I Discuss “Is It Time for Gitmo to Close?” with Scottie Nell Hughes on Sovren Media | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

A screenshot from “Is It Time for Gitmo to Close?” with Scottie Nell Hughes on Sovren Media.

If you have half an hour to spare, I hope you’ll watch my interview about the prison at Guantánamo Bay with Scottie Nell Hughes, on her show 360 View, as featured on the online TV channel Sovren Media, in which the other featured guest was the conservative talk radio host Steve Gill.

Scottie and I had spoken previously when she worked for RT America, between 2018 and the channel’s politically motivated closure in 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it was good to be given an opportunity to elucidate some of the many incontrovertible reasons why this festering sore from the US’s brutal and lawless post-9/11 experiments in torture, dehumanization and endless imprisonment without charge or trial should be shut down.

I’m glad to say that I was given plenty of time to explain the reasons that Guantánamo must be closed, and should have been “a long, long time ago”, as I put it — because it is, as I also explained, “a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and a great shame for the United States every day that it remains open.”

The video, available here, is also embedded below:

Is it time for Gitmo to close? – powered by sovren.media

In further discussion, I was able to describe in detail who the 30 men still held are, and why it is so shameful that 16 of them are still held despite having been unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, further elaborating that, despite efforts by Hughes to claim that no one wants to take them, a State Department official appointed to oversee transfers from Guantánamo — former Ambassador Tina Kaidanow — has been working with other countries to disprove her unsubstantiated allegation.

As this interview was recorded a few months ago, and has not aired until now, it doesn’t include information received recently — that Kaidanow and her team had definitively negotiated the release of eleven of these men to Oman in October, but that it was called off at the last minute because of fears, higher up the chain of command, that the “political optics” of releasing Guantánamo prisoners after the attacks in Israel on October 7 by Hamas and other militants were not conducive to allowing these men to be granted their long-awaited freedom. I wrote about this story a month ago, as Guantánamo Scandal: Eleven Men Were Set to Be Freed Last October, Until “Political Optics” Shifted After Hamas’ Attack on Israel, and it is shameful that — still — no date has been set for the release of these men.

I also had the opportunity to talk about the the military commissions, set up to try the handful of men accused of crimes, including the 9/11 attacks, and how justice is indefinitely delayed because the entire system is infected and undermined by the torture to which these men were subjected while held in CIA “black sites” before their transfer to Guantánamo in 2006. This is because, as I described it, “torture is incompatible with the pursuit of justice”, and the only way forward is for plea deals to be negotiated, which would bring justice — and closure for the victims’ families — in exchange for the men’s continued imprisonment at Guantánamo, but crucially, with the provision of the mental and physical care that has been denied them as torture victims for all these years, although this solution, as I also explained, is regarded as so politically toxic that, after long and apparently fruitful negotiations between prosecutors and the defense teams, President Biden has refused to endorse it.

There was much more in the interview than I’ve mentioned above, and I hope that you have time to watch it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), 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 (see the ongoing 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 you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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.