Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Guantánamo Hunger Strike on Press TV

For the last fortnight I have been writing about, and discussing the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, in my articles “A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo” and “How Long Can the Government Pretend that the Massive Hunger Strike at Guantánamo Doesn’t Exist?” and in an appearance on RT, which I wrote about here.

Below, via YouTube, is my most recent TV appearance to discuss the hunger strike, which involved a late night Skype call from Press TV at 2am on March 20.

I hope you have the opportunity to watch it, and to share it if you find it useful.

To recap briefly on the situation at Guantánamo, it is clear that, for the last six weeks, over 100 of the remaining 166 prisoners — and perhaps as many as 130 — have been refusing meals, in protest at deteriorating conditions at the prison, including aggressive cell searches, the seizure of their possessions and correspondence (including supposedly confidential correspondence with their attorneys), and mistreatment of their copies of the Koran.

However, it is also clear that one of the main drivers of the hunger strike is the despair induced by eleven years of imprisonment without charge or trial, with no end to the prisoners’ ordeal in sight, after President Obama failed to fulfill his promise to close the prison, and abandoned the men.

Although 86 of them were cleared for release by an inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by President Obama himself, their release has been blocked by Congress, and, in the cases of the Yemenis, who make up two-thirds of the cleared prisoners, by President Obama himself, who imposed a ban on releasing any of them — on the basis of their nationality alone — in January 2010, after a would-be plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian recruited in Yemen, was seized on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

46 others were designated for indefinite detention by President Obama’s Task Force, on the basis that they are too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial. This was a disgraceful position for the Obama administration to take, as “insufficient evidence” is shorthand for unreliable evidence, consisting of untrustworthy statements made by other prisoners, both in Guantánamo and in the CIA’s global network of “black sites.” However, President Obama endorsed the detention of these men — 48 in total, reduced to 46 when two of them died — in an executive order two years ago, when he also promised periodic reviews of the men’s cases. Those reviews, however, have not taken place, providing another powerful reason for the men at Guantánamo to feel abandoned.

Thanks for your interest in this story. I will continue to cover it, in the hope that it will persuade President Obama to rouse himself from his inertia before more prisoners die. To demand action from President Obama, and from Secretary of State John Kerry, please see this article on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, of which I am a founder, and a member of the steering committee, with the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases in 2004 and 2008.

Note: For further information, please also see this interview with my friend, the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, on RT.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo 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, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.