For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-Guantanamo Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
We're going to go ahead and get started right away here with our first guest, Andy Worthington.
He's the author of the Guantanamo Files, stories of all the 700 plus Guantanamo inmates, and also he made the movie Outside the Law, stories from Guantanamo.
You can find his articles all over the place, first and foremost at AndyWorthington.co.uk, at Antiwar.com, at Truthout.org, and at the Future Freedom Foundation, which is FFF.org.
And the article in question here today is Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List, for Truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show Andy, how are you?
Hey Scott, good to be here.
Well I'm happy to have you here.
This is great work, very important story.
A spinoff of the Guantanamo theme this week on the show, Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List.
What's Bagram, just Guantanamo East?
Well you know, Bagram's the pre-Guantanamo, really.
You know, that's the place that just about everybody who ended up in Guantanamo was processed through.
You know, in the very early days, Kandahar was used as well, but Bagram became the main prison, it's still the main prison.
It's also the prison in which pretty much all the ghost prisoners, some of them the high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who ended up in Guantanamo, a lot of other people whose whereabouts are still unaccounted for, who are held in a variety of secret CIA prisons, most of which I think were actually various facilities in Afghanistan, were all processed through Bagram as well.
So you know, it's really the heart of the beast.
Well in fact, wasn't it just what, last summer, something they said they were going, they were starting a new project to expand it?
Yeah.
Yeah, well I mean they, from what I understand, have now built this new state-of-the-art facility replacing the medieval squalor of the place which appears to have prevailed since 2001.
It's something equivalent really to the transformation that took place at Guantanamo, you know, where this kind of rather ad hoc system that was there at the beginning was eventually replaced by the construction of kind of maximum security cell blocks.
You know, now I have a real problem really with maximum security isolated cell blocks, even for the baddest dudes on earth, isolating them for the rest of their lives when deprivation of liberty I think is punishment enough.
But you know, as with Guantanamo, Bagram is a place where people who have never, it's never been verified that they should be held in this manner, will be held there.
You know, bluntly these guys should be, for the most part, prisoners of war, held in a prisoner of war camp, recognizable according to the Geneva Conventions, and yet they're going to get some massive 21st century maximum security prison instead.
Yeah, that's what we call spreading American values around the world.
They didn't have a bad enough time over there, they need 21st century maximum security American-made supermax facilities.
Alright, well now you hit on the key there about whether these people are prisoners of war or whether they ought to be, whether they ought to simply be, you know, arrested and tried in some sort of civil system inside Afghanistan.
I mean, in a sense, and this is a subject we've gone over over and over again on the show in the past, when the government's at war with the law, they make up all these contradictory and kind of ad hoc ridiculous ways of explaining what they're doing.
So, in a way, we won the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November of 2001, and we've since installed a friendly government there, and all military and police that have any authority inside that country belong to that government that we support there, according to our theory, and yet it's still a war zone, and none of the laws that you would think would go into force, even if it was martial law, right, it would still be martial law on a battlefield that was already won, would go the legal term, and yet we have a permanent state of lawless warfare, and then, even then, they still don't get prisoner of war status.
Yeah, well, no, that's it, and I mean, that's the bit that I don't understand, really, is that we haven't had a clean break.
I mean, I do understand it, it's pragmatism, and it's Obama, I would say, even with the Westworld being prevailed upon by people in the military who like it how it is now, and in the intelligence services.
You know, what Bush did by unilaterally rewriting the Geneva Conventions was doing away with the obligation to really kind of minimize the interrogation angle of detention during wartime.
So, you know, it's been open-ended, it's been chaotic, but it worked as far as they were concerned, even though, in terms of winning hearts and minds, it's been disastrous, that you just round up a whole bunch of people, stick them away in a prison, and take your time going through them to find out whether, actually, there was any purpose in having them there in the first place.
You know, this isn't supposed to happen.
With an irregular fighting force, you're supposed to screen them close to the time and place of capture, sort out that, you know, that guy was a farmer rather than a fighter, make sure he gets sent home.
But this has stayed.
This is what's still happening at Bagram.
Now, you know, and it's revealing that in the government's struggle to prevent the courts from having access to the foreign prisoners who were rendered into Bagram, you know, this very small part of Bagram's population, the kind of Guantanamo people who never ended up in Guantanamo.
With the rest of it, well, in fact, with the overall population, what they proposed in the summer and what I believe that they're introducing is more screening closer to the time of capture, more kind of fixed rules that are better for the prisoners about these review processes that they hold there to ascertain whether they need to hold these people or not.
Now, ironically, the ones that they used to have there made the kangaroo court tribunal system that they had at Guantanamo look as though it was reasonably good because they allowed the prisoners in Bagram to make a statement, but only before they were told what they were accused of.
You know, think about that.
How ridiculous is that?
What they propose now is it's a system that's really remarkably similar to the one that they used at Guantanamo in 2004 and 2005, where they present the evidence and the prisoners are assigned somebody and they're allowed to talk about it.
Well, what is this?
I mean, this is just the reinvention of the Guantanamo system, which was itself, as I say, this is essentially this unilateral reworking of the Geneva Convention to say, actually, it's much more convenient if this is how we treat people when we capture them in wartime.
Well, I think it's important to note, and I think you kind of referred to this, that under the regular legal military code of justice and what have you, they have already, from their point of view, perfected way of a process, a pre-existing process for separating the wheat and the chaff.
And all of that was taken out with the prisoner of war status.
And so that's how you end up with people who weren't even the cook that they're accused of being, tortured to death at Guantanamo eventually, is because they just bought people on bounties and the normal military process that there's, it's already some lieutenant's job to carry out the process for figuring out who's who on the battlefield.
All of that was shut down from the get go.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you know, this was, this was what, you know, in Afghanistan, at the end of 2001, the U.S. military, when they were setting up Kandahar and Bagram, were preparing to conduct competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Convention.
These are the ones that say, if you've got any doubt about who you've captured because they're not part of a regular army, i.e. they're not wearing a uniform or they're not carrying an insignia or, you know, exactly what was happening, then you screen them to find out whether, whether you've got the right guys.
And, you know, the statistics that have always got to me about this, that 1,200 of these were held during the first Gulf War.
And in nearly 900 cases, they sent the guys home.
Now, you know, if you apply those statistics to Guantanamo, you realize that a population of nearly 800 would have been 200 from the beginning.
And, you know, that would have been considerably less inaccurate than it was.
And in fact, you know, I think it's pretty clear that 600 guys at least should never have been held in the first place because they were wrongly detained or had such a kind of peripheral involvement with anything that it was unnecessary to hold them.
So it didn't happen.
But, you know, what's happening in Bagram now is still, from what I can see, is what Obama's doing is he's trying to introduce the few safeguards to make an unreasonable, unacceptable and unlawful process appear to be more fair.
But all that's happening in Afghanistan is the same as what happened in Iraq, which is that the main ways of operating are, you know, to act on intelligence, which may very well be faulty because who are the guys out there just talking to to work out where they're raiding a house here, you know, and here and there?
And who are they rounding up?
They're rounding up a whole bunch of people, you know, and then they're sifting through them afterwards.
And I have to say that not only is this wrong, but it's counterproductive.
You know, from the very start of the war on terror, the way that the military has operated in alienating the civilian population is disastrous in terms of what their objectives are.
Indeed.
Well, now, let me ask you about some of these specifics.
You know, the fact that imprisoning people without trial and torturing them creates more enemies for us is an absolute fact and also a whole other show.
But I want to ask you about, well, to please refresh my memory as the timing of when the last of the ghost prisoners, that is those that were held at former Nazi and Soviet bases in Eastern Europe, those held at ships at sea in Thailand and different places around Afghanistan and who knows where else, Morocco, when Jordan, when these ghost prisons were closed, was that after the Rasul case or that was after the Bometin case?
And then how is it?
Because you do detail in this article how you know.
How is it that you know that some of these people, some of the ghost prisoners were sent home, some of them were sent to Guantanamo and then some of them were sent to Bagram?
Right.
OK.
And wait a minute.
Now, Bagram isn't one of the ghost prisons at this point.
It's the official one.
Right.
Well, Bagram is, you know, I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, none of us, none of us really know because we've, you know, we're not allowed in.
We don't know quite what the format of the place is, but, you know, at various times throughout history, it's history, there appear to have been parts of Bagram that were not used for the general population.
So, you know, that the CIA had its own place, which I think was called the hangar in the early days.
And this may have changed over time.
But I suspect there's always been a section of Bagram that is kind of closed off and that is for, you know, special prisoners, high value prisoners or whatever they're called.
Now, you know, what happened during the height of the rendition and the secret prison program is that, yeah, there were these 14 high value detainees.
There were more than that.
I mean, according to one of the torture memos released last year, there were 28 prisoners designated as high value.
But we don't know who all of them were.
We know that 14 of them ended up in Guantanamo in September 2006.
Now, that came three months after the Hamdan Rumsfeld ruling ostensibly about the military commissions.
But it established the benchmark that everybody in U.S. custody had to be treated according to, had Article 3 Geneva Convention rights, the rights not to be treated inhumanely.
So, you know, I think that was when the program was really being dismantled.
And from stuff that I've read, I mean, and that's available, you know, a program that started off in haste, in vengeance, in paranoia, and where nobody thought, how is it going to end?
As the years went on, by 2005, 2006, even people within the system are saying, you know, what are we doing?
What are we doing here?
We've got a bunch of guys.
We kidnapped a bunch of guys.
We've got them held here, there, and everywhere.
What are we going to do with them?
So, from my understanding, and, you know, there are reports of people being sent back to Libya, for example.
I think a handful of prisoners were sent back from secret prisons to Libya in 2006, around the time that these 14 were moved into Guantanamo, so that Bush could stand up and say the secret prisons, which didn't exist, which I never acknowledged existed until this moment, I'm now telling you that they did exist.
And I'm now telling you that they're now closed.
So, you know, there were other people who were held in prisons in Afghanistan.
You know, I think that there were five, six, seven secret prisons that we used at various times in Afghanistan, that a lot of prisoners were moved about between all these prisons.
But when they started downscaling the program, and it started in 2004, so 2004, 2005, 2006, everybody ended up in Bagram at some point.
And from there, they either sent some of them on to Guantanamo, or they sent them back to their home countries.
Now, what's not accounted for is what happened to everybody, you know?
Do you know how they picked and chose who was going where?
To be honest, I don't.
I mean, you know, they sent a plane load of 10 people from the secret prisons to Guantanamo in September 2004.
Now, that included Binya Mohammed, the British resident who's now a free man in the UK, who had been initially sent to Morocco to be tortured.
It includes a bunch of other guys, most of whom are still in Guantanamo, who are not very well known.
You know, a Yemeni businessman who'd worked for the intelligence services who was kidnapped in Egypt, for example.
You know, a whole bunch of people seized in various countries around the world.
And from what I understand, they were downgraded, you know, their status was downgraded, possibly officially, to medium value detainees around this time.
And they were sent to Guantanamo.
But not everybody was.
So, you know, I don't know what the arrangements were.
As I say, we know that there were arrangements with Libya to send prisoners back there.
I'm not sure exactly how these decisions were made.
But, you know, what's important about this, I think, is that there were people left in Bagram who had been through the secret prison network in Afghanistan.
Some of them had been sent to other places.
And these habeas corpus cases that the International Justice Network got going and, you know, the Court of Appeals is looking at at the moment, because last March, Judge Bates ruled in favor of these prisoners.
Foreigners kidnapped, rendered to Bagram.
He said, look, these guys are exactly the same as the Guantanamo prisoners.
And yet they have no rights.
Whereas the Guantanamo prisoners had three Supreme Court rulings in their favor.
They should have the same rights.
They have the right to habeas corpus.
Now, they'd identified three foreigners and one Afghan who was seized outside the country who were in Bagram.
And now this prisoner list has got their names on.
But what happened to all the others?
And, you know, there are dozens and dozens of people unaccounted for in the secret detention program.
There are, frankly, I think, at least a few dozen of these people who we have no idea who they are.
I mean, you know, the list that have been compiled over the years by people trying to work out who the secret prisoners are is only really slightly scraping at the surface of this topic.
But this list, I think, you know, contains the names of a few of these other foreign prisoners.
But it also doesn't answer the question of where's everybody else?
Did they send them all home?
Or, you know, did some of them get killed?
Right.
Well, I was going to say, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's aide, says that he knows of at least 100 people who died in custody.
And, of course, I don't know the guy's name, but there's the famous pictures of the Abu Ghraib guards gloating over the Iceman, as they called him, who they basically crucified, hung from the ceiling until he suffocated, you know, hung him from his arms until he suffocated there.
And, of course, we know the story of Dillawar, the taxi driver, who didn't do anything and nor did any of his passengers.
He was simply sold to the Americans and tortured to death at Bagram.
Correct?
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
Along with, well, you know, there are two that are well-known.
There was a man called Muhibullah who, no, Habibullah, Mullah Habibullah, who died about a week before Dillawar in Bagram.
A particularly brutal period in that prison's history.
But there are former prisoners, Mozambique, Omar Degaez, and another British prisoner, who've all spoken about being held in Bagram in that period.
And they've all independently stated that they saw or heard other prisoners being killed in 2002.
And their accounts are all different, suggesting that there were maybe five murders in Bagram in 2002.
Now, you mentioned that when the judge ruled that, hey, taking foreigners who weren't even in Afghanistan, abducting them, and sending them to Afghanistan under the theory that the law doesn't apply there, is the same thing you tried to get away with at Guantanamo Bay, and you were told no.
They at least get rid of habeas corpus, right?
Yeah.
But that only applies to people who, it wouldn't have applied to Dillawar the taxi driver.
It only applies to people who, I mean, if he was alive right now.
It does not apply to anybody who was kidnapped while inside Afghanistan.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
And then the Obama administration is arguing to an appeals court judge, which hasn't ruled yet, that this previous judge is wrong, and that they do need to be able to treat Bagram just like Bush wanted to treat Guantanamo Bay.
Yeah, exactly.
They do.
And they haven't got a leg to stand on, Scott.
That's the really disturbing thing about it, really.
I mean, you know, Judge Bates really spelled it out very clearly.
And he's exactly right.
These are men who were rendered to Afghanistan, to the secret prison network in 2002, 2003, 2004, exactly the same time that this was happening with prisoners who were taken to Guantanamo.
Now, you know, they either had some specific separate program where, you know, it made sense to hold these guys there rather than send them to Guantanamo.
But I think, you know, and I've written this and I will repeat it, but I think it's something closer to an administrative accident that they weren't actually put on the plane to Guantanamo, and that they were held in Bagram instead.
You know, and so Judge Bates is right.
You know, these are people who, if we go back to the Rasool ruling back in 2004, if we go back to the very premise on which lawyers started to pursue cases on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners, I mean, seriously, on the 11th of January 2002 was when Michael Ratner and some other lawyers, the alarm bells went off in their head and they went, hang on a minute, the Bush administration has set up this prison outside the law, where if a man held there says that he's innocent, there is absolutely nothing he can do about it.
And, you know, this is the same thing in Bagram.
I mean, are these guys guilty of something or not?
Well, I don't know.
But, you know, if they claim that they're innocent, and, you know, and bearing in mind the colossal ineptitude of the intelligence and detention policies in the war on terror as a whole, I'm sure some of these guys are.
They have no way of proving it unless, as Judge Bates ruled, the writ of habeas corpus in Boumediene, the Supreme Court case relating to Guantanamo in 2008, extends to them.
It's that simple.
There shouldn't be an argument against it.
I was appalled that the Obama administration put its foot down and, you know, played the Bush card.
Yeah, well, shocked but never surprised, right?
No, that's right.
Okay, well, so, well, I think it's important to say, I don't know if these numbers can transfer over in terms of percentage or something, but at least it's a clue that something's amiss here when the Bush and Cheney regime let hundreds and hundreds of these guys go.
You can, you know, give me a better, more accurate explanation than that.
But then of the few left, the ones who aren't already part of the process, and maybe even all of them now, of the so-called military process, were guaranteed, as you mentioned by the Supreme Court in the Boumediene decision, at least one chance before a guy in a black robe, and that so far the guys at Guantanamo have scored 32 out of 41, and we're talking the lowest standard of evidence, like in a civil case or maybe like, you know, an objective belief on the part of a cop, that sort of standard of evidence here.
And still, 32 out of 41 of them are being released when they get one shot in front of a judge.
Yeah, well, they're not being, they're not necessarily being released.
They're being ordered released and then they're being held longer.
Yeah, they are.
And in some of the cases, you know, in quite a lot of the cases, the government is appealing.
But, you know, but then they should lose the appeals, really, because, you know, I've studied all of these cases closely.
And each time it has, you know, the judges have their own different take on quite what's gone wrong.
But, I mean, it has been the most extraordinary story for the last 16 months, Scott.
And really a testament to the intelligence and independence of the judiciary that they have been able to say, ah, finally, somebody is allowed to objectively have a look at what is supposed to be the evidence.
That's us, the district court judges.
We're going to go through this very, very carefully and reach our informed conclusion.
And, you know, and in 32 out of 41 cases, they've just said, well, you know, you haven't established a case.
This is what you've brought before us, the testimony of the prisoners themselves when it's clear that they were abused or tortured.
You've brought before us admissions that were made by other prisoners, some of whom you yourselves have said are notoriously unreliable.
In other cases, prisoners with obvious mental health issues.
They've said to the government, you have attempted to weave together, to put together a mosaic of scattered bits of intelligence that create the coherent picture, and you have failed to do so.
You know, and it's been extraordinary.
I mean, some of the cases, you know, I mean, I think we've talked about them over last year, Scott, but just, you know, just the one that a couple that spring to mind, this guy, Abdul Rahim al-Ginko, a young Syrian who had been persuaded to go to Afghanistan for training back in 1999, 2000, I think, you know, and reluctantly gone to a training camp for two weeks and then had been seized by al-Qaeda as a spy.
They tortured him for three months.
The Taliban imprisoned him for two years.
The Americans liberated him, found a tape of his confession, but obviously there was no Arabic speaker on hand because they thought it was a jihadi suicide bomber video.
So they sent him to Guantanamo as a terrorist.
Last June, the Obama administration finally brought this case before a judge, you know, a judge who's a George Bush nominee, who said, you guys have got to be kidding.
This guy was tortured by al-Qaeda, and you're coming in front of me and claiming that he still has a connection with al-Qaeda despite the torture and despite the fact that all that happened was that many years ago he spent two fairly unwilling weeks in a training camp.
You know, he scoffed the case out of court.
And then, you know, in September there was the case of Fouad al-Rabia, the Kuwaiti businessman who had gone in front of his tribunal in Guantanamo and said, I met Osama bin Laden.
I was in Tora Bora, and a man there insisted that I helped out with the supplies.
Told this whole elaborate story.
Only turned out when the judge got to scrutinize the evidence that he lied.
He had been taught to lie, to tell a story that implicated him in some kind of terrorist activity.
He was told it was the only way he was going to go home.
He was tortured in Guantanamo to do so.
He was sleep deprived.
Various other stuff happened to him.
It only came out in the courtroom, finally, all these years later.
My God, they tortured this man to get him to tell a false story.
They knew that it was a false story.
And then they still tried to have the right to bang him up forever in a U.S. court under the Obama administration.
I mean, it really is, you know, it really is extraordinary what's been going on.
It is.
I mean, just because we're used to it, because it's been going on for so long, doesn't mean it's not extraordinary.
Or maybe it does, but it's still bad or something.
I guess extraordinary is no longer the case if we're going to be technical about it.
It's still shocking, and it's still wrong, and it's not too late to try to do something about it or something.
Well, yeah.
I mean, you know, the thing is that, you know, as you started off by saying about habeas, you know, most of the guys that are still there are still waiting to have their day in court.
And another thing that the Obama administration has done is persist with obstructing the easy progress of these cases towards court.
Now, you know, I think I have a valid explanation for why that is.
They're absolutely fixated on their own task force review of the prisoners' cases.
They don't really want the interference of the judges, which in itself I find rather insulting to the independence and intelligence of the judiciary in these cases, and that they are capable of being objective.
They're the only people capable of being objective.
The only ones we got anyway.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the ones who've been ruling on the Guantanamo cases have been, you know, have been some good people, you know.
And this guy who ruled on the Syrian who was tortured by al-Qaeda, he's made some dodgy decisions.
Judge Leon, he's a George Bush appointee.
He's no liberal.
But even he's made some good decisions, you know.
Well, I mean...
It's the task force that was established by Obama that's been going through the cases.
You know, they're desperate not to make any mistakes, clearly.
And we understand why, because you look at all the flack that they took over Christmas over the Yemenis, because the plane bomber had allegedly trained in Yemen.
He allegedly hooked up with a couple of Saudis who'd been released by George Bush from Guantanamo in spite of warnings that they shouldn't be released by the intelligence agencies.
But it all gets heaped on Obama as blame-like war.
You're just going to release a load of bad guys.
And he backs down from releasing Yemenis who have been cleared through very careful processes.
No wonder they're all, you know, taking such care over who they approve for release from the prison.
But they have approved for release over half of the guys who are still there.
103 of the men who are still in Guantanamo have been approved for release by the Obama administration.
And, you know, with those guys and with the habeas petitions for the other 95 who are still there going ahead, then, you know, I can see that eventually we're whittling away at this whole story until we end up with what I always wanted all along, Scott, after all these years of researching this story, is you're looking at a maximum of 40 bad guys in there, and then you need to deal with these guys properly in a legal manner.
But the rest of them, you know, you need to get these guys home.
Well, as we're going to be talking about with Glenn Greenwald here pretty soon, it's already pretty clear that the ones who are going to get trials, even if they're acquitted, which they won't be for various reasons, they'll still be held for life as enemy combatants anyway.
That's the official position of the Obama administration.
But let me ask you to tell the story of Amantula Ali.
And he comes up in your recent article here at Truthdig.org, Dark Revelations, in the Bagram prisoner list, because a part of his story would seem to indicate that there's sort of a secret can't know at Bagram, separate from the rest of Bagram.
How's that?
Well, you know, I may be wrong on this, but he's one of the people who we know is in Bagram at the moment.
He's in communication with his family.
There have been letters from Bagram recently.
He doesn't appear to be on this prisoner list that was released, you know, as a result of the ACLU legislation and was released on Friday with these 645 names.
Now, it's a very, you know, it's a pretty useless list in so many ways, because everything is blacked out apart from the names.
So nationalities, ages, place of capture, none of this is included.
But his name, Amantula Ali, does not appear to be on that list.
So where is he?
I mean, is their bookkeeping just very bad?
Well, it could be.
It very well could be, and that could be an innocuous explanation.
But it may be that it indicates, the fact that he's not on there indicates that this isn't the complete list, and that there is some other part of Bagram that isn't covered by it, and that maybe that contains, you know, some of these other guys that I was mentioning, the ghost prisoners who are unaccounted for.
But, you know, the other really astonishing thing about this man's story, you know, and it's important to me, because we know so little about the people who are held in Bagram.
We haven't had all that paperwork that came out of Guantanamo, which enabled me, you know, two, three years ago to go through it all, and to build up the profiles of the prisoners, to find out how many mistakes were made, to write the book that I did, and to do all the writing that I've been doing ever since, in detail about Guantanamo.
We know so little about Bagram.
Are they holding bad guys?
Well, they could well be.
But, you know, we need to be able to establish whether this is the case, because they've never been screened adequately.
So, in most cases, we don't know what the story is about these people.
But in the case of this man, who's represented by lawyers at Reprieve here in London, and Clive Stafford-Smith, you know, we know that he was seized in Iraq in 2004, that the British were involved, and that the British, although they hid the story until last year, rendered them to Bagram.
And the guy has been held at Bagram ever since.
Now, you know, he's seized for being a member of a radical, Sunni, Pakistani organization.
And on that basis, I think, presumably, that is the basis on which he has been held and deprived of his liberty in Bagram for getting on for six years now.
Which is funny, because it also means he could just as well be one of our friends in Jandala, fighting against Iran.
But I guess, never mind that.
Yeah, well, you know, the thing about this guy is that, you know, this guy is supposed to be part of this Sunni terrorist network in Pakistan.
He's a Pakistani.
He's a Shia Muslim.
He is the enemy of...
Oh, I thought you said that he was a Sunni radical, as they accused him.
No, no, no, no, he's not.
He's a Shia landowner.
There is no way that this guy is going to be part of this organization that he's alleged to be part of.
They would split his throat rather than accept his membership.
And it's just, you know, we know that story, because, you know, because Clive and the people at Reprieve have dug into his story, went to visit his family, have established this.
This is the same kind of stuff that lawyers were doing with Guantanamo in 2005.
And yet, you know, for most of the people held at Bagram, what are their stories?
Is it not probable?
Is it not absolutely probable that the same kind of blunders were made, have been made at Bagram, as were made at Guantanamo?
You know, and I think the answer to that is an affirmative yes.
Of course.
You know, which is the explanation of why it isn't enough to still be living under the Bush doctrine of concluding, based only on the motion of your brain, that a man is guilty and flinging away the key and locking him up forever.
And yet, that's the position that this poor man is still in.
Well, and maybe more of us in the future.
You know, well, I don't know if I should bring this up, but I guess I will go ahead and bring it up.
Somebody brought up to me, and I'll hope to be able to make more out of this later in the week, but someone brought up to me that there was a guy who was nothing but an Al Jazeera reporter.
I forget if they're talking about Al Sami or whatever the guy's name was, who was nothing but an Al Jazeera reporter.
That was his crime.
He hadn't done anything.
And I wondered, you know, you look at all the British subjects that have ended up in Guantanamo and who knows where else, do you ever worry that actually you're in a position now where you could have made yourself a target, and yet you're outside of any law that would prevent the CIA or the Special Operations Command from kidnapping and torturing you, Andy?
Well, you know, I don't, only because I think that, you know, that my skin is white and I don't have a beard.
Oh, thank God for that.
You know, this is a, but you know, but the fact that, you know, that it's completely understandable what you're talking about and what those fears would be were I to be a Muslim man.
Well, and I don't want to oversimplify it, because maybe there are other legal reasons other than you don't have a beard and you're white that would make you different from these men, or is that not the case?
Well, you know, I mean, you know, we're not in a stage yet where writing about the mistakes, failures and crimes of our government is itself something that makes people disappear.
What's been happening for the last eight years is that people have been disappeared and have been, you know, and have been deprived of their liberty in the most horrendous, lawless manner, have been tortured, have been transported around the world, have been sent to other countries, tortured, imprisoned on the basis that somebody somewhere thought that they had a connection to terrorism.
I mean, that's what it's all been about.
It's all been about supposedly being connected somehow to terrorism, or in the case of the confusing overlaps that took place in Afghanistan and Iraq, that you might well be a citizen of a country resisting what you regard as an unacceptable occupation.
But instead of being regarded as somebody who's allowed to fight during wartime, you know, you become a terrorist.
So for the Al Jazeera reporter or reporters who've been targeted, they were all brown men with beards and were abducted somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere other than England anyway.
Well, there have been a few things.
I mean, there's one story I don't know of, but I know that they didn't bother capturing anybody in Iraq.
They just blew up the building that Al Jazeera was in.
With Samuel Hatch, you know, I never got to the bottom of it.
That's who I was thinking of, Sammy, yeah.
I never got to the bottom of this story, you know, because as with everybody else, once he was in Guantanamo and they tortured him and they tortured whoever else they could get their hands on sufficiently, then they compiled a dossier of things that he was supposed to have done.
Now, you know, I know speaking to Clive that, you know, that he thinks that they mistakenly thought that he had conducted an interview with Osama bin Laden.
He hadn't.
But, you know, but it seemed to me that one of the things that they wanted was that he might know where Osama bin Laden was.
Well, they got the wrong guy.
You know, he'd never even done the interview.
And even if he had, you know, I didn't see them rushing to round up Peter Bergen from CNN because he'd interviewed Osama bin Laden.
Once they had him in custody, he said, and, you know, and I have no reason to disbelieve this, that all they tried to do was to get him to turn on Al Jazeera and work as a spy for them.
The Randy Weaver treatment, we call that here in the USA.
The Jose Padilla treatment as well.
That's all they wanted out of Jose Padilla.
They didn't consider him a threat, quote unquote, the FBI agent.
We didn't consider him a threat.
We wanted to flip him and use him as an informant, but he wouldn't go along.
So we turned him over to Donald Rumsfeld and the CIA to torture him for years upon end until he was a crazy person.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, nothing.
There's a very dark truth in that, actually.
I mean, I don't think that we've, I think that we've barely scratched the surface of two things, really.
One is how many people they tried to turn into informants.
And secondly, you know, what does that tell you about the quality of our intelligence services?
The people that they're seizing and holding in barbaric conditions and, you know, grim iconic places like Guantanamo that they think, you know, well, that's OK if we if we recruit them, you know, we'll send them out there with some false idea and nobody will know they're in Guantanamo.
And all of it just seems, you know, just seems like it's just nonsense to me.
I mean, and these are these are the intelligence services.
Well, I want to ask you about the men featured in the story by the other Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine.
It's the Guantanamo suicides.
A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle and the three murder victims, as he makes fairly plain.
These were murder victims in this article.
Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utabi, Yasser Talal al-Zarani.
They're the three men who apparently were murdered on the night of June 9th, 2006.
But I was also hoping that maybe you could tell us a little bit more about Shaker Amir, who was tortured and is cited by Scott, other Scott Horton and Harper's as describing rags being stuffed down his throat and how this sounds basically like they were giving this man who luckily survived the same treatment that they were giving the three that they killed.
But I was just thinking that, you know, and they weren't just names, they were people.
So maybe you could tell us a little bit about these people who were killed.
Were they the worst of the worst jihadist terrorists trying to kill us?
No, no, no.
They absolutely weren't the worst of the worst.
I mean, in no conceivable manner were they the worst of the worst.
But I've been thinking about this a lot since yesterday.
I mean, this is the most extraordinary story.
We've already had a little bit of a backlash from, you know, Colonel Bumgarner, who was the warden of Guantanamo at the time.
And I had a comment in one of my posts from somebody who claimed to be a soldier who was there saying, you know, this is complete lies.
The official story is true.
These men committed suicide.
That's always been extremely doubtful.
And it seems to me that Scott Horton is on the goldmine here with this story of what really happened.
Now, I've spent since yesterday working out, did three men happen to be killed on the same evening as a result of enhanced interrogation that went wrong?
And that Shaka Armour, the fourth man, was lucky that he didn't die?
Or, you know, I've heard people suggesting, were they killed because of something they knew?
And at the moment, and my thoughts may change, it just seems to me this is an example of when you allow soldiers or whatever agency was involved in this to become brutalized, how do you put the brakes on?
How on earth are you going to put the brakes on?
If there's this little camp outside the main body of Camp Delta where they took people to give them the serious treatment, you've set a bunch of people off on a course of activity where this is how they start to get their kicks.
And, you know, I wonder whether indeed these guys were not murdered.
I think they may well have been murdered by people who had, you know, that's where they'd taken it to.
Because the three men that were killed, you know, we know for a fact that two of these men had been cleared for release.
You know, one of them was supposed to be going home almost immediately afterwards, but nobody had told him.
But they'd been cleared for release.
The third one, it came out in an official statement sometime after his death that the Pentagon knew that, you know, that he was a nobody and the allegations against him were worthless as well.
So it wasn't because these guys were, you know, the bad guys.
Now, what is there about these people?
They were all very, very long-term hunger strikers in Guantanamo.
So, you know, do you want me to put this bluntly?
I think they'd really pissed some people off.
Because the hunger strike had started a year before these guys died.
It swept through the camp.
And as the months went on, they'd broken this.
They brought in the restraint chairs, 18 straps that were put around the prisoners, the tubes that are shoved up their nose into their stomach that are taken out each time to try and make it more uncomfortable so that the people would give up.
By the new year in 2006, there were only a handful of prisoners who were still on hunger strike.
And three of them were these guys who died.
And in the cases of two of these guys who died, the Pentagon published the weight reports of these prisoners several years ago.
I wrote a story about it last year, actually, because I went through analyzing, because they were so shocking, these stories about how little these prisoners weighed.
So many of the prisoners in Guantanamo are weighing, you know, weighing 80 pounds, shockingly thin.
And it gave the dates of when these people were weighed.
And you could tell from it when people were hunger strikers, because they were fed on a daily basis and weighed on a daily basis.
And right up until a few days before two of these three guys died, they were being force-fed on a daily basis.
Now, I think that to certain people, it's easy for me to see that to certain people, they were the biggest irritant going, and they really wanted to show them, you know, and these guys are out of control.
Now, I might be completely wrong, but with Shakaama, he was on a hunger strike, but that wasn't what pissed them off about him.
Shakaama, by everybody's account, is a magnificently eloquent and charismatic man.
He speaks perfect English.
He lived in Britain.
He opposed everything that had happened to these men from the moment of their capture with every fiber of his being.
He was the biggest irritant in Guantanamo to everybody in the authorities because of his consistent presence fighting for the rights of the prisoners.
You know, so he's another obvious target for punishment.
Well, the other Scott Horton in his article at Harper's Magazine reports that this is the one Brit that the UK did not try to get back.
Yeah, well, they have tried to get him back, Scott, but the question is, how much have they tried to get him back?
Now, you know, what bothers me about this is that clearly Shakaama...
Well, I may be oversimplifying what other Scott says, by the way, there.
No, no, no.
I mean, you know, that's kind of right, but, you know, they did...
The British government applied for the return of all the residents in July, August 2007, and, you know, they all eventually came back apart from Shaka.
Now, they say that they're persistently asking for his return, but, you know, it's very easy to see from everything that Shaka knew.
Shaka knew everybody's business in Guantanamo.
He knows probably more about that prison than any other prisoner.
Now, clearly, do the Americans want to release a man who is so passionate and eloquent and capable of telling the story, the whole story of Guantanamo?
No, that really wouldn't be very helpful, especially, we now find, because he was beaten within an inch of his life on the night that these three men died.
So they don't want him to go somewhere that he can talk.
Now, Shaka's a Saudi Arabian by birth, even though he's got a British wife and four children in Britain, four British children.
So would it not be more convenient, and would the British government not be able to be coerced into understanding that it would be more convenient to make sure that this man goes to Saudi Arabia?
Because prisoners who go to Saudi Arabia, very few of them have ever spoken out publicly about what happened to them.
It's very easy for them to be silenced.
Whereas if Shaka Amr is returned to Britain, the newspapers won't really have to do much queuing up around the block to get to talk to him, because he will tell his story.
He will tell the most blockbusting story about the truth of what has been going on at Guantanamo.
Wow, that's really incredible.
You know, if I can get a little bit philosophical here, Chalmers Johnson, the guy that wrote the Great Blowback Trilogy, he says that, listen, the British Empire, after World War II, basically decided, or maybe the British people, the British government decided that they would rather give up their empire than live under it, because it was going to take totalitarian control at home in order to continue waging the empire abroad.
And they decided, well, at least we'll get to keep our rainy little island.
And the other model, of course, would be how the Nazi regime fell, or the Japanese fell, or the Roman Empire back in the old days fell, which is you go ahead and you bring your empire home, and you do institute a totalitarian system in order to try to perpetuate it until the very end.
And I guess it only serves you guys right, you know, that you helped turn us into this empire with your world wars there, and now we're dragging you down the pit of total destruction with us.
Well, you know, now you put it that way.
I mean, you know, it just, you know, what's depressing really is the, however you look at it, is almost the inability of radical change in the US government.
Let's even give some of these guys the benefit of the doubt.
You know, the machinery is in place to really not move very much, not be diverted much from the kamikaze path that it's on.
You know, and cleaning up Guantanamo and this mess.
That's funny, isn't it, how kamikaze and Hamid Karzai sound the same?
I misunderstood you for a second there.
Pardon me.
Having honesty and accountability about, you know, about the monstrous things that we're talking about is really, you know, what any sensible, intelligent person would need.
And I know that, you know, that is by no means the description of all the American people, but it's the description of a fair number of them.
But, you know, it's tied in with the whole juggernaut machinery of war that's going on.
It's tied in with this ongoing madness of escalating things in Afghanistan.
And I don't know what we're going to do, Scott.
But, you know, but I would hope that if this year rolls on, that we can start to build up more of a movement of people to say, look, enough is enough.
You know, this is total madness.
And we can see that where it's taking us is a ruinous place in every way possible.
It is not only brutalized as a people.
It is bankrupting us as a nation.
It is only benefiting a small handful of people who profit off war and destruction.
You know, we've got to change the way we do things.
Well, I guess as your younger cousin over here in America, I appreciate you looking out.
There's no American whose work really compares to yours, and maybe because they wouldn't even bother because you already got it covered.
But you certainly do.
And it's certainly greatly appreciated, Andy.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's the great Andy Worthington.
The website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
The book is called The Guantanamo Files.
It's profiles of all the men kept at Guantanamo Bay.
The movie is called Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
And the recent article at Truthout.org is called Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List.
