I’m now back in the UK after an inspiring ten-day visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the 18th anniversary of its opening, when I took part in a prominent rally in Washington, D.C. on the actual anniversary (January 11), two subsequent speaking events with lawyers representing prisoners, one TV interview (the sole TV feature marking the anniversary in the whole of the US broadcast media) and six radio interviews.
My visit was important, I think, because, although Guantánamo ought to be a source of permanent shame for all decent Americans, it has fallen so far off the radar under Donald Trump that many people don’t even know that it exists, and many of those who do don’t care, even though the continued existence of the prison, where the US government holds foreign Muslims without charge or trial, and, in many cases, with no genuine effort made over 18 years to establish who they are, is like a virus infecting America’s soul.
Although few people care, my efforts to remind people of the prison’s existence, and my shared events with lawyers who still visit prisoners (and particularly Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who carries the weight of their horrendous isolation and despair under Donald Trump), was easily enough to persuade me that, despite America’s amnesia, this work is still of extraordinary importance.
The prison at Guantánamo Bay —- and the plight of the 40 men still held there — has, in general, fallen so far off America’s radar that it is unsurprising that many in the US think that it has closed down.
So little interest is there in Guantánamo that the days when I was regularly asked to discuss it on US radio stations are, sadly, long gone, and so I was delighted last week to be asked to discuss it with Linda Olsen-Osterlund, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon.
The one-hour show is here as an MP3, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful.
How time flies. It’s almost a week since I left the US after my annual visit to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the anniversary of its opening, and here I am still posting videos and audio links of shows I took part in.
That’s a good sign, however. On the last two anniversaries, the focus on Guantánamo had almost entirely disappeared. Two years ago, we were caught in the limbo between the outgoing administration of Barack Obama and the imminent arrival of Donald Trump, and last year, after Trump’s first year in office, the outrage and exhaustion was such that Guantánamo barely got a look-in.
A year on, and you’d be excused for thinking that the situation would only be worse, but although that certainly seems true when it comes to Trump — now obsessed with his Mexican wall, and having shut down the federal government for the longest period in US history (marking a calendar month today) — it is not true of those opposing him on many fronts, including Guantánamo. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I was delighted to talk to Linda Olson-Osterlund for the morning show, Political Perspectives, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. Linda has been talking to me about Guantánamo for many years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to her.
The show is available here — and here as an MP3 — and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful. Unfortunately, KBOO had a new telephone system, which didn’t allow foreign calls, and so the first 12 minutes of the show feature some music by Bill Frissell, before Linda introduced me at 12:20, prior to our interview beginning at 15:00.
Linda and I spent the first ten minutes talking about the habeas corpus petition submitted by lawyers for eleven of the remaining 41 prisoners at Guantánamo on January 11, the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison. As I explained in a recent article, the lawyers argued, as a press release by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights put it, that “[Donald] Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’” Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, I was delighted to speak to Linda Olson-Osterlund on KBOO FM, a great community radio station in Portland, Oregon. The show, “Positively Revolting,” aired for an hour from 8am (4pm London time), and is available here on the website or here as an MP3. I hope you have time to listen to it and to share it if you find useful.
On the website, it was noted how Linda and I “talk[ed] about the seventy days left of the Obama presidency and the movement to close Guantánamo and release all prisoners not convicted of a crime,” as well as “the 2016 Presidential election and the parallels to the UK vote to leave the EU and the rise of the extreme right wing in both countries.”
Linda had picked up on the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that has been running all year, and that I was promoting on Thursday, just two days after the election, because moping or ignoring Guantánamo will not get that wretched place closed, and Barack Obama is still president for another ten weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Friday I was delighted to take part in an hour-long show on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon, to discuss the ongoing situation regarding the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and also to discuss Britain’s proposed departure from the European Union after the referendum on June 23.
The MP3 for the show is here, and I hope you have time to listen to it, and to share it if you find it useful.
The show — Positively Revolting — was hosted by Linda Olson-Osterlund, who has long taken an interest in Guantánamo, and has been interviewing me on a regular basis since 2008 (see here for shows from the last three years).
Linda began by mentioning the two police murders last week (of Alton Sterling and Philander Castile), and the killing of police officers in Dallas, and we then moved on to discuss the situation at Guantánamo with less than 200 days left of the Obama presidency, and she directed listeners to the website of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I established in January 2010 with the lawyer Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m happy to make available two recent interviews I undertook with radio stations in Chicago, and in Portland, Oregon.
The first was with an old friend, Linda Olson-Osterlund, for KBOO FM, a community station in Portland, Oregon, and our 27-minute interview is available here, as an MP3, starting at 4:38, after adverts for the radio station.
Linda and I have spoken many, many times before, and it was a pleasure to talk to her again. I was delighted that she opened the show with “Song for Shaker Aamer,” the campaign song I wrote and played with my band The Four Fathers for We Stand With Shaker.
We Stand With Shaker is the campaign I launched two and a half months ago with the activist Joanne MacInnes, to call for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison.
This is how Linda described the show: “Host Linda Olson-Osterlund talks with British author and film-maker Andy Worthington about the news coming out of the illegal prison at Guantánamo Bay and the international protest movement against it. You will hear both good news and bad from prisoner releases to revelations about torture experimentation and murder at the facility. You will also hear about the January 10th protest on Dick Cheney’s lawn and January 11th at the White House.” Read the rest of this entry »
Last Thursday, on the eve of a global day of action on Guantánamo, I spoke to Linda Olson-Osterlund on KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon. Linda and I have spoken many times over the years, and it’s always a pleasure to speak to her. The half-hour show is available here, as an MP3, and the page on the KBOO FM site is here.
The day of action (see my photos of the London protest here, and my report here) was called to mark the first anniversary of President Obama’s promise to resume releasing prisoners, after a 32-month period in which just five men were released from the prison. The release of prisoners almost ground to a halt because Congress raised significant obstacles, which President Obama chose not to overcome, even though a waiver in the legislation allowed him to do so.
Since the promise, President Obama has appointed two envoys to work towards the closure of Guantánamo, and 12 men have been freed from the prison, but much more needs to be done. On the anniversary, half of the men still held — 77 of the 154 men still imprisoned — are still detained even though all of them have been cleared for release. 75 of them were told in January 2010 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that the US no longer wanted to hold them, and two others had their release approved in the last few months by Periodic Review Boards. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, during the West Coast leg of my 12-day “Close Guantánamo Now” tour (supported by the World Can’t Wait), I was first in San Francisco, a visit that involved being reunited with a number of old friends, including Stephanie Tang and Curt Wechsler of World Can’t Wait, Joey Johnson, who does community work in San Francisco neighbourhoods, the academic and anti-torture activist Rita Maran, lawyer Sharon Adams (with whom I spoke on Rose Aguilar’s “Your Call” show on KALW Public Radio) and Michael Kearns, the former instructor in the SERE program, which trains US personnel to resist interrogations if captured by an enemy that uses torture, who was appalled to discover, several years ago, that his former colleagues Bruce Jessen, James Mitchell and Roger Aldrich had played a key role in reverse-engineering these techniques for the torture of supposed “high-value detainees” seized in the “war on terror.”
I had met many of these good people for the first time in October 2010, when World Can’t Wait brought me over to Berkeley for “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and was reunited with many of them two years ago, as part of a short US tour on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, in which I also visited New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago.
On this occasion, I first met up with some of my old friends in Oakland, at the house of other old friends, Ruth and Zeese, who had put me up on previous visits, where we had an inspiring anti-torture salon experience, of a kind that would be difficult to achieve outside of those involved in “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week. This was on the evening of my arrival, after a few hours in the afternoon spent exploring and photographing Mission Street in San Francisco, and the next morning I recorded the “Your Call” show with Rose and Sharon (and CUNY law professor and Guantánamo attorney Ramzi Kassem in New York), and then walked along Ocean beach, saw the Bay Area from Twin Peaks and ate delicious lamb shwarma with Joey Johnson, soaking up the radiant sunshine everywhere we went. Read the rest of this entry »
Suddenly I’m talking to people on the radio all the time — for the first time since the height of the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo a few months back. I’ll shortly be speaking to an old friend, Peter B. Collins in San Francisco, and on Sunday I’ll be speaking to another old friend, Jackie Chase at Radio Free Brighton, and I’ll be making those shows available as soon as they’re online. On Saturday, I spoke to Chuck Mertz in Chicago for “This is Hell” (which I publicized here), and in the interests of completeness I’m posting here a couple of shows I did recently that I haven’t made available until now.
The first show was a half-hour interview with Linda Olson-Osterlund on KBOO FM in Portland,Oregon, which I wasn’t able to make available until now because of problems with KBOO FM’s website. These have now been resolved, and the interview is available here (or via the webpage here). Linda and I have been discussing Guantánamo for many years, and, although it is never a happy occasion to have to talk about Guantánamo, it was good to be able to discuss at length the ongoing injustice of the prison, the failure to close it, and the responsibilities for that failure, which lie with all three branches of the US government — the Obama administration, Congress and parts of the judiciary; specifically, the court of appeals in Washington D.C. and the Supreme Court.
The spur for our discussion was the release of two Algerian prisoners, and it is a sign of how very wrong things are at Guantánamo that they were the first two prisoners to be freed as a result of the wishes of the Obama administration — rather than through a court order or a plea deal in the military commission trials — since September 2010. The two men had been cleared for release in January 2010 by the inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in January 2009, but while they have finally been released, 84 other men, also cleared for release by the task force, continue to be held, because of Congressional obstruction, and President Obama’s unwillingness to spend political capital overcoming the obstacles raised by Congress. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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