For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Now we're going to go straight to our first guest today.
It's the other Scott Horton, heroic international anti-torture human rights lawyer.
He's a professor at Columbia University.
Legal affairs correspondent for Harper's Magazine and keeps the great blog No Comment there.
He is associated with the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, is the co-founder of the American University in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, and formerly he chaired the Committee on International Law at the New York Bar Association.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
Tired, actually.
Yeah, well, I can tell you've been working hard here.
This is a big deal.
If this doesn't make some sort of change, if there's not a tidal wave of effect that flows from this, then I throw my hands up.
This is murder gate.
The Guantanamo suicides, ironic quotes around those suicides.
A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle at harpers.org.
And this is following up on your blog entry at the Huffington Post from last December about the Seton Hall study of an NCIS report, which is the Naval Criminal Investigative Service report about the quote unquote suicides of three Guantanamo detainees, Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utabi, and Yasser Talal al-Zarani on the night of June 9th, the morning of June 10th, 2006.
And then now what's happened is apparently since their study came out and since your blog entry there at the Huffington Post, there are four witnesses, four American military members who have come and talked to them and to you to flesh out more of this story.
And that's what this recent article is based on, correct?
That's all correct, yes.
Okay, so let's start with the official story of what happened to these three men the night of June 9th, 2006, Scott.
Well, remember right after these suicides, it was spectacular news in all the American papers.
And in fact, all around the world, it was spectacular news that there had been three suicides in which the prisoners had hung themselves in their cells.
And this was being described dramatically by military and mostly really by the Pentagon in Washington as asymmetrical warfare.
Their suicide was an attack itself on the United States.
In Pentagon press releases, these people were described as hardened killers, as frontline fighters for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
And all of that was reported completely uncritically in the American media.
And it turns out that not a single word was true.
All these assertions are false.
And maybe we can just deconstruct, or maybe we should start.
One of the reasons they were very, very brief in describing the suicides and how they happened is that the official narrative of what happened was completely absurd.
It was completely unbelievable.
And we weren't able to piece together the official narrative until the Seton Hall report came out.
And that I discussed with you on our last interview about a month ago.
But, you know, in short, the statement is that these prisoners bound their own hands, bound their own feet, stuffed cloth down their throats past the point of choking, put a mask on their face, fashioned a noose from cloth, and hung that to the top of an eight-foot mesh wall, then stood up, while their feet are bound and their hands are bound, they stood up on top of a washbasin, put their heads through the noose, and jumped off, asphyxiating themselves.
A feat which could not have been performed by Harry Houdini.
But that was the official narrative.
Now, what actually happened?
First of all, they weren't in their cell that night.
They were removed.
So we have guards citing them that a van, a white Ford Econoline van, which was known by the guards there as the Paddy Wagon, showed up at seven o'clock that evening in front of Camp One, where these prisoners were housed, picked up one passenger, carried one at a time, picked up one prisoner.
He was manacled, hooded, put in the back of the van, and driven off.
And he was driven off to a clear destination, which was a secret facility called Camp Noe.
And Camp Noe was located about one mile to the northwest of the Camp Delta facility.
20 minutes later, exactly enough time to make the round trip from Camp Noe, that van returned again to Camp One, picked up a second prisoner, drove and delivered that second prisoner to Camp Noe, then a third prisoner and delivered that third prisoner to Camp Noe.
So by eight o'clock, these three prisoners, the only three unaccounted for, of course, being those who died at the end of that night, were in the hands of we don't know who at Camp Noe.
We don't know what happened to them at Camp Noe, but we know they were never returned from that facility to their cells.
Instead, at 11 o'clock, that van was seen backed up against, 1130 I should say, backed up against the detaining medical clinic as if to unload something.
Okay, so a couple of things here.
First of all, Camp Noe, the reason that you can say so definitively that the van went to Camp Noe is because it was, you have four eyeball witnesses, you know, coming together with different parts of that story of what they saw that night.
But they either took these prisoners to Camp Noe, which, no, it doesn't exist is where that comes from, you say in the article, or they took them swimming at the beach.
There's nothing else if the van takes a left.
That's the place to go to Camp Noe.
Exactly correct.
And also...
The only two places are the beach and the camp.
And so our observers all say, you know, there's no question in their mind they were going to Camp Noe.
And moreover, the people who are providing this information, you know, this is not a passing casual observation.
Their job was to strictly and tightly monitor every vehicle and individual that entered and left the compound that night, and they were doing exactly what their job required.
Well, and also you say in here that they proved the negative here, they witnessed the fact that these bodies were not removed and taken away from their actual quarters.
That's also correct, because the official narrative says they found the bodies hanging in their cells around 1230.
And those bodies were then removed from their cells and passed on to the detainee clinic on gurneys or trolley.
And so I spoke with the guard on duty at Tower 1 and the guard on duty at Tower 4, and at the site you'll see the map showing exactly where they are, both of whom had a clear line of sight down the central alleyway that connected that camp with the detainee medical clinic, and they had instructions that they were to log all movements that occurred, and they both say exactly the same thing, there weren't any.
Okay, so far what we know is that they were not seen being taken, dead bodies were not removed from their quarters, that the account in the NCIS report of how they killed themselves is not plausible at all.
We have witnesses saying they were taken to this secret interrogation facility that's separate from all the rest of Camp America down there, and well, I want to try to get through as many points as you have, indicating that these men were in fact murdered rather than killed themselves.
Before we get into what's always the real story, my dad taught me when I was a kid about Richard Nixon, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up, and if a couple of, you know, special forces guys or CIA guys murdered somebody, that's something, but if all of Washington DC moved into gear to close down the truth, then that's where the real scandal lies.
So first though, is there anything that we haven't gotten to that actually indicates murder of these three men that night?
Yeah, I think the bodies speak to how they were killed, and in fact, you know, there is both witness evidence and there's physical manifestations that one of the bodies showed signs of being brutally beaten.
Also, one of the bodies shows signs of being quite brutally put into a restraining chair, and we have the evidence of a fourth witness that same night who was seized and taken, he describes what's happened, what's done to him that evening, and his description of what happens to him matches almost perfectly what we see in these bodies, including the bruises and injuries, and he says, when I cried out, they blocked my windpipe and put a mask over my face, which caused me almost to suffocate, and that's exactly, it seems quite clear now, that is exactly how these three prisoners died.
Moreover, the evening immediately after the deaths were announced, repeatedly, the guards are being told by medical personnel and by others, three detainees delivered to the clinic, they're dead because they had cloth stuffed down their throat.
This is told over and over and over again, no talking about anybody being hung in their cells or anything of that sort.
The following morning at seven o'clock, the commander of the camp- Well, this is where we start getting into the cover-up, but I wanted to make a slight, pardon me for interrupting you, Scott, but I wanted to, it's a parenthesis, but it's an important parenthesis, that the man you say who told his lawyer and described the method of torture that sounds a lot like what apparently happened to these men, he's innocent and still being held apparently only because of what he knows.
He's a British subject, and the only one that they're not trying to get back, is that right?
That's correct.
His name is Chakar Amir, and of all the people Britain asked to be returned to it, there's only one that the United States refused to turn, return, and continues to hold, and that's this individual, Chakar Amir.
There's no credible evidence of any wrongdoing involved in his case, no real explanation.
The government under Bush and Obama alike has had no plans to bring any charges of any kind against him, and yet he has been treated really brutally and been locked in solitary confinement, and the government has repeatedly, over and again, blocked access to him by his attorney.
And what is so dangerous about this guy?
It's like Alexander Dumas, the man in the iron mask.
They don't want anybody to see him or talk to him, and it seems that they're not concerned about what he did, they're concerned about what he knows about Guantanamo and Bagram.
Absolutely horrible.
That's a whole other interview in itself right there, but I wanted to give you a chance to to make that clear.
Okay, so now it's the morning of the 10th of June 2006, and all night long word has spread throughout the camp that these men killed themselves, but they killed themselves by choking on rags.
That's right.
Okay, but then a colonel named Bumgarner gives a speech to about 50 assembled troops, and the cover-up begins.
That's correct, and he does this at Camp America Theater.
I've interviewed five people who were present at the speech.
They all give a substantially identical account, and particularly identical on the same elements.
He starts by saying, you all know that these people died by choking on cloth, but tomorrow or later today, you're going to hear in the media a different story.
The different story you're going to hear is they died by hanging themselves in their cells, and none of you had better undermine or interfere with or contradict this statement in any way.
He goes on to say, your telephone conversations and your emails are being monitored.
Right.
So that was an order to everyone there.
When we say they hung themselves, don't contradict that.
Don't say you know different.
Right, and now you say the media picked this up and just ran with it, and whatever the spokesman says is the truth, and that was apparently working okay until this same guy, Bumgarner, accidentally slipped and admitted that they had rags stuck down their throat to The Observer in London?
The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, actually.
Oh.
Yeah, which is his hometown newspaper, and he gives an interview, and in the interview, he slips that, yeah, they choked on the rags that were stuffed down their throats.
I mean, and he also uses the whole line that they hung themselves in their cells and so on, and he attacks them as jihadists and so forth, and he is called into the commander of Joint Task Force Gitmo, Admiral Harris, then Rear Admiral Harris, and Admiral Harris, as he describes it in a later interview, has a copy of that Observer article, and he's holding it, and he's saying, you're going to cost me my command, he points to it, and he goes on to make clear that people in Washington are extremely upset over what he said in this newspaper article, and of course, you can go through and you can check it side by side, but the Pentagon narrative, there's only one particular in which there's any difference between what Bumgarner says and what the Pentagon says, and that is the prisoners dying by choking on rags, which is, in fact, exactly how they died.
Well, and is that what caught the attention of the people at Seton Hall?
I think the people at Seton Hall, they were puzzled by the fact that a lot of the medical evidence referred to cloth in the mouth and masks and so forth, and that this never appears anywhere and the formal reporter statement is just sort of wiped away as an inconvenient fact.
I see.
And then, now, what about the Justice Department here?
This is where we get into your technical legal skills.
I believe you say in the article that normally the Pentagon would just handle this, because that's how they keep control of it, but the Justice Department and civilian FBI agents were brought in almost immediately.
Why was that?
Well, that's the absolutely key giveaway here.
From the beginning of this cover-up, the Justice Department was the principal agent of the cover-up, and we see how that's done, how after this problem with Colonel Bumgarner, suddenly the FBI is brought in, and the FBI conducts an investigation that says, looking into whether classified information has been leaked, and the classified information is people's descriptions of what they saw involving the detainees.
In other words, the government has tried to put a secret stamp on top of all people's observations of what they saw that evening.
It was a secret.
If you talk about it, you're disclosing a secret, and you are subject to serious discipline.
And, in fact, here a colonel gets fired because he said what he saw.
And the unusual thing, FBI is doing this.
When the military deals with a leak issue, they use NCIS, they use CID, the FBI comes in when a decision has been made in Washington to do that.
And in this case, we've already got some preliminary evidence pointing right now to the National Security Council as the source of the cover-up plans and the introduction and involvement of the FBI, which of course is in the White House.
And what evidence do you have of that?
I can't say at the moment, but we'll be developing that further.
Okay.
And we can look for that at the No Comment blog there at Harper's.org?
I think so.
Okay.
And, again, by the way, this is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with the other Scott Horton heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine about his new article, The Guantanamo Suicides.
A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle.
And, in fact, let's take this time to give you a chance to describe your sources for this article.
Unlike something in the New York Times, we know their names.
Well, that's the really interesting thing here is when I started researching this, and I talked to these soldiers, and I'd say, you mind if I identify you by name?
And every one of them said, of course not.
We're only saying exactly what we saw.
They all say, we're not interested in politics.
We're not interested in anything of that sort.
We're just concerned that these pieces of the truth aren't out there, and they need to be out there.
So every single one of these soldiers, you know, they're identified by name.
They give their account of exactly what they saw.
No problem.
But I discover, on the other hand, when I talk to the U.S. government, no one wants to speak on the record.
Everyone is adamant.
Don't use my name.
Whatever you do, don't use my name.
I don't want my name appearing in connection with this in any way.
There's absolute paranoia.
And now let me talk a little bit more about these soldiers.
The principal guy who came forward, Joe Hickman, is as much a model soldier as I've ever seen.
I mean, this guy lives and breathes military, and you could not pull a negative comment out of him about his commanders or about the president with a plier.
You know, just will not do it.
He says, has only positive things to say about his commanders.
And he's a distinguished, decorated NCO.
He was the NCO of the year when he was out there in Gitmo.
And he's also, he told me he decided to make a military career after listening to speeches by Ronald Reagan, who he says is the greatest president ever.
You know, so I think he's a very, very proud conservative with a strong military attitude.
He's also someone who has not the remotest sense of sympathy for the prisoners at Gitmo.
And in fact, he was involved in an incident where horrible force was used to put down a prison riot, and he stepped in decisively and did that, you know, wielding batons and firing rubber bullets.
So it's not sympathy or anything of that sort that's driving this.
I think what drives it is just concern that the record relating to homicides should be correct.
How consistent were your various witnesses with each other?
Perfectly.
They all they corroborate one another with respect to the things that they actually observed.
And I'll tell you, when you push them, you know, what do you think happened?
How do you think these people were killed, etc, etc.
They all respond the same way, which is, I don't think, and I'm not going to express any views, because I don't have any opinion about how they died.
I'm just going to tell you exactly what I saw.
And let's let professional investigators decide what all this means.
Right.
So as far as witnesses go, they sound pretty credible.
Sounds like to me, I'd say they're perfectly credible.
And the, you know, official US government spokesmen are completely absurd.
I mean, nothing they say stands up.
I'll just give you an example.
You know, the article came out on Monday, Colonel Bumgarner gives a statement to the Associated Press within a couple of hours.
Every single point he makes in his statement is untrue.
The first thing he says is, I don't know, Sergeant Hickman, who is this Sergeant Hickman?
Well, you'll see documents very shortly, that will demonstrate that he knew Sergeant Hickman extremely well, very closely, and that they were working together constantly, right at this time.
And it's public record documents.
So there's no issue about them.
And then he goes on to say, Hickman wasn't there that evening.
I was there that evening.
I saw this, I know.
Well, Colonel Bumgarner's got a problem, because either he lied to the Associated Press, or he lied to NCIS in a sworn statement to criminal investigators, which is a pretty serious matter.
Because he told those criminal investigators that he wasn't there at the camp that night, because he was socializing with Admiral Harris at his quarters on the other side of the base.
Wow.
Well, it's hard to remember when you tell lies, you know.
The truth is always easier, especially when it's been a few years.
Wait, what was it that I told the officials?
Anyway, well, so here's my point about your credible witnesses here, is they're not just yours.
They went to the Seton Hall people who were doing the study.
They're the graduate students, and I guess their professor, who were doing the studies here.
The same people who figured out that 92% of the total Guantanamo population were innocent back a couple of years ago.
And they also went to the FBI and to the Congress and told their version of the truth, the credible version that people can read in Harper's today.
That's correct.
I mean, well, the first part about Seton Hall is not quite correct.
Mark Dimbo, who directed the Seton Hall report, was advising them as an attorney, and he knew their story.
But the researchers, the student researchers at Seton Hall had never met them and had never heard their account before.
Well, what's this in the article about?
Good job, but I know something that you don't know yet.
Yes, that's Mark Dimbo.
That's him talking to Mark Dimbo.
I see.
So yeah, so that's true.
But, you know, it's also the case that, I mean, for instance, Sergeant Hickman told me, I didn't want to talk to the media.
I never wanted to have anything to do with anybody from a newspaper or television.
He went on to say he didn't trust journalists, which made our dealings much easier, of course.
But then he said, you know, I went to Congress.
I went to the Justice Department.
They all had the full story, and nobody did anything.
So it was only after all of that that there was no alternative except to go to a journalist.
Well, and so do you think that now this story does have legs?
I know that I've got to let you go in a few minutes here because you have an interview with National Public Radio.
Is something going to really happen here?
This is pretty big, and Harper's Magazine is pretty big.
And hey, you're kind of a big shot too, Columbia University and all this.
I mean, this is a story that they can't ignore this, can they?
Well, you know, I'll just tell you this morning after the story ran.
The story appears and is exerted and discussed in 300 newspapers around the world.
What about in America?
And four of them are in America.
So, you know, there are feature stories in the Observer, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, you know, a whole long slew, even Suddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, all over the world, big stories, features about this, and not in American newspapers.
And the reason is very simple.
The Republicans hate this story, and the Democrats hate this story.
Oh, so that's the end of that?
Yeah, because it, you know, reflects negatively on the Bush administration, and it reflects negatively on the Obama administration.
So there's very, very strong pressure from both sides of the political spectrum to simply suffocate it.
They don't want to hear it.
Okay, now, I got to get into my confusion about how the law works here.
Because on one hand, there are these laws.
But then on the other hand, there is no law and George Bush can torture and murder whoever he wants, depending on which memo is enforced at which time.
And I know that this is sort of the basis of the preliminary investigation as to whether there will be an investigation into the cases of some people who were tortured literally to death in the custody of the CIA under the Bush administration, this, this prosecutor Durham, who started out looking into the destruction of the CIA tapes.
But so we've talked before about how any torture that may have taken place before August of 2002 may not be protected, because it wasn't under the good faith doctrine that they were only going by the memos.
But here's where I'm curious.
June of 2006 is after that's over, right after the court has ruled against it after the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 has been passed forbidding the military if not the CIA from torturing people, right, it's before the Military Commissions Act, which kind of reaffirms the President's authority, which wasn't signed until September of 2006.
So is there any way that they can say here, hey, well, you know, if they die, you're doing it wrong, but otherwise, no big deal.
Or is this, you know, all all David Addington's technicalities aside an open and shut murder case.
This is why this entire case is a complete nightmare for the Department of Justice.
You just put your finger on it.
Exactly.
And let me just that is the Department of Justice was giving legal advice to the people who are running that torture cell, and Gitmo can't know whether it was JSOC, whether it was CIA, I don't know, but whoever they were getting advice by the Department of Justice telling them, you can use these techniques that we approve.
And if you kill people, or people suffer horrible injuries as a result, that's okay, you get a get out of jail free pass, no problem.
Now, here's the real kicker.
When the Justice Department assigns this matter after Hickman comes forward to a career person, to conduct an investigation, they assign it to Teresa McHenry.
Teresa McHenry is one of the authors of the torture memoranda.
So if it turns out that these people were killed as a result of the application of techniques that the Department of Justice applied, then in the view of the Department of Justice, and I'd say, particularly in the view of Teresa McHenry, who would be a person immediately concerned by this issue, there isn't any crime that occurred.
This was a licensed homicide.
Wait a minute.
This is starting to sound like a tabloid story here.
You're telling me the FBI agent that was assigned to investigate the claims of your most credible witness here, and his associates, that she was actually in on it with Bybee and you and Addington when they came up with the torture doctrine in the first place, Scott?
This is Department of Justice lawyer Teresa McHenry.
Oh, pardon me.
I said FBI agent.
That's right.
And, you know, we have Department of Justice documents showing that she participated in the drafting of the 2004 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum on torture.
This is not the 2002 Bybee or you memo, but there are a large number of these memos.
But in any event, she is in one of these memos, which did continue the legal authorization of the use of torture techniques, and since was rescinded, of course, by President Obama.
But it has her fingerprints on it.
Now, we do not know exactly what role she played, or what she said, or what her opinions were.
I would say it's possible, it's just possible, that she was horrified by this memo and she objected to it and she sent in objections.
But I would also say that in the Bush period, people who did that didn't wind up being appointed as section chiefs, which is what happened to her.
Well, how much of this cover-up happened, you know, since Obama took power?
I mean, we have a new Attorney General and a new Office of Legal Counsel and everything else.
What have they done?
Have they taken affirmative steps to continue this cover-up?
Well, I'll just put it this way.
February 2nd, which is the day before the vote on the confirmation of Eric Holder, Hickman had a meeting with a group of very serious, powerful Department of Justice lawyers, career lawyers, and he presented them with the essence, not Hickman, but rather his attorneys, presented them with the essence of all the observations of these lawyers and said they would provide all the witnesses to be interviewed and everything else.
Okay, so that is from the beginning of the Obama administration, the Obama administration was fully informed about this cover-up and about the fact that the claimed suicides weren't really suicides from the beginning, and it decided really to do an investigation which was not an investigation.
In fact, one of the key things we point out in the article is that Theresa McHenry in the summer, or rather actually in the fall, contacts Professor Dembo and tells him that the investigation is over, that, you know, we couldn't find evidence that corroborates what Joe Hickman claims, and Dembo, who had been tracking everything, responds to her saying, well, that's interesting because we know you didn't contact the lawyer, the, excuse me, the soldiers who were prepared to corroborate everything that Hickman said, and she pauses and says, oh, well, then there are a few small things to attend to and then it'll be over, which shows you their attitude towards the investigation, which was not that they were conducting any kind of serious investigation.
In fact, the way their cover-up here was pulled off with the panache of the Keystone Cops.
I mean, they completely revealed in a public way that there wasn't a full investigation.
All right.
Now, forgive me for asking such a silly question, but what about the Congress?
Yeah, well, the Justice Department went to Congress early on and told them, you back down, we're looking into this.
And they did that to stop Congress from conducting investigations while they were not doing one themselves, which shows the intention of covering up, I think, very clear evidence of it.
And this involves Theresa McHenry, as well as other people in the Justice Department.
Well, McHenry has come back the second time and said the investigation is fully closed now, or we're still waiting on that part?
No, they have said that now, and I expect now that Congress is going to be starting an investigation.
You do suspect that, and you have a real reason to believe that or just hope?
No, talking to people in Congress, I understand that plans are underway for it.
I mean, among other things, some of the congressional staffers I talked with about this said, you know, they wanted to see these accusations and the evidence in the public record as a result of disclosure before there were hearings.
So they were eager to see the press do it.
And I know I was in competition as the story was developed with ABC News and with some other people who were also trying to track this down.
But I also know that I had pretty much the inside track throughout.
And do you have any reason to believe that ABC News is still working on it?
Because that's really what counts here is TV, not Harper's Magazine.
I think ABC was very close to closing the story when we went to press.
And I don't know what Brian Ross and his team intended to do with that.
It would be a shame.
I mean, obviously, they should air their story.
I think that would be good.
All right.
Well, we'll definitely be keeping an eye on this story.
I got to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your hard work on this.
This is extremely important stuff.
And it's going to be a real test, isn't it, for whether there's a rule of law anymore or not?
Well, I think so, too.
I mean, you know, we're talking we're talking triple homicides that involve the government at the highest level.
The cover up is now all but admitted by senior figures in the government.
The falsity of their description of this, I'd say their silence right now speaks volumes, makes it very clear that they know that they've been peddling a lie for a long time.
And the question is, what happens about this?
This is just an inconvenient matter to be swept away.
Or is the public going to confront itself with the truth?
And this is the same time that Republican politicians are all over the airwaves talking about how Guantanamo is a basically a spa for wonderful that people get to go there and that nothing horrible ever happens there.
There's a model prison, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, I mean, that's just that that's ludicrous.
And this case of the three murders or the three homicides of prisoners certainly puts the lie to that right away.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know if you've ever looked in this story at all, but when you talk about the father saying that his son's body had been beaten and tortured and all this and you have Eric Holder in on this cover up, it's just a replay of what happened to Kenny Trinidou, who was mistaken by the feds, apparently for a guy named Richard Guthrie, who was likely John Doe, too, in the Oklahoma City bombing.
And the feds were so convinced that this guy, Kenny Trinidou was Richard Guthrie, that they tortured him to death trying to get him to admit it.
And his brother, Jesse, is a lawyer in Utah and has been suing and has shown in the documents where Eric Holder is off to go talk to Orrin Hatch today to make sure that there are no hearings on what happened to Kenny Trinidou in a case of mistaken identity.
Which sort of shows how these inside networks shut things down.
And in this case, I have to say, I was, it's very, very clear that these three prisoners were all brought to Guantanamo by mistake.
They never should have been brought there.
They were all set by the Bush administration to be released.
That's all clear.
All these allegations that they were Al Qaeda or Taliban are acknowledged by the Pentagon not to be true.
And the most moving interview I conducted here was with the father of Mr. Al Zarami, who I discovered was a general and a senior police officer responsible for counterterrorism matters in Saudi Arabia, who told me, you know, the suggestion that my son has something to do with the Taliban was ridiculous, completely ridiculous.
And he went over in detail why that was so.
And, you know, I have to say, I believe him completely.
And he kept saying, you know, all these claims by the Pentagon and by the Gitmo authorities, untrue, untrue, untrue.
And he was able to demonstrate very clearly that they weren't true.
And I think part of the problem here is that that voice, you know, the families of the prisoners in Saudi Arabia, for instance, no one talks to them.
No one credits them.
But General Zarami is someone who's, like, worked with American law enforcement half of his career, has no animus against the United States, you know, is a completely credible person, far more credible than the people I've interviewed at the Pentagon and at the Justice Department, frankly.
Well, you know, it's one of those things where we have to face up to the unfaceable, like they say on The Simpsons.
We can just keep sliding down this slippery slope or we can, you know, stand to thwart it and yell, stop.
You know, which is it going to be?
Well, yeah, I think we have to seize the truth when it's presented to us.
All right.
Well, we'll keep an eye on your blog.
No comment at Harper's dot org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Scott.
Great to be with you.
Go rock NPR for us.
All right, everybody.
It's antiwar radio.
That was the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer.
The article is the Guantanamo suicides.
A camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle at Harper's dot org.
You can find it from the front page there and certainly keep an eye on his blog also at Harper's dot org.
No comment.
We'll be right back.
