08/20/15 – Katie Taylor – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
Okay, our first guest on the show today is Katie Taylor.
She is with Reprieve, which is the organization of Clive Stafford Smith, the heroic human rights lawyer over there in merry old England.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Katie?
Great.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry I don't have your title and information and things right in front of me like I should.
Could you please tell us exactly what's your role there at Reprieve?
Sure.
I coordinate a project called Life After Guantanamo, which works with men who have been released from Guantanamo Bay to ensure that they get the rehabilitation support that they need.
I see.
Okay, very important work.
And, of course, Clive has just been absolutely heroic on the issue of Guantanamo Bay all these many years.
And one of his clients is Shaker Amr.
Am I saying anything close to right?
Yeah, Shaker Amr.
Shaker Amr.
Okay.
And now, well, I guess go ahead.
First of all, can you give us the thumbnail of his story here?
Sure.
Of course.
So Shaker is the last British resident who's in Guantanamo.
He's in his 14th year now, and he's never been charged with any crime, let alone given any sort of trial.
He's been cleared for release twice, which is basically an administrative process by which six U.S. defense and security agents, so we're talking like CIA, FBI, DOD, et cetera, et cetera, have said that he should be released.
And despite that, he's not been released.
So basically they made that decision in 2009, and here we are six years later, and he's still sitting there in Guantanamo.
At the same time, the British government has been basically bending over backwards to say how much they want him back because they view his incarceration there as such an injustice.
Prime Minister David Cameron has raised it personally with Obama twice this year and received assurances that, you know, they were prioritizing the case.
But, again, here we are.
He's still in Guantanamo.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so if we could go back to the beginning here real quick, can you tell me how it was that he was captured and who it was pointed their finger at him, said he was somebody he wasn't, or how it was that he ended up in Guantanamo in the first place?
Because, unfortunately, as you know, law and tradition and fairy tales aside, if you're locked up in any jail, especially Guantanamo Bay, and especially with, you know, brown skin and a beard, you are presumed guilty.
So this guy must have done something.
Tell me why those lazy cops were going to let this guy go free if the military didn't stop him.
Well, basically, you know, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about how people ended up in Guantanamo.
There wasn't a lot of intelligence that was being used initially after 9-11 in places like Afghanistan to make sure that the people who were being captured were actually people who were involved with al-Qaeda or Taliban.
What isn't known, or isn't sort of widely known, but is a really important fact, is that the U.S. flew airplanes over Afghanistan and Pakistan dropping leaflets promising, you know, average Afghan and Pakistani villagers $5,000 for any foreigner that they turned in.
That's not exactly intelligence.
So what happened is that, you know, you get people turning in their neighbors if they happen to be foreigners for this huge, life-changing sum of money to the Americans.
It basically meant that they were being sold for bounties.
And then once they were under American control, usually in secret prisons in Afghanistan, they were then brutally tortured.
And through this torture, you know, they'd admit that they could make these false confessions, anything to make the brutal torture stop.
It's quite understandable.
And unfortunately, despite the fact that that so-called intelligence has been massively discredited, you know, most recently in the Senate intelligence report, somehow this stigma still follows these men.
So people like Shaker, who, again, has never been charged with a crime, they've never had any evidence of any wrongdoing from him, you know, he's still sitting there in Guantanamo.
It's just that image of the orange jumpsuit and the beard and Rumsfeld's voice saying they're the worst of the worst.
They'd chew through the cables to kill us all if they could and all this.
And it just, it doesn't matter that it's been refuted even by the government itself.
That image sticks.
That public relations campaign from 02 is still, you know, in effect in people's minds, I guess, to a great degree.
And now when I said the lazy cops want to let him go, in fact, as you guys write here and talk about, he's been cleared by the military, by the CIA and by the Justice Department.
Right.
The spies, the soldiers and the cops agree to let him go.
So why is he still sitting there?
I wish I had an answer to that.
You know, I honestly don't.
It's it's ridiculous, you know, and it's to the point where it's actually affecting relations between the US and what is supposedly its closest ally.
You know, Britain, there was a delegation of four cross-party members of Parliament, really high profile members of Parliament who came to Washington a few months ago to meet with prominent members of the Senate.
So they met with David Feinstein, for instance, and said, look, you know, we're asking to have him back because we see this as such a massive injustice.
And, you know, even they weren't given any sort of answer as to why he's still in Guantanamo.
Yeah.
Now, so in Clive's recent piece for The Guardian, again, it's Clive Stafford Smith here from Reprieve.
The article is the military ignores Obama's order to release Shocker Armour.
And now he's referring to a statement by Obama that, yeah, I want to go ahead and speed that up.
If he's been cleared, let's prioritize the case.
That's the word in quotes here and linked.
And and yet I wonder if possibly Clive makes too much of that public statement.
Do we really know that Obama has actually ordered the military to release him or he just said that he did publicly?
Well, I'm not sure we'll ever really know the answer to that.
But I mean, is there any other reason to think besides that public statement that he actually gave an order, any other statements by his other, you know, his chief of staff confirming that or anything like that?
Well, I mean, he he also told, you know, the prime minister, David Cameron, that he was prioritizing the case.
So, again, I mean, oh, yeah, that wasn't just a statement to the press.
It was a statement to the prime minister.
Yeah, yeah.
At a certain level, we we should really be able to take him at his word.
Yeah.
On that level, you would think, right.
The prime minister of Great Britain.
All right.
And now I'm sorry to go back to this, but I think it is important for people's understanding because of the success of that PR campaign from 13 years ago.
Do you guys have an official story as his lawyers and his representatives of why you say he was in Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever he was sold for for a bounty to the spies back then?
Sure.
And, you know, being in Afghanistan in 2000 was not in itself a crime.
I mean, there are there are multiple reasons why any foreigners would have been in Afghanistan, including we had clients who were charity workers.
We had one client who was actually an Al Jazeera cameraman.
He was obviously there covering the war in Chakras case.
He was working for a charity.
And what that charity was doing was very important work for a community digging wells and setting up girls schools.
And I assume that you have plenty of documentation of all of that to refute and apparently enough to convince, again, the board back in 2009 to go ahead and clear him for release.
Right.
Of course.
I mean, the CIA, DOD, FBI.
It's not like they take these decisions lightly.
Right.
Certainly not.
Yeah.
Not in the atmosphere of the way the Republicans were attacking Obama for doing anything at all with Guantanamo.
They were obviously being as careful as they possibly could.
They were going to make a mistake like letting a real Al Qaeda guy go.
Obviously not.
All right.
Well, listen, I think it's so important, the work that you guys do there at Reprieve.
And if you didn't do it, it wouldn't get done.
So, you know, keep that in mind that it must get done.
So thank you for showing up at work and thank you for doing my show today.
Oh, thanks.
Thanks for having me on.
All right.
So that is Katie Taylor.
She is at Reprieve with Clive Stafford Smith.
Check out his article in The Guardian.
The military ignores Obama's order to release Shocker armor from Guantanamo.
We'll be right back in a sec.
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