Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo on the Scott Horton Show

On Thursday, just after President Obama had spoken about Guantánamo, for the first time since the global protests on May 23 (the first anniversary of his promise to resume releasing prisoners after two year and eight months in which just five men had been released), the ever-indignant radio host Scott Horton asked if I was free to talk.

As one of the first radio hosts to take an interest in my work (back in August 2007), Scott is someone I always like to talk to, especially as we hadn’t spoken since February, and there was much to discuss. Our half-hour interview is available here, or see here for the link to the show on Scott’s own website. For the first time we used Skype for the interview, and I have to say that the sound quality is wonderfully clear.

President Obama had spoken about Guantánamo in a speech about America’s foreign policy at the US Military Academy at West Point, in which he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions. That’s why I will continue to push to close GTMO — because American values and legal traditions don’t permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.”

One of the things that Scott and I talked about was whether or not the president meant to imply that American values and legal traditions do permit the indefinite detention of people within America’s borders — through the National Defense Authorization Act, for example — or whether that was just an unfortunate choice of phrase.

The protests on May 23 — a global day of action initiated by the US-based activists of Witness Against Torture — marked the anniversary of a major speech on national security by President Obama, prompted by a prison-wide hunger strike and the widespread indignation it triggered in world leaders, NGOs, the global media and the million ordinary people who signed petitions calling for the prison’s closure.

In the speech, President Obama promised to appoint two new envoys — in the Pentagon and the State Department — to help with the closure of Guantánamo, dropped a ban on releasing Yemeni prisoners that he had imposed after it was revealed that a failed airline bomb plot in December 2009 had been hatched in Yemen, and promised to resume releasing prisoners who had been cleared for release by a high-level, inter-agency task force that he appointed shortly after taking office in January 2009.

At the time of his speech, 86 prisoners cleared for release were still held, and since then, although 17 men have been released — including 11 of the 86 men cleared for release, another man who agreed to a fixed sentence as part of a plea deal in his trial by military commission, and five men in a prisoner swap at the weekend (which I’ll be writing about very soon) — 75 other prisoners cleared for release by the task force are still held, plus three other men cleared for release since last year’s speech by Periodic Review Boards, convened to assess whether the majority of the rest of the prisoners — those not cleared for release by the task force — should be added to the list of those the US says it no longer wants to hold.

Of these 78 men, 58 are Yemenis, and although President Obama appointed the two envoys he promised to appoint, he has not yet released a single Yemeni. The last Yemeni to leave the prison alive was in July 2010, while another died in September 2012, despite having been repeatedly approved for release.

As I keep pointing out, releasing the Yemenis is essential, not only to show a respect for justice on the part of President Obama, but also to move towards his long-delayed promise to close the prison.

Scott and I talked about these issues, and many others, including whether or not President Obama will close Guantánamo before the end of his presidency, the Periodic Review Boards, the failure of the military commissions, and the Bush administration’s deliberate and long-lasting effort to confuse soldiers and terrorists, and I hope you have time to listen to the show, and to share it if you find it useful.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and 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. 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).

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, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas 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.