Andy Worthington Discusses the Urgent Need to Close Guantلnamo with Peter B. Collins

Andy Worthington Discusses the Urgent Need to Close Guantلnamo with Peter B. Collins

Andy Worthington

 uruknet.info

December 23, 2012

As the 11th anniversary of the opening of the "war on terror" prison at Guantلnamo Bay approaches (on January 11, 2013), I wanted to make sure that I made available an interview I undertook recently with the respected progressive radio host Peter B. Collins, in San Francisco. Peter’s site is here, and our 50-minute interview is here, as an MP3.

Peter and I have spoken many times over the years, and it is always a pleasure to talk to him, as he is such a well-informed host, and his shows allow complex issues — like Guantلnamo — to be discussed in depth.

Out latest conversation followed the reelection of Barack Obama, and gave us an opportunity to catch up on where we stand nearly four years on from the President’s failed promise to close Guantلnamo within a year.

As Peter described it, "Journalist Andy Worthington updates us on Guantلnamo, where 86 men cleared for release are still held … Worthington wrote The Guantلnamo Files and continues to provide the best coverage of our island dungeon at his website." As part of our discussion of the 86 cleared prisoners — out of 166 prisoners in total who are still held — we spoke specifically out the importance of the list providing the names of 55 of these cleared men, which was released by the government for the first time in September, and which I analysed in depth in my article, Who Are the 55 Cleared Guantلnamo Prisoners on the List Released by the Obama Administration?

We also spoke about "the September death of Adnan Latif, the Yemeni who had languished for 8 years since being cleared by Bush-era officials," as Peter put it — a terrible indictment of US injustice and complacency that my colleague Jason Leopold has been pursuing relentlessly, and which I have most recently written about here and here.

As Peter put it, I also spoke about "the almost 100% denial rate for habeas corpus suits from Gitmo prisoners by the DC Court of Appeals in recent years" — a shameful story, also involving the Supreme Court, last June, which has never received the serious media attention it deserves — and we then followed up by discussing the surprising ruling by this same deeply Conservative court in favor of Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, whose 2008 conviction for providing material support for terrorism was overturned in October, on the basis that "material support" was "not a defined crime prior to 2006," as Peter described it. I wrote about the Hamdan ruling in my article,Conservative Judges Demolish the False Legitimacy of Guantلnamo’s Terror Trials.

Peter also explained how I provided "an update on the last British detainee still held, Shaker Aamer," and also explained, "You can show your support to close Guantanamo here" — via the "Close Guantلnamo" campaign and website that I established a year ago with the attorney Tom Wilner.

My thanks again to Peter, and I hope you have time to listen to the show.

Note: Peter’s show also included an interview with Sam Banning, who spoke about his new documentary, "Cruel and Unusual," dealing with the unjust "three strikes" law in California.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantلnamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantلnamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, "The Complete Guantلnamo Files," a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantلnamo" (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see mydefinitive Guantلnamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new "Close Guantلnamo campaign," and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.