Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Need to Close Guantánamo on CCTV America with David Remes and J.D. Gordon

Humiliating Tory Defeat in Parliament... Calling for the Closure of Guantánamo...

Video: Andy Worthington Discusses the Need to Close Guantánamo on CCTV America with David Remes and J.D. Gordon

Yesterday, I was delighted to be asked to take part in CCTV America’s half-hour show, “The Heat,” to debate the question, “Will Obama shut down the Guantánamo Bay detention center?” The video of the show is available below in two parts on YouTube, and it can also be found on the CCTV America website.

CCTV America described the show as follows:

US President Barack Obama vowed in 2009 to close America’s Guantanámo Bay military prison in Cuba. Five years later, GTMO remains open … 149 prisoners are still languishing there without [in most cases] prospect of a trial that could free them. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, said that GTMO’s prisoners are not entitled protection under the Geneva Conventions. The UN said it should be closed.

The detention center’s infrastructure is crumbling. The prisoners are aging and medical facilities are limited. US law doesn’t permit Guantanámo’s detainees to be transferred to the United States. There are 79 officially rated ‘low level’ detainees who are recommended for release to other countries under a resettlement policy, but that policy must still overcome major hurdles. Earlier this month, six ‘low level’ detainees were ready to board a plane to Uruguay when the agreement fell apart at the last minute.

Here’s the show:

The presenter of “The Heat” is Anand Naidoo, and the other guests on the Guantánamo show were David Remes, a lawyer who represents a number of Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo, and J.D. Gordon, a retired US Navy officer, who was a spokesperson for the authorities at Guantánamo during the Bush administration.

I have known David and J.D. for many years. As well as representing a number of men still held, David also represented a prisoner named Adnan Latif. A Yemeni with severe mental health problems, who had been cleared for release on numerous occasions, Adnan Latif died exactly two years ago, allegedly by committing suicide, although the official story has been challenged. The fact that the show was taking place two years after his death added a poignancy to the broadcast for both David and I.

J.D. Gordon and I have frequently discussed Guantánamo and the “war on terror” online, although it would be fair to say that we do not see eye to eye, as J.D. believes — or professes to believe — the whole discredited nonsense about the prisoners being “the worst of the worst” that was peddled by senior Bush administration officials when Guantánamo opened.

On “The Heat,” I was unable to put up with any more of the lies and distortions, challenging J.D.’s claims about the men at Guantánamo being terrorists, and pointing out that very few of the men have ever been accused of terrorism, and the majority were either innocent men, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or soldiers, who had been involved with the Taliban in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that morphed into the “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks — and most of them were bought for money. Along the way I was also obliged to challenge J.D.’s unconnected digressions about ISIS, Lee Rigby and beheadings.

I hope you have time to watch the show, and that, if you like it, you will share it.

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).