Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Now you guys all know Andy Worthington, he's the author of The Guantanamo Files and is the producer of the movie Outside the Law and this week he's commemorating, marking, certainly not celebrating, Guantanamo Week.
Welcome back to the show Andy, how are you doing?
Yeah, I'm alright Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Hey listen, I forgot to tell them that your website is andyworthington.co.uk and that you write for the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org and they can also find you at the Huffington Post and of course at antiwar.com.
So what the hell is Guantanamo Week?
It's an attempt to raise the profile of the Guantanamo habeas cases that have been going on for the last 19 months.
What's a habeas case?
Well you know, this is the right that the Supreme Court gave the prisoners to ask why the hell they were being held at Guantanamo.
And it's kind of important to remember that back in June 2004 when the Supreme Court first did this, it was pretty unusual to give habeas corpus rights to prisoners seized in wartime.
Generally you wouldn't do that, they would be held according to the Geneva Conventions in a prisoner of war camp, treated humanely and what would be happening by now would be that we would be saying, is it really possible that this war is going on longer than the Second World War and apparently may last forever?
But of course that isn't what happened, what happened was these guys were thrown in the hole without any way of addressing their complaints, if they said, as many of them did, listen, you know, I'm a completely innocent man who was swept up by mistake, you know, the purpose of Guantanamo was a total legal black hole that there was no way out of, which is why the Supreme Court gave them these rights.
And then what happened was that Congress was persuaded to remove these rights or to attempt to remove these rights and it wasn't until June 2008 that the Supreme Court got to look at the cases again and said, no, actually Congress acted unconstitutionally, these guys have habeas rights.
So since October 2008, these cases have been proceeding generally at quite a slow rate of progress because of obstruction by the Justice Department, but have been proceeding and there have now been 47 of them, 34 of them, the judges have ruled in favor of the prisoners.
So that's 72% of the cases suggesting, in fact, the judges ruling that the government failed to establish a case, even with such a low hurdle of evidence that's required, failed to establish a case that these guys were connected to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
And then we've got the 13 cases that have been lost.
And I think there are kind of problems with those as well.
So that's been part of the thing this week really is to show the scale of the victories on the prisoners part, which do so much to destroy the government's so-called evidence.
And also to say what's happening with these guys who are losing their cases because they're essentially, most of them have been revealed to be extremely insignificant characters connected to the Taliban, nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the war on terror or the 9-11 attacks or international terrorism.
Why are we presiding, why are we, you know, accepting a system that is imprisoning these guys where the right-wing media can call them terrorists, when in fact they really should have been prisoners of war.
All right.
Well, that's a lot to go over.
First thing I want to talk about there.
No, that's good.
I'm not complaining.
That's wonderful.
I'm sitting here taking notes and we got a whole hour here and it's going to be awesome.
So already is.
First thing is your point that you emphasize, and I think rightly, that Bush picked a fight with the Supreme Court basically by adopting the Dick Cheney, David Addington view that there is no law and I'm the king and I can do whatever I want and creating this whole other separate system of kangaroo courts.
He actually picked a fight with the Supreme Court that ended up extending more protections to people arrested or held one way or another in wartime than had ever existed before.
That's actually, you know, kind of a one silver lining of this thing, huh?
Well, kind of.
But, you know, but the problem is that everybody's everybody's implicated in this because the question of why we have a war on terror or whatever has been renamed now, you know, this whole thing that's been going on for over eight years is based on well, according to Bush, it was based on, you know, his ability as a president in wartime to do whatever the hell he liked.
Now, but now Obama came in and said, I'm not going to do that one.
But what I am going to rely on is the same other thing that Bush did, which was the authorization for use of military force.
Now, this was passed within a week of the 9-11 attacks, authorizing the president to go after whoever he thought was connected with 9-11 anywhere in the world and please them.
And the Supreme Court in a case in 2004 actually said, well, we think that this authorization for use of military force also allows the president to hold people that he believes were involved in the attacks.
So so actually, the basis for holding these guys at Guantanamo is something that involves Congress and the judiciary and the Supreme Court.
So, yeah, on the one hand, you're right about one aspect of it.
On the other hand, the problem that we've got, which, you know, as I see it is not in the vindication of the guys who've been saying, listen, why are you holding me?
It's in these cases where a medic with the Taliban in Afghanistan fighting other Muslims in the Northern Alliance before 9-11 is being held justifiably, according to the fact that he's lost his habeas petition because he was involved with al-Qaeda and or the Taliban.
And the same with a cook who was working for Arab forces supporting the Taliban who lost his habeas petition 15 months ago.
And it goes on like this.
What are these guys doing?
These guys should be prisoners of war.
Now, effectively, that wouldn't make much difference, would it, Scott?
We'd still be holding them, although they wouldn't have.
None of this torture and stuff would have been able to happen had the Geneva Conventions been followed.
Well, and they would have had regular, already legal for 200 years process in the American military system for finding out whether they actually really are even worth holding as a prisoner of war or not.
Well, yes, that's the bit that really was missed out fundamentally at the very, very beginning was that when they were captured, you know, not all in Afghanistan because at least half of them were captured in Pakistan.
But when they came into U.S. custody, you know, and we know that the majority of them were sold by the military's allies, they weren't screened, according to Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, that if the guys are not wearing, you know, not part of a recognized military force, then you have to screen them because otherwise what you end up doing, as they did, is sending loads of farmers and taxi drivers and missionaries and humanitarian aid workers to Guantanamo.
And they did that very deliberately.
I mean, the military was ready to hold these tribunals in Guantanamo because this wasn't a novelty.
This was something the U.S. military had been doing since Vietnam, you know, but they were told by, well, guess who, you know, Rumsfeld with Cheney looking over his shoulder, no, we're not.
We're not screening them at all.
We're presuming that they're all guilty.
Right.
Well, and now let's get specific about exactly what is a writ of habeas corpus and what habeas hearing actually entails here.
Well, a writ of habeas corpus is, you know, is going before an impartial judge and saying, you know, according to this law that was invented in England, what are we up to now, seven hundred and ninety five years ago and was modified to include everybody.
When it started, it was just the nobles.
But as time has passed, it has become for the benefit of everybody.
And it essentially says you cannot sling me in the hole without having my case reviewed before a judge with a jury of my peers.
That's it.
You have the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned.
Well, it's in a sense, at least it began as, you know, means different things, different people, I guess.
Certainly, if you asked Antonin Scalia, he'd have his own version or whatever.
But my understanding is that it's really the power of a judge to say it's not so much your right in a sense, like it's kind of a civil right where you have the right to be within the jurisdiction of a judge to say it's his power to demand that the executive bring whichever accused before him and he gets to decide whether they get to keep that accused or not.
Right.
So it's not quite a right.
It's more of a construct of the power of the judiciary to check the executive.
Oh, yeah.
But I mean, fundamentally, what it means for somebody who's being imprisoned is that unless you are in prison, you know, after screening officially as a prisoner of war and given the rights of a prisoner of war and safeguarded from from cruel and inhuman treatment, then, you know, nobody can be slung in prison without having a trial.
Yeah.
But it's even what you can be thrown in jail without a trial.
And that's really what this is about, in a sense, right, is, well, tell me what happens at these habeas hearings.
I mean, how substantive are these hearings?
How much of a chance to attempt to acquit themselves to these men really have, et cetera?
Well, what happens is that, you know, the the government has been compiling its evidence from the intelligence agencies, from various departments, you know, none of which was originally intended to be used in this context.
It was all about intelligence gathering.
You know, when when Cheney and Rumsfeld Bush set this whole thing up, their plan was just to interrogate people, to keep them away, to keep lawyers away from them, interrogate them for as long as they wanted, the rest of their lives, if they felt like it.
They didn't really think about where they were going with this plan.
Like most of the things they did, they started things in a blaze of macho glory and had absolutely no idea how they were going to end.
You know, so so the evidence wasn't really isn't really a lot of times what we would call evidence.
You know, it's intelligence reports, it's transcripts of their interrogations in various places, and the judges have been eventually presented with a huge amount of information from both sides and have then, you know, been able to sift through it to see what they think of it.
And, you know, and what's really been shocking about it is how often they have turned up the truth of what's actually been happening in Guantanamo and the war on terror, which is that the only evidence that there is against these men is the statements that they've made themselves and in an alarming number of cases, statements that have been made by other prisoners about them.
And, you know, I would say on that second theme, they've probably even more been uncovering clear evidence that, you know, these are unreliable witnesses, that these are people who have either been tortured or have been coerced in some other way.
Some of them are prisoners with mental health problems, and, you know, or they've been bribed with better living conditions, and they keep coming up with this over and over again.
But also, you know, there are severe problems with the with the statements that the prisoners themselves have made, because they have also, in some cases been tortured, they have also in some cases been coerced.
And it's been up to the judges to try and work out, you know, the extent to which this has happened.
And I think what they've done, which is the most remarkable in a lot of these cases, is that they've been able to establish this kind of chronology of the treatment and the abuse that's taken place and have just said, well, you know, well, no, we can't accept any of this.
This is rubbish, really.
Well, you know, Larry Wilkerson made headlines, he was in the Times of London there, saying that, oh, yeah, they knew all along and there was apparently an official report inside the Bush government in 2002 saying that, oh, yeah, Guantanamo is full of innocent people and they knew it good and well.
I wonder whether you think that they knew good and well, not just from that report after the fact, even then in 2002, it was after the fact, but whether that was really just the plan all along was and that's why they put bounties out.
They knew it would be ineffective as far as actually getting the people that you're trying to get.
But they knew that in reality there were never more than three or four hundred Al-Qaeda dudes and that 80 something percent of them had been bombed off the face of the earth by the Air Force and the CIA laser designators and whatever.
And that, you know, what, a few dozen of them escaped to Pakistan, maybe.
And yet they had to make it look like there was this giant Islamic Soviet on the march on its way if we didn't stop it, especially in the run up to the war in Iraq.
And we know even McClatchy newspapers did the work and said, look, when we want to know who was getting tortured the worst, when it was these people.
And it was when Dick Cheney was trying to get them to implicate Iraq right before the attack and right after it.
Yeah.
Well, I think, you know, I think the most disturbing aspect of all of that is how much of this was based around manufacturing through the use of torture material that could be presented as evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
You know, that's the biggest that's the biggest thing.
The alarm bell really should be perpetually ringing over that one because we have so many examples of it happening.
But, you know, I don't I don't actually subscribe to the view that it was all a front and, you know, that they accepted these reports that came through that said, look, you know, we're making colossal mistakes here.
I think that every time it came down to it, they would say, no, actually, you're exaggerating.
There can't be that many innocent people there because their presumption, their arrogance in the first place was not to question how many ways there were that they could have made mistakes.
They just didn't.
You know, it's funny to me.
They wouldn't.
They wouldn't have implemented the policies that they implemented at Guantanamo where, you know, having when when Rumsfeld introduced specifically for use on Mohammed al-Qahtani, the guy who was supposed to be the 20th hijacker, when he specifically adopted the CIA's torture techniques and, you know, authorized their introduction at Guantanamo, you know, they were then applied to at least 100 prisoners in Guantanamo.
And you know, this is this is all the stuff about about 20 hour interrogation, prolonged sleep deprivation involving this thing they called they called euphemistically the frequent flyer program where they would move people over weeks or months from cell to cell every few hours so they could never sleep.
You know, it's the nudity, it's the dogs, it's the sexual humiliation, it's the extreme use of heat and cold, it's the stress positions, all of it.
They applied this to loads and loads of people in Guantanamo, all the British prisoners, anybody who spoke English, anybody who'd been to America, anybody that they thought somehow or another was remotely significant and was hiding information from them.
They used it on so, you know, it wasn't the front of them.
They just didn't want to believe the scale of their incompetence.
I genuinely, I genuinely think that, you know, and it's generally what I think is that when people try to portray Cheney and Rumsfeld and the Bush administration as the clever devious people, they they really overestimate just how stupid these people are.
Well, you know, it's notable for me that you think about this time frame when these decisions are made and what these people were doing.
This is when the American people loved George Bush the most.
I mean, if you just think back to 2002, I don't know how much American TV you're able to watch over there on your rainy little island, Andy, but but over here, I remember a guy brought his daughter on The Today Show in the morning because she was four and had memorized the names of all of our dear Republican leaders in the administration, Tom Ridge and Connelisa Rice and everybody and everybody had an American flag sticker, which meant I support whatever the Republicans want to do and or are doing or will do ever.
And we're happy to denounce their own neighbors as traitors to America and and underminers of the war against terrorism, allies of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, if indeed those are two different people for opposing any of the policy.
And so I just I like bringing that up and beating people over the head with it, that at this time that these men were reading reports saying, listen, you've done nothing but abduct a bunch of innocent people.
The most guilty one you got was a guy who couldn't make it and was turned away and not allowed, you know, Katani, who wasn't even allowed into the country, that most of these guys and the next most significant terrorist you got is the guy that was bin Laden's chauffeur or who who arranged to bring in the wives and kids to visit on the weekend.
Some, you know, a Canadian child or a Canadian child.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, but it's funny because it's funny how much this ties into something that nobody else wants to acknowledge, which is that when the US military had bin Laden and senior al Qaeda figures and senior pro al Qaeda Taliban figures, because not everybody in the Taliban supported al Qaeda when they had all these guys rounded up in in the Tora Bora mountains in November and December 2001.
Yeah.
One square mile.
Yeah.
That's that's that's why so many nobody's ended up in Guantanamo, because they let all these guys escape.
And that's another thing that nobody wants to acknowledge is that is that, you know, the guys on the ground who are out there were saying, you know, let's move the 2000 Marines we've got down near Kandahar.
That was that was James Matthews was saying that, you know, was livid that they wouldn't let him do that.
You've got the guy on the ground.
He's running the running the show for the Americans with their proxy Afghans actually doing the fighting, saying, let's bring in some of the some of the toughest guys we've got.
Let's get him here now.
You know, we've got 800 special forces who could seal the border to Pakistan.
None of it happened.
There were 10,000 Marines like 10 miles away.
And they were told by Tommy Franks and Don Rumsfeld, stand there and chew bubble gum.
Yeah, exactly.
So everybody escaped.
So the guys that should have been in Guantanamo are the ones who escaped.
Not that anybody should have been in Guantanamo, because they should have known how to deal with terrorists as distinct from soldiers.
But they messed the whole thing up and muddled it up in the beginning, which is the mess that we're in now, really, with what the courts are trying to deal with.
Hey, you know what bugs me?
One of these cases, I'm sure you know the guy's name.
But one of these cases is a guy who's accused of making Al Qaeda propaganda videos.
And so but, you know, quote, unquote, legally, according to the government, the way that works out is some vague terminology about, you know, helping the world see things more bin Laden's way or something, which seemed, you know, vague enough.
I forgot the exact terminology, but seemed vague enough to mean that anybody who speaks out against American policy, just like in 2002, is, you know, therefore objectively, as Christopher Hitchens would say, on the side of the enemy.
And according to a officer, I forget, I think Air Force officer named Todd Pierce, who I interviewed on this show, who's representing this guy, he said that he fears that this same doctrine could be applied to you, my friend, Andy Worthington, the Brit over there, you know, our closest special relationship of all with England over there, the mother country or cousins or whatever, across the pond, they like to call it all those things, the Atlantic Alliance and all this, your life is worth less than that of a Pakistani.
And the CIA can do whatever they want with you right now.
Well, this is a problem, isn't it?
I mean, I'm quite, I'm quite entertained by the fact that Todd has chosen to cite me specifically as an example.
I'm trying to get him to include some other Brits.
I think that, you know, I think Philippe Sands, who wrote the case for the prosecution against the torture lawyers, needs to be mentioned in the same breath as well.
But I mean, you know, yeah, there's that guy.
What's the lawyer who represents Binyam Mohamed?
Clive Stafford Smith.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, Clive's actually an American citizen.
So it's a different, he sounds very British, but he is an American citizen.
Well, that's OK, because according to Barack Obama, that makes no difference.
The whole world's a battlefield and American citizens count, too.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, this thing with the case of Ali Hamzal-Balouli, talking about the, this is going to go ahead, this case about, you know, well, is this right?
Because what Todd is saying, and genuinely, you know, he has a point, is that, you know, if I write something complaining about Dick Cheney, you know, there is in theory nothing to stop Dick Cheney turning around and suing me for, you know, offending him, for causing him mental distress.
You know, and that bothers me, too.
And I'm sorry for just a chip on the shoulder throughout your interview here.
But, you know, when I was a little kid, I might have learned it from Bugs Bunny cartoons or something, that there was such a thing as Chinese water torture, and that's where they just drip, drip, drip on your head, and you just go mad or whatever.
For the rest of history now, there will be the American water torture.
That's where they stuff a rag down your throat and pour a jug of water up your nose until you're almost dead.
And they have doctors there measuring the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream.
And as soon as you're in the death spiral, they flip your right side up and let you puke and breathe again.
And then they do it to you again.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's the history of mankind now.
And that's permanent in all the textbooks from here on out.
I mean, assuming people are allowed to read and write what they want in the future.
Well, I think the problem is that, you know, we've got a situation at the moment where we haven't sufficiently managed to demonstrate that this is torture, plain and simple.
And what we have is, you know, you know how it's always described, a technique that some describe as torture.
And why would it be that only some people describe what the Spanish Inquisition called water torture?
Well, it's because this was a safe and humane technique and its approval was actually facilitated by lawyers who told the administration that it was fine for that to happen.
So therefore, that's OK.
This is actually, you know, what the Bush administration gave the world is redefining torture, attempting to redefine torture, you know, and getting away with it.
And that's the really that's the really pretty disgraceful thing.
I think, actually, Scott, is that, you know, this is this is what happens with looking forward and not looking back on the part of the Obama administration is that essentially, you know, even tacitly, they have accepted everything that happened.
You know, it was just let's all just agree that everybody was a bit upset and, you know, we don't really want to examine what happened at that time, because, let's face it, you know, you'd have done the same if you'd been there because of the pressure that you were under.
Yeah, well, it's almost like people didn't even know that, actually, that is the line between civilization and barbarism, right?
That's why we're not just monkeys.
We're human beings.
Well, I think so, you know, and I think that it took hundreds of years to get to a point where after the Second World War, you know, there was a great movement to try and establish principles and aspirations for people to really look up to and believe in and push towards, you know, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, you know, the progress that took decades to get to the UN Convention against Torture in the 1980s, which Ronald Reagan signed on behalf of the United States, you know, and it's sliding back from that, which is what has happened since 9-11 with the Jack Bauer influenced policy approach to the United States.
Well, and every pundit just takes it for granted that everything is always a balance between liberty and safety, as though living in a police state is safe, as though our best security doesn't come from being free and, for example, having a foreign policy of freedom that doesn't go around provoking people wanting to kill themselves in order to take some of us with them occasionally.
Yeah.
And also that fails to understand that there is a way of behaving that doesn't involve being a macho bully and shouting at the top of your voice.
But that is, you know, those people who've been sidelined in this story, those skilled interrogators who can sit opposite a table from somebody that they, you know, know is a dangerous man, a terrorist, a mass murdering criminal.
But it's their job to elicit from them information that will enable them to build a criminal case without the use of torture, that they can use by having skills as a human being and knowing how to play people psychologically.
And also, you know, that they can also be doing deals to turn people into informers, because that's part of how law enforcement works.
And everybody forgets that one.
And that's the one that's kind of really getting me just at the moment, because it's been part of a story of a guy who's in Guantanamo called Mohamedou Tlahi, who was supposed to be connected to the 9-11 hijackers.
And so they, you know, they rendered him, they gave him a whole bunch of torture.
And he surprisingly won his habeas corpus petition a couple of weeks back, because the judge said, well, no, actually, all that you really have here is a whole load of guilt by association, essentially, because this guy hung around in the milieu, but there was nothing to pin it on him.
Now, the shocking bit is that since they actually categorically broke him with torture in 2003, he's apparently, according to the Washington Post, become one of the most significant informers in Guantanamo.
Now, you know, I have my doubts about what somebody who's so brutally broken by torture, how accurate is he as an informer?
But let's accept that for a minute.
The main thing is that they regard him as a very, very useful informer.
And what certain people in the intelligence agencies who have their heads screwed on have been saying is, why is this guy still banged up in Guantanamo?
Why when he wins his habeas petition, does the government still respond to right wingers shrieking by saying there'll be an appeal?
What are we doing to recruit people to help us when we publicly announced to the world that he was one of the most helpful informers that we've had, and yet we have no intention of ever doing anything for him?
Yeah, well, we got to keep him in Cuban lawless indefinite detention because it's to protect him because we told the whole world that he was a snitch.
Yeah, well, you know, it's protective custody.
See?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, they could they could arrange for him to have a new identity.
They could rehouse him if he's provided such astonishingly good information.
You know, they can they can use him.
They can put him in a witness protection program.
We can have trials of people.
It's like that option has gone out the window because that's another part of the bully boy mentality that doesn't exist is any kind of subtlety that involves cutting deals with people.
And, you know, none of it happens.
It's all when it comes to Guantanamo, all the Guantanamo really now is various different ways of trying to make sure that you don't let people out of there.
And this is under President Obama.
Right.
Well, at least he's not adding people to it.
He's sending them all to Bagram.
Right.
All the new arrestees or I guess even the right wingers are complaining that Obama is not arresting terrorists.
He's just using hellfire missiles on them.
Yeah.
Well, no, that's definitely been, you know, been been the the new approach, hasn't it?
You know, why bother with the extraordinary rendition and secret prisons?
Why don't we just, you know, just bomb the hell out of people and see if we can get away with it?
Yeah.
And of course, the military's own reports say that.
Yeah, we're mostly killing women and children, but still.
Well, collateral damage.
Yeah, that's just the way things go.
See?
No, I mean, you know, that's shocking as well.
I mean, you know, I mean, it demonstrates a few things to me, really, that, you know, a continuing disregard for human life in that, you know, Cheney had the 1 percent doctrine.
If you know if one of these guys that we hold has some information, then who cares about the fact that we're torturing the other 99 who don't?
That'll do for me.
It's pretty much the same thing, isn't it?
Let's kill 100 people.
And if one of them was one of the bad guys, then fine.
Yeah, that's the philosophy.
It's a well, famously, Timothy McVeigh said, oh, yeah, collateral damage.
That's all that is.
And everybody was horrified and said, how can you say collateral damage?
But he didn't make that word up.
He learned that in the army.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, you mentioned that despite the fact that this one guy was turned informant and supposedly is such a great snitch after being broken by his mistreatment there, Jane Mayer, the reporter from The New Yorker magazine and the author of The Dark Side, as recently as just a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway, it seems like she stands by saying, you know, her multiple intelligence sources named and unnamed say that they never got any useful intelligence from torturing anybody.
None of it, at least nothing they didn't already know or something.
No, absolutely.
I mean, I, you know, I agree with that.
And, you know, and I and I think that the administration very clearly knows that as well, because that is almost exactly what President Obama said in that otherwise rather depressing national security speech last May, when he suddenly decided that everything was back on the table, military commissions, indefinite detention without charge of trial.
But he did say, you know, he repudiated torture because he said there was no information obtained from it that could not have been obtained by by legal means.
You know, so that he didn't come up with that off the cuff.
I mean, nothing that he says is off the cuff when it comes to those important speeches.
So that's very much coming from the analysis from within the administration of, hey, this thing didn't work.
None of this was necessary.
But I mean, any anybody who looks at these cases at all would know that that's the case, because in most of the most of the stories of the supposed bad guys that they had, not all of them, but in a lot of them, the FBI had them for, you know, a few days or a few weeks before they were snatched by the CIA and brutalized and tortured.
And, you know, and lo and behold, what happened?
Well, the FBI was making progress.
Quite often, it seems that the only reliable information that came from these guys was what was established before the waterboarding began and the hanging naked from the ceiling and all the rest of that stuff.
What a surprise.
Right.
Well, and tell us again about the story of Sheikh Ibn Al-Libi.
Oh, even Sheikh Al-Libi, who was the who was in charge of the Kaldan training camp, which was not related to to al-Qaeda.
In fact, you know, the Taliban apparently closed it in 2000 because he wouldn't agree to it coming under the control of bin Laden.
And so, you know, when he was captured November, December 2001, the FBI had him, they had him for a little while and he was apparently cooperating with them.
And who knows where that might have gone?
Had that been pursued through legal means?
That's an extraordinary what if scenario, I think, because this guy had been running this training camp throughout the 1990s, you know, that wasn't connected to al-Qaeda, you know.
But when they captured him, instead of pursuing this avenue, the CIA took over.
They put him in a small box and sent him to Egypt where he was tortured.
And this is where, you know, the point of torture being to advance the neocons great enthusiasm for invading Iraq.
This is where this comes in.
Under torture, he claims that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which were then packaged up and sent Colin Powell's way so that he was persuaded to present this information to the UN in February 2003, a month before the invasion.
And of course, it was all rubbish and al-Libi had denied it.
Now, he was then sent around various places.
There are there seem to be stories that he passed through four different countries.
He ended up in Bagram and then he didn't end up coming to Guantanamo, like a lot of the other guys who've been through this whole circuit of horrible prison.
He eventually, from from all reports, was actually sent back to Libya, like a lot of the secret prison guys that they kind of tired of, because they certainly did this with at least half a dozen Libyans.
They sent him back to the tender mercies of Colonel Gaddafi.
And then last May, three days before the U.S. flag went up over the embassy for the first time in 40 years in Tripoli, Mr.al-Libi conveniently committed suicide in the prison in which he was held.
Ain't that a hell of a thing?
Well, that's kind of convenient for everybody, isn't it?
Well, you know, I don't know.
I should take the opportunity to just point out that, hey, if we can be friends with Muammar Gaddafi, if the South Koreans can take a torpedo hit and pretend like no big deal because we don't really want a war here, if we can make up with Gaddafi, then there ain't no excuse for wars with anybody anywhere.
Come on, man.
This is just I don't know why anybody would want to buy into this leader's lie or the last one.
Tell me about Colonel Morris Davis.
Who's he?
Well, Morris Davis was the was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo in, I believe, 2005 to 2007.
And, you know, and a great advocate for them at one time.
You know, he really believed that the commissions were going to to bring justice in dealing with with the bad guys.
But where he particularly clashed with the Bush administration is that he he wanted these trials to be something that would be internationally acceptable and that wouldn't cross any moral lines, essentially.
So he instructed his people not to not to accept any evidence that had been extracted through the use of torture.
And he ran up smack up against the administration, which, of course, has set these up precisely so that it could launder torture evidence through show trials and, you know, and and convicts.
And presumably the plan was execute anybody that they thought was a bad guy.
And so what happened was that things reached ahead in the summer of 2007 behind the scenes with various maneuvering in the Pentagon.
And the day after he was put below Jim Haynes, the Pentagon's senior lawyer, the day after he was put below him in the chain of command, he resigned and he said explicitly, you know, I can't work.
I can't work under Haynes.
Haynes is one of the guys who authorized the use of torture, who's been trying to make sure that we can use torture in these cases.
No, thank you.
I'm off.
And, you know, and and since then, he's he's been, you know, a fantastically outspoken critic of the use of torture, really, of of how a line was crossed and how by crossing that line, it's simply unacceptable.
So, you know, it's always great when most speaks out.
And he did that recently.
Well, you know, it seems to me like as far as lines being crossed, the executive is always going to cross the lines.
But the problem really came not even from the torture itself, but when Congress just abandoned any idea of accountability.
And Nancy Pelosi announced before the Democrats victory, I believe, or maybe right after the Democrats victory in the midterm elections of 2006, that impeachment is off the table.
We're not even considering it.
Don't worry.
And then they have scrambled ever since to legalize every crime that Bush committed to extend immunity and, you know, sovereign protections for anybody.
They have a so-called preliminary investigation to see whether there is anyone who there ought to be an actual criminal investigation of for going outside the memos that David Addington and Jim Haynes and Alberto Gonzalez and Jay Bivey and the rest of these criminals wrote up.
John, you and the mantra is it's stuck.
We're going to look forward, not back.
Yeah, well, exactly.
Yeah, it's over.
There's no accountability.
And so it's not just that they completely broke the law, but that they won.
They had a revolution against the theory of there being law and they beat it.
Well, they've been complicit in, you know, in in allowing everything to happen, essentially, you know, they they I mean, I can understand why they passed the authorization for use of military force, whatever it was, three days after 9-11.
You know, let's go after the bad guys.
But they never made any they've never made any attempt to rein that in.
When the Supreme Court gave the prisoners habeas rights, you know, they twice removed those rights.
They you know, they passed those dreadful pieces of legislation in 2005 and 2006, the culminating in the Military Commissions Act, you know, which is just an extraordinarily bad piece of legislation that, you know, supported everything that was going on.
So, yeah, just totally weak.
Don't rock the boat.
Look forward, not back.
You know, how how much of a disappointment could these people be?
Well, they still are, you know, any any impulses that President Obama or certain people around him might have had to correct this, to repudiate it in the early days.
You know, what do you what do they run up against?
They run up against terrorists in Congress, people who are supposed to be members of their own party, who won't help them out on anything that's remotely important.
Yeah, it's a total disgrace, really.
Well, you know, in Justin Armando's article today, he's got a couple of links to speeches where Obama was opposing the Iraq war and pretending to, you know, have a single piece Nick sentiment in his entire body back in 2007.
And he has a whole part of his rant is about the authorization to use military force.
And what do you think is going to happen when you write him a blank check?
The president's going to cash it, he says.
So, yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
And now he's the dear leader.
And now he's the one cashing the very same check.
Well, welcome to the realities of power, I suppose.
You know, I mean, you know, I am somebody who thinks that there was meant to be slightly more than just rhetoric behind the stuff that Obama said in 2007.
And I think, you know, there are a variety of reasons why it's not considered important and why he clearly has a man very close to him who's telling him endlessly, don't bother about any of this stuff because it's really not important.
Well, which seems to be rather manual.
But it disappoints me that people in in the administration who were pushing for there to be a noticeable line to be drawn between the Bush and Obama administration and, you know, Greg Craig, who pushed for the deadline for closing Guantanamo, those executive orders that were issued, tried to get some of the cleared guys who couldn't be returned home, the Uyghurs to come and live in America last April.
He was very close to to getting that one through.
And then, you know, too many Republicans started shouting at Obama and he caved on the whole thing.
Where are the people prepared to fight back?
Where are the people with principles?
And they're just you know, they're just being sidelined or they're disappearing.
If that's the truth of the reality of politics, then, you know, then let's all give up.
I mean, let's not pretend that any of them really make a difference at all, because what we still have essentially in place or what we're still living with is, you know, the barbaric years of the Bush administration and nobody being responsible.
And that I keep trying to look at this from the future.
How might people look at this, you know, some time in the future?
Because they certainly don't seem able to look at it now that, you know, I mean, I'm sure I've said this to you before, you know, what was it that Nixon did again compared to Dick Cheney?
How are these guys getting away with it?
How did the world change so much that this bunch of outrageous criminals are allowed to walk free?
Yeah, well, it's a revolution and it won.
It worked, I think that's really the deal.
And I think, you know, in terms of the future, looking back, I mean, to me right now, it's a knife in the back of the people who, after all, you know, it's not just hyperbole that, you know, people fighting in the wars have at least believed in probably each and every case, not each and every individual, but each and every war that America has ever fought.
They at least, at the very least, maybe sometimes correctly believe they were risking their life, perhaps even knowing they were going to give it for freedom in order that, you know, their kids that they were leaving behind could have a free society.
And it's a stab in the back for all of them when a whole society gives up on even being literate in the Bill of Rights, even understanding what the Declaration of Independence says, even knowing that they're giving up their heritage and again, crossing that line into barbarism and ratifying that crossing of the line into barbarism and lawlessness and shrugging it off and saying it's OK.
And here's the real rub that gets me more than anything else.
And I knew it was going to be like this.
So it's not like I'm surprised, but I'm still not over it.
And that is the fact that it could have been Ron.
And Ron Paul was on TV in 2007 and 2008 saying, I want Jonathan Turley to be my attorney general.
I am absolutely opposed to any of this lawlessness.
All we got to do is believe in the strength of our somewhat libertarian system and our process for jailing people that we already have and our process for protecting ourselves that we already have in our Constitution.
It could have been him.
He was handing people peace and liberty on a silver platter.
And the Bill of Rights in specific, the sixth and the Seventh Amendment back, every Addington theory ever repealed, every executive order he could think of crossed out.
And the people told him, no, they would rather vote for hope and change.
He was sitting in the Senate voting for more war, voting to extend more immunity to the executive branch.
Sorry, but they had their chance.
And they told him, no, people always said, you know, the American people have never been given a chance.
It's always Dewey versus Truman.
But they actually could have they had Ron Paul and they told him, forget it.
I guess we'll see what happens next time.
But there's no question that people would be on trial right now if he was the president for torturing people to death.
Well, you know, I mean, I think I think the fundamental problems that we've got is how much people's ability to believe in the Constitution and the existing laws have have just been so fundamentally undermined.
I mean, that's why the big problem is that, you know, ruling by by trying to constantly do deals and look at your poll results when you're following on from what happened with the Bush administration, you really can't do that.
You know, you have to you have to stand up and categorically state what the what the truths are about how we should be living and how we should respect the Constitution and how we should respect the law.
And it's just a mess because of that.
I mean, that's really what's happened is that it's a mess.
You know, we've now got you know, we've now got any number of right wing lawmakers standing up, proposing new outrageous proposals for new categories of human beings that don't have that don't have the rights that they should have, that all comes out of the Bush Bush and Cheney view of detention, that all should have been thrown back at them and said, no, guys, we're not doing that stuff anymore.
But it's all been able to thrive because of this.
And I mean, it's a it's an it's actually a pretty cynical game, because clearly, if the Republicans were actually in power now, they wouldn't be able to chuck around such outrageous ideas.
But they're able to, you know, play on the fear issue and and and keep going this this notion that, you know, everything's everybody's got to be scared and that the existing laws are not enough to protect us.
And my God, we have to do this and that.
And that will undermine everything that we thought was how we should be living and what laws we should be abiding by.
And it's just going on and on.
And, you know, I mean, I think it's definitely it's clear to me that, you know, it's all talk.
But the problem is that they just you know, they're just constantly stirring it up.
And because they're given the power of various media outlets who, you know, who are extremely irresponsible about the way that they approach the truth, you know, it's just more and more creating a kind of frenzy.
And we're getting further and further away from being able to just quietly say we have the laws in place.
What's the problem?
I mean, the 9-11 trials is a good example of that.
What we have is a long and good record in federal courts of prosecuting successfully terrorism cases set against that.
We have we have a largely useless and ridiculed military commission system invent, you know, brought back from the dead by Dick Cheney, thrown out by the Supreme Court and revised by Congress.
Well, you know, all the critics of Guantanamo, all they don't give these people any rights.
People want military commissions for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other guys.
Why?
Well, you know, it's it's almost become a matter of ideology for them.
That's what I mean.
If they were in power, they'd actually have to look at the facts and people will be saying to them, you know, why do you want to do this?
You've got a much better chance of having the result that you want in federal courts.
But it's it's not giving trials to these warriors.
It's not, you know, it's still pumping up the story.
It's all idiotic.
It's completely idiotic the way that it's become now.
But but, you know, how far adrift are we from the law?
Well, we're a long way from it, because does anybody really care about Guantanamo and habeas corpus?
Does anybody really care in any significant numbers about what the judges are painstakingly doing, providing evidence of how chronically brutal and stupid this whole war on terror has been?
You know, and the stories of these guys who lost over eight years of their lives.
Well, no, not really.
Well, at least we got you.
I care.
I know there are people who care and people who care.
We got to have places to go to know the truth.
And you've been doing the humans work on this for years and years.
Andy, it's not being, you know, I know I speak for a lot of people, you know, in the mainstream, as it should be, because, you know, they are they're fundamental questions about what America is and what America was founded on and what America until recently thought it believed in.
And they have been shoved to the side by just a bunch of, you know, just it's just a show.
It's just a freak show of who can shout the loudest and be the rudest.
And well, I can win that.
The hell am I waiting for?
You need to be you need to get a TV show, Scott.
No, man.
No, I don't.
That always bugs me.
Looking into a camera.
I don't know how you do it.
Anyway, listen, man, again, I really do appreciate all your work and your time on the show this week.
Everybody, it's Guantanamo week over at Andy Worthington's blog.
Andy Worthington dot co dot UK at the Huffington Post at the Future Freedom Foundation at Antiwar dot com.
Thanks again, man.
Thanks, Scott.
Great to talk to you.
