Radio: My Interview About Guantánamo with Chris Cook, Plus Dahr Jamail on Our Planetary Environmental Catastrophe

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It’s nearly three weeks since the 17th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the flurry of media activity that accompanied that somber occasion — although, as is typical, with little or no interest from the mainstream US media — has now largely faded away.

In an effort to keep interest in Guantánamo alive, I will continue to write about it as much as possible this year, to campaign for its closure, and to speak about the need for it to be closed to anyone who shows an interest.

One such person is Chris Cook, in Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada, who has interviewed me on numerous occasions after my annual US visits to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the anniversary of its opening (see our interviews in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017).

Last Thursday, I spoke to Chris by phone about my most recent visit, when, as I have noted in several articles featuring videos, reports and photos from my ten-day trip (see here, here, here and here), I was glad to be able to report that there was renewed energy this year for keeping up the pressure to get Guantánamo closed — not least through the slim hope of action offered by Democrats taking the House of Representatives in the midterm elections n November.

Towards the end of our interview, Chris also asked me about my work on housing issues in London, specifically motivated by my involvement in the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, in which I was part of the two-month occupation of a communal garden in Deptford, in south east London, to try to prevent its destruction. My discussion of how we are plagued by unaffordable new high-rise towers, and how social housing is being cynically destroyed to make way for new and less affordable housing unfortunately resonated with developments in Canada — and, indeed, worldwide, as we are all, it seems, victims of predatory transnational bankers.

Chris also played out with ‘Close Guantánamo’ by my band The Four Fathers, the third occasion that it’s been played on the radio this month.

The one-hour show is available here — or here as an MP3 — and I’ve also posted it below. I hope you’ll have time to listen to it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

My interview took place in the second half of the show, but I do urge you to listen to the first half too, as it features Dahr Jamail, who I first met over ten years ago, when he was reporting from Iraq. Since then, however, he has been investigating and reporting on the unprecedented environmental crisis we are now facing, and he was speaking to Chris about his new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, which has just been published by the New Press.

I happened to bump into Dahr during my US visit, when we were both being interviewed by Chris Hedges for his show on RT, On Contact. My interview will be out sometime next month, as will Dahr’s, but I have to tell you how moved I was watching his interview with Chris from the Green Room. I also spoke to him before and after, and was profoundly impressed by what he had discovered and what he had to say; namely, that it is too late to avert significant environmental destruction, but it is up to us how much we can collectively change our way of living to mitigate some of the worst effects of the unfolding catastrophe.

Dahr’s work also includes a profound spiritual angle — a recognition, on his part, of the need to love the planet that sustains us, but which we are destroying —and this adds a powerfully poignant aspect to his message of doom; one so powerful that, afterwards, I only half-joked with Chris, before our interview, that there really isn’t any other topic worth discussing after hearing what Dahr has to say.

Please do check out his book, and if you want a taster, read this excerpt on Truthout, entitled, “In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve.”

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.