Linda Olson-Osterlund speaks to Andy Worthington...a British historian, investigative journalist, and film director. He has published three books, and been published in numerous publications. In 2009 Worthington was the co-director of a documentary about the Guantánamo detainees. Worthington published what has been described as the most definitive annotated list of all Guantánamo detainees. In January 2010 he published the first annotated list of Bagram detainees.
Worthington's most recent book is The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison. Following its publication in October 2007, Worthington has published articles supplementing the information in his book, to track new developments. Michelle Shephard, author of Guantanamo's Child, when summing up other books on Guantánamo, described his book as: "Perhaps the single most important book to cover the big picture of Guantánamo", even though he "has never even been to Guantánamo Bay."[11] Stephen Grey, writing in the New Statesman, called the book "...a powerful, essential and long-overdue piece of research".
Worthington and Polly Nash co-directed Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo, a 75-minute documentary. The film focuses on the cases of United Kingdom citizen Moazzam Begg, and Omar Deghayes and Shaker Aamer, legal residents of the UK. In addition to interviews with Begg and Deghayes, there are interviews with lawyers Clive Stafford Smith and Tom Wilner, and Worthington himself.
-from www.andyworthington.co.uk
"It’s now nine days since the international human rights organization Reprieve issued a shocking press release, explaining that two clients at Guantánamo, the Pakistani Ahmed Rabbani, and Khalid Qassim (aka Qasim), a Yemeni, both hunger striking to protest about the injustice of their seemingly endless imprisonment without charge or trial, had told them that, since September 20, following new instructions from Donald Trump, “a new Senior Medical Officer (SMO) stopped tube-feeding the strikers, and ended the standard practice of closely monitoring their declining health.”
I immediately wrote an article about the news, and was, frankly, astonished that it took another four days for the mainstream media to respond — and when that happened, it was just the New York Times paying attention, and, to my mind, giving too much credibility to the authorities, via a spokesman who claimed that the military’s “11-year-old military policy permitting the involuntary feeding of hunger-striking detainees remained in effect.” Given the lies we have heard from the military at Guantánamo over the years, I asked, in an analysis of the New York Times article, why we should trust them.
Expanding on the story further, Reprieve, on Thursday, secured coverage in Newsweek — a description of the current situation, made in a phone call to Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, by Ahmed Rabbani, who has been at Guantánamo, without charge or trial, for just over 12 years, and who, before that, was held and tortured for 545 days in CIA “black sites” including the disgusting “black site” in Afghanistan, codenamed COBALT, which was known to the prisoners as the “dark prison.”"
- KBOO