving prolonged sleep deprivation, isolation, humiliation, the use of loud music and noise, and the exploitation of phobias. This produced copious amounts of information, as was revealed when WikiLeaks released classified military files relating to the prisoners in April 2011, but much of it was fundamentally unreliable. Read the rest of this entry »

Back to home page

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

CD: Love and War

The Four Fathers on Bandcamp

The Guantánamo Files book cover

The Guantánamo Files

The Battle of the Beanfield book cover

The Battle of the Beanfield

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion book cover

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion

Outside The Law DVD cover

Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo

RSS

Posts & Comments

World Wide Web Consortium

XHTML & CSS

WordPress

Powered by WordPress

Designed by Josh King-Farlow

Please support Andy Worthington, independent journalist:

Archives

In Touch

Follow me on Facebook

Become a fan on Facebook

Subscribe to me on YouTubeSubscribe to me on YouTube

The State of London

The State of London. 16 photos of London

Andy's Flickr photos

Campaigns

Categories

Tag Cloud

Abu Zubaydah Al-Qaeda Andy Worthington British prisoners Center for Constitutional Rights CIA torture prisons Close Guantanamo Donald Trump Four Fathers Guantanamo Housing crisis Hunger strikes London Military Commission NHS NHS privatisation Periodic Review Boards Photos President Obama Reprieve Shaker Aamer The Four Fathers Torture UK austerity UK protest US courts Video We Stand With Shaker WikiLeaks Yemenis in Guantanamo