Radio: Dick Cheney – Gone But Not Forgiven
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It’s over two weeks since Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, died at the age of 84, and, after a brief flurry of mainstream media activity, in which the immensity of his war crimes and crimes against humanity (for which he was never indicted) was largely whitewashed through mentions of how, although he was a “divisive” figure, he was also a towering presence in US politics, the media moved on, only waking up again yesterday when his funeral service was held in Washington, D.C., at which former presidents and vice presidents, lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices all ignored the horrors of his legacy.
Former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden attended, as did former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. Also present were the Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi. former House Speaker John Boehner, former national security advisor John Bolton, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan.
Biden’s attendance struck me as particularly grimly appropriate, because his “ironclad” support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which he referred to the attacks of October 7, 2023 as Israel’s 9/11, has always struck me as nothing less than a transfer of Cheney’s lawless and violent post-9/11 policies of vengeance from the US itself to Israel, a parallel made all the more alarming because, of course, Israel is a foreign country, even though Biden’s actions did more than any previous president to foster the illusion that, actually, the US is nothing more than a colony of Israel.
Notable absences were Barack Obama, who had, nevertheless, posted condolences on November 5, in which he stated that, “Although Dick Cheney and I represented very different political traditions, I respected his lifelong devotion to public service and his deep love of country”, and both Donald Trump and JD Vance, who had not been invited. Trump has, noticeably, made no public comments whatsoever about Cheney’s death, although Vance expressed his condolences at a Breitbart News event on Thursday, in which he also made reference to “some political disagreements” between Trump and Cheney.
That was something of an understatement, as Cheney had condemned Trump’s 2020 vote-rigging claims and his subsequent support for the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and had endorsed Kamala Harris over Trump in last year’s Presidential Election, when he said that “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” In response, in a rare moment of clarity, Trump shot back that Cheney was the “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars.”
In some ways, of course, Cheney was undoubtedly correct about the threat posed by Trump, as Trump’s concept of the presidency seems mainly to be that he perceives the role as granting him the power to act like an erratic and completely unaccountable emperor, although, as the primary architect of the post-9/11 “war on terror”, the unapologetic driver of the CIA’s repulsive “black site” torture program, and the chief instigator of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, Cheney himself posed an extraordinary threat to the US republic, which he never acknowledged, and which has been noticeably absent from mainstream media coverage since his death.
As well as tearing up all domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the pursuit of war and the treatment of prisoners, Cheney maintained a lifelong obsession with unfettered executive power, which, for the republic, was his most devastating legacy, as it so fundamentally weakened the checks and balances built into the Constitution, and, ironically, paved the way for Donald Trump to so breezily assume that there ought to be no constraints on his own power.
I’m pleased to have marked Cheney’s passing with critical commentary about the multitude of crimes for which he was never held accountable — in my article on my website here about how his death coincided with the latest monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure, as well as 8,700 days of the prison’s existence, as well as in a follow-up article on the Close Guantánamo website, No Tears for Dick Cheney on Guantánamo’s 8,700th Day of Existence.
Updates on Trump’s Deportation Obsession and His Open Warfare on the US Courts, and My Interview on Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook
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Many thanks to Chris Cook in western Canada for having me on his weekly Gorilla Radio show on Wednesday to discuss the latest developments in the horrendous “war on migrants” that Donald Trump initiated when he took office three months ago. The interview is available here, on Gorilla Radio’s Substack, taking up the first half of the hour-long show, with Canadian author Ray McGinnis in the second half.
Chris and I last spoke in February, just after Donald Trump had started using Guantánamo to hold migrants — the majority of whom were Venezuelans, who were accused, without evidence, of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. I wrote about the use of Guantánamo for migrants in a series of articles here, here, here, here, here and here, with a summary on the Close Guantánamo website on March 21.
By that point, Trump had begun shifting his focus to an even more alarming location than Guantánamo, sending 238 Venezuelan migrants and 23 Salvadorians — all, again, accused of being gang members, without any evidence being provided — on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison (the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or, in English, the Terrorism Confinement Center) on March 15.
Video: I Discuss Guantánamo Past, Present and Future with David Swanson on Talk World 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. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
I’m delighted to be making available below the video of a half-hour interview that I undertook on Sunday with the great peace activist David Swanson, of World BEYOND War, for his Talk World Radio show, which is syndicated by the Pacifica Network throughout the US.
David and I have know each other for a long time, since my earliest visits to the US at the end of the Bush administration, and the start of the Obama presidency, although we haven’t seen each other for many years, and I haven’t before had the pleasure of being interviewed by him for his show, which he helpfully entitled, “Close Guantánamo While Its Victims Are Still Alive.”
Half an hour was a helpful amount of time to discuss a complicated story like Guantánamo with the attention to detail that it deserves, and I was more than happy to discuss the prison from its earliest days, as a facility designed to hold human beings without and rights whatsoever, and to torture them when the largely hapless individuals rounded up or bought in Afghanistan and Pakistan failed to provide the “intelligence” that those in charge of the “war on terror” demanded.
World on Fire: I Discuss Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians with Andy Bungay
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If you have an hour to spare, and want to listen to the kind of political analysis of current events that is completely absent from mainstream media, I hope you’ll listen to me discussing the situation in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and the collective psychic derangement of our politicians in the west with Andy Bungay, recorded last weekend and broadcast on Andy’s show on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London.
Andy has interviewed me numerous times over the years, in connection with a variety of topics including Guantánamo and London’s housing crisis, and in July we spoke at length about the UK General Election, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the right to protest and the release of Julian Assange, leading to a new arrangement whereby, once a month, we’ll discuss topic of concerns in a new hourly slot on Andy’s show.
In this first monthly interview, posted below via YouTube, and featured as part of Andy’s whole show here, we began by discussing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which allowed me to discuss at length the “genocide within a genocide” that has been taking place for the last month in northern Gaza, via a truly abhorrent new plan that mixes starvation with extermination, the destruction of hospitals and efforts to displace the surviving population through ethnic cleansing, prior to Israeli colonization.
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
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 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
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
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
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
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.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
