Radio: My One-Hour Interview With Peter B. Collins About Closing Guantánamo, and Julian Assange’s Extradition Hearing

Andy Worthington marking 6,900 days of the existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and calling on President Elect Joe Biden to close it, on December 1, 2020, and a campaigner calling for an end to the proposed extradition to the US of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, outside the Old Bailey in London on October 1, 2020.


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Last week I was honoured to be asked by the veteran talk radio host Peter B. Collins to take part in what is being billed as his ‘Last Interview’ series, as he retires from regular broadcasting after a 47-year career which began with him covering Watergate when he was just 19.

The show is available here, and here as an MP3 — and as this is my quarterly fundraising week, please be aware that I don’t receive any payment for my various TV and radio appearances, so if you can help with a donation, to enable me to keep writing about, campaigning about and talking about Guantánamo (and other human rights issues) across a variety of media, it will be very greatly appreciated!

Peter first interviewed me about Guantánamo — if I recall correctly, gazing back into the mists of time — back in 2009, and we have spoken many times since, as he largely moved from hosting talk radio shows into running his own subscriber-based podcasts.

It has always been a pleasure to talk to Peter, as he is so well-informed about all the topics he discusses with his guests, and his show will be sorely missed by those who value a consistently intelligent and challenging analysis of US politics from a non-partisan left-wing perspective — “from the Left Coast”, as Peter describes his Bay Area location.

I hope you have time to listen to the show, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

Peter’s description of the show is below:

Will Joe Biden release prisoners, and ultimately close Guantánamo? British journalist Andy Worthington returns to talk about America’s Caribbean gulag and his role in the British extradition hearings for Julian Assange. Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files, and has dedicated more than 15 years of his life to expose and end the use of the prison complex that has undermined America’s reputation and claims of liberty and justice. Get his latest reporting here.

We open with some speculation about Biden’s potential for action on Gitmo, since he has not taken a public position during the presidential campaign. Worthington hopes he will permit the release of 5 prisoners who were cleared during the last year of the Obama administration, and amend the laws that prevent Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US to at least allow for emergency medical care, especially for elderly men.

We discuss Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo — which he lamented in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert — and related issues, like Obama’s legal equivocation about the rights of “forever prisoners” who may never be charged, tried, or released. While it’s easy to blame Republicans, many Democratic leaders oppose any changes to Guantánamo policy.

And near the end, Worthington shares his observations about the recent extradition hearings for Julian Assange, where Worthington was scheduled to testify. In the end, he submitted a statement describing how WikiLeaks release of the Guantánamo files produced evidence of American war crimes.

Andy’s important work is supported by contributions, so if you are able, please chip in!

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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 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight 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 the 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, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, 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.