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.
Radio: I Discuss the Aborted Guantánamo Plea Deals and the UK’s Far-Right Riots with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio
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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.
Radio: I Discuss Israel’s Horrendous Prisons for Palestinians and the ICC Noose Tightening Around Netanyahu’s Neck on Gorilla Radio
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My thanks to the indefatigable Chris Cook, based in western Canada, for having me on his Gorilla Radio show to discuss Ending Israel’s Impunity for Genocide in Gaza, and the Threat to Those, Like Joe Biden, Who Are Most Complicit, my latest article on the defining horror of our times. Our discussion takes place in the second half of the one-hour show, available on Substack here, after an illuminating first half with Yves Engler, the Montreal-based political activist, whose latest book, co-authored with Owen Schalk, is ‘Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy.’ I’m also pleased to note that Chris played my song ‘Forever Prisoner’, about Guantánamo prisoner Khaled Qassim, recorded with my band The Four Fathers.
Chris and I began by discussing Jonathan Cook’s latest article for Middle East Eye, The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians, which drew on a detailed CNN investigation published on May 11, Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center, about Sde Teiman, a secret Israeli prison on a military base in the Negev Desert, where Palestinians seized in the Gaza Strip since October 7 are kept naked, blindfolded and handcuffed, and, permanently, “forced to remain motionless and silent”, as Cook describes it, adding, “At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are broken.”
The whistleblowers who spoke to CNN also explained that “doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.”
On Gorilla Radio, Chris Cook Plays ‘Warriors’, and We Discuss Julian Assange, Guantánamo, Genocide in Gaza and George Galloway
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.
Thanks to Chris Cook for having me on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, in western Canada on Wednesday to talk about a number of topics. The one-hour show is available here, on Chris’s Substack account, and my interview took part in the first half.
Chris began by asking me about the recent by-election victory, here in the UK, of George Galloway, the former Labour MP, who destroyed both Labour and the Tories on a platform opposing their unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which, of course, is also opposed by a majority of the population. As he stated in a tweet after his victory, “Gaza is the moral centre of the world right now.”
Chris asked me about the government’s hysterical response, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivering a special address to the nation to complain about the threat posed by a democratically-elected MP, but with, of course, a darker undercurrent of groundless suggestions that British democracy is under threat from “Islamist extremists” — all part of the desperate, flailing efforts of the British establishment to criminalize all criticism of Israel’s actions as anti-semitic.
Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo Vigils, “Forever Prisoners” and Genocide in Gaza 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.
My thanks to Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, in Victoria, Canada, for reaching out to interview me last week about the coordinated monthly vigils for the closure of Guantánamo which take place in London, across the US and around the world on the first Wednesday of every month, and which I initiated in February (following up on monthly vigils in London, which began last September) by reaching out to friends and colleagues elsewhere to join us. Chris and I have spoken many times over the years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to him.
Our interview takes up the second half of the one-hour show, beginning at 28:45, following an interview that is also worth listening to — with William S. Geimer, a peace activist, Professor Emeritus of Law at Washington and Lee University, a military veteran who resigned his 82nd Airborne commission in opposition to the war against Vietnam, the author of the book, ‘Canada: The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars’, and the founder of the Greater Victoria Peace School.
The interview is available here as an MP3, or here on the Gorilla Radio website, and it’s also embedded below.
Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo’s Discredited Torture Trials with Scott Horton
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, hot on the heels of my interview about Guantánamo with Kevin Gosztola and Rania Khalek for their “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast, I was delighted to speak again to Scott Horton, the indefatigable interviewer, author and libertarian, who I’ve been talking to on and off for the last 16 years. Scott works so hard that this was, astonishingly, his 5,935th interview!
The focus of our half-hour interview was my recent article, Trial Judge Destroys Guantánamo’s Military Commissions, Rules That “Clean Team” Interrogations Cannot Undo the Effects of Torture, about the recent devastating ruling by Col. Lanny Acosta, the trial judge in the military commission pre-trial hearings (now in their 12th year) for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of being the mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, who was held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for nearly four years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006.
Al-Nashiri had made self-incriminating statements under torture, but the government knew that these could not be used in court, and so, four months after his arrival, a so-called “clean team” of interrogators interviewed him non-coercively, apparently securing voluntary self-incriminating statements. It is these statements, however, that Col. Acosta has just ruled inadmissible, because, as he established, the regime of torture and confession in the “black sites” was so enduring that al-Nashiri had essentially been “conditioned” to believe that, if he didn’t tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear, he would inevitably be subjected to horrendous torture.
Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo’s Shameful 21st Anniversary on the Scott Horton Show
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Last week, as part of my concerted efforts to publicize the ongoing and unjustifiable existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the 21st anniversary of its opening, I was delighted to be asked by the indefatigable radio host Scott Horton to appear on his show, in an episode that he gave the appropriate heading, “The US is Still Running an Illegal Prison at Guantánamo Bay.”
Scott and I have been dissecting the iniquities of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” on a regular basis for over 15 years, and I’m impressed by his astonishing dedication to amplifying critical voices that are generally ignored by the mainstream media. This was his 5,831st interview, in a career as a radio host spanning 20 years, and he has somehow also found the time to write and publish two books about US militarism and the “war on terror” — “Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan,” and “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.”
As Scott explained in his introduction to the show on his website, where you can listen to our half-hour interview, and also download it as an MP3, “Andy Worthington returns to talk about the 35 men who remain imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay as we pass the 21st anniversary of the prison. Of those 35 men, 20 have already been cleared for release, yet they remain in custody with no release date. Scott and Worthington talk about the shameful history of the prison, consider all the reasons it’s stayed open so long and discuss what must happen for this disgraceful chapter of America’s history to finally be brought to an end.”
Two Radio Shows: I Discuss Guantánamo and Julian Assange on TNT Radio and Parallax Views
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.
This week I was delighted to take part in two interviews, to discuss the prison at Guantánamo Bay, as the 21st anniversary of its opening approaches, and the ongoing plight of Julian Assange, still held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London, as he continues to challenge his proposed extradition to the US to face espionage charges relating to WikiLeaks’ publication of classified US documents leaked by Chelsea Manning.
On Monday, I spoke with Jason Olbourne on TNT Radio, based in Australia, in an interview that started 21 minutes into the 55-minute show. The interview is available here, and after a great introduction, in which Jason enthused about my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and the music of The Four Fathers (asking if people have suggested that I sound like David Byrne), we spoke about Guantánamo, with Jason asking me to run through the story of how I first got involved with Guantánamo, in 2006, and how I worked out who was held there, and how very few of them had any meaningful involvement with Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.
Jason suggested that people might be held at Guantánamo in future, but was, I hope, persuaded by my explanation that Guantánamo is such a disaster area, legally, that no one with any sense would consider sending anyone there in future. I explained how the majority of the men held there were insignificant, but were tortured or otherwise abused in an effort to extract information from them, because of mistaken presumptions that they were hiding actionable intelligence — presumptions that wouldn’t have been so easy to make if the US authorities had not done away with any kind of screening process when they were first seized, and which led to Guantánamo becoming a place where the authorities’ actions resembled the witch hunts of centuries past.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
