Radio: I Discuss “Will Joe Biden Close Guantánamo?” on South Africa’s Radio Islam International
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.
Yesterday evening, I was delighted to speak for half an hour to Ebraham Moosa on South Africa’s Radio Islam International about US President Elect Joe Biden — and, specifically, what to expect from the new president regarding a long-standing travesty of justice: the continued existence of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.
In a thorough and wide-ranging discussion of the issues, I talked about what a disgrace Donald Trump has been when it comes to Guantánamo, entombing the 40 men still held, and how we can be hopeful that there will be change under Joe Biden, even if it also reasonable to expect that it will have to be fought for.
Unlike eleven years ago, when Barack Obama first took office promising to close Guantánamo within a year (but left eight years later having failed to do so), Guantánamo is, nowadays, America’s largely forgotten shame, and raising it as an issue — as Obama found — only tends to play into the hands of Republicans and the right-wing media.
Reflections on Herman Wallace – and I Discuss Guantánamo on Radio Stations in Portland and Johannesburg
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 »
Who's still at Guantánamo?
