January 11 marked the twenty-third anniversary of the opening of the US military prison on occupied land in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Clearing the FOG speaks with Andy Worthington, an investigative journalist and author of The Guantanamo Files. Worthington explains that the United States opened the prison in Guantanamo to avoid legal restrictions. He describes the connections between Guantanamo and the CIA ‘black sites’ where prisoners were tortured and who the men are that were recently released as well as who remains. There are calls for Joe Biden to release all of the men and end the scandal of the prison at Guantanamo Bay before he leaves office.
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Andy Worthington is a writer, campaigner, investigative journalist and commentator. He is internationally recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” and is increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented, and ever-growing threat to life on earth. He is also involved in housing protest issues in London, and is also a historian of the British counter-culture, and, in particular, the free festival and travellers’ movements. He is also a photo-journalist, posting a photo a day, with accompanying essays, from eleven years of bike rides around London, on his Facebook page ‘The State of London‘, and a singer and songwriter, with his band The Four Fathers.
In 2013, in recognition of his work on Guantánamo, he was short-listed for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.
In the 17 years Andy has spent working full-time on Guantánamo and related issues (since he began researching his book The Guantánamo Files in 2006, which was published in September 2007), he has worked as a consultant for the United Nations, as the lead writer on a report on secret detention in 2010, and in a follow-up capacity in 2015.
Andy also worked as a media partner with WikiLeaks, for the release of classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, in April 2011, which he subsequently began analyzing in depth as “The Complete Guantánamo Files.”
Andy has also been involved with a number of NGOs. In 2011-12, he worked with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights on a number of Guantánamo reports. In 2008, he worked for the legal charity Reprieve, and between 2009 and 2011 with Cageprisoners (now CAGE). He has also worked with Amnesty International, primarily in promoting, to student audiences across the UK, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film he co-directed with Polly Nash, which was released in 2009.
In January 2012, to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, Andy established the campaigning website, Close Guantánamo, with the US lawyer Tom Wilner and with support from a number of prominent lawyers, retired military officials and human rights organizations. He regularly visits the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo (and has done since 2008), and he has also traveled to Kuwait, Poland, Norway and the European Parliament in Brussels on Guantánamo-related business. See here for a video of Andy with Roger Waters on Democracy Now! in 2016, launching a new initiative for President Obama’s last year in office, the Countdown to Close Guantánamo. See here for the latest photo campaign, and also check out the Gitmo Clock, which counts how long Guantánamo has been open in real time.
In November 2014, Andy established We Stand With Shaker with the campaigner Joanne MacInnes, to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo. The campaign successfully focused on celebrities and MPs standing with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker. In October 2015, Andy and Joanne set up another campaign, Fast For Shaker, encouraging celebrities, MPs and members of the general public worldwide to undertake a 24-hour hunger strike in solidarity with Shaker, and to keep pressure on the Obama administration to honour its promise to release him, which was made on September 25. Shaker was finally freed on October 30.
Follow Andy’s work at AndyWorthington.co.uk.