This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

This week on GR: Andy Worthington is a journalist and author whose book titles include: 'Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo,' 'Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion,' 'The Battle of the BeanField,' and his latest, 'The Guantanamo Files: Stories of 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.'

 

Listen. Hear.

 

Welcome to GR, etc. And happy Martin Luther King Day to our American listeners, and all who share Martin's vision of a better world. It seems like a dream, a long nightmarish death march through endless days, the horrors and degradation of war repeated relentlessly across the world, wrecking lives and ruining nations.

 

Entering its tenth year, the latest fascist incarnation, in the guise of the Global War on Terror, grinds steadily on, devouring too with the blood of innocents the laws and conventions humanity past made in hopes of creating a civilized existence. After ten years of gross murder and the vile depravity this war demands, it would be easy to dismiss the human race to the despair of the forever charnel house world the war lords and their apostles would have of it.

 

And yet, people, puny individuals, and fragile coalitions of like-minded peace activists refuse to surrender. Against the relentless tide of misery and stupidity and hatred and lies these intrepid souls lean their shoulder to seemingly immovable barriers, building the peace, love, and understanding necessary to motivate an end to our torpid acceptance of boundless militarism, and to stop finally the practice of perpetual war.  

Mike Ferner is a peace activist, journalist, author, and president of Veterans for Peace. He visited Iraq shortly before America's invasion of 2003, and returned again a year later, his impressions and experiences in Iraq forming the basis of his book, 'Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran for Peace Reports from Iraq.' Ferner recently returned from Afghanistan, where he again visited the common people of a benighted land, documenting their extraordinarily difficult struggle. Mike Ferner, back from the front in the first half.

And; from those distant lands where the wars for dominance, or "stability," rage it can truly be said; there exists there those living who envy the dead. Brutally whisked away in the dead of night, hooded, trussed up and delivered to the wicked ministrations of ruthless jailers, uncounted prisoners of the Global War on Terror languish still in conditions that would ring immediately familiar to the miserable victims of Stalin's Gulags, or to the denizens of the Black Holes reserved for those who opposed the Empires of old.

Entering its tenth year, America's most infamous prison, the jewel in the crown of its innumerable detention facilities around the globe, Camp X-Ray, Quantanamo Bay, Cuba carries on its daily duty of detaining without trial, or other "quaint" niceties eight centuries of English Common Law engendered, the proclaimed enemies of America and its nebulous "International Community."

 

Despite the new president's much ballyhooed promise to shut down "Gitmo" upon his ascension, two years later it and its forlorn inmates remain.

Andy Worthington is a journalist and author whose book titles include: 'Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo,' 'Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion,' 'The Battle of the BeanField,' and his latest, 'The Guantanamo Files: Stories of 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.'

 

Worthington is also co-director of the film, 'Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo.' Andy is back in his native Britain now, following a tour of the United States to screen his film and discuss the issue of America's extrajudicial practices. Andy Worthington and remembering the forgotten in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of the goings on going on on Victoria's streets and beyond. But first, Mike Ferner and finding peace at the heart of a dark conflict.
 

 

 

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, Mark and Rhoda Berenson, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Mordecai Briemberg, James J. Brittain, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Ezili Danto, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Yves Engler, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Glen Ford, Susan George, Stan Goff, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Scott Horton, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Chalmers Johnson, Diana Johnstone, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Brewster Kneen, Betty Krawczyk, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, Ken O'Keefe, David Orchard, Riki Ott, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Lila Rajiva, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, David Robb, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, David Rovics, Danny Schechter, David Schindler, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Harvey Wasserman, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Howard Zinn and many others.