Investigative reporter Jason Leopold discusses his latest surreal visit to Guantanamo prison (it has a gift shop); the doctors who have no ethical reservations about force feeding hunger strikers; and the despair of prisoners who remain incarcerated despite being long ago cleared for release.
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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.
Hey, I keep forgetting to mention, I finally got the Amazon thingamajig up and running, where if you want to go and buy your books by way of my site, I'll get a cut.
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Doesn't raise your price any, it just means I get a cut of what you spend at Amazon.com.
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If you go to ScottHorton.org and you look in the right-hand margin, then you will see a big Amazon.com logo.
Click on that and then anything that you buy after that, I'll get a little bit of a kickback.
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Wouldn't that be cool?
Alright, so ScottHorton.org, just look in the right-hand margin there for the link.
Also, you can find it on my Facebook page too, if you want.
Alright, anyway.
So now we get to talk with Jason Leopold, intrepid reporter on the Guantanamo beat, mostly these days, and he is writing for Al Jazeera America, and that is America.
AlJazeera.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason, how are you doing?
Doing well, Scott, thanks for having me back on.
Good to have you here.
So you just got back from Guantanamo Bay, right?
How long were you there?
I was there for a week.
I was there last week, just returned on Saturday.
And I was basically down there to check out the facilities again, take another prison tour, and speak with some of the new military personnel who were recently deployed there in October.
Also to get a sort of insight, as much as possible, into what the state of affairs is with regard to a hunger strike.
Yeah, well, and you got a lot of great journalism here at America.
AlJazeera.com.
I want to tell people about here.
We've got marooned at Guantanamo.
We've got new Guantanamo Commander Supports Closing Facility.
Gitmo media blackout hopes to undermine hunger strikers.
And Gitmo officials change procedures for hunger strikes, force feeding, and of course, yeah, as just referred to, the process for disclosing what's going on with the hunger strike behind the scenes.
You want to start with that?
And there's also a story up there about some of the items you can buy at the gift shop at Guantanamo and the sort of whole surreal experience about hearing Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville as I'm traveling over to the prison.
Well, you know what, I don't want to spend too much time on that, but actually I think it is probably kind of important to set the scene about what you call the surreal nature of the Guantanamo base surrounding this notorious prison.
Yeah, I mean, I probably mentioned this to you before, but Guantanamo is an active naval base.
It's 45 square miles, resembles a small town, and in fact, the prison itself is on a far corner of the island in a real desolate area.
It's not accessible to anyone who works there unless you have a specific clearance.
So you can't just sort of say, hey, I'm going to drive over to the prison side.
But the rest of Guantanamo, the folks that are there on the Navy side just sort of go about their business and seem to forget and are oblivious to the fact that you have this prison there.
I mean, during the week that I was there, they were preparing for Christmas.
So you have this big Christmas tree as you're driving up sort of the main road, these holiday lights that say, Season's Greetings from Guantanamo Bay, gingerbread houses, gingerbread Santa Claus, frosty the snowman out there.
So it's just surreal because you are at Guantanamo.
And then, of course, you go into the gift shop and every t-shirt that they have there describing Guantanamo as this coastal paradise.
They did have one t-shirt that said, joint task force Guantanamo, detainee operations, Operation Enduring Freedom.
So I'm not sure who would wear such a shirt, but they have a t-shirt commemorating the fact that they do have a prison there.
Well, and listen, I mean, you got to admit, it all is very normal now.
And there was a time where that was sort of all of what you're describing there would be the most normal thing about it, as though somehow that kind of fake hometown feeling that they build up around it is meant to try to force a feeling of normalization about what's actually taking place.
But at this point, it's worked, I think.
And it is all very normal, not because of the town that they built up there or that already existed there to a great degree, I understand.
Not because of that, but just because it's been so long that we've had this more or less legal black hole.
I mean, you couldn't really consider the laws that they've passed legalizing this after the fact to be legit, I don't think.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
I mean, it's been 12 years.
January will be 12 years since the first prisoners were brought to Guantanamo.
And in fact, this month marks 12 years, actually, since when John Yoo, the former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel attorney wrote a memo, actually, to the Defense Department, more or less explaining why Guantanamo was the best place to hold so-called enemy combat.
And essentially, he said, it's outside of the law.
They won't have a right to habeas corpus.
So he was proved wrong years later, but many anniversaries coming up.
And just a fact, as I indicated, being there, you don't expect to get much when you're there, Scott, but it's important.
I wanted to talk to the medical staff.
I really wanted to get an opportunity to, once again, see the facilities.
I was able to observe some prisoners in the compliant camp, which they call Camp 6.
That's the camp where you have to eat food.
And if you don't eat food, you get sent over to Camp 5, which is the non-compliant camp.
You know, it's always amazing to me to sort of take a walk through these, you know, through the cell blocks.
And there's no, you know, they brought me through a cell block where there's no, you know, it wasn't an active cell block.
No prisoners are there.
But, you know, looking at these cells that they have spent, you know, 12 years in, nearly 12 years, most of them, it's unbelievable.
They still wouldn't let you anywhere near any of the detainees at all?
Well, they actually did.
I mean, you know, I was standing outside of, or I was facing, you know, some of the prisoners behind one-way glass.
So I was able to, you know, observe them in Camp 6 in this communal block as they were, you know, watching television, eating lunch.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
You say that.
They got headphones on.
That means they're watching TV.
They're plugged in and everything.
Right.
So I did get to see them.
And I'll tell you, you know, many of them, they just look old.
They look old.
They look weak.
I tried to really sort of study their faces to see if I could, you know, figure out who's who.
That was difficult because, you know, they're obviously moving around.
And, you know, having the opportunity to speak to some of the guards, you know, one guard telling me that, you know, he's ready to go home.
He wants to get the heck out of there.
Guantanamo's not for him.
You know, the staff is constantly sort of emphasizing how, you know, the challenges that they face.
You know, trying to impress upon me.
I was the only media there that week, by the way.
But they're trying to impress upon me that the, you know, they're constantly splashing them and assaulting the Guard Force with, you know, a cocktail of feces, urine.
You know, and then just trying to get an idea of what, you know, what the operations are like, what the hunger strike has been like, whether there's an ongoing hunger strike.
Those were the difficult questions.
Those were the questions that I just could not get an answer to.
You know, speaking with the medical staff, I mean, they just spoke in clinical terms, you know, calling it an e-feeding.
I actually have not heard that before.
E-feeding as opposed to force feeding.
Hunger strike was self-backed.
And, you know, they're unconcerned about the criticism that, you know, ethical groups have laid out, you know, with regard to the force feeding.
But I will tell you that, you know, while there's these discussions taking place here in the U.S. about Guantanamo and whether or not it will be closed, and we just saw, as a matter of fact, you know, two prisoners were released over the weekend right as I was leaving.
Apparently they released two prisoners back to Saudi Arabia.
There's no discussion like that at Guantanamo, Scott.
So everyone there is, they won't discuss the possibility of the prison closing down.
They'll only say, you know, we're focused on the mission.
We're focused on the mission.
In fact, in that story where I've got sort of a photograph there with a t-shirt, I picked up while I was there, you know, one of these smart cards that the public relations staff carries around.
You know, I'm able to understand now why certain questions aren't answered because on the smart card it contains all the talking points, you know, what can be talked about and what cannot be discussed with the media.
So it was certainly surreal being there.
I think it was, you know, again, it's just important and, you know, having the opportunity to sort of, you know, be a bit aggressive in my reporting and try to get some questions answered.
And, you know, for example, as you know, they recently withheld they're no longer providing the media with a figure of how many prisoners are on hunger strike.
And I was able to at least get them to admit that the reason they're not doing that anymore is because the prisoners were very successful in attracting media attention, which was ultimately the main goal, you know, to try to raise awareness You know, I don't particularly see anything wrong with that you know, with trying to get media attention but the fact that they did you know, attract so much attention now they're withholding those numbers.
Right, and they're pretty honest about that anyway, right?
Well, Sewell's working, so we had to stop.
Yes, they were very forthcoming, you know, the head of public affairs who I spoke with there, Commander John Philostrat, said, you know, it's a self-perpetuating story.
We don't want to feed into that.
We don't want to give them an opportunity to sort of, we don't want to help them attract the media attention by giving me or anyone else any figures about the number of hunger strikers because, you know, they felt that what happens, what will you know, what will you do with that information?
Well, you'll go out and you'll write a story and that story will just you know, it will just constantly every day we'll hear about the number It's so funny because they claim, you know, one of the taglines there is transparency safe, humane, legal, transparent that's the actual tagline of Joint Task Force Guantanamo Operation or the motto and they've been anything but transparent.
You know, one of the things that you'll notice in some of these pictures I took you're not allowed to shoot you're not allowed to take photographs of anyone's faces so I could not take a photograph except unless they give you permission so I was not able to take a picture of, you know, for example the head of the hospital or the officer in charge of the detainee hospital showing his face he did allow me to use his name and I also was able to speak to a guard who allowed me to use his name and photograph him but after I left I found out that they implemented literally when I left, I mean I'm still on the plane back to the U.S. they have a new policy now that no one can speak on the record or have their picture taken even if they volunteer because of the fear that, you know security concerns that something could happen to them or their families by being associated with prison operations Yeah, well they're just projecting their guilt and it's kind of understandable putting these guys in a sense There's a little truth there, right?
That they're putting these guys in danger like that Now, so the numbers, I think you said in the article you believe, you are led to believe there are 29 people who are still hunger striking now basically, correct?
Well that's actually the figure that comes from Chakra Amar, who is the last you know, the last UK prisoner still in Guantanamo and so, you know, during the hunger strike what was happening all year basically, we received our information about at first how many prisoners were on hunger strike from the attorneys who received it from the prisoners so once it got to the point where they were sort of driving the news cycle that's when the Guantanamo official stepped in so once they stopped reporting those numbers Chakra Amar spoke to his attorney Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve and said that the Guantanamo hunger strike is back on and there's now 29 prisoners on hunger strike and 19 being forced out Yeah, well and you know, I don't know if maybe this is kind of beyond your purview as a journalist about this, but you may have an opinion it seems like, in a sense, they're really asking for the right to commit suicide here and when you talk to the doctor in your article, his thing is hey man, I only have one job and that is keeping them healthy and any other consideration about why it is that they're choosing starving themselves to death as a form of protest or whatever that's beyond their purview to even think about but that's really the right that this officer is denying them is their right to go that far in trying to make their point about being held indefinitely without charges like this, correct?
Exactly, yes, you've nailed it and it's as I indicated, taking a look at these cells which are 10 by 7 I believe I mean, Scott, some of these cells there aren't any windows in there the lights are either very bright very dim, it's a climate controlled setting it's a sensory deprivation and to be told over and over that yeah, you've been cleared for release but we're never going to release you you're going to die here too you haven't been charged with any crime much less convicted of one but we're still not letting you go right, and if we do let you go you're going to have to go to a rehab center even though we were never able to prove you did anything hold it right there, Jason we've got to take this break, unfortunately we'll be right back, everybody with Jason Leopold right after this go to america.aljazeera.com he's got a great series here from his recent trip down to Guantanamo Bay more like this on the other side of the break alright, welcome back to the show I'm Scott Horton, 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