Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo, Torture and the Failed Military Commissions with Jon Gold

[image error]My friends,

I’m delighted to let you know that on Tuesday evening, March 3, I was interviewed by Jon Gold for his show, “We Were Lied to About 9/11,” which is part of Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox.

Jon is a long-time advocate for 9/11 justice, and the author of the book 9/11 Truther: The Fight For Peace, Justice And Accountability, and we have known about each other, and communicated, on several occasions over the years, but this was our first interview, and I’m very pleased with the result — over 80 minutes of detailed analysis of the history of Guantánamo, the torture that has taken place there, and the discredited military commission process, which, from the beginning, has been a disaster, and ought to be a source of shame to any US citizen who believes in the rule of law.

We also spoke about the futility of war — and I was able to put a shout out for my friend Anand Gopal‘s heartbreakingly powerful book about the US occupation of Afghanistan, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, and Jon also asked me about the number of deaths at Guantánamo (nine), which gave me an opportunity to plug another book, the recently published Murder at Camp Delta by Joseph Hickman, a former Staff Sergeant, who was in charge of the guard towers at Guantánamo on the night in June 2006 when, according to the official report, which his account demolishes, three prisoners died by committing suicide simultaneously.

Please listen to the interview below (it’s on YouTube, but it’s audio only):

Jon and I have areas on which we had to agree to differ — namely, the events of September 11, 2001, which I believe were terrorist attacks, and not an inside job, and I am grateful to Jon for not allowing our differences to get in the way of a thorough discussion about the horrors of the “war on terror.” For the record, I recommend Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 for a compelling account of how the CIA’s inability to share information with the FBI allowed the 9/11 plot to develop, even though many of these involved were under surveillance. I also recommend Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side for establishing how, according to a friend of Dick Cheney’s, he changed after 9/11, and became harder and colder than he had been before, which is a chilling thought in and of itself.

To my mind, opportunists within the Bush administration used 9/11 to advance their geopolitical aims — and Jane Mayer’s book is also illuminating for her accounts of shocked British operatives, who happened to be in the Pentagon on 9/11, being appalled to hear many of their US counterparts talking about attacking Iraq in retaliation, even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks — and still didn’t 18 months later when the illegal US-led invasion began.

I hope you find my interview useful, and will share it if you do.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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, 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.