11/24/09 – Scott Horton: Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Andy Worthington.
As you know, he's the author of the book The Guantanamo Files.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk and he's got a new movie out, which this interview will not be about because I haven't seen it yet, called Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Nice to be talking to you again.
It's good to have you here.
There's been a lot of important developments in all the legal issues and the prosecutorial military commissions, Guantanamo Bay, Lithuanian torture prison type news going on, so I figured I would get your expertise and your very informed opinion about some of this stuff.
I guess let's start with Obama's announcement that, unlike the speech he gave the day after being inaugurated as America's president last January, Guantanamo Bay prison will, in fact, not close in the one-year timeline.
What have you got to say about that, Andy?
Well, you know, it's very disappointing, isn't it?
And it's disappointing for a number of reasons.
They're not all his fault.
I do think that he should have, instead of coming in and making a big announcement and issuing the executive orders which promised the earth and then not doing anything for several months, he should have followed it up.
He should have brought cleared prisoners to the U.S. mainland.
I'm thinking about the Uyghurs, which is the poor guys from northwestern China, who everybody who has ever encountered in a position from the administration, from the military, from the judiciary, from everywhere, in fact, it's been obvious to them that these guys were never terrorists.
They were fleeing Chinese persecution.
They have only one enemy, the Chinese government.
And he kind of missed the boat on that one.
If he brought these guys to Washington, D.C., as the judge ordered the Bush administration to do last October, everybody would have been very quickly found out that they weren't terrorists, that it was the most perfect example of how the Bush administration made terrible mistakes and imprisoned innocent people at Guantanamo.
And I think it would have dispelled before it even began the kind of scaremongering that actually was followed up pretty swiftly by not doing this, when, of course, Dick Cheney started wheeling himself around the country and denouncing that everybody was a terrorist.
And the Republicans seized on that because they realized that in a climate of fear that has been so for the last eight years, Guantanamo and complaining about terrorists coming to the U.S. mainland was a win-win situation for them.
And, in fact, I think all year since then, to be honest, Scott, the kind of quality of the discourse about Guantanamo has just sunk down to the lowest level imaginable yet again.
Well, and, you know, this is the problem, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to hurt anybody's feelings, but this is the problem with liberals, is that, well, and I'm sorry to paint such a broad brush, but, damn, what's so hard about making the obvious argument that, guess what, I don't care if you don't like it, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment are the law, and if you want to introduce a constitutional amendment to repeal the Fifth and Sixth Amendment to our Bill of Rights, then fine.
But, I mean, anyway, there's a hundred arguments that you could make that completely demolish any stupid Republican fear-mongering about, oh, no, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to kill us from his, you know, solitary confinement cell where his hands are shackled to his feet and he can't even move without being halfway carried down the hall.
This guy has already been tortured, you know, brought into the death spiral by drowning 183 times, who's clearly not a threat to anybody, probably couldn't even kill himself at this point, this guy.
And yet, Democrats just can't say, no, you're wrong, Republicans, people should not be scared, and what's with your fear-mongering and whatever, they can't even make their own argument.
That's why Republicans always win, because liberals are so weak, they can't even make the right argument correctly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, partly it is an example of, you know, how everybody's mind has been bent by the war on terror rhetoric.
I mean, you know, it really is partly to do with that.
What are these guys doing?
Why is nobody standing up and saying to all these Republican guys who are wailing and complaining about, oh, no, we can't bring them here.
Why is nobody saying to them, you know, the reputation of the United States abroad is that you guys get really heavy on these kind of cases of, you know, bad guys.
You put them in court, you have no problem sending them out to be executed afterwards.
And yet, suddenly, on this one particular issue, these particular terrorists, you know, this same superhuman shtick is still being applied.
And it's just rubbish.
I mean, it looks ridiculous from outside the state.
You know, it's like, what, these big, strong Republican guys have this reputation for being the hard man, you know, put him on trial, hang him, you know.
And now suddenly there are these exceptional human beings for whom, you know, all the normal rules don't apply.
It's just ridiculous.
Well, and it's the premise of the whole terror war is that, you know, here we're dealing with a group that on September 10th had, what, maybe 400 people or something were members of it.
And somehow they had to pretend like it was the Kremlin in 1955 or something like that.
And so, you know, the whole premise is that each and every one of these guys is a Lex Luthor unto himself who could bring down the whole world, you know, at a moment's notice.
We have to be right 100% of the time.
We only have to be right once and all that stuff, you know?
Yeah, well, no, absolutely.
You know, and I have to say, Scott, you know, to get back to this particular question of this trial, this is what it was all supposed to be about.
Bringing these people and putting them forward for federal court trials is clearly the right thing to do.
You know, what about everybody else who's still swept up in this rhetoric of terrorism?
That's what worries me is that behind these figurehead people are, you know, people against whom the administration clearly has less evidence.
And so it's engineered with Congress to have a second-tier judicial system which will hopefully, they hope, will disguise some of these failings, the military commissions.
And behind that, a whole other bunch of guys at Guantanamo where, you know, there appears actually to be no evidence.
Now, what the administration says is that, you know, the evidence is too weak or it's tainted.
You know, what does this mean, guys?
You've got evidence derived through torture.
That's not evidence.
It's false information.
You can't use it in a court.
There's a reason for that because it's unreliable.
Well, actually, you haven't got anything at all.
Let's look at what's been happening in the habeas corpus petitions in the district courts.
Well, there was a ruling on Friday which, you know, I'm just about to post something about, but otherwise only the Miami Herald wrote about it.
A district court judge, Gladys Kessler, looked at the case of an Algerian, Farhaid Saeed Bin Mohamed, 48 years old, been in Guantanamo nearly eight years.
Government had gotten her case against him, thrown it out.
We haven't had her ruling yet, but I know what her ruling will say.
It will say that all these spurious allegations that litter the supposed evidence against him are rubbish.
She will discover that these liars in Guantanamo, whose stories about how the prisoners pepper the allegations against almost everybody in that place, she will pinpoint these liars again.
She will pinpoint the holes in the government's feeble structure of bits of information masquerading as evidence.
You know, and this is the truth.
And on the other hand, you know, you've got the administration that has bought into this idea that there is more to the evidence than there is, and that as a result they're actually saying, you know, we may have to carry on holding people that we don't have enough evidence against to prove anything.
Well, now, let me, let me figure something out here.
I'm confused.
Why is it that, well, you bring up the multiple tier thing, right?
If Khalid Sheikh Mohamed's trial is a slam dunk, we'll give him a trial.
But if Omar Khadr is innocent, then we'll go ahead and give him one of these bogus, even more bogus, I should say, military commissions.
But we've also heard, and I'm not sure if this is the judge you're talking about just now is one of these, but we have these habeas corpus petitions, right?
The 31 out of 38 of these habeas corpus petitions mandated by the Supreme Court to be allowed to these people at Guantanamo.
In 31 now of 38 cases, the judges have said, let him go.
If you have nothing on him, let him go.
But how come Omar Khadr doesn't get one of those?
Well, let me just say what I think is a misunderstanding, but is my best understanding, and then you fix it.
If they've been indicted, they're already through a certain step in the process, a quote unquote indicted under the military process at Guantanamo, then it's too late for them to get rid of habeas corpus.
And so I guess Omar Khadr must have already gone through some level of process at Guantanamo, which means that he won't get to go before a judge and say, come on, I was a 12-year-old kid, and they threatened to kill my mommy if I didn't plead guilty or confess to whatever they said.
Well, I mean, I think a military jury, if they carry on with this two-tier system, and let's face it, above all, you don't have two options for putting somebody in trial.
This doesn't exist.
Let's just have federal court trials.
I don't think that anybody's going to convict Omar Khadr, because I don't think there's any evidence, and I don't think that what he did was a war crime, even if he did do it, which he didn't, it appears.
So I don't know what they're doing.
But, you know, the other guys, yeah, you're right.
I was talking about the habeas cases.
Wait, wait, wait.
Why doesn't Omar Khadr, the 12-year-old at the time that he was tortured into making a false confession, why doesn't he get to go in front of a judge with the writ of habeas corpus?
Well, I mean, he must have a habeas petition.
It's just that, you know, most of the habeas petitions are being stalled by the Justice Department.
Now, I don't know, actually, whether there's a process that if you're, you know, you reach a certain stage in the military commissions, you don't get to have your habeas appeal considered.
But two guys who, I think that can't be true, Scott, because two people who were put forward for military commissions, you know, under the Bush administration, these were supposed to be the worst of the worst.
Two of those guys have had their release ordered by the U.S. courts, by the district courts.
One is this poor guy, Mohammad Jowad, you know, the Afghan who supposedly threw a grenade but was tortured into saying that he did, who was somewhere between 12 and 15 when he was freed.
Oh, you know what, and I apologize, too, because I think I've gotten Omar Khadr and Mohammad Jowad confused on a couple of different occasions here, because wasn't Mohammad Khadr also a kid at the time?
Mohammad Jowad and Omar Khadr were both children, yeah.
Khadr was 15 when he was captured, and he was, you know, from the photos that emerged a couple of months back.
Right, Jowad was the one who threw the grenade, supposedly.
Yeah, but so did Khadr, supposedly.
Oh, okay.
But, I mean, a picture that was published by the Toronto Star recently showed him face down under a pile of rubble when this grenade was supposed to have been thrown, it appears.
So, you know, I don't think there's a case, and as I say, even if he did, you don't make a war crime out of somebody fighting during war, that's not a war crime, that's war.
Yeah, the war crime is what the people who arrested him did, and are doing.
Yeah.
That's the most ironic thing about all this, is this whole process for war criminals is the war crime of, it's, you know, as bad as the aggressive invasion of Iraq itself, almost, is the complete abandonment of the rule of law, and the kidnapping and torture of these people, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions and the federal laws that apply them.
Yeah, and here we are, with Obama having said he's not going to meet the deadline, with nobody really seriously thinking, what is it like for these guys after nearly 8 years of being held under these circumstances, of every day waking up thinking, am I ever going to get out of here?
People forget, I think, that, you know, if you have a trial in front of a judge, and even if it's a miscarriage of justice, but somebody puts a date on something, says to you, you are serving X amount of time, you know that.
These guys don't.
These guys never know what's going to happen.
Every morning, they don't know, will I ever be released from here?
It's worse than that.
You know, I just saw, and everyone, if you go to AndyWorthington.co.uk, you can watch this great clip of Andy being interviewed on ABC News, and this is as much of your movie as I've seen so far, your movie Outside the Law, and it's a short clip that they play of one of the former Guantanamo inmates, kidnappees, whatever you want to call them, who ended up released, and he said that they told him, I guess, basically confessing to him that they didn't really have anything on him that would give them the opportunity to convict him of anything, so they told him, yeah, you're going to be released, but we're going to completely destroy you, mentally and physically, we're going to break you, and we're going to split your cortex off from the rest of your head in there through our mistreatment, and then we'll let you go after you're a broken man, and you can't get revenge for us breaking you.
And that's what they told him, it's almost like 1984 or whatever, oh, we'll let you go, but first you have to love Big Brother and really mean it.
Yeah, yeah, no, I know, I mean, they showed a really powerful clip from the film, actually, and I know that's the only few seconds that you've seen so far, Scott, but it's a good indication of some of the strength of the testimony of that particular former prisoner, Armando Galles, who manages to tell a lot of home truths about what the situation actually was at Guantanamo for people like him, who, you know, were accused of all kinds of nonsense, but were actually released without charge, without trial, and are free men to this day, and have not rejoined the battlefield or taken up arms or anything, because they never were terrorists in the first place, and have no intention of ever becoming terrorists.
So, you know, I mean, I'm very glad that they showed that little clip yesterday, and I'm hoping we're going to get the message out, because I think it's powerful for people to see somebody, you know, there's an extra power to the fact that he speaks English, it's not having to be translated from some weirdy terrorist language, you know, this is a guy speaking in English, he lived in Britain, he lives in Britain, he's telling the story of what happened to him, and, you know, it's very powerful.
Well, and speaking of that, let me just get this out here.
Can people go to Amazon.com and buy Outside the Law on DVD there, or where can people find this?
Because there's a lot of towns around here in this country that don't have the art house cinema that might end up playing this thing, you know?
Yeah, no, well, you know, exactly.
No, we'll be making DVDs available pretty soon, I should think.
December, if not, then certainly in the new year.
And then we'll be making sure that information about that and promotional clip is available.
Across the net, hopefully.
And I'm sure I can count on you to help out a bit there, Scott.
Well, you know, what you're doing there is smart.
It's, I guess, what I would say rather than what I do, which is you've got to make it TV.
It's got to be visual for people to sit down and watch.
And if you explain to them that we even have the exact same names if you translate, we even have the exact same names for our torture techniques that the Cheka used in the Soviet Union.
And that's a bit shocking, but it's still just, you know, the shape of letters on a page somewhere.
You've got to show them.
No, really.
What the American CIA and military do to people in custody is the same torture techniques that the KGB use, you know, and the Nazis use, all the stress positions and the sleep deprivation and all of this.
You know, I read something the other day about Don Rumsfeld when he went to Lithuania, I guess as part of, you know, going over there to check on the secret prison that they had there.
He actually, as part of his PR move while he was there, he went and visited a museum about a Soviet prison there in Lithuania.
And they even had an exhibit that was like the torture room.
And what they would do is they would put their poor prisoners, the KGB or the Cheka, the NKVD, whatever, they would, you know, put them in these stress positions and keep them awake for days and days and days and all these terrible torture techniques that the Soviets would use.
And yet why was Rumsfeld even in Lithuania?
He was going to check up on the secret torture prison that the U.S. government had set up there.
I mean, that's the kind of thing where you've got to put it on TV to get that into people's thick skulls that, no, really, we've gone way, way, way off the course of what we're supposed to be doing here, guys.
You know, secret prisons in the former Warsaw Pact states, I mean, what?
Yeah, what was going on?
Well, I mean, you know, I've been doing some research recently into the renditions in the early days, you know, before torture was brought in house.
And, of course, you know, we're all going to have to look very closely at the story of, you know, how we can hang them for having started torturing people, you know, some considerable time before they got that disgraceful and, frankly, illegal memo from Jay Bybee and John Yoo saying that torture wasn't torture, so that, therefore, the CIA could torture people.
You know, and it just is kind of incomprehensible that, you know, that they were doing deals with Syria, you know.
Syria is the one that particularly gets me.
I know they've been doing deals with Egypt for years, you know, when rendition was going on under Clinton, the first extraordinary rendition, and sending people there, sending Egyptians back to Egypt, knowing that they would be tortured and maybe killed.
But, you know, picking up people around the world and setting up these deals, which they did very quickly in the first few months after 9-11, you know, with Jordan and with Morocco and with Egypt and with Syria, to send guys there to let them practice the torture on them.
I mean, they leapt on this idea that these kind of things, doing these disgusting, disgraceful, and useless and counterproductive things to people, you know, they leapt on the idea that, no, actually, this is what tough guys do, and this is, you know, how you get the truth.
Well, and also there was the whole thing about this is how you get through to Arabs, right?
Is they only know fear and shame, and so you have to break their will.
It's worked really well in Palestine, for example, where they don't dare resist.
Right.
Well, you know, I think you probably just touched on a whole element of, you know, racism going on there as well, which isn't very often mentioned, is it?
No, and it's a very important part of it.
I mean, you think about even the pictures of Abu Ghraib, which the pictures were the least of it, right?
But people chained to the railings and chained upside down, chained to the wall and piled on top of each other, something like that.
Just switch it around a little bit and picture a favored, politically correct minority group, and that being done to them, like, say, black people or Jews.
And this is the American government with their pile of Jews that they made.
This is the American government, you know, making these guys perform sex acts on each other at gunpoint.
And that's what, if we were doing that to a politically favored group, that would be, there would be some kind of absolute outrage.
And yet, with Abu Ghraib, and we all know it's been going on all over Iraq and Afghanistan the whole time, it's not just that one prison or anything.
But, yeah, well, you know, basically they're a bunch of towel heads, and I can't understand a thing they say, and who cares?
Absolutely, you know.
And no wonder it's so disappointing to, you know, I'm not saying that, I wouldn't say for a minute that the military has a clear history, but, you know, there are people who have served in previous times, you know, not just in the States, in other countries as well, there are people who remember a time that treating prisoners well, you know, was not only something that was an important moral value, but, you know, that actually it was useful.
All these guys have done is, you know, they really have, they've dragged the United States really, really down into some kind of moral gutter.
And, you know, and I find it distressing, obviously, during those eight years of the Bush administration, when, sadly, there were too many outlets for these, you know, for these screaming idiots on the far right.
And, you know, and I thought they would go away, but, of course, they haven't.
You know, they're still there, pushing their pernicious message, you know, unless we're just vile and chanting and preferably being violent, you know, we're not real Americans, we're not real men, you know, and it's kind of, it's unbelievably disgusting, really.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
Well, you know, I saw something that just disturbed me so much.
In fact, it was the spotlight on antiwar.com a few days ago, and it was Arthur Silber's article, Hey, I know, let's hold a show trial.
And, you know, ever the dramatist, he really explains how, you know, the American belief that there's always going to be a happy ending and everything's going to be okay and all this has really poisoned us.
And we really got to understand that we're dealing now with things, and we will be dealing with things for maybe generations to come, that are direct consequences of what it's too late to undo.
What we've already done here.
And his example was he pointed to this great article at Slate.
It's a horrible article, but anyway.
It's by David Feige, F-E-I-G-E.
It's called The Real Price of Trying, Colleague Sheikh Mohammed.
And he says that here's what's going to happen.
You can see it coming a mile away, right?
Any lawyer, I mean, let's assume that he gets the very best civil liberties lawyer in the New York court in our adversarial system after all this time.
Well, the defense lawyers are going to say, yeah, but judge, he didn't get a speedy trial.
And the judge will say, yeah, yeah, but it's Colleague Sheikh Mohammed, so we're going to go ahead.
And then the defense lawyer will say, yeah, but this is hearsay evidence.
And the judge will say, yeah, yeah, but this is Colleague Sheikh Mohammed.
And the political pressure is such that there's no way that the judge is going to dismiss the case.
So there will be a million pretrial motions about he was tortured, about the people who are testifying against him were tortured, or these statements are being admitted that came from people who were tortured and now they're dead so we can't cross-examine them or whatever.
And what's going to happen is the precedent will be set by the Colleague Sheikh Mohammed trial that actually all this stuff is okay and we're going to go ahead and hold the trial anyway.
There will be no way that the judge could stop the trial.
And then so what does that mean?
It means from now on, speedy trial, yeah, it doesn't matter so much.
Yeah, I know it says it right there in the Bill of Rights.
But yeah, and torture evidence, yeah, we're going to go ahead and admit that.
And this is going to destroy the way the law is applied to the rest of us too.
And why?
Because Americans went along with George Bush's decision to treat these people as enemy combatants and whatever back then.
And so now they didn't get their speedy trial.
And yet here, what are we supposed to do?
Let them go scot-free?
I mean, I actually have to say that I do think fundamentally, although there's clear calibrations of what they think they can get away with on the part of the administration, which is certainly preordaining justice to a certain extent, and especially with comments about don't worry guys, they're going to be found guilty and executed, which has been coming from the very top of the government.
Right, yeah, failure is not an option, which again sounds like a threat to the jurors, right?
They really don't need to say that.
What they actually need to say, and the reason clearly that they've decided to go ahead with these, which I still think is the right thing to do, because we have to somehow deal with this, is to put them on trial.
And they think they've got evidence.
They must have evidence.
And I've always maintained all along that all you need to say, which is why I don't know why they've been going so over the top, is just say, look, we believe that the prosecution has evidence against these people, which is not tainted, and that no U.S. jury will be able to ignore that.
I think that's the case.
I think all the other issues that you're talking about, which is, you know, why are you sending somebody to a torture chamber for three and a half years, and then holding them in Guantanamo for another X years before finally putting them on trial?
We really don't want to do this again.
This stuff all has to be sidelined to have a trial to bring these particular stories to an end.
But, you know, what we all still need to be aware of and still need to work on is, that's okay, but the guys who did this are the ones who also still need to be brought to account.
And, you know, that's my bottom line still is, you know, if they're allowed to get away with it, if Cheney and Addington and Rumsfeld and all those guys in the OLC are allowed to get away with this, it sends out that message, you can get into the White House and do what you want.
There are no laws.
You can break them all.
Because you can then leave office and look, you got away with it.
I saw Dick Cheney popping up the other day.
Why is that man allowed to speak?
You know, so this has got to go hand in hand with it.
Otherwise, this scenario that you're setting up, well, yes, it does start to become a little more ominous that actually a precedent has then been established for breaking all the rules about how you treat prisoners before trial.
You can disappear them for three and a half years and torture them.
Who cares?
It wasn't torture.
Hey, you know, look, it's still on the books.
The guys who, in a very bent manner, wrote those legal memos, no, they were legal.
They were lawful, just like Dick always said.
There were bright lines that were drawn that we didn't cross.
We were very careful always to get the advice of the lawyers.
The lawyers lied.
They cheated.
You all knew that you were going to torture people and it was illegal.
And, you know, that has to be dealt with as well.
Yeah, well, and, of course, that speech almost a year ago now, where Obama promised he was going to end Guantanamo, he said right in there, I have decided to ban torture today, as though it wasn't already illegal under all these laws.
Basically, I guess he was saying that the latest version of the law that exists is the Military Commissions Act and the Detainee Treatment Act, both of which give him permission to give the CIA permission to torture people.
And so he was not repudiating his power to torture people.
He was only saying, I have decided to turn it off for now.
That's all.
Yeah.
That's hope and change for you, Andy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, no.
No, absolutely.
I mean, it's why there is this big problem just still sitting there.
You know, we hear that the OLC report is finally going to come out.
I don't know how watered down it's become now.
But, you know, the internal report about the conduct of the lawyer.
And, you know, the fact is, we need a smoking gun to prove what we all know.
These guys conspired together, Cheney, Addington, you, Bybee, to sit down and lie and cheat about what the law was.
You know, the OLC, which is supposed to interpret the law as it applies to the executive, objectively, clearly didn't.
It was completely politicized.
It said what was wrong, what was untenable, and did it so that the government could torture and then say we didn't do it.
Waterboarding isn't torture.
The Spanish, when they call it water torture, you know, they were exaggerating.
You know, they just needed to legally approve it, and it would have been fine.
Right.
Well, I guess it goes back to the racist thing, right?
That was why it was okay in Spain back then, because it wasn't the regular Spanish people that were going through the Inquisition, not the way they defined it.
It was minority people and pagans and Jews and Muslims and whoever else that wasn't like them in the same way that it is now, right?
Even though those are groups that we wouldn't torture Jews or pagans now or Spanish people, but we'll torture Arabs, though.
Same difference, you know.
All right.
Anyway, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Andy.
I can't wait to see the movie.
It's called Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
And, of course, the book is The Guantanamo Files, the website, AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Appreciate it, man.
Scott, always a pleasure to talk to you.
Cheers.